Saturday, November 17, 2018

The Global Big Chill

Two days ago snow fell in New York City. Mid-November snow is rare indeed. So rare that the city was unprepared. Politicians were running around covering their butts… trying to explain why a mere 6 inches of snow had nearly brought transportation to a halt.

On a good day public transportation in New York is dysfunctional, a national embarrassment. Perhaps Amazon will come along to fix it, but that is probably a bit optimistic. Led by Comrade Bill de Blasio, city government is fundamentally incompetent.

And yet, hovering over the snowfall was a colossal irony. Climate change activists had been warning us, in typically Chicken Little fashion, that the earth was heating up, that it could only get warmer, that the oceans would rise to engulf all beach real estate, and the the polar bear population would be decimated. Not only that, but they were also telling us that we were at fault, that the climate and the goddess of Nature were punishing us for our excessive expulsion of greenhouse gases… or some such thing.

Settled science, then intoned, as though anyone who did not accept their dogmatic opinion about our own responsibility for the state of the climate should be expelled from polite society… and even jailed. Climate change denial was denounced as roughly akin to Holocaust denial. It was a guilt trip in steroids.

As it happens, the epicenter of climate change activism, California is burning up… as we speak. Villages and towns and cities are being erased by a fire the likes of which we have not seen since the Santa Rosa fires of last year. How does it happen that the most environmentally conscious state in the nation, a state that wants to lead the international fight against the climate, now sits under a cloud of toxic fumes. When San Francisco air is more polluted than the air in major cities in India and China, you know that something is wrong.

What, I do not venture to guess. It could all have been a mere accident, forest fire meets drought conditions. It could have had something to do with the failure of state authorities to manage their forests, especially the underbrush. It could have had something to do with water management.

One man’s pristine purity of nature is another man’s kindling. There will certainly be a lot of blame to be spread around. And yet, as stewards of the environment, California’s “woke” leaders, beginning with Governor moonbeam himself, have obviously not been doing a very good job.

I will assume, without possessing any more information than you have, that they are not working hard to fix the problem and even to prevent it from ever happening again. I suspect that they are sitting around trying to blame it all on Donald Trump.

As though the fires had not sufficiently thrown the general hysteria about global warming into question, along comes a NASA scientist with word that… would you believe it… sunspots have a direct and decided influence on our climate. And that activity on the sun is going to make the world much, much colder. Yikes. Worse yet, it is difficult to blame them on Donald Trump.

We read this on the Metro site (via Maggie’s Farm):

Humanity is facing a long, cold winter which could see temperatures across the planet plunge to depressing lows.

That’s the warning from a Nasa scientist who fears sunspot activity on the surface of our star has dropped so low that it could herald the arrival of a uniquely grim mini Ice Age.

‘We see a cooling trend,’ Martin Mlynczak of Nasa’s Langley Research Center told Space Weather. ‘High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy.

‘If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.’

Sunspot activity follows a cycle which is believed to last 11 years as the number of patches peaks and drops.

There have been very few spots on the sun for most of this year, meaning that it could be about to get very cold, very quickly. ‘It could happen in a matter of months,’ Mlynczak added.

You would think that this recognition of the influence of the sun on climate would cause our climate scientists to question their idea that human beings are at fault. Not so fast. The scientists are happy to inform you that the new ice age, which will apparently override the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, will give us time to get our houses in order, to reduce carbon emissions and to save the planet.

Or else, to become more like California.

9 comments:

Malcolm said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Malcolm said...

Not long ago the great physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an introduction to a report on the beneficial aspects of higher carbon dioxide levels. In it he asked:

The people who are supposed to be the experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence… That to me is the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that the whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?

He continues:

Indur Goklany has assembled a massive collection of evidence to demonstrate two facts. First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial. I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.

http://malcolmpollack.com/2018/11/13/freeman-dyson-on-scientific-tribalism-jordan-peterson-on-the-idiocy-of-climatism-and-nasa-on-cooling/

Dr. Irredeemable Dreg said...

The climate simulations have been obviously wrong for quite some time. And it's a sad state of affairs when major claims, like Michael Mann's "hockey stick" and the recent "ocean warming" paper by Resplandy et al, are falsified by private citizens and not by vaunted peer review boards. To no one's surprise, the apocalyptic deadlines of Mr Asswad al-Gore, O'Rama's' "science advisor" John Holdren, and James Hansen have been embarassingly and repeatedly passed without incident.

Re California, I can tell you exactly what happened there, because I watched the same thing happening in Boulder County, CO, when I lived in a mountain home in the Roosevelt National Forest. When the USFS (or other agency) got funding to clear deadwood and thin the forest, the greenloons and their lawyers tied up the projects in court until either the time limit expired or project funding was depleted on legal expenses. The problem in CO was the pine beetle and forest overcrowding, and they have a similar problem in CA. The massive presence of standing deadwood, abundant and flammable undergrowth (aka "kindling"), high winds, and arid climate combine to create explosive fire danger. The same people who believe every dead tree has a right to life will tell you there are too many human beings on the planet. And not enough snail darters.

But the ultimate joke is the straightfaced claim that the UN and national governments, the same institutions who presided over the rise of terrorism, global economic disasters, mass murders, nuclear proliferation, and the impending demise of Western Civilization in Europe, among countless other calamities and catastrophes, is competent and should be trusted to "fix" the global climate. A recently elected woman is a perfect representative of this bizarre notion... Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with her degree in economics from a formerly well-respected university, is on a mission to fix health care and immigration. Yes, the cute bubblehead bartender who claimed unemployment is low because everybody is working two jobs. When Jerry Brown gets that high-speed train running on time, then maybe I might- might - think about handing over the planetary habitat to his care.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Thank you for the information about Colorado... somehow or other this side of the story has been completely buried.

Sam L. said...

It's GLOBAL UN-WARMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!! The HORROR!! The horror...

"Led by Comrade Bill de Blasio,": should be "Mis-led by..."

"When San Francisco air is more polluted than the air in major cities in India and China, you know that something is wrong." A friend of my son has been teaching in Beiping, and he told me the pollution NEVER gets above 250 ppm, because that's the maximum allowable number the CCP allows the papers to print.

"You would think that this recognition of the influence of the sun on climate would cause our climate scientists to question their idea that human beings are at fault. Not so fast. In the immortal words of John Belushi, "But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO."

Sam L. said...

Dr. ID, you'll be dead before the greenies will stop fighting the high-speed train.

ASM826 said...

New York's transportation issues are not a national embarrassment, because they are not a national problem. It's a mistake to look at any state's problems and the size of those problems and assign responsibility to the federal gov't.

Anonymous said...

Regarding blaming Trump for the fires, this is too opportunistic. Everyone knows it's Bush's fault.

(pun intended)

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Alll government everywhere has one singular aim: to consume all citizen resources.

Why? Well, it’s clear... it’s because they’re smarter than you. Just ask them.

Analytical intelligence has become a ticket to the upper class in America. But the dirty little secret is that analytical intelligence creates nothing. In it’s pure form, it tells you what is. OIt involves no risk whatsoever. It merely survives off the creativity of others — the entrepreneur. In an endless desire to tell the entrepreneur what to do, to keep him in check, to slow progress because it doesn’t conform to the models analysts developed on spreadsheets.

Climate Change is the latest installment in the analyiticals’ desire to take over everything. It’s technocratic sensationalism. Translation: it’s bunk. Nonsense. A millinion words to communicate one desire: control.