RUTHFULLY YOURS

The east coast of the United States just endured a rare spring snowstorm. How could this happen when NASA is constantly announcing that we have record high temperatures?

Advocates of the global warming theory have been predicting rising temperatures since around 1983. Available data indicated no such trend, so these advocates found reasons to adjust past temperatures downward. People who remembered the 1930s as being the hottest decade of their lifetimes were ignored. If people witness spring snowstorms, should they be ignored, too?

Recent scientific work predicts that the sun’s output will diminish in our lifetimes. Valentina Zharkova et al, here and here, estimate that we will have an ice age from about 2020 to 2053.

The theory about ice ages is simple. Do you remember when your science teacher would rap two tuning forks against a table? They would make two tones plus a periodic lull, which your teacher called a beat. Zharkova believes that the sun has two resonances and they sometimes cause a beat. The last beat that we observed, the Maunder Minimum, was from 1645 to 1715. It accompanied a climatic episode known as the “Little Ice Age” (LIA).

Much to the regret of the warmist establishment, its grant-lapping minions and the rent-seeking camp followers who have made our electricity amongst the world’s dearest, witches and heretics are no longer tossed on a pyre. These days, it is reputations and careers that are incinerated.

The Little Ice age was quite severe in Europe from 1550- 1700. After the prosperity and plenty of the medieval warm period, the LIA led to impoverishment, crop failure, starvation and a resurgence in witch burnings. Every misfortune was an excuse to accuse someone of being a witch working under the direction of Satan. Many of these accusations were the result of some calamity caused by an extreme weather event.

For example, in 1626 a hailstorm struck Germany and dropped a metre of hail. Two days later an Arctic front descended on Europe. Rivers froze, grapes on the vine ‘exploded’ and rye and barley crops were destroyed. Then came a severe frost the likes of which had not been seen for 500 years. Because all of this was so unusual it was determined to be ‘unnatural’ and there arose a cry that sorcerers and witches must be responsible and must be punished. Around 5000 were burnt in Germany alone.

It is estimated that across Europe there were at least 50,000 executions during this period, all carried out with the blessing of the educated and privileged. It was dangerous to be a sceptic because those who dissented from the hysteria were inevitably themselves accused of sorcery subject to the same punishments. Thus was any debate stifled.

weyerjean bodinLegal philosopher Jean Bodin (left) in 1580 insisted that witchcraft was the most terrible problem facing humankind. Bodin championed the international attack against sceptics, such as physician Johann Weyer (right), who tried to bring some scientific rationality to the discussion by pointing out that “confessions” obtained through torture were both worthless and immoral. In response, Bodin accused Weyer of witchcraft. Sceptics had to be wrenched out of society, he thundered, with any country tolerating them certain to be struck by plagues, famines and wars.

Sound familiar? If the modern parallels escape you, let us compare the dark past with what has happened over the last 30 years. And if James Cook University’s disgraceful shunning of Professor Peter Ridd comes to mind, so much the better.

Every perceived extreme weather event is attributed the evil CO2 causing global warming which causes the climate to go totally berserk and, of course, it’s those evil white capitalistic CO2 spewing industries which are the devil’s servants.
Global warming-caused climate change is the most terrible problem facing mankind.
Sceptical of the two points above? Well you must be one of those “climate denier”. Burning at the stake is no longer permitted, but being marginalized, ostracized and harassed is perfectly okay.
The scientific method of observation — hypothesis, develop testable predictions, gather data to test predictions, refine, alter or reject hypothesis — is not applicable to global warming “fact”. The “science is settled”, don’t you know, so no debate will be tolerated. Just send more grants, please, so warmists can continue to “prove” something they insist is already beyond dispute. As Macquarie University assures prospective students, the thriving field of climate-change validation opens up “career prospects and further research opportunities”.

President Trump’s pick to be the new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is not a fan of the Paris climate agreement, the treaty that claims it will slow global warning by reducing the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Politicians from most of the world’s nations signed the deal, and President Obama said “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”

That’s dubious.

Trump wisely said he will pull America out of the deal. He called it a “massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.”

Unfortunately, Trump often reverses himself.

The climate change lobby has been trying to change Trump’s mind. Al Gore called his stance “reckless and indefensible.” Most of the media agree. So do most of my neighbors in New York.

That’s why it’s good that Pompeo opposes the Paris deal. Such treaties are State Department responsibilities. Pompeo is more likely to hold Trump to his word than his soon-to-be predecessor Rex Tillerson, who liked the agreement.

The Paris accord is a bad deal because even if greenhouse gases really are a huge threat, this treaty wouldn’t do much about them.

I’ll bet Al Gore and most of the media don’t even know what’s in the accord. I didn’t until I researched it for this week’s YouTube video.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Oren Cass is the rare person who actually read the Paris accord.

“Everything is pointing to belief in global warming as being a reliable indicator that a person is a mindless fool, a witless idiot. If they can’t get global warming right and persist in believing in something for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, then how can they trusted to make the right decision in any instance? ”

This time it is bushfires, the next it will be floods, or drought, or gender-fluid frogs or somesuch. No matter what Gaia comes up with, some or other spigot of snappy sound bytes will point at climate change with one hand while reaching for fresh grants with the other. Well, they need fret no more.

According to an article in The Australian, the Greens have blamed bushfires and cyclones on the government’s inaction on climate change. Well the good news for the Greens is that they are wrong and therefore they can worry about something else instead. Australia’s climate hasn’t changed one whit, so a deranged climate can’t be the cause for bushfires and cyclones. Exhibit A is Australia’s lower tropospheric temperature anomaly as measured by satellites with the data available from Dr Roy Spencers’ group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville:

Only forty-some years ago, “climate science” suddenly turned from advancing a theory of global cooling to one of global warming. A 123-page paper by Christopher Booker, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), explains this sudden change in terms of a “groupthink” belief system formulated and perpetuated by a few strong personalities. Through key positions, and with sympathetic lobbyist groups, the theory overwhelmed politics during its formative years in the 1970s from its center in various United Nations agencies until its unraveling began in the late 1990s.

The first of those personalities was Swedish meteorologist Professor Bert Bolin (1925-2007), who believed that increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide from industrialization would inevitably lead to global warming. Bolin presented his views in 1979 at a first-ever meeting of the “World Climate Conference,” sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The WMO is a 191-member-country agency of the United Nations (U.N.), headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Bolin had developed his theory in the 1950s during thirty-five years of declining temperatures. Through the 1970s, many scientists, activists, and policymakers had voiced alarm at global cooling. A common view was that the cooling effect of more dust in the atmosphere, from volcanoes and industrial smokestacks, more than offset the warming effects of carbon dioxide and might require dire policies, such as those proposed by Dr. Arnold Reitze, to include banning the internal combustion engine, regulating industrial research and development, and limiting population.

The climate debate is one of the most important discussions in the world today. At stake are billions of dollars, millions of jobs, and — if people like Canadian environmental activist Dr. David Suzuki are right — the fate of the global environment. Consequently, we need all parties in the debate to behave responsibly.

Sadly, climate discussions are often poisoned by misrepresentations and errors in reasoning. Suzuki does this in “Climate science deniers’ credibility tested,” his March 1 article attacking those of us who question the science promoted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Published on the David Suzuki Foundation website and reproduced by media across Canada, Suzuki’s attack is typical of what independent thinkers about climate science experience on a regular basis. For that reason, his article is worth examining in detail.

Suzuki implies that the argument presented by Canadian ecologist Patrick Moore, that glaciers “are basically dead zones,” is somehow wrong. Similarly, Suzuki mocks as “anti-climate-science” the position I (Harris) promote: that “carbon dioxide is harmless plant food.” In neither case does Suzuki explain in his article what is mistaken with these statements. Perhaps this is because both are obviously true.

While he may not understand glaciers, one would assume that, as a biologist, Suzuki would comprehend that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, an essential reactant in plant photosynthesis on which all life on Earth depends. That’s why commercial greenhouse operators routinely run their internal atmospheres at up to 1,500 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide concentration. Plants inside grow far more efficiently than at the 400 ppm in the outside atmosphere.

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, a report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, cites over 1,000 peer-reviewed studies that document rising productivity of forests and grasslands as carbon dioxide levels have increased, and not just in recent decades, but in past centuries.

Despite the excited proclamations of climate activists, increasing carbon dioxide levels poses no direct hazard to human health. Carbon dioxide concentrations in submarines can reach levels well above 10,000 ppm, 25 times current atmospheric levels, with no harmful effects on the crew.

Aside from these two issues, and his false claim that I doubt “the existence of human-caused climate change altogether,” Suzuki says nothing about the science we present. CONTINUE AT SITE

I’ve written often enough about how much the Scientific American has to do with lefty culture wars and how little it has to do with science. But now it had to actually pretend that Obama’s “bitter clingers” slur is science.

Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns? Research suggests it’s largely because they’re anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market and beset by racial fears

By research, SA means the prejudices of the people doing this “research”.

The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male

A member of the majority of the population is most likely to own a gun? #Science

When Northland College sociologist Angela Stroud studied applications for licenses to carry concealed firearms in Texas, which exploded after President Obama was elected, she found applicants were overwhelmingly dominated by white men. In interviews, they told her that they wanted to protect themselves and the people they love.

So obviously she decided that they’re insecure and racist.