GLOBAL WARMING HYSTERIA : Suicide A Climate Change Solution

Cheer up. If we keep our heads we are likely to deal with climate challenges the same way we got to where we are; innovation, markets, democracy and optimism. | The Australian

Cheer up. If we keep our heads we are likely to deal with climate challenges the same way we got to where we are; innovation, markets, democracy and optimism. | The Australian


“Articles, tweets and interviews that deliberately lob personal tears into the public domain sound the alarm bells of sanctimony..”
― Chris Kenny

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FIRSTLY, apologies for the use of “suicide” in the heading to all those who have been directly or indirectly affected by such a horrible and tragic event. I can personally sympathise.

THAT said, the use of the threat of “suicide” by those pushing the global warming climate change agenda is indicative of the desperate, dishonest and disrespectful lengths that climate activists will go to in order to drive their latest fashionable eco-scare.

AUSTRALIAN columnist Chris Kenny with some much needed perspective, clarity and reason to parlay the constant rhetoric of climate change doom and gloom that the Climate Crisis Industry relies on in an attempt to remain relevant…

(Links, Graphs and Bolds added by Climatism)

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Stop the hand-wringing, humankind will adapt and prosper

Chris Kenny

Chris Kenny

Associate Editor // The Australian
Sydney

WHEN people go public with private tears I am immediately suspicious. Not that I am against tears; as a physical reaction to emotion they are a fact of life best controlled in some circumstances but uncontrollable in others.

But articles, tweets and interviews that deliberately lob personal tears into the public domain sound the alarm bells of sanctimony. Telling the world about your saltwater reaction to this or that is perhaps the epitome of virtue-signalling.

“I cried two times when my daughter was born,” was the opening line in a New York Times piece this week. Those sanctimony warning bells rang loud. It was by Iraq veteran, English professor and climate alarmist Roy Scranton, promoting a new book of essays on war and climate change titled We’re Doomed. Now What? And yes, he claims to have shed tears for the planet.

“First for joy, when after 27 hours of labour the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.”

Where to start with such inanity? Perhaps with the good news. Max Roser’s work for Oxford University’s Our World in Data project shows that two centuries ago, 90 per cent of the global population lived in extreme poverty and now, even though the population has grown from less than one billion people to about 7.5 billion, those proportions have completely reversed so that only 10 per cent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty.

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world-poverty-since-1820-750x535

Global Extreme Poverty – Our World in Data

Global Extreme Poverty - Our World in Data

Global Extreme Poverty – Our World in Data

* Read the rest of this entry »


U.S. Olympians Head To Capitol Hill In Bid To “Salvage” Winters From Climate Change

Screen Shot 2018-04-26 at 5.31.36 am.png

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read.
The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think.
The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is;
he confuses it with feeling.”
– Thomas Sowell

Via CBS NEWS

Five U.S. Olympians will be on Capitol Hill Wednesday to brief lawmakers on how climate change is impacting winter sports and recreation.

“We still have a chance to be able to kind of salvage whatever is left of our winters, and kind of get back to a more sustainable way of life,” said Arielle Gold, who won a bronze in the halfpipe snowboard event in the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics — and will be on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Gold — along with cross country skier Jessie Diggins, freestyle skier David Wise, biathlete Maddie Phaneuf and alpine skier Stacey Cook — are expected to highlight climate solutions they’d like to see implemented.

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A recent study by a team of researchers, led by the University of Waterloo, found that climate change poses a threat to the Winter Olympics — and that by the end of the century, only eight of 21 sites that have hosted the Winter Olympics in the past will have temperatures low enough to host again unless greenhouse gases emissions significantly drop.

“The climate in many traditional winter sports regions isn’t what it used to be, and fewer and fewer places will be able to host the Olympic Winter Games as global warming accelerates,” Daniel Scott, a professor at Waterloo, said in a January news release on the study.

The Paralympics is also particularly vulnerable, according to researchers.

“The traditional scheduling of the Paralympic Winter Games, approximately a month after the Olympic Winter Games, poses additional climate challenges as temperatures are warmer and the probability of rain instead of snowfall increases in most of the host locations,” Scott said.

The briefing Wednesday follows the introduction of House Resolution 825, which supports policies addressing the causes and effects of climate change and recognizes its impact on outdoor recreation.

U.S. Olympians head to Capitol Hill in bid to “salvage” winters from climate change | CBS News

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THE “SCIENCE”

NO doubt these graphs were presented to Congress, as evidence, by the CO2-complainants…

nhland_season1.png

Rutgers University Climate Lab :: Global Snow Lab

Read the rest of this entry »


Politics Is Obsessed With Virtue Signalling

Virtue-Signalling RIDLEY.jpeg

“Policies are chosen according to whether they mean well, not whether they work. From the climate accord to badger culling, we increasingly judge policies by intentions rather than achievements.”

MATT RIDLEY writes an excellent piece in The Times Of London that drills down into the ‘seeming good is more important than doing good’ sickness that has infected modern Western politics with perilous results…


Politics is obsessed with virtue signalling

From the climate accord to badger culling, we increasingly judge policies by intentions rather than achievements

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THE curse of modern politics is an epidemic of good intentions and bad outcomes. Policy after policy is chosen and voted on according to whether it means well, not whether it works. And the most frustrated politicians are those who keep trying to sell policies based on their efficacy, rather than their motives. It used to be possible to approach politics as a conversation between adults, and argue for unfashionable but effective medicine. In the 140-character world this is tricky (I speak from experience).

The fact that it was Milton Friedman who said “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results” rather proves the point. He was one of the most successful of all economists in getting results in terms of raising living standards, yet is widely despised today by both the left and centre as evil because he did not bother to do much virtue signalling.

The commentator James Bartholomew popularised the term “virtue signalling” for those who posture empathetically but emptily. “Je suis Charlie” (but I won’t show cartoons of the prophet), “Refugees welcome” (but not in my home) or “Ban fossil fuels” (let’s not talk about my private jet). You see it everywhere. The policies unveiled at the [UK] Conservative Party conference show that the party is aware of this and (alas) embracing it. On student fees, housing costs and energy bills, the Tories proposed symbolic changes that would do nothing to solve the underlying problem, indeed might make them worse in some cases, but which at least showed they cared. I doubt it worked. They ended up sounding like pale imitations of Labour, or doing political dad-dancing.

“Our election campaign portrayed us as a party devoid of values,” said Robert Halfon MP in June.

“The Labour Party now has circa 700,000 members that want nothing from the Labour Party but views and values they agree with,” lamented Ben Harris-Quinney of the Bow Group last week. I think that what politicians mean by “values” is “intentions”.

The forgiving of good intentions lies behind the double standard by which we judge totalitarians. Whereas fascists are rightly condemned in schools, newspapers and social media as evil, communists get a much easier ride, despite killing more people. “For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big,” read a New York Times headline last month.

“For all its flaws, Nazi Germany did help bring Volkswagen and BMW to the car-buying public,” replied one wag on Twitter.

Imagine anybody getting away with saying of Mussolini or Franco what John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn said of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez. The reason for this double standard is the apparently good intentions of communist dictators: unlike Nazis, communists were at least trying to make a workers’ paradise; they just got it wrong. Again and again and again.

Though Jeremy Corbyn is a leading exponent, elevating intentions over outcomes is not entirely a monopoly of the left. It is something that the coalition government kept trying, in emulation of Tony Blair. Hugging huskies and gay marriage were pursued mainly for the signal they sent, rather than for the result they achieved. (Student loans, to be fair, were the opposite.) Indeed, George Osborne’s constant talk of austerity, while increasing spending in real terms, was an example of the gap between intention and outcome, albeit less sugar-coated.

I can draw up a list as long as your arm of issues where the road to failure is paved with counter-productive benevolence. Gordon Brown’s 50p top tax rate brought in less tax from the richest. Banning fox hunting has led to the killing of more foxes. Opposition to badger culls made no ecological sense, for cattle, hedgehogs, people — or badger health. Mandating a percentage of GDP for foreign aid was a virtuous gesture that causes real inefficiency and corruption — and (unlike private philanthropy) also tended to transfer money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

Or take organic farming, which has been shown repeatedly to produce trivial or zero health benefits, while any environmental benefits are grossly outweighed by the low yields that mean it requires taking more land from nature. Yet the BBC’s output on farming is dominated by coverage of the 2 per cent of farming that is organic, and is remorselessly obsequious. Why? Because organic farmers say they are trying to be nice to the planet.

My objection to wind farms is based on the outcome of the policy, whereas most people’s support is based largely on the intention. There they stand, 300ft tall, visibly advertising their virtue as signals of our commitment to devotion to Gaia. The fact that each one requires 150 tonnes of coal to make, that it needs fossil fuel back-up for when the wind is not blowing, that it is subsidised disproportionately by poor people and the rewards go disproportionately to rich people, and that its impact on emissions is so small as to be unmeasurable — none of these matter. It’s the thought that counts.

The Paris climate accord is one big virtue-signalling prayer, whose promises, if implemented, would make a difference in the temperature of the atmosphere in 2100 so small it is practically within the measuring error. But it’s the thought that counts. Donald Trump just does not care.

One politician who has always refused to play the intention game is Nigel Lawson. Rather than rest on the laurels of his political career, he has devoted his retirement to exposing the gap between rhetoric and reality in two great movements: European integration and climate change mitigation. In his book An Appeal to Reason, he pointed out that on the UN’s official forecasts, climate change, unchecked, would mean the average person will be 8.5 times as rich in 2100 as today, rather than 9.5 times if we stopped the warming. And to achieve this goal we are to punish the poor of today with painful policies? This isn’t “taking tough decisions”; this is prescribing chemotherapy for a cold.

Yet the truth is, Lord Lawson and I and others like us have so far largely lost the argument on climate change entirely on the grounds of intentions. Being against global warming is a way of saying you care about the future. Not being a headless chicken — however well argued your case — leads to accusations you do not care.

The Times

(Climatism bolds)

Politics is obsessed with virtue signalling | Comment | The Times & The Sunday Times

•••

More Must Read Matt Ridley :

  • WIND TURBINES Are Neither Clean Nor Green And They Provide Zero Global Energy | Climatism
  • A Must Read : The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science | Climatism 
  • A must watch – Greening the Planet – Dr. Matt Ridley | Climatism
  • THE TIMES : The sceptics are right. Don’t scapegoat them | Climatism
  • Must Read : Matt Ridley – Why Nobody Ever Calls The Weather Normal
  • Dialing Back the Alarm on Climate Change | Climatism
  • A warming planet is helping humans | Climatism

 


Californian Climate Madness: Committed to Moving Forward, Ignoring Warnings From Business

The eco-militant EPA’s own figures note that slashing America’s CO2 emissions, will prevent less than 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming 85 years from now!

All that pain – destroying jobs and impairing human welfare – for such little gain!

Virtue-signalling politicians “riding their eco-friendly flying pigs” – a far more dangerous threat to life on earth than any minuscule and arguably beneficial, ‘global warming’ could ever be!

Eco-insanity on stilts.

Watts Up With That?

Costs are rising for Californian Renewable Energy Consumers Costs are rising for Californian Renewable Energy Consumers

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h/t Breitbart; California has committed to moving forward with its job destroying climate policies, regardless of vocal complaints from business leaders.

California, at Forefront of Climate Fight, Won’t Back Down to Trump

“California can make a significant contribution to advancing the cause of dealing with climate change, irrespective of what goes on in Washington,” Mr. Brown said in an interview. “I wouldn’t underestimate California’s resolve if everything moves in this extreme climate denial direction. Yes, we will take action.”

When California enacted its climate reduction standards last year, it drew fierce criticism from state business leaders.

The bills “impose very severe caps on the emission of greenhouse gases in California, without requiring the regulatory agencies to give any consideration to the impacts on our economy, disruptions in everyone’s daily lives or the fact…

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