Years of Living Hypocritically: Five Alarmist Celebs and Their Double Standards – ‘James Cameron, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and actors Harrison Ford, Matt Damon and Ian Somerhalder who are worth a collective $1.2 billion’
Showtime, Syria, and the Faces of Climate Change: ‘So if the proximate cause of Syria’s civil war cannot be pinned on drought or climate change, why then is the Showtime documentary spending 20 minutes on a weak case study?’
Showtime, Syria, and the Faces of Climate Change
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Collide-a-scape/~3/_foTV2Uex6o/
Twenty years ago, a hugely influential article by Robert Kaplan titled “The Coming Anarchy,” was published in The Atlantic magazine. Kaplan argued that the environment would be the “national security issue of the early twenty-first century.” He predicted that resource scarcity and ecological degradation would be destabilizing forces in the developing world, “making more and more places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable.”
Such claims have not come to pass, as one reappraisal of Kaplan’s piece has noted. But in the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration was spooked enough by world events to take Kaplan’s thesis very seriously. Scholars were much less impressed. They noted at the time that he painted with a broad brush, extrapolating from the world’s most desperate, war-torn regions. Geoff Dabelko, an environmental security scholar, wrote in a 1999 essay in The Wilson Quarterly:
Kaplan’s “anarchy thesis” suffered an obvious logical flaw. While poverty and environmental destruction were grievous problems in the less developed countries, most of them remained far from the complete collapse suffered in Haiti and West Africa. “The Coming Anarchy” looked to many critics like little more than a perverse form of travel journalism with intellectual window dressing. It certainly was no guide to the world’s future.
Ah, but a powerful narrative was born, which other authors were soon to build on and popularize. One of the stickiest memes to emerge from the resource scarcity-leads-to-conflict narrative was the idea of “war wars,” which has turned out to be a myth. In recent years, legitimate climate change concerns have combined with legitimate global environmental concerns to form the media-driven “climate wars” narrative.
Which brings me to a segment in the first episode of Showtime’s “Years of Living Dangerously,” a new, much-discussed documentary that aims to chronicle present-day, real-world impacts of climate change. This particular segment, as the Guardian wrote, featured New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman traveling “to the Turkish border with Syria to look at how climate change and drought is fueling war.”
Some quick background: A drought in northern Syria between 2006 and 2010 devastated over a million farmers and herders, many who eventually poured into Syria’s major cities. Near the end of the drought, a civil war commenced, tearing Syria apart. So Friedman is sent over there by Showtime to investigate the climate change connection. To his and their credit, they don’t …
Bjorn Lomborg: The deadliest environmental threat (it’s not global warming)
http://nypost.com/2014/04/21/the-deadliest-environmental-threat-its-not-global-warming/…
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi: Earth Day 14:. ‘Highest ice level on Great Lakes so late, lowest tornado total through date, global sea ice above avg, Southern Hemisphere record high’
Earth Day 14:. highest ice level on Great Lakes so late, lowest tornado total through date, global sea ice above ave, S hem record high
https://twitter.com/BigJoeBastardi/status/458614831923605504…
‘The tragedy of Earth Day is that governments spend billions of dollars on meaningless efforts to curb carbon dioxide while billions live in poverty and squaller around the world’
NYT accused of ‘mindless parroting of the UN IPCC party line’ – Delusions Climactic & Otherwise @ the New York Times
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2014/04/22/delusions-climactic-otherwise-the-new-york-times/…
Review paper finds the Medieval Warm Period was global and its peak warmth likely significantly greater than the present
Review paper finds the Medieval Warm Period was global and its peak warmth likely significantly greater than the present
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-paper-finds-medieval-warm-period.html
A new paper from SPPI and CO2 Science reviews the scientific literature on the Medieval Warm Period in Upper North America, and concludes, “these published results now join the many other similar results, from all around the world, where it can be seen that the Medieval Warm Period was not only a global phenomenon, but that its peak warmth was very likely significantly greater than that of the Current Warm Period.”
For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here.
[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]
Excerpts:
Climate alarmists claim that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations due to the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, gas and oil, have raised global air temperatures to their highest level in the past one to two millennia. And, therefore, investigating the possibility of a period of equal global warmth within the past one to two thousand years has become a high-priority enterprise; for if such a period could be shown to have existed, when the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration was far less than it is today, there would be no compelling reason to attribute the warmth of our day to the CO2 released to the air by mankind since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Thus, in this review of the pertinent scientific literature, results of the search for such knowledge are presented for studies conducted within the borders of Canada and other regions north of the lower 48 states of the United States of America.
There is nothing unusual or unnatural about climate change. It happens on decadal scales, centennial scales and millennial scales. And over the past century or two, the earth has experienced a natural and not-unexpected millennial-scale climatic shift that may or may not have yet run its course.
The fact that the air’s CO2 content increased in phase with this shift is simply due to the coincidental concurrent development of the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent transformative impact on humanity.
Since the peak warmth of the Medieval Warm Period was caused by something quite apart from elevated levels of atmospheric CO2, or any other greenhouse gas for that matter, there is no reason to not believe that a return engagement of that same factor or group of factors is responsible for the even lesser “peak” warmth …
Climate Brainwashing Of Children: A Rough Guide To Spotting It Happening
Climate Brainwashing Of Children: A Rough Guide To Spotting It Happening
http://www.thegwpf.org/climate-brainwashing-of-children-a-rough-guide-to-spotting-it-happening/
Way back in 1992, Thomas Sowell wrote about brainwashing going on in the American education system, and he defined what he meant by that emotive term. As I shall show below, his insights are relevant today when examining materials aimed at children about climate.
Extracts from Chapter 3:
“A variety of programs used in classrooms across the country not only share the general goals of brainwashing – that is, changing fundamental attitudes, values, and belief by psychological-conditioning methods – but also use classic brainwashing techniques developed in totalitarian countries:
1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance
2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance
3. Cross-examining pre-existing values, often by manipulating peer pressure
4. Stripping the individual of normal defences, such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate
5. Rewarding acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs – a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form.”
I will illustrate these using an odious book for children called ‘How to Turn Your Parents Green’, first published in 2007. Extracts from the book are shown in italics, and the techniques from Sowell’s list are shown in bold
1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance
‘The weather’s gone weird. The polar bears are anxious. Ghastly Global Warming is here.’
There are more examples of this sort of thing, but it will all too familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance such material. It is the bog-standard.
2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance
For children, these familiar sources are usually their parents. Russell’s book sees them as stupid, selfish, ignorant people who are to be punished rather than seen as a source of advice or support:
‘…Only you can make the Groans behave because only you can make their lives a misery if they don’t. We’ll help you draw up a Glorious Green Charter for them sign, and show you how to punish them – oh yes – if they don’t change their Grumbelicious ways. Don’t be an Eco-Worrier, be an Eco-Warrior. And turn your parents Green.’
So, don’t look …
Matt Ridley: The Richer We Get, The Greener We’ll Become
Matt Ridley: The Richer We Get, The Greener We’ll Become
http://www.thegwpf.org/matt-ridley-the-richer-we-get-the-greener-well-become/
The world’s climate change experts are now saying that strong growth doesn’t hurt the environment, it protects it
In the past 50 years, world per capita income roughly trebled in real terms, corrected for inflation. If it continues at this rate (and globally the great recession of recent years was a mere blip) then it will be nine times as high in 2100 as it was in 2000, at which point the average person in the world will be earning three times as much as the average Briton earns today.
I make this point partly to cheer you up on Easter Monday about the prospects for your great-grandchildren, partly to start thinking about what that world will be like if it were to happen, and partly to challenge those who say with confidence that the future will be calamitous because of climate change or environmental degradation. The curious thing is that they only predict disaster by assuming great enrichment. But perversely, the more enrichment they predict, the greater the chance (they also predict) that we will solve our environmental problems.
Past performance is no guide to future performance, of course, and a well aimed asteroid could derail any projection. But I am not the one doing the extrapolating. In 2012, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asked the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to generate five projections for the economy of the world, and of individual countries, in 2050 and 2100.
They make fascinating reading. The average per capita income of the world in 2100 is projected to be between three and 20 times what it is today in real terms. The OECD’s “medium” scenario, known as SSP2, also known as “middle of the road” or “muddling through”, sounds pretty dull. It is a world in which, in the OECD’s words, “trends typical of recent decades continue” with “slowly decreasing fossil fuel dependency”, uneven development of poor countries, delayed achievement of Millennium Development Goals, disappointing investment in education and “only intermediate success in addressing air pollution or improving energy access for the poor”.
And yet this is a world in which by 2100 the global average income per head has increased 13-fold to $100,000 (in 2005 dollars) compared with $7,800 today. Britain will be very slightly below that average by then, yet has still trebled its …
Julian Simon: Happy Earth Day (1995): ‘It is very frustrating that after 25 years of the anti-pessimists being proven entirely right, and the doomsayers being proven entirely wrong, their credibility and influence waxes ever greater’
Julian Simon: Happy Earth Day (1995)
http://www.thegwpf.org/julian-simon-happy-earth-day-1995/
“[It] is very frustrating that after 25 years of the anti-pessimists being proven entirely right, and the doomsayers being proven entirely wrong, their credibility and influence waxes ever greater. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is every scientific reason to be joyful about the trends in the condition of the Earth, and hopeful for humanity’s future, even if we are falsely told the outlook is grim. So Happy Earth Day.”
April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting. But all reasonable persons who look at the statistical evidence now available must agree that Earth Day’s scientific premises are entirely wrong.
During the first great Earth Week in 1970 there was panic. The public’s outlook for the planet was unrelievedly gloomy. The doomsaying environmentalists–of whom the dominant figure was Paul Ehrlich–raised the alarm: The oceans and the Great Lakes were dying; impending great famines would be seen on television starting in 1975; the death rate would quickly increase due to pollution; and rising prices of increasingly-scarce raw materials would lead to a reversal in the past centuries’ progress in the standard of living.
The media trumpeted the bad news in headlines and front-page stories. Professor Ehrlich was on the Johnny Carson show for an unprecedented full hour–twice. Classes were given by television to tens of thousands of university students.
It is hard for those who did not experience it to imagine the national excitement then. Even those who never read a newspaper joined in efforts to clean up streams, and the most unrepentant slobs refrained from littering for a few weeks. Population growth was the great bugaboo.
Every ill was the result of too many people in the U. S. and abroad. The remedy doomsayers urged was government-coerced birth control, abroad and even at home.
On the evening before Earth Day I spoke on a panel at the jam-packed auditorium at the University of Illinois. The organizers had invited me for “balance,” to show that all points of view would be heard. I spoke then exactly the same ideas that I write today; some of the very words are the same.
Of the 2,000 persons in attendance, probably fewer than a dozen concluded that anything I said made sense. A panelist denounced me as a religious nut, attributing to me …