Climate Marches Aren’t About Science — They’re About Trump
Organizers promised that hundreds of thousands would participate in an April 22 March for Science planned for hundreds of cities worldwide and an April 29 People’s Climate March in Washington, DC.
These events have no more to do with science or climate change than do UN programs or the Paris climate treaty. Their own leaders make that perfectly clear.
A climate website asserts that marchers intend to mark President Trump’s 100th day in office “with a massive demonstration that shows our resistance is not going to wane.” They intend to “block Trump’s entire fossil fuel agenda,” with Berkeley-style tantrums and riots, most likely.
A science march website says this is “explicitly a political movement, aimed at holding leaders in science and politics accountable” for trying to “skew, ignore, misuse or interfere with science.”
That pious language really means they intend to allow no deviation from climate cataclysm doctrines.
It means everyone must accept claims that fossil fuel emissions, not powerful natural forces, now govern Earth’s climate; any future changes will be catastrophic; despite growing wealth and technological prowess, humanity will somehow be unable to adapt to future fluctuations; and mankind can and must control the climate by regulating emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, regardless of costs.
Equally revealing, former UN climate convention director Christiana Figueres has said the UN goal is to “intentionally change the economic development model” that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.
“Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection,” former IPCC mitigation group co-chair Ottmar Edenhofer has stated. It is about negotiating “the distribution of the world’s resources.”
The ‘March for Science’ Is Actually a Threat to Science Itself
BY TYLER O’NEIL
Scholars in the fields of biology, ethics, environment, and economics attacked the upcoming “March for Science,” scheduled for Earth Day this coming Saturday, as a threat to the public appreciation of science. They argued that a politicization of science following the rhetoric of the “Women’s March” against President Donald Trump would be disastrous.
“When they behave like partisan hacks in the name of science, they politicize science and undermine trust in science,” Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), declared at a Heritage Foundation event on Wednesday. “When you use your expertise as a license to regulate others and tax others … ordinary people are going to get very skeptical, not only about your expertise but about your motives.”
The “March for Science” started as a form of opposition to President Donald Trump, whom many have accused of launching a “war on science.” The march’s original statement declared “certain things that we accept as facts with no alternatives” such as “the Earth is becoming warmer due to human action,” and “the diversity of life arose by evolution.”
In other words, the march is promoting the “consensus” around climate change and evolution, two developing areas of science in which there is actually good evidence and debate on both sides. While the organization’s website has since minimized these hot-button political issues, it is likely activists will wave signs attacking climate and evolution “deniers.”
Lewis focused on the issue of climate change and the tactic of stifling debate by labeling skeptics “climate deniers.” He noted that when an atmospheric scientist, John Christy, presented evidence of “an increasing divergence” between climate models predicting “more and more warming and the data showing less and less,” this testimony was dismissed as “antiscientific climate denialism.”
Keith Seitter, executive director of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), wrote a letter of protest to Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, declaring that “to suggest that humans are not responsible for most of the warming we have experienced over the past 50 years indicates a disregard for the scientific process” (emphasis added).
Lewis argued that Christy was following the scientific method, while Seitter was just “making an appeal to authority which is not a scientific argument at all.”…
CBS News: An 11-Year-Old Is Suing Trump for His Climate Skepticism – Kid declares: ‘Trump is a climate change denier’
CBS News celebrated an eleven-year-old who is suing President Trump for his climate change skepticism. The kid, Avery McRae, said, “Trump is not doing anything to help stop climate change. He’s a climate change denier, and we’re going to prove that to — to the world.” CBS felt like this was the cutest thing ever — to possibly cost taxpayers oodles of money and perpetuate fake news. The journalist said, “Although their lawsuit may seem leak a long shot, who better to fight for the future than those who will be here to see it?”
Craziest activist photos from the #marchforscience #sciencemarchdc
Their true colors shine brightly:
This Earth Day, April 22, Earth Day Network and the March for Science are co-organizing a rally and teach-in on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The day’s program will include speeches and trainings with scientists and civic organizers, musical performances, and a march through the streets of Washington, D.C. The crowd will gather at 8:00am, and the teach-in will begin at 09:00am.
Here’s a photo of AP’s science writer Seth Borenstein doing an interview with, er, Barney. I think. Pretty well sums up Seth’s outlook.
Godwin’s law was proven early, and this sign, pretty well sums up the insanity:
I seem to recall leftists went berserk when the Heartland institute put up a billboard with a similar meme, using the unabomber. But, apparently its OK when they do it.
Ummm….WTF?
‘March For Science’: ‘The whole march parodies itself’ – ‘Not even Hitler doubted climate change’
SCENES FROM THE SCIENCE MARCH
The “March for Science” is underway today, featuring the usual mountebanks like Michael Mann and Bill Nye. Liberals sure are fond of marching. It is doubtful that this march represents a true cross-section of actual scientists, but you never know. In any case, the whole thing parodies itself, making our job easy.
In 2004, Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin wrote a shocking admission in the New York Review of Books: “Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.” (With political judgment this bad, is it any wonder there might be doubts about the policy prescriptions of scientists?) MIT’s Kerry Emanuel, as mainstream as they come in climate science (Al Gore references his work) warned: “Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well-documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.”
So, yeah, this kind of thing is sure to help the cause of science:
Live Poor & ‘Green!’: World’s ‘Greenest’ People Live In Ridiculously Poor Authoritarian Regimes
By ANDREW FOLLETT – Daily Caller
A new report ranking countries with “the most environmentally friendly people” shows the greenest nations are also some of the poorest in the world.
A MoneySuperMarket report listed Mozambique, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as having “the most environmentally friendly people in the world,” while ranking Americans as being some of the least eco-friendly people on the planet. That may not be a bad thing, though, given the greenest countries also tend to be poor and run by authoritarian regimes.
“At the top of the list, people from Mozambique have the least impact of anyone anywhere – using almost 100 per cent green energy, producing almost no carbon dioxide and creating almost no waste,” MoneySuperMarket said in a statement. “Their only disadvantage is that they don’t treat any of their wastewater, so anything that gets poured away stays as it is.”
The average person living in Mozambique earned $511.47 a year in 2015, which was 4 percent of the global average. Mozambique is ruled by an authoritarian-leaning “hybrid regime,” according to the Economist’s Democracy Index.
Likewise, the Economist lists Ethiopia’s government as an authoritarian regime, and Zambia is listed as having a “hybrid regime.” Ethiopia’s average resident earned $1,529.89 a year in 2015, and the average Zambian earned only $3,602.33. In contrast, the average American earned nearly $52,000 a year.
(Graphic: Courtesy of MoneySuperMarket)
In fact, there is not a single “full democracy” listed in the top 10 of MoneySuperMarket’s report. Three countries are listed as “flawed democracies,” four as “hybrid regimes” and three as authoritarian states.
The average person living in on of those 10 countries had an annual income of $3,640.83 in the year 2015 – nearly five times below the global average annual income of $17,760 in that year.
(Graphic: Courtesy of MoneySuperMarket)
The 10 least green countries listed in MoneySuperMarket’s report were far richer and more democratic than the greenest countries. Four of the 10 countries had “full democracy,” five were listed as “flawed democracies” and only China was listed as authoritarian.…
Earth Day Must Divorce Itself From The Climate Scare
By Tom Harris
All sensible people are environmentalists. We want to enjoy clean air, land, and water and we like to think that future generations will live in an even better environment. These were the original objectives of Earth Day and I am happy to have presented at Earth Day events in the early 1990s.
However, in recent years, Earth Day has been hijacked by the climate change movement. Today, the Earth Day home page starts:
Earth Day 2017’s Campaign is Environmental & Climate Literacy
Education is the foundation for progress. We need to build a global citizenry fluent in the concepts of climate change and aware of its unprecedented threat to our planet.
The U.N.’s My World global survey shows that Earth Day organizers are out of touch with average people around the world. After almost 10 million people from 194 countries have been polled, “action taken on climate change” rates dead last out of the 16 suggested priorities for the United Nations.
For most of the world, and especially those in developing nations, the message is clear: in comparison with access to reliable energy and clean water, better healthcare, government honesty, a good education, and protecting forests, rivers and oceans, climate change is not important.
Besides the strategic blunder of focusing Earth Day on an issue that the people of the world do not seem to particularly care about, there is a serious ethical problem that will come back to haunt organizers if they don’t soon change focus.
Reports such as those of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change illustrate that debate rages in the scientific community about the causes and consequences of climate change. Scientists cannot even agree on whether warming or cooling lie ahead, let alone the degree to which we affect it. Yet, climate campaigners assert that ‘the science is settled.’ We know with certainty, they claim, that our carbon dioxide emissions will cause a planetary emergency unless we radically change our ways.
The consequence of this overconfidence is tragic. According to the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, of the over $1 billion spent worldwide each day on climate finance, 94% goes to mitigation, trying to control future climate. Only 6% of global climate finance is dedicated to helping vulnerable people cope with climate change today. In developing countries, even less, an abysmal 5%, goes to adaptation. Based on a theory …
Believe It! Global Warming Hiatus Real, Chinese And Japanese Scientists Affirm
Slowdown: The braked warming of the last one and a half decades and its reasons
By Dr. Sebastian Lüning und Prof. Fritz Vahrenhholt
(German text translated by P Gosselin)
Stefan Rahmstorf is against the notion of a warming hiatus. In his eyes it doesn’t exist. Instead he prefers to live in his Rahmstorfian world, where every thing is the way it’s supposed to be: warming is galloping along. It’s a strange parallel world that has nothing to do with reality.
The rest of the scientific community, fortunately, see things somewhat more realistically and are busily publishing papers on the reasons for the hiatus or slowdown. The Institute for Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has even issued a press release on the subject:
New Study Reveals the Atmospheric Footprint of the Global Warming Hiatus
The increasing rate of the global mean surface temperature was reduced from 1998 to 2013, known as the global warming hiatus or pause. Great efforts have been devoted to the understanding of the cause. The proposed mechanisms include the internal variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, the ocean heat uptake and redistribution, among many others. However, the atmospheric footprint of the recent warming hiatus has been less concerned. Both the dynamical and physical processes remain unclear.
In a recent paper published in Scientific Report, LIU Bo and ZHOU Tianjun from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences have investigated the atmospheric anomalous features during the global warming hiatus period (1998-2013). They show evidences that the global mean tropospheric temperature also experienced a hiatus or pause (Fig. 1). To understand the physical processes that dominate the warming hiatus, they decomposed the total temperature trends into components due to processes related to surface albedo, water vapor, cloud, surface turbulent fluxes and atmospheric dynamics. The results demonstrated that the hiatus of near surface temperature warming trend is dominated by the decreasing surface latent heat flux compared with the preceding warming period, while the hiatus of upper tropospheric temperature is dominated by the cloud-related processes. Further analysis indicated that atmospheric dynamics are coupled with surface turbulent heat fluxes over lower troposphere and coupled with cloud processes over upper troposphere.
Figure 1. (a) Global mean temperature anomalies from 1950 to 2015 and (b) linear trends of global mean temperature for near surface (i.e. the lowest atmospheric layer), and
‘March for Science’: Politics Disguised as Science: When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’
This week’s March for Science is odd. Marches are usually held to defend something that’s in peril. Does anyone really think big science is in danger? The mere fact that the March was scheduled for Earth Day betrays what the event is really about: politics. The organizers admitted as much early on, though they’re now busy trying to cover the event in sciencey camouflage.
If past is prologue, expect to hear a lot about the supposed “consensus” on catastrophic climate change this week. The purpose of this claim is to shut up skeptical non-scientists.
How should non-scientists respond when told about this consensus? We can’t all study climate science. But since politics often masquerades as science, we need a way to tell one from the other.
“Consensus,” according to Merriam-Webster, means both “general agreement” and “group solidarity in sentiment and belief.” That sums up the problem. Is this consensus based on solid evidence and sound logic, or social pressure and groupthink?
When can you doubt a consensus? Your best bet is to look at the process that produced, defends and transmits the supposed consensus.
Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that scientists are prone to herd instincts. Many false ideas once enjoyed consensus. Indeed, the “power of the paradigm” often blinds scientists to alternatives to their view. Question the paradigm, and some respond with anger.
We shouldn’t, of course, forget the other side of the coin. There are cranks and conspiracy theorists. No matter how well founded a scientific consensus, there’s someone who thinks it’s all hokum. Sometimes these folks turn out to be right. But often, they’re just cranks whose counsel is best ignored.
So how do we distinguish, as Andrew Coyne puts it, “between genuine authority and mere received wisdom? And how do we tell crankish imperviousness to evidence from legitimate skepticism?” Do we have to trust whatever we’re told is based on a scientific consensus unless we can study the science ourselves? When can you doubt a consensus? When should you doubt it?
Your best bet is to look at the process that produced, defends and transmits the supposed consensus. I don’t know of any complete list of signs of suspicion. But here’s a checklist to decide when you can, even should, doubt a scientific “consensus,” whatever the subject.
CNN criticized on Earth Day for daring to air a climate skeptic
There was a certain melancholy about Earth Day 2017. The decades of failed predictions of doom, those damn frackers giving us cheap gas back, and now the Trump administration cutting regulations. No wonder some of the front men are getting a little testy.
Like Bill Nye, the guy who doesn’t have a science degree. Matthe Balan ofMediaite caught him revealing his inner authoritarian:
TV personality Bill Nye criticized CNN on New Day Saturday for letting a skeptic of man-made climate change participate in a panel discussion.
“I will say, much as I love CNN, you’re doing a disservice by having one climate change skeptic, and not 97 or 98 scientists or engineers concerned about climate change,” Nye contended.
Nye appeared with May Boeve of the green action group 350.org and Princeton University physics professor William Happer, who has downplayed the impact of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. So despite the two-to-one slant in favor of the environmentalists, the former PBS host wasn’t satisfied.
The message of the American Left has devolved into “shut up!”