Years ago, “Slow” Joe Biden, who was until recently, inexplicably, the Democrat front-runner, was busted plagiarizing a speech by British Labour droog Neil Kinnock.
I’m starting to think that Big Left only has a few speeches; they just recycle them with different speakers.
Case in point: Greta Thunberg and one Severn Cullis-Suzuki – the 1992 model of the left’s Childrens Crusader, in this case.
Go ahead. Watch.
It truly befits a movement that has no original thoughts.
Steven Miller on Twitter:
Make the next president of the NRA a 15 year old. Then we’ll see how far that “how dare you cyber bully a teenager” holds up with our media betters.
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) September 24, 2019
Speaking of “cyberbullying”: so when a teenager smiles awkwardly at guy tacitly harassing him at a rally in DC, it’s racism – but when a teenager rants at the UN like a junior Mussolini, before taking a “green” trip to the next stop on her agenda and thence home on $10M sailing yacht? Voice of a generation!
A roundup of climate panic advocates’ recrods shows…
…well, you know:
“While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited,” they added.
Some examples:
1967 — Stanford University expert Paul Erlich predicted “time of famines” in 1975.
1971 — A top NASA expert predicted an “ice age” by 2021.
1988 — It was predicted that the Maldives [Ahem – usually referred to as “The Falklands” – Ed] would be under water by last year.
2008 — Gore said the Arctic would be free of ice by 2013.
2009 — Charles said there was just 96 months left to save the world.
Starting Friday, there is a global climate strike set to last for a week. According to the organizers, “Our house is on fire — let’s act like it. We demand climate justice for everyone.”
And my favorite: 1988, Ted Danson predicting that the growing hole in the ozone would kill us all in 15 years.
My go-to response to the whole thing: let’s say for sake of argument that they get one right; let’s say that the climate is irreversibly warming due to human activity.
Why is the solution to turn the keys to the world’s economies over to the kind of people who gave us Srebrenica, or Chicago city politics or MN-LARS?
I’ll wait.
Too much water in the Great Lakes. Global warming.
Not enough water in the Great Lakes. Global warming.
Or maybe it’s just natural variation?
But definitely, the solution is for you to quit driving your car and pay more taxes. Definitely.
Joe Doakes
I’m trying to imagine a “climate science journalist” taking my high school’s chemistry class…
Barack and Michelle Obama buy a place high up in the Rockies, as a hedge against rising sea levels.
Just kidding. They bought a place on Martha’s Vineyard.
Apparently he took that whole “We’ll make the ocean level recede” thing pretty seriously.
Greta Thunberg seems to be for Swedish environmentalists what Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez is for American progressives; overconfident, undereducated, and very, very overpromoted.
I’ll give her this much, though; unlike the folks flying in private jets and ocean motor yachts to climate conferences, the girl – who has “led” a number of climate-related school strikes in Sweden – is putting her travel plans where her mouth is. More or less.
Greta Thunberg is to sail across the Atlantic in a high-speed racing yacht next month to attend UN climate summits in the US and Chile as part of a sabbatical year the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist will spend in the US.“Good news! I’ll be joining the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, COP25 in Santiago … I’ve been offered a ride on the 60ft racing boat Malizia II. We’ll be sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to NYC in mid August,” Greta tweeted. The journey will take two weeks.
So at least she’s sailing, rather than taking some plutoprog’s Gulfstream.
Although it’s not exactly the kind of boat my great-grandparents sailed from Norway and Sweden on. It’s the kind of rustic adventure Robin Leach in his heyday might have said was “a bit much”.
So – travel is apparently either for those who are wealthy enough to qualify as exceptions to global warming, or only for people who can take a month out of their lives to cross the ocean on a yacht that costs millions to build and tens of thousands a week to charter.
Sounds about right.
The rich, powerful and famous journey to a climate change conference at a posh resort in Sicily, leaving a luxuriant trail of hydrocarbon exhaust:
According to Italian media reports, guests were expected to arrive in an eye-popping 114 private jets.
The Post guesstimated that with 114 flights from Los Angeles to Palermo, the planes would have pumped an astonishing 100,000 kilos of C02 into the atmosphere.
“Google Camp is meant to be a place where influential people get together to discuss how to make the world better,” one frequent flier told the tabloid.
“There will likely be discussions about online privacy, politics, human rights, and of course, the environment, which makes it highly ironic that this event requires 114 private jets to happen.”
Interesting to note by way of contrast that climate skeptics tend to have smaller carbon footprints than Warmers. I’m not sure if the figures for the warmers control for the profligate use by the rich and famous.
I have these two jokes – which in a sense aren’t jokes at all.
First – when it comes to progressivism, yesterday’s joke is today’s proposal and tomorrow’s policy.
And the second: Babylon Bee is becoming less and less distinguishable with “real news”.
And now, the former “fact-check” site Snopes is trying to deplatform Babylon Bee because…well, apparently they think satire confuses people?
And it occurs to me – it’s all clear, and the dots all connect, now: Snopes is trying to deplatform Babylon Bee because they’re actually the real news, 2-3 years ahead of time.
The actual science about the dangers of nuclear power – or lack thereof – is not “settled” so much as it is very, very convincing:
“By now close to one million people have died of causes linked to the Chernobyl disaster,” wrote Helen Caldicott, an Australian medical doctor, in The New York Times. Fukushima could “far exceed Chernobyl in terms of the effects on public health.”
Many pro-nuclear people came to believe that the accident was proof that the dominant form of nuclear reactor, which is cooled by water, is fatally flawed. They called for radically different kinds of reactors to make the technology “inherently safe.”
But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.
It’s a long read, but an excellent one…
…whose conclusions show that any “Green New Deal” that doesn’t include nuclear power, isn’t about saving the environment.
I have concerns about the climate, and about man’s involvement in them.
I have bigger concerns about being logrolled.
I have nothing to say about Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’ “Green New Deal” (which got disappeared after it was revealed to be something a spoiled sixth-grader could have, and may have, written) y abou that David French at National Review doesn’t say better.
Read the whole thing. I add emphasis:
Nobody has to be a progressive to be concerned about the environment. Nobody has to be a progressive to respond to climate change. Any proposal that conditions response to climate change on the adoption of the full progressive platform is not only doomed to fail, but it raises the question of whether the declared climate emergency is more pretext than crisis. There’s a need for a serious discussion about our climate. The Green New Deal is not serious.
Did you miss it before it got disappeared yesterday? Have no fear, people glommed onto it. And David Harsanyi found the 11 bits you really needed in the first place.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools are closed today. I’m getting old, my memory isn’t what it was. I remember looking forward to snow days, but did we get cold days off school? My sister claims there were a couple of occasions when the country kids didn’t have to come in, only the town kids, but I wonder if that was due to bad roads for the school busses more than low temperatures?
I’m having trouble squaring school closures for cold, record setting cold in Chicago, freezing temperatures for 75% of the nation, with The New Hotness’ claim global warming will destroy the world in 12 years.
Although if it does, I suppose women and minorities will be hardest hit, so I’ve got that going for me.
It’s science, because shut up.
The short answer: whille the GOP on the national level capitulates on spending and allow all sorts of government scope creep the chips are down, the Democrats take the gas pedal of power and jam it to the firewall:
Democrats are increasingly lining up to support a “Green New Deal,” which, while vague on details, could end up being the largest expansion of government in decades.
As it stands, the “Green New Deal” is more aspirational than actual policy. Indeed, it takes its name from the New Deal of the 1930s, and its main backer, incoming Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, compared it to the Great Society of the 1960s.
More than 40 Democratic lawmakers support the “Green New Deal” as part of a broad plan to fight global warming and bring about what they see as “economic, social and racial justice.” A poll found most Americans supported the deal, but knew little about it.
But the big question is when Americans find out what’s in the “Green New Deal,” will they be willing to pay for it?
After a few months or years of media alarmism and emotional logrolling from an in-the-bag media?
Is that even a serious question?
Joe Doakes from Como Park notes that if we’re really serious about climate change…:
Climate scientists insist we must stop driving petroleum powered vehicles. Public health officials are worried about an epidemic of childhood obesity. Cities want heavy vehicles off the streets to reduce wear.
Seems to me there is one common solution.
Ban school busses.
And we should ameliorate schools’ huge carbon footprints by making homeschooling mandatory…
…oops. Went too far.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
If Democrats honestly believe in global warming, they should insidt we declare war on Canada so we can shift our citizens Northward to survive the Deluge.If Republicans honestly believe in global cooling, they should insist we declare war on Venezuela to shift our citizen Southward to escape the glacier.Bonus. Both have lots of oil to maintain our lifestyle. This is what a resilience officers ought to be working on.
A study that claimed that the oceans are warming 60% faster than the IPCC’s prediction turns out to have had a bit of an issue:
“The findings of the … paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”
Co-author Ralph Keeling, climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took full blame and thanked Lewis for alerting him to the mistake.
“When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” he said. “We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly.”
Keeling said they have since redone the calculations, finding the ocean is still likely warmer than the estimate used by the IPCC. However, that increase in heat has a larger range of probability than initially thought — between 10 percent and 70 percent, as other studies have already found.
“Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Keeling said. “We really muffed the error margins.”
A correction has been submitted to the journal Nature.
Of course, to the crowd that thinks “I Heart Neil DeGrasse Tyson” is “science”, the narrative is already set.
I’m gonna take a wild guess that if you asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez how precisely it was that the US defeated Naziism, “turbocharging the industrial base and floating the whole thing on a sea of oil and a mountain of coal, to back up a complete national militarization” isn’t what she’s thinking.
I think she’s thinking it was all about Rosie the Riveter.
A study shows that global warming skeptics’ actual behavior is more environmentally responsible than Warmists’, and that enviro-weenies feel they are entitled to do a little polloting:
The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, followed more than 400 Americans for a full year. On seven occasions—roughly once every eight weeks—participants revealed their climate change beliefs, and their level of support for policies such as gasoline taxes and fuel economy standards.
They also noted how frequently they engaged in four environmentally friendly behaviors: recycling, using public transportation, buying “green” products, and using reusable shopping bags.
The researchers found participants broke down into three groups, which they labeled “skeptical,” “cautiously worried,” and “highly concerned.” While policy preferences of group members tracked with their beliefs, their behaviors largely did not: Skeptics reported using public transportation, buying eco-friendly products, and using reusable bags more often than those in the other two categories.
This pattern was found consistently through the year, leading the researchers to conclude that “belief in climate change does not appear to be a necessary or sufficient condition for pro-environmental behavior.”
It’s more important to signal virtue than to actually be virtuous.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
LED lights use less electricity, which is good for the environment because it means power plants burn less coal, emitting less carbon dioxide and creating less acid rain and global warming.
LED lights allow us to light up more places for the same money, which is bad for the environment because it means fewer pitch-dark places for wildlife and star-gazing, plus the bluish tint of all-night reflected LED light fools our bodies into thinking it’s daytime and messes with our health.
It’s always something with Luddites.Joe Doakes
I wonder if Whole Foods has reverted to natural wax candles yet?
Seen on Twitter:
Algore’s Inconvenient Sequel flops at the box office.
Netflix edits history – cutting out the part of a 20-year-old Bill Nye episode about there being precisely two genders.
Because science!
(Note for bobbleheads: It would be appropriate for Nye to explain why he’s reversed course; since he styles himself a “Science Guy”, perhaps he’d include some evidence that led to his conclusion, rather than just a perfunctory flush of the memory toilet.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Plainly, this is a meritless lawsuit, brought by some whiner hoping to strike it rich. There is no air pollution in Paris. There can’t be: that’s where the Paris Accord was signed, which eliminated all air pollution and thereby saved the planet from global warming before President Trump condemned us by withdrawing the United States.
If the air in Paris were that bad, they wouldn’t be complaining about who’s still in the “save-the-planet” group, they’d be fixing the problem.
Wouldn’t they?
Joe Doakes
As Glenn Reynolds says, “I’ll believe climate change is an emergency when its advocates start acting like it’s an emergency”.
In one of the most glorious moments in the history of cable television, the late Christopher Hitchens told Bill Maher’s audience – basically the same species of smug droogs that dutifully clap on command, just like Jon Stewart’s and Steven Colbert’s and Samantha Bee’s audiences, and those at pretty much every other liberal Bread and Circus show.
SHOW MORE
Hitchens didn’t stanch the wave of smug liberals – indeed, they’ve only gotten worse since they’ve been relegated to the minority.
The left’s trait – condescend first (often, lately, by smugly wrapping themselves in a “scientific” banner that few understand and fewer still earn – has been most egregiously on display in last weeks’ flap over Bret Stephens’ apostasy on climate change.
David French on the Smug Liberal plague and Stephens:
Let’s be clear about what Stephens actually said. Here’s his summary of the current state of climate science: While the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. Here’s the translation: Science teaches us that humans have helped cause global warming, but when we try to forecast the extent of the warming and its effects on our lives, the certainty starts to recede. In addition, the activism has gotten ahead of the science. Indeed, Stephens even quotes the New York Times’ own environmental reporter, Andrew Revkin, who has observed that he “saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” Not only did the “hyperbole” not “fit the science at the time,” but — Stephens writes — “censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.” As if on cue, parts of liberal Twitter melted down. Stephens was instantly treated as, yes, an imbecile and a deplorable. Not only did the vast majority of commentators ignore his argument, they treated it as beneath contempt.
I have yet to have a liberal at any level answer this question for me:
Let’s say, for purposes of argument, that global warming is exactly what the Warmist faith says it is. OK – so why is “turning the keys to the entire world’s economy over to the people who’ve made the Congo a massive lake of blood” the only possible solution?
I think i know – but I don’t think they do.
Liberals? Sound off!
I sort of cringed when I watched the “Science March” – because “Science” is being dragged down the same Orwellian linguistic rathole that has claimed so many other once-useful/meaningful words.
At one point, science meant “You have a theory. You frame a hypothesis. You come up with experiments that can disprove the hypothesis. You publish the theory, the hypothesis, the experiments, and the results, with an aim toward allowing other scientists to check your work and see if your results could be repeated.
Today? It’s just another word for peer pressure (from the left).
Ben Shapiro on the appearance of the loathsome Bill Nye at the marches:
But this is demonstrative of the Left’s take on science: Science is actually just the name for anything the Left likes. Worried about the humanity of an unborn child? Concerned that fetuses have their own blood types and their own DNA? Stop it! You’re quoting science, not Science™! Wondering how it is that a genetic male is actually a woman? You’re worrying about science, not Science™!
This is the dirty little secret of the Left’s sudden embrace of Science™ — it’s not science they support, but religion. They support that which they believe but cannot prove and do not care about proving. Bill Nye isn’t interested in a scientific debate about global warming — how much is occurring, the measurement techniques at issue, the sensitivity of the climate to carbon emissions, the range of factors that affect the climate. He wants you to accept his version of the truth — not just that global warming is happening, but that massive government intervention is necessary in order to avert imminent global catastrophe.
Worse? This is just one front in the battle for something more important than science – the battle for the language itself.
And the good guys are losing that one, too.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
We took very precise, very careful climate temperature measurements that did not show the result we wanted, then ran them through a black box that nobody understands and we cannot replicate. And what do you know, now the results DO show the result we wanted. You can’t deny science.
Joe Doakes
When you politicize science, you don’t get scientific politics; you get politicized science.