Amerika

Someone last night finally explained the right wing argument against global warming to me: in their view, the irresponsible masses who create Revolutions want a good excuse for one world government with massive powers, and global warming is the justification that racism and terrorism haven’t been.

I shrugged that one off with the Platonic knowledge that one world government is inevitable, and whether or not it’s abusive depends on who runs it. However, I think most people like to point fingers at abstract things instead of engaging with the reality of needing good leaders with sensible ideologies.

So it’s not surprising the Neue Droit-ish Brussels Journal is defecating on Global Warming:

The climate ‘experts’ in attendance — such as Tony Blair and Kofi Annan — all took human-caused global warming for granted and potentially catastrophic. The debate at Davos was whether Europe and the world should submit to an 80% emissions cut, a 20% cut, or something in between.

President Klaus said he chided Davos attendees for talking up radical proposals when they hadn’t even been able to fulfill their modest Kyoto commitments. But trying to reason with the Davos people was like trying to reason with Communist officials before 1989 — they just regarded you as hopelessly ignorant or naive. Klaus described the business attendees at the Davos meeting as “rent seekers,” interested only in profits from government and “not at all interested in markets or freedom.” The political situation, he said, is that of a highly organized rent-seeking group rolling over an opposition of isolated unorganized individuals.

The UN models, Professor Lindzen jested, are “examples of unintelligent design.” Global warming effects are miniscule if seen on a graph mapped against the huge variability of daily and seasonal weather. Climate warming alarmists have forgotten the null hypothesis — which assumes that there is no need to bring in exogenous forcing mechanisms (such as anthropomorphic CO2) to explain observed climate behavior. The ocean’s turbulent movements can suffice to explain most climate variability. Dreaming up specific causes for this or that climate blip isn’t necessary; we don’t, after all, need specific causes for each whorl and eddy in a bubbling brook.

Brussels Journal

Arguments against the global warming idea are presented, but are too much to quote here.

My position: global warming is probably both man-made and a natural cycle, but we must deal with it. Also, global warming is a symbol to represent “all human changes to our environment” which concern most intelligent people. There are too many people, and not enough unbroken thousand miles of wilderness for species to preserve themselves and thrive. We’re changing this world for the better, in the human sphere, but we haven’t examined the secondary costs to many of the things that make life on planet earth great.

Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.

Altogether, 68% of U.S. adults believe the effects of global warming will be manifest at some point in their lifetimes, indicating the public largely believes the problem is real. However, only 38% of Americans, similar to the 40% found in 2008, believe it will pose “a serious threat” to themselves or their own way of life.

Gallup

How can this be? Let me show you something else, and then I’ll tell you what I think is afoot:

I mean, if you look at polls, you see right now, for example, that obviously the economy is just through the roof. So whatever is going on at that particular moment that is really affecting people’s lives, that’s what ranks high in the polls. And climate change has often been described as a slow-moving catastrophe, and it’s precisely the kind of issue that once you actually really feel the dire effects in your own life, then it’s way too late. That’s what the science tells us and what scientists have been telling us for 25 years now really. So it’s a very, very difficult problem for the political system to deal with.

I went to interview John McCain, and he made this point. He was very honest and it was back in the straight-talking John McCain days, where he said, “It’s very unclear whether our political system can deal with a problem like this because usually we wait for a crisis and then we deal with the crisis, and that’s just not the way climate change works. You can’t deal with it once the crisis hits.”

I think that’s one of the reasons that it doesn’t register very high in polls as a concern — it’s just not in people’s faces all the time right now. So it really is the obligation, you could argue, of the media and also of the political system, to put it there. And the political system has been very consciously ignoring the problem for a long time now, eight years of really trying to suppress discussion of climate change and reports about climate change. So I think that also contributes to the public sense of “I don’t have to worry about that,” because they’re not hearing people talking about it in Washington. And now that is changing to a certain extent.

Yale

So, are the Brussels Journal and Michael Crichton just wrong when they say global warming is a sham?

No, they’re correct — it’s not actual science. It’s a symbol.

As Kolbert said above in the crypto-language of media-savvy leftists, people aren’t going to pay attention to big, slow problems. We can’t mention that because it points out that democracy is garbage that survives only in convenient times. That’s taboo. So instead, we invent a giant hype and a horrific albeit unscientific symbol, and use that to scare other people into acting.

It’s no different than claiming black rapists stalk the park, or that Zombie Hitler waits under the bed, or that if you masturbate your palms will get hairy. Our self-appointed media elite are accustomed to manipulating us with symbols, whether a dead dog or crying waif or pile of cash, and so they’re doing the same thing. As in all things, leftists mean well but are subverted by their desire for power through self-righteousness, and so they’ve run into a snag here.

For one thing, our big media has been falling in importance. For another, our political landscape is highly polarized. For a third, people are now accustomed to the internet and being able to see only what agrees with them. Like conservatives? Read/watch/hear the odious blob Rush Limbaugh and the frank yet charming Ann Coulter. Like liberals? Read/watch/hear Glenn Greenwald and the quirky, likable Huffington Post. So the message falls between political allegiances.

All of this is an attempt to cover up the real problem: democracies further fragment societies, as does consumerism, and without a consensus or goal, we’re falling into infighting and declining while others rise. If we focus on global warming, we look at one subset of that decline — the environmental impact — without looking at the rest. So here, again, Global Warming is a symbol that represents the whole without being it.

Now on to the scary evidence for human change to the environment. Note that I don’t attribute this to global warming, or exclusively to humans, but view these as problems we must address — problems that would be made easier if we were honest about the amount of pollution the third world produces (we can’t measure it because they don’t have factories that keep records) and the problem of overpopulation, both taboo subjects in the crowd-pleasing news.

Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society

World population is likely to reach 9.4 billion by 2070. If all these people were to consume fossil fuels at present rich-world per capita consumption rates, all probably recoverable conventional oil, gas, shale oil, uranium (through burner reactors), and coal (2,000 billion tonnes assumed as potentially recoverable), would be totally exhausted in about 20 years.

What is not well understood is the magnitude of the overshoot, the extent to which our present consumer society has exceeded sustainable levels of resource use and environmental impact. This is made clear by a glance at the greenhouse problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given a range of emission rates and the associated levels that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would rise to.

Perhaps the most quoted graph shows that if the concentration is to be stabilized at 550 parts per million (ppm), twice the pre-industrial level, emissions must be cut to 2.5 gigatonnes per year (Gt/y) by 2040 and to 0.2 Gt/y by about 2200. The present level from fossil fuel burning (i.e., not including land clearing) is over 6 Gt/y.

To keep the concentration below 450 ppm, emissions must be cut to about 1+ Gt/y by 2100, and to about 0.3 Gt/y by 2200. This target is much too high, because the atmospheric concentration is now at about 380 ppm and many disturbing climatic effects are becoming apparent.

If world population reaches 9+ billion, a global carbon use budget of one Gt would provide us all with about 150 kg of fossil fuel per year, which is around 2–3% of our present rich-world per capita use of fossil fuels (in GHGe [greenhouse gas equivalent] terms). Alternatively, only about 170 million people, 2.5% of the world’s present population, could live on the present rich-world per capita fossil fuel use of over 6 tonnes of fossil fuel per year.

Intel Daily

Gosh, we’re back to that sickening knowledge that if we had fewer people, they could live a better life with zero environmental impact. They estimate 2.5% of the world’s population; I’ve been saying 5% of the world’s population which coincidentally would be the ones over 120 IQ points, or those likely to contribute anything of lasting importance. If we cut back, we’d want to keep the smart, because being smart is good…right? Well, most people think that’s not fair and would oppose it.

Of course, it wouldn’t be hard to cut our use by half if all the fast food, porn stores, nail salons and ebay stores went away. I don’t see many smart people in those.

At a scientific conference on climate change held this week in Copenhagen, four environmental experts announced that sea levels appear to be rising almost twice as rapidly as had been forecast by the United Nations just two years ago. The warning is aimed at politicians who will meet in the same city in December to discuss the same subject and, perhaps, to thrash out an international agreement to counter it.

The reason for the rapid change in the predicted rise in sea levels is a rapid increase in the information available. In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change convened by the UN made its prediction that sea levels would rise by between 18cm and 59cm by 2100, a lack of knowledge about how the polar ice caps were behaving was behind much of the uncertainty. Since then they have been closely monitored, and the results are disturbing. Both the Greenland and the Antarctic caps have been melting at an accelerating rate. It is this melting ice that is raising sea levels much faster than had been expected. Indeed, scientists now reckon that sea levels will rise by between 50cm and 100cm by 2100, unless action is taken to curb climate change.

Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado, Boulder, leads one study of the Greenland ice sheet. He told the conference that this sheet is melting not only because it is warmer but also because water seeping through its crevices is breaking it up. This effect had been neglected in the earlier report.

The Economist

Basically, nothing’s changed except that their models were bad. Generally, models are bad, because it’s really difficult even for a genius to think of all the factors involved. It’s why video games with extremely realistic physics engines don’t look quite like reality yet. They are capturing 300,000 factors out of ten million, and those last 9.7 million factors represent the finishing 5% of detail that makes life “lifey.”

Saying there’s no excuse for inaction, the nearly 2,000 climate researchers meeting in Copenhagen urged policy-makers to “vigorously” implement the economic and technological tools available to cut emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

“The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized,” the scientists said in a statement. “There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.”

The climate change panel predicted a sea level rise of 7 to 23 inches (18 to 59 centimeters) by the end of the century, which could flood low-lying areas and force millions to flee. But more recent research presented at the conference suggested that melting glaciers and ice sheets could help push the sea level up at least 20 inches (50 centimeters), and possibly as much as 39 inches (1 meter).

“Recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change with poor nations and communities particularly at risk,” the statement said.

SFG

More support for my thesis hard. Want to convince people to do something? “Think of the children… the orphans, the poor, minorities, gays and other victims you can feel good about yourself for saving!”

And finally, the blasting gap to prime you with fear:

Lord Stern, the economist who produced the single most influential political document on climate change, says he underestimated the risks of global warming and the damage that could result from it.

“Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C could be? I think, not yet,” Lord Stern posed to the meeting of scientists in Copenhagen.

“A rise of 5C would be a temperature the world has not seen for 30 to 50 million years. We’ve been around only 100,000 years as human beings. We don’t know what that’s like.”

Lord Stern said new research done in the past two or three years had made it clear there were “severe risks” if global temperature rose by the predicted 4C to 7C by 2100. Agriculture would be destroyed and life would be impossible over much of the planet, the former World Bank chief economist said.

The Independent

Does that sound like a movie? Like total apocalypse, Ragnarok creeping in from the wings, all life ends, etc? Yeah… it’s a movie apocalypse, complete with “et cetera.” No one knows, but we use that ambiguity to pitch a very worst case scenario. He may be right, but it’s equally possible this is a powerful manipulation.

Michael Crichton was known for his interpretations on the philosophical level of science, putting numerous small discoveries into context and showing us what they meant in terms of impact, not raw data. His epic State of Fear pointed out that global warming wasn’t good science in the context of pointing out how our mass media manipulates us with symbols of fear.

Fear sells. Fear also motivates. Saying things are OK does not. This is why “Progressive” dogmas are most appealing to those with no purpose in life; they seem dramatic, important, a good way to be self-important. And the mass media has one concern: profit. Therefore, they frame their reporting as what gets the most purchases, hits, mentions, etc., and that’s constant fear that’s after the event justified as “well meaning.”

While I think the right — “neoliberals” — are on crack, it’s because they’ve become reactionaries instead of people with creative and positive, assertive, warlike plans for conserving nature and culture, I think they’re right to fear the power global warming gives.

It’s obvious first world people aren’t going to give up their SUVs, and third world people aren’t going to stop at two children. They will need to be forced. That will require a global Taliban of the Secular, Scientific and You-Can’t-Prove-Us-Wrong Populist Progressive Alliance. That’s probably a bad thing.

But then again, not regulating human impact to the environment is a bad thing also… so we need something like the NWO to help us do what populist democracy never will do: anticipate a problem and fix it even though the solution is unpopular.

As one man says, it’s off people’s radar:

1998 remains the warmest year on record, and since then there has been no discernible upward trend.

Last year saw a miserable summer in much of western Europe, and the same countries are in the middle of a winter which has been colder than for many years.

For the average layman, global warming remains a distant prospect.

Politicians are naturally reluctant to impose apparently unwarranted costs on their citizens if those same people can vote them out of office at the next election.

BBC

No one wants to pay for an illusion. We’re also used to our governments, media and fellow citizens selling us lies so they can advance themselves.

Supposing we put all our wealth into global warming, cut our emissions by killing parts of our industry and lifestyle, and then find out it was a fraud? That means others get ahead at our expense.

Crichton was right. The climate of fear, the grimly deceptive competition between humans, means we’re at a stage in our evolution where there is no way to get consensus on an issue like Global Warming. We’re too afraid of each other and too tired of being lied to.

So it goes.

Tags: cognitive dissonance, media, passive aggression