RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Cancer is a scary disease, but Californians have been determined to scare themselves more than most with warnings about the supposedly cancer-causing material in everything from shoes to cat litter. Now a federal judge says these mandatory fright signs may violate the First Amendment when not backed by accurate science.

Judge William Shubb issued a preliminary injunction two weeks ago blocking California from compelling businesses to issue warnings about a chemical known as glyphosate. Farm groups and businesses sued after the state required new cancer warnings on food products that contain wheat, corn, soybeans and other crops exposed to the common herbicide.

The Environmental Protection Agency has deemed that glyphosate is safe, and California’s Office on Environmental Health Hazard Assessment also found it “unlikely to pose a cancer hazard to humans.” But under the 1986 state Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, also known as Prop. 65, California defers to the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. In 2015 the France-based United Nations outfit claimed glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic.”

Reuters later revealed that the U.N. agency ignored substantial evidence showing no link between glyphosate and cancer. One adviser to the agency, Christopher Portier, worked on the glyphosate decision even as he received pay from Lundy & Lundy, a law firm that brings cancer-related class-action lawsuits, according to a deposition in a different lawsuit.

The U.N. outfit is notorious for bad science. The group has assessed 1,067 products and ruled only once that a substance was “probably not carcinogenic to humans.” The group’s list of cancer risks includes eating red meat, french fries or “pickled vegetables (traditional Asian),” drinking “very hot beverages,” using fluorescent lights, working the late shift, having your dentist fill a cavity, getting your hair colored, and using aloe, talc or Tylenol.

Debates over climate change are filled with dire estimates of its cost. This many trillions of dollars of damage, that large a share of gross domestic product destroyed, so-and-so many lives lost, etc. Where do such figures come from? Mostly from laughably bad economics.

This has nothing to do with the soundness of climate science. The games begin when economists get their hands on scientific projections and try to translate temperatures into human impacts. They conduct statistical analyses of the effects that small year-to-year temperature variations have on things like mortality and economic growth, and try to extrapolate to the effect of very large, slow shifts in underlying climate. This creates absurd estimates that ignore human society’s capacity for adaptation. This is the latest iteration of the same mistake environmental catastrophists seem insistent on making in every generation.

The best illustration lies deep in a 2015 paper published in Nature by professors from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. They found that warm countries tended to experience lower economic growth in abnormally warm years, while cold countries experienced higher growth in such years. Applying that relationship to a much warmer world of the future, they concluded that unmitigated climate change would likely reduce global GDP by more than 20% from what it otherwise would reach by century’s end.

That is roughly an order of magnitude higher than prior estimates, and it has received widespread media attention. But it is as preposterous as it is stunning.

Climate change is amazing! In addition to being responsible for colder temperatures, warmer temperatures, less snowfall, more snowfall, and terrorism, now it seems that it can also cause heart attacks.

Yes, someone really said that.

University of Michigan cardiologist Hedvig Andersson recently stated: “Global warming is expected to cause extreme weather events, which may, in turn, result in large day-to-day fluctuations in temperature. … Our study suggests that such fluctuations in outdoor temperature could potentially lead to an increased number of heart attacks and affect global cardiac health in the future.”

In other words, as we experience more extreme weather, it will put more strain on people’s hearts, thus creating more heart attacks.

Anderson notes that while the body has processes for dealing with fairly extreme weather, it might be too much for our natural systems to deal with. “While the body has effective systems for responding to changes in temperature, it might be that more rapid and extreme fluctuations create more stress on those systems, which could contribute to health problems,” he said.

The truth is that this was an epidemiological study that simply looked at the weather and hospital records and looked for a correlation. As we all know, correlation does not necessarily equal causation. In this case, the greater the temperature swing, the greater the supposed risk for a heart attack.

The 1970s were a great time for disaster movies. There was Earthquake with Charlton Heston, Towering Inferno with Steve McQueen, the Poseidon Adventure, and many more.

By the 1990s, disaster movies had taken on a distinctly sci-fi element, such as the movie Armageddon, which highlighted the twin disasters of an asteroid striking the Earth and a plan to send Ben Affleck into space.

That’s where we are today, except our science fiction is being portrayed as science fact by liberals who want to scare us with the global warming bogeyman. In their latest attempt, they have produced a map showing which parts of the San Francisco Bay Area will be plunged underwater by 2100 due to global warming:

Points for discussion:

Notice that San Francisco is spared from flooding, but Oakland in the northeast and San Jose in the south (right next to Santa Clara) are subject to a lot of it. S.F. is largely white, but Oakland is home to many black people and San Jose to many Hispanics. Can a natural disaster be racist?
Note again that San Francisco is largely untouched by the flooding. Do you think all those Prius-owners in S.F. will go back to driving gas-powered cars since they now know they have nothing to worry about?
Foster City is to be heavily hit by global warming. It’s a city with a large Asian population. Should we care because Asians are a minority, or should we not care because they are not a minority favored by liberals?
Palo Alto and much of Silicon Valley are slated to go under water. If the people at Google and Facebook really believe this nonsense, why have they not put forward a plan to start waterproofing 100,000 web servers?
This disaster will heavily impact a very liberal metropolitan community. There seem to be no consequences at all for conservative areas. Do you think the authors of the study are inadvertently incentivizing conservatives?
In the original Superman movie, Lex Luthor plotted to detonate a nuclear device in the San Andreas Fault, which would supposedly cause the western edges of California to slide into the sea. Luthor had previously arranged to buy up land in Nevada, which would instantly become valuable waterfront land. Instead of conducting a real study, do you think the authors simply cribbed the map from Superman?
If this reminds you of the plot of a bad sci-fi movie from the 1990s it’s because it is the plot of a bad sci-fi movie from the 1990s. Let me refresh your memory of Escape from LA:

Do you know anyone who denies that there’s such a thing as climate? Do you know anybody who hears the word “climate” and says, “Nuh-uh! You can’t fool me, that’s just made up!” I don’t. Yet whenever somebody questions any aspect of the prevailing global warming orthodoxy, he or she is labeled a “climate denier.” It’s a clever little bit of deceptive rhetoric, linking climate change skeptics with deniers of the Holocaust. A Holocaust denier is an awful thing to be, so a “climate denier” must be just as bad.

You don’t want to be one of those deniers, do you? You know how those people are.

That’s why my climatically skeptical ears perked up when I heard that somebody in Australia had written a stage play with the subtlest title ever: Kill Climate Deniers. Here’s a synopsis of the play, courtesy of killclimatedeniers.com:

As a classic rock band take the stage in Parliament House’s main hall, 96 armed eco-terrorists storm the building and take the entire government hostage, threatening to execute everyone unless Australia ends global warming. Tonight.

Now, the embattled Environment Minister has no choice but to pick up a gun and stand up for her ideals, pushing back against the threat which has engulfed her country – one terrorist at a time.

Sounds like a real crowd-pleaser. They even made a trailer of sorts for it:

Oh. Um… Ha ha?

Now, I tend to be a small-l libertarian about these sorts of things. I think you should be able to espouse any ridiculous conspiracy theory you want, even if it involves the belief that people are destroying the planet by leaving their phone chargers plugged in when not in use. That’s fine. You’re entitled to your religious views, no matter how stupid and insane they may be.

And I don’t think anybody will be inspired to actually kill climate skeptics just because they saw a play called Kill Climate Deniers. I don’t believe that movies or video games or novels or comic books or anything else will make anybody do anything. Let alone stage plays.

But just imagine the uproar if somebody produced a play called Kill Tree-Huggers. Or Kill Feminists, or Kill Militant LGBTQ Activists, or Kill [Fill in Some Other Protected Class Here]. Then it would be different. Then it would be time to hit the panic button. The 24/7 news cycle would be filled with solemn warnings about “hate speech” and “toxic rhetoric” and other euphemisms for “We don’t like what you’re saying and we want you to shut up.” CONTINUE AT SITE

A favorite technique of the propagandists of the Global Warming scare is to find cute and cuddly creatures that they can claim are “threatened” by global warming. For years, an iconic picture of a polar bear on an ice floe was used to frighten children into clutching their stuffed teddy bears and demanding Mommy and Daddy act to save them.

But the bloom started coming off that rose when a scientist who had made population estimates that allowed the bears to be classified as threatened admitted that the estimates were: “A guess to satisfy public demand” but wrapped in the prestige of settled science.”

The scam took an even heavier blow when NASA admitted there was no measurable retreat in polar ice last year

But that hasn’t stopped other cure species from being held up as hostages to carbon. Along with polar bears, another favorite creature is penguins, so cute in their version of tuxedos.

Ever eager NASA published a warning less than two years ago: “Climate change may shrink Adélie penguin range by end of century.”

Climate has influenced the distribution patterns of Adélie penguins across Antarctica for millions of years. The geologic record tells us that as glaciers expanded and covered Adélie breeding habitats with ice, penguins in the region abandoned their colonies. When the glaciers melted during warming periods, the Adélie penguins were able to return to their rocky breeding grounds.

Now, a NASA-funded study by University of Delaware scientists and colleagues at other institutions reports that this warming may no longer be beneficial for Adélie penguins. In a paper published June 29 in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers project that approximately 30 percent of current Adélie colonies may be in decline by 2060, and approximately 60 percent of the present population might be dwindling by 2099. They also found the penguins at more southerly sites in Antarctica may be less affected by climate change.

Why do so many apparently informed, intelligent, educated people still believe in ManBearPig?

For the same reason that the U.S. underestimated the Japanese threat before Pearl Harbor; that General MacArthur stupidly advanced north of the 38th parallel in Korea; that JFK got embroiled in the Bay of Pigs disaster; that LBJ dragged the U.S. deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War.

A phenomenon known as ‘groupthink’.

Though the name dates back to a 1952 article in Fortune magazine by William H Whyte, it wasn’t popularized for another twenty years when a Yale research psychologist called Irving Janis used it in the title of his influential 1972 Victims of Groupthink.

Little did he know it – Janis was looking to past events like the ones mentioned above, not the future – but his book would anatomize with unerring accuracy the perverse mindset which would lead to the creation of the biggest, most expensive junk science scam the world has ever witnessed: the great global warming scare.

This is the subject of a must-read paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Christopher Booker: Global Warming – A Case Study in Groupthink.

Though it’s quite a long read, I do recommend you have at least a dip because it contains so many pertinent answers to that question you so often hear from global warming true believers: “What kind of crazy conspiracy theorist would you have to be to think that so many experts from science, politics, business, the media, even the oil industry would lie to us about the scale of the problem?”

But as Booker – via Janis – shows, there’s a much more simple explanation than conspiracy theory. It has to do with the bizarre, but very well documented tendency many humans have towards embracing fashionable nonsense.

Comfortably settled climate scientists (room service eases jet lag) jetted into New Zealand last week to discuss how modern life, which presumably includes air travel, is riling Gaia ever which way. It was there, at this gathering of great minds and grants, that Mr Climategate explained all.

Few stars in the frothy firmament of academic climate science shine more controversially than Dr Michael E. Mann, creator of the notorious “hockey stick” curve, gloomy prognosticator, conspiracy theorist, co-author of The Madhouse Effect: How climate change denial is threatening our planet, destroying our politics and driving us crazy, anti-Trump activist and fan of climate toothpaste, the only anti-apathy oral hygiene product with UH-OH formula.

The Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, USA, was in New Zealand last week, where he gave a keynote lecture at the Second Pacific Climate Change Conference.

Radio NZ’s Kim Hill caught up with him for a 32-minute interview.

Hill: Can you attribute recent weather events to [dangerous anthropogenic] climate change? (1.40min.)

Mann: You can. In fact, there are droughts, wildfires and floods occurring without any precedent in the historical record where we can now show [the reality of anthropogenic climate change] using computer model simulations.

You can run two parallel simulations; one where carbon dioxide is left at pre-industrial levels, and a parallel simulation where you increase these levels in response to the burning of fossil fuels. You can look at how often a particular event happens in both counterfactual worlds.

What on Earth is a “counterfactual world”? Struggling to prove an anthropogenic influence in the “actual” world, members of the so-called climate detection and attribution (D&A) community were forced to create virtual “worlds” to run their computer games, an opaque process known as in silico experimentation.