Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
While cosmic and natural cyclical patterns have made dramatic changes on occasion throughout history, there is no evidence carbon dioxide levels have served as a tipping point for such occurrences.
An article in CNN claims feedback responses to rising temperatures driven by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations may result in deadly, permanent changes to the Earthโs climate. The article provides no evidence to support this alarming claim, because there is no real-world data to back it up. The only climate tipping points that we can be certain exist are in the climate models themselves. While cosmic and natural cyclical patterns have made dramatic changes on occasion throughout history, there is no evidence carbon dioxide levels have served as a tipping point for such occurrences.
The problem for CNNโs report begins in the title. The source for CNNโs claims is not a โstudy,โ but rather a โcommentary,โ titled โMany risky feedback loops amplify the need for climate action,โ that published in the online-only journal called One-Earth, seen in the screencap below (yellow highlight by the author):
First, โcommentaryโ is just another word for anย opinion piece. Opinions are not science. Second, as is confirmed by the publisher in the screencap below, the articleย didnโt actuallyย doย any new science; it produced no new data, no formulas, no methods:
The โcommentaryโ is nothing more than a compilation of what the authors claim is a list of 27 climate feedback loops that will supposedly cause dangerous permanent changes to the Earthโs climate, listed in table 1 of the publication.
In reading the article it becomes clear that it is not a scientific piece, but rather is an advocacy piece. The title itself betrays this fact; โMany risky feedback loops amplify the need for climate action.โ
Here are some other examples of advocacy cloaked in science:
A targeted expansion of research and an accelerated reduction of emissions are needed to minimize risks.
โฆ
As we increasingly understand climate change as a series of disasters in the short term and a major threat in the longer term, many governmental jurisdictions and world scientists have declared a climate emergency.
โฆ
Based on our compilation of numerous and potentially risky climate warming feedback loops, we call for immediate concurrent changes to both (1) climate research and (2) climate policy, which should strategically inform and guide each other.
โฆ
Transformative and socially just changes in global energy and transportation, short-lived air pollution, food production, nature preservation, and the international economy, together with population policies based on education and equality, are required to address this immense problem in both the short and the long term.
The entire article is peppered with such call-to-action and โequityโ styled language. It is long on action proposals but short on any scientific discussion or defense of the problematic โfeedback loops,โ the authors claim merit political action. In the place of evidence, the authors commit the logical fallacy of appeals to authority. There are no data, procedures, calculations, and formulas presented to justify claims that dangerous feedback loops exist and that tipping points are pending. Instead, what we have here is an op-ed by some climate advocates.
Finally, the One-Earth โcommentaryโ mentions climate โtipping pointsโ or some variation no less than seventeen times. In the closing summary the authors say, โโฆif the worst-case risks posed by feedback loops and tipping points have been underestimated, the future of a hospitable planet Earth may be at stake.โ
Clearly, the authors think doomsday is on the near horizon. Perhaps they never got the memo that the worst-case climate models, like RCP8.5, have recently been proven to run too hot and are producing โimplausibly hot forecasts of future warming.โ Many of the worst-case feedback scenarios are based on simulations that only exist in climate models, being impossible to obtain in the real world.
Apparently, CNN missed all of that, thinking that some real, actual science was being done here. CNN promoted the clearly labeled โcommentaryโ as if it were a scientific study. Further, CNN embellished the headline, perhaps to make it more alarming, referencing โnearly 30โ dangerous feedback loops, rather than the 27 identified in the One Earth commentary.
This is a shamelessly incompetent piece of so-called journalism on the part of CNN, but sadly, incompetence in journalism today, especially when it comes to climate science, seems to be a feature, rather than a bug.
Allan Savouryย is a farmer from Zimbabwe who used to believe that livestock were destroying the land. He still believes the CO2 scary narrative, but even despite all that, heโs an ecologist who now argues we need large herds moving nomadically toย stopย desertification.
Allan Savoury is a farmer from Zimbabwe who used to believe that livestock were destroying the land. He still believes the CO2 scary narrative, but even despite all that, heโs an ecologist who now argues we need large herds moving nomadically to stop desertification.
Years ago he was one of the scientists advising the Zimbabwe government to get rid of lifestock to save the land. In a great moment of ecology they even shot 14,000 elephants for land restoration which didnโt work. That was the saddest blunder of my life, he says. And when he went to the US he found national parks were desertifying too even though they had not had livestock on them. โClearly we didnโt understand what was driving desertificationโ. He now claims that the soil of grasslands ends up encrusted with algae, which leads to water runoff and evaporation โand that is the cancer that leads to desertificationโ.
Iโm sure cows donโt change the climate either way, but this sure flies in the face of the idea that livestock create deserts and eating meat destroys the land.
He points out that the soil and vegetation in Africa evolved with massive groups of herding animals being chased by lions and what not. The large masses of herbivores play a vital role in ecology โ they return the grass to the land as fertilizer. In turn the booming plant-life boosts carbon and microbes in the soil, and changes the microclimate, keeping temperatures and humidity more constant than bare sand does. Without plants, the rain that falls on the sand evaporates and blows away instead. Grass alone is all very well, except that each year the remnant dry grass needs to decay. If it doesnโt, it smothers the soils and thereโs a shift to woody scrubland with bare earth instead. Mere oxidation of grasses is too slow to keep up. The other alternative is fire, but it doesnโt fertilize crops and soil the way cows do, and may not be the best for the microflora either. Savory calls his technique Holistic Management, though there are obviously many details he doesnโt describe.
It turns out this TED Talk was from 2013. Apparently it has attracted millions of views. It has mostly disappeared like a stone. In farming circles there are ardent fans and critics, but possibly very few detailed scientific reviews. George Monbiot dismissed it in 2014, but The Guardian also published a reply from fans. Probably the truth is that it works in some environments and not in others, and because it has no billionaire friends, it hasnโt had the investigation it really needs. I post it here for discussion because it pokes the sacred cow that all livestock โare badโ. Readers may know moreโฆ
Soil scientist, Dr Elaine Ingham, a microbiologist and until recently chief scientist at Rodale Institute, described how healthy soil, the underpinning of civilization throughout history, is created in interaction between grazing animals and soil microbiology. Peer-reviewed research from Rodale has shown how regenerative agriculture can sequester more carbon than humans are now emitting.
โฆJoel Salatin of Polyface Farmsโฆ was made famous in UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollanโs book Omnivoreโs Dilemma, which explores his success using Savoryโs approach. Salatin explains how Savoryโs approach enabled him to turn an uneconomic farm into an operation that now supports 35 prosperous agricultural ventures. From selling grass-fed beef and pasture-raised eggs to health-conscious connoisseurs and teaching interns how to replicate its successes, Polyface Farms is leading an agricultural revival.
I can attest from personal experience that Savoryโs approach works. โฆ. In our case, we restored cattle to the ground, managed as Savory advised, and within two years watched the water table rise, wetland plants returned and the economic value of the property increase.
In Australia, for profit company Sustainable Land Management says it has more than doubled stocking rates of cattle over historic rates on seriously desertified Australian range, achieved superior weight gain, doubled plant diversity, restored the grasslands, while buying no feed, even despite severely deficient rain.
Six years later John Cookโs website attempted to rebut the idea. The author Seb V doesnโt discuss desertification much, except to say the obvious that we canโt just put cows in the Sahara and fix it in 40 years. He mostly talks about uncertainties in carbon accounting instead. Seb V claims a couple of studies on โgrazingโ show no result. But Bellamy 2005 studied English soils where I suspect no one tried to gather livestock into massive wandering holistic herds. And the other study by Schrumpf et al was titled โHow accurately can soil organic carbon stocks and stock changes be quantified by soil inventories?โ. In other words, it was mostly about carbon accounting, not about restoring deserts. Commenters there were mostly unimpressed. Post Vegan points out that โgrazingโ is not the same as Holistic Management, Short Duration Grazing or Rotational Grazing either.
From the rebuttal it appears that there have not been any serious scientific studies specifically reviewing the Savoury techniques.
From Wikipedia, a long while ago, Savoryโs idea were even fashionable in environmental circles:
In 2003 Australia honored Savory with the Banksia International Award โfor the person doing the most for the environment on a global scaleโ[9] and in 2010, Savory and the Africa Centre for Holistic Management won The Buckminster Fuller Challenge,[10] an annual international design competition awarding $100,000 โto support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanityโs most pressing problemsโ.[40]
Most people donโt have a clear understanding of the greenhouse effect (GHE). It is not complicated to understand, but it is usually not well explained. It is often described as โheat-trapping,โ but that is incorrect. Greenhouse gases (GHG) do not trap heat, even if more heat resides within the climate system due to their presence in the atmosphere. The truth is that after adjusting to a change in GHG levels, the planet still returns all the energy it receives from the Sun. Otherwise, it would continue warming indefinitely. So, there is no change in the energy returned. How do GHGs produce GHE?
GHGs cause the atmosphere to be more opaque to infrared radiation. As solar radiation heats mainly the ocean and land surface of the planet, GHGs absorb thermal emission from the surface at the lower troposphere and immediately pass that energy along to other molecules (typically N2 and O2) through collisions that occur much faster than the time it would take to re-emit the radiation. This warms the lower troposphere. The density and temperature decrease rapidly through the troposphere, so molecules are colder and more separated at the upper troposphere. Now GHGs have a chance to emit IR radiation so when they finally collide with another molecule, they are colder so GHGs have a cooling effect in the upper troposphere and stratosphere.
Because GHGs make the atmosphere more opaque to IR radiation, when they are present the emission to space from the planet normally does not take place from the surface (as happens in the Moon). Part of it still takes place from the surface through the atmospheric window, but most of it takes place from higher in the atmosphere. We can define a theoretical effective emission height as the average height at which the Earthโs outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) is being emitted. The temperature at which the Earth emits is the temperature at the effective emission height in the atmosphere. That temperature, when measured from space is 250 K (-23ยฐC), not 255 which is the calculated temperature for a theoretical blackbody Earth. That temperature corresponds to a height of about 5 km, which we call the effective emission height.
The last piece we need to understand the GHE is the lapse rate, which in the troposphere is positive, meaning that temperature decreases with height. Without a positive lapse rate, the GHE does not work. Since GHGs cause the planet to emit from a higher altitude, due to making the atmosphere more opaque to IR radiation, that altitude is colder due to the lapse rate. The Earth still needs to return all the energy received from the Sun, but colder molecules emit less. So, the planet will go through a period when it will emit less than it should, warming the surface and the lower troposphere until the new height of emission achieves the temperature necessary to return all the energy, at which point the planet stops warming.
The GHE simply states that the temperature at the surface (Ts) is just the temperature of emission (Te) plus the lapse rate (ฮ) times the height of emission (Ze).
Ts = Te + ฮZe
Held & Soden (2000) illustrated it in figure 1:
This is how the GHE actually works. An increase in CO2 means an increase in the height of emission. Since the temperature of emission must remain the same, the temperature from the surface to the new height of emission must increase. The increase is small but significant. As Held and Soden say:
โThe increase in opacity due to a doubling of CO2 causes Ze to rise by โ150 meters. This results in a reduction in the effective temperature of the emission across the tropopause by โ(6.5K/km) (150 m) โ1 K.โHeld and Soden
So, the temperature at the surface must increase by 1K. Thatโs the direct warming caused by the doubling of CO2, before the feedbacks (mainly water vapor) kick in, further raising the height of emission.
This also has an interesting prediction. If the warming is due to an increase in CO2 when the increase takes place and the altitude of emission increases, the planet should emit less OLR as the new altitude is colder and a reduced OLR is the warming mechanism. Once the warming takes place, the OLR will become the same as before the GHG increase. It says so in Held and Sodenโs figure 1 caption: โNote that the effective emission temperature (Te) remains unchanged.โ Same Te, same OLR. So, if CO2 is responsible for the surface temperature increase, we should first expect less OLR and then the same OLR. If at any time we detect more OLR that would indicate another cause for the warming. Anything that makes the surface warmer, except GHGs, will increase the temperature of emission, increasing OLR.
So, this is the test:
โ Surface warming but less or same OLR: CO2 is guilty as charged
โ Surface warming and more OLR: CO2 is innocent
And the test results can be evaluated for example with Derwitte and Clerbaux 2018:
โdecadal changes of the Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) as measured by the Clouds and Earthโs Radiant Energy System from 2000 to 2018, the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment from 1985 to 1998, and the High-resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder from 1985 to 2018 are analyzed.ย The OLR has been rising since 1985, and correlates well with the rising global temperature.โDerwitte and Clerbaux 2018
CO2 is innocent. Its fingerprint is not found at the crime scene. Something else is warming the planet and causing the increase in OLR.
Stephens, G.L., OโBrien, D., Webster, P.J., Pilewski, P., Kato, S. and Li, J.L., 2015. The albedo of Earth. Reviews of geophysics, 53(1), pp.141-163.
Number 1 among all the ministers is Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party) with 67 flights,ย 5000 tonnesย of CO2 and costs of around 7.6 million euros.
Recall how climate activists demand that ordinary citizens, i.e. โuseless consumersโ, limit their annual CO2 emissions to just a single measly tonne per person. Currently the average CO2 emissions per person in Europe are about 8 tonnes.
German government ministries run by the Green Party emit by far the most CO2 when it comes to government flights. AI generated symbol image, dall.e 2.
Climate activists, like the German Greens, youโd think, would thus themselves be practicing what they preach, at least limiting their emissions to some extent in order to set an example for the rest of us.
To find out whether or not the leading German Greens are preaching water and actually drinking it themselves, economics expert Tilman Kuban of Germanyโs opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU), asked the current Socialist-Green government to provide a breakdown of how many flights were made by the government ministries using the German Armed Forcesโ Special Air Mission Wing during the current legislative period (December, 2021 to January, 2023).
For the sake of a political overview, there are basically major 6 parties active in Germany. from left spectrum to right: Die Linke, The Greens, The Socialists SPD, The Free Democrats FDP, the Christian Democratic Union CDU and the Alternativ fรผr Deutschland AfD. Currently a leftist coalition made up of the SPD, FDP and Greens make up the government.
Germanyโs online BILD daily crunched the numbers on the number of flights and the CO2 emitted by the different ministries and the people who head them.
62% of all CO2 emissions by government flights were generated by the Greens alone
According to the official government data, most of the 11,234 tonnes of CO2 for flights by government ministries so far in the current legislative period are attributable to the Greens: 6900 tonnes of CO2. That is over 60 percent of the CO2 emissions of all ministerial flights.
Top frequent flyer/emitter: Annalena Baerbock
Number 1 among all the ministers is Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party) with 67 flights, 5000 tonnes of CO2 and costs of around 7.6 million euros.
Second place goes Robert Habeck, Minister of Economics and Climate Protection (Green Party) with almost 1900 tonnes of C02 emitted on 32 flights (costing around 3.2 million euros).
In total, 250 flights were taken by the government ministries.
The governmentโs biggest CO2 emitter is Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) himself (not a minister). According to BILD daily: โThe Chancellorโs office took 114 flights that emitted almost 7200 tons of CO2. Cost: more than 11.2 million euros.โ
Sadly, these days the liberals, Democrats, and โgreensโ are all into the feelz, and they run from the ugly facts listed above like vampires running from garlic โฆ
The countries of the West are slowly destroying their manufacturing, mining, and fossil fuel producing industries by way of well-meaning but ultimately destructive โenvironmentalโ regulations. I put โenvironmentalโ in quotes because many of the regulations have much more to do with the green fantasies of the wokerati than to do with the environment.
At the heart of the problem is the fact that most developing countries have little to no environmental regulations. So when e.g. smog regulations cause German factories to close and relocate to say Nigeria, the smog in Germany decreases but the global smog increases.
But since it canโt be seen from Germany, the Germans get to feel all noble and pat themselves on the back about the clean German air.
And when so-called โgreensโ prevent the opening of new cobalt mines in the US, it means that children in the Congo are sentenced to virtual slavery to build our windmills and electric vehicles โฆย but hey, the greens say, you canโt see the kids from my house โฆ
I hadnโt thought about it, but the same is true about the Biden Crime Familyโs insane war on US oil and gas production. In this regard, thereโs an interesting study from the Institute for Energy Research entitled The Environmental Quality Index. From the release:
The contradictions of this approach are most apparent in the case of the United States, the largest producer of both oil and natural gas in the world. Reductions or limitations on domestic U.S. oil production must be made up elsewhere in the remaining major oil producing countries, which have far lower environmental standards than the U.S. This paper seeks to quantify that environmental gap by creating an environmental quality score, weighted by production, for oil and gas production in countries around the world using the well-known Environmental Performance Index (EPI) produced by Yale University. The results show that purely as a matter of environmental protection, replacing U.S. domestic production with foreign supply would be an overwhelmingly negative tradeoff.
The major points highlighted by this analysis are:
For the 20 largest oil-producing countries outside the United States, the average EPI environmental score, weighted by liquid fuels production, is 39. When compared to the U.S. EPI score of 51.1, it means the average barrel of non-U.S. petroleum is produced in a country with an environmental score that is 23.6% lower than that of the U.S.
For the 20 largest non-U.S. natural gas producers, the average EPI environmental score weighted by production is only 38.6. So compared to the 51.1 EPI score of the U.S., the average billion cubic feet of natural gas is produced in a country with an environmental score that is 24.5% lower than that of the U.S.
The United States, the worldโs largest producer of both oil and natural gas, is only outranked on environmental quality by 3 of the top 20 oil producers and 3 of the top gas producers. None of those countries produce even one-quarter of the volumes of oil or natural gas coming from the U.S. Indeed, all oil production from countries scoring higher on environmental quality amounts to only 35.7% of U.S. production, and that from gas-producing countries is only 33.4% of U.S. production. The sheer size of U.S. production combined with its excellent environmental standards means that U.S. production disproportionately reduces the environmental harms of oil and gas production on a global scale.
Sadly, these days the liberals, Democrats, and โgreensโ are all into the feelz, and they run from the ugly facts listed above like vampires running from garlic โฆ
My very best regards to everyone,
w.
Same Old Same Old: When you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing. This lets us all know just who and what you are responding to.
Alan Korwin reports on how words are twisted in their meanings serving as weapons in the current culture war. His Town Hall article is The Great Reset Is Really Great Resentment. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
This fairly new thing, the so-called โgreat reset,โ is more than the political left acting out their bottled-up fury at successes of the land in which they find themselves. Infuriated at how well freedom is workingโthe opulence, scientific and technological achievements, personal advancements at every levelโeven for the โdowntroddenโ compared to the rest of the worldโthey grouse. They can see (and deny) how poorly socialist utopian schemes they hold dear are doing. Like spoiled brats they nihilistically seek to overturn everything about this nation that is good and decent and pure.
America is in mortal danger from this actual mass psychosis afflicting so many of our countrymen. The psychiatric community calls it mass formation, a term and effect worth studying if you havenโt. The most striking modern example of course was in Germany before WWII, but communist China soon afterwards under the brutal dictator Mao Tse-dung wasnโt far behind. Pol Pot in Vietnam set new standards of depravity and evil, with popular support. Our own witch hunts in New England soon after we achieved independence were a similar thingโhysteria that knows no controls.
Words Are the Key
Using principles learned from Russian, Chinese and North Vietnamese communists, along with George Orwell, whose 1949 dystopian novel 1984 spelled it out with chilling clarity, leftists understand that whoever controls our language controls us. That battle is on. An entire generation of Newthink terms have entered the public mind, infiltrated newsrooms and classrooms everywhere, and threaten our health and liberty.
It boggles the mind how easily that disease has spread. People at the vaunted Associated Press have picked up the gauntlet, and what used to be a descriptive guide for journalists, like a dictionary, the AP Stylebook has become a proscriptive mandate. It now dictates which terms are acceptable and which must be cast aside as intolerant, offensive, biased and other inaccurate derogatory slurs.
Americaโs consciousness of this grew in a quantum leap, especially in the enormously influential Second Amendment community with the development and release in the year 2000 of The Politically Corrected Glossary, published by Bloomfield Press. It changed some dialog and terminology, jump-starting reassessments, but the powerful mainstream media steamed right ahead regardless. The terribly sexist slur, gunman, appears constantly instead of killer, murderer or even criminal. Inanimate wholesome products like pistols or sidearms became fearsome semi-automatic handguns, which anti-gun forces publicly acknowledged misleads many into thinking machinegun.
To this day, despite constant complaints, reportsย call mass murderers โshooters,โย denigrating 100 million American shooters who shoot for fun, sport and safety. Simultaneously, this linguistic trickย avoids casting any shade on the criminal psychopathsย who murder innocent people by the thousands annually. Those culprits areย further protected by prosecutors and a judiciaryย that often avoids going after the perps, a shortening of perpetrators, now also frowned upon by the great resetters.
Assault is a type of behavior, not a type of hardware, outlawed everywhere under multiple laws, as it should be. That does little to stop resetters from attaching assault to weapon, so effective in turning the public against household firearms, the commonly used kind youโll find in millions of American homes. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment holds extra special protection for such household arms in common use, a point leftists treat with disdain.
Those usual suspectsโMarxist socialist democrats and other malfeasantsโare actively pushing the overhaul of our languageโand our freedoms. Tough to admit, but theyโre pretty good at it. You may not even know youโve been snookered, itโs so subtle and easy to miss. Thatโs what makes it so effective. Merely declaring yourself pro gun plays into their hands. How? Because theyโve cast guns as horrific instruments of the devil. If you say youโre pro gun you practically are the devil, to their addled minds. Try instead thinking of yourself as pro rights, a term they avoid, because if thatโs you, what are they? Anti rights, which is pure truth on a platter, intolerable to them, and now youโre catching on.
Comment:
Many have sensed this twisting of words attacking rights other than bearing arms for self-defense. An overview of this lexicon of distorted terms was published at Canada Free Press by Linda Goudsmit, entitled Orwellโs Doublespeak: The Language of the Left.. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
To understand why the progressives speak doublespeak, their goals, who benefits, and the purpose of relabeling up as down and down as up, it is necessary toย translate doublespeak into colloquial English. In an effort to translate the language ofย doublespeak a glossaryย with explanations is helpful. The glossary willย decode the disingenuous Doublespeakย of the radical left-wing liberals broadcast incessantly by the colluding mainstream media, taught in the infiltrated educational curricula, and dramatized by the Hollywood gliteratti and television programming in the entertainment industry. There is no informed consent in a society of lies and propaganda. If American democracy is to be preserved it isย essential that an informed citizenry understand how they are being indoctrinatedย toward socialism by a deliberate program of propaganda and doublespeak.
GLOSSARY OF LEFTIST DOUBLESPEAK:
1. Diversity = Differences in appearance
Diversityย is a word thatย refers to variety. It has an inclusive connotation and in a social context means the inclusion of multiple races and ethnicities โ black, white, Asian, Hispanic etc. For Leftists, whatย the word does not includeย is anyย variation in thought.ย Leftist diversity only extends as far asย appearancesย โ it doesย notย tolerate anyย variety of opinions.ย Leftism is tyrannical in its demands for conformity to its politically correct left-wing narrative of moral relativism and historical revisionism it does not include any conservative opinions or ideas. In Doublespeak diversity means differences in appearance.
2. Education = Indoctrination
Education is the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction especially at a school or university.ย In a democracy public education is โinclusive,ย both in its treatment of students and in that enfranchisement for the government of public education is as broad as for government generally. It is often organized and operated to beย a deliberate model of the civil community in which it functions.โ โ Wikipedia Education in America has been commandeered by left-wing liberals andย is now a vehicle for indoctrinating American youthย from K-12 and throughout college. Conservative voices are no longer welcome in education. What was once aย traditional American education of core subjects and prideย in American democratic ideals has beenย transformed into an echo chamber of Leftist propagandaย promoting globalism, socialism, American self-loathing, political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism. In Doublespeak education means Leftist indoctrination.
3. Freedom of speech = Approved speech
Freedom of speech is the foundation for democracy. Without freedom of speech there is no other freedom which isย why tyrants always eliminate freedom of speech first.ย Leftists in America are determined to eliminate freedom of speech by enforcing their ownย code of political correctness which labels any opposing speech as hate speech.ย Speakers with conservative points of view are disinvited or intimidated through organized boycotts and violent protests. It is unAmerican to disallow the expression of opposing views but Leftists are tyrannical in their demand for conformity to their approved rhetoric. In Doublespeak freedom of speech means freedom of approved speech.
4. Globalism = One-world government
Globalism is defined as the operation or planning of economic and foreign policy on a global basis. Globalism commonly refers to international trade among nations. Leftists seek to internationalize the world and are not using the word globalism to mean global trade.ย When Leftists say globalismย they mean one-world government โ theirย intention is to eliminate national boundaries, national sovereignty, and impose one-world government.ย The irony is that Leftists do not realize they are participating in their own destruction because the globalist elite who will rule the new world order consider the Leftists to be useful idiots. In Doublespeak globalism means one-world government.
5. Global warming/climate change = Redistribution of wealth
In 1992 UN scientists on The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeย (IPCC) stated: โIt is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warmingย since the mid-20th century.โ Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on June 24, 2014 that: โExtremely likelyโ isย not a scientific term but rather a judgment, as in a court of law.ย The IPCC defines โextremely likelyโ as a โ95-100% probability.โ But upon further examination it is clear that these numbers are not the result of any mathematical calculation or statistical analysis. They have been โinventedโ as a construct within the IPCC report to express โexpert judgment,โย as determined by the IPCC contributors.โ Climate change is the greatest hoax everย perpetrated on industrialized countries to transfer their wealth to non-industrialized countries.ย The United Nations is committed to globalization and one-world government and is supported worldwide by Leftists with the same objective. In Doublespeak global warming/climate change means the redistribution of wealth.
6. Income equality = Redistribution of wealth
Income equality in a democracy is achieved through equal opportunity โ there is no guarantee of equal outcome. When Leftistโs speak of income equality they mean compulsory income redistribution that guarantees equal outcome. In Doublespeak income equality means redistribution of wealth.
7. Progressive = regressive
The wordย progressive has a positive connotationย and is commonly understood to mean something that happens orย develops gradually or in stages;ย proceeding step by step. Synonyms for progressive include continuing, continuous, increasing, growing, developing, ongoing, accelerating, escalating, gradual, step-by-step, and cumulative. Inย Doublespeak progressive is synonymous with regressiveย โ the opposite of actual progress (see above).
8. Resistance = Anarchy
Resistance is the refusal to accept or comply with something. In a democracy there areย laws and elections designed for citizens to legally and peacefully express their discontentย at the voting booth. Whenย Leftistsย speak ofย resistanceย they areย fomenting the overthrow of the government.ย In Doublespeak resistance means anarchy.
9. Social justice = Reverse discrimination
Social justiceย in a democracyย is achieved through laws and Constitutional protections that guaranteeย equal rights, equal opportunity, and equal protection under the law.ย Whenย Leftistsย speak of social justice they mean reverse discrimination where a two-tier system of justice is acceptable, whereย sanctuary citiesย that protect illegal alien felons are endorsed, and whereย anarchy and violenceย are fomented to effect social change. In Doublespeak social justice means reverse discrimination.
10. Tolerance = Intolerance
The word tolerance has an inclusive connotation and is commonly understood to mean the ability orย willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behaviorย that one does not necessarily agree with. Synonyms for tolerance include acceptance, open-mindedness, forbearance. Inย Doublespeak toleranceย is synonymous with intolerance โ the opposite of tolerance. It isย exclusively awarded to those who LOOK differently and withheld from those who THINK differently.ย Leftists tolerate differences in race, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status but are extremely intolerant of differences of opinion.
Populism: When the wrong person or cause wins a free election, like Brexit or Trump.
[Alternative: โPopulism is a term used by centrist liberals to describe political blowback from the disruption of society produced by their policies.โ (John Grayโs definitionโIn The New Statesman.)
Nationalism: Patriotism that liberals donโt like.
The Administrative State: Rule by an overwhelming minority.
Woke (1): The belief that (1) all of society is currently and intentionally structured to oppress, (2) all gaps in performance between large groups illustrate this, and (3) the solution is โequityโโproportional representation without regard to performance. (From Wilfred Reilly)
Woke (2): A state of awareness only achieved by those dumb enough to find injustice in everything except their own behavior.
Racism: Any kind of resistance, conscious or unconscious, to the political program of the left.
Democracy: Any institutional design or voting system that enables the left to get what it wants. [Updated version: โOur democracyTMโโdemocracy as the left defines it]
โThreat to democracyโ: When Republicans win an election.
Diversity: Where everyone looks different, but thinks the same thing, and speaks in identical cliches.
Inclusion: The deliberate exclusion of white males.
Disinformation: Anything a conservative says.
Root causes: Method of deflecting attention from solutions that can relieve a problem immediately (like locking up criminals instead of playing catch and release).
Property: Theft. (See Marx, Karl, & Proudhon, Joseph.)
โHate speechโ: Any statement that challenges the dogmas of the left. Usually deployed whenever a conservative is about to win an argument. (See also, โRacism,โ above.)
Free speech: The firebombing of public buildings by Leftists.
Violence: The expression of conservative ideas.
Living Constitution: The written Constitution is dead.
Meritocracy: Created originally by liberals, now means racism/white supremacy.
Voter Suppression: Elimination of Democrat election fraud.
Divisive: Any opinion the left doesnโt like.
Advocate: People without real jobs who live to complain.
Denier: Label for anyone who dissents from leftist positions that canโt be successfully defended (or who didnโt vote for Liz Cheney)
Australia last year set itself the goal of being one of the worldโs three largest hydrogen exporters over the coming decade, with a further aim of using the energy source to supply clean and green power to an emerging manufacturing sector. Many of the gains are expected to flow to regional areas now dependent on fossil fuels.
โฆ
But the Deloitte analysis shows many of the expectations around an Australian hydrogen industry have been dealt a blow by US President Joe Bidenโs Inflation Reduction Act passed last year, which contained $580 billion in support for clean manufacturing.
The various subsidies in the new laws are expected to make renewable US hydrogen the cheapest in the world while drawing in investment that otherwise could have flowed to nations such as Australia.
None of these projects make economic sense. If they made economic sense, they wouldnโt need government money.
But this hasnโt stopped a bizarre fantasy economy from developing, an international subsidy give-away war, in which politicians compete to make their green energy export plans seem more credible. I mean, everyone is going to end up looking pretty stupid, if after the subsidised factory is built, the politicians who bet their reputations on the project canโt even give the hydrogen away.
Having said that, I doubt the hydrogen automobile revolution will be a part of our lives for very long. From the US Government Occupational Health and Safety Administration;
Hydrogen Fuel Cells: Fire and Explosion
Hydrogen used in the fuel cells is a very flammable gas and can cause fires and explosions if it is not handled properly. Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas. Natural gas and propane are also odorless, but a sulfur-containing (Mercaptan) odorant is added to these gases so that a leak can be detected. At present, it is hard to tell if there is a hydrogen leak because it has no odor to it. Hydrogen is a very light gas. There are no known odorants that can be added to hydrogen that are light enough to diffuse at the same rate as hydrogen. In other words, by the time a worker smells an odorant, the hydrogen concentrations might have already exceeded its lower flammability limit.
Hydrogen used in the fuel cells is a very flammable gas and can cause fires and explosions if it is not handled properly. Hydrogen fires are invisible and if a worker believes that there is a hydrogen leak, it should always be presumed that a flame is present. When workers are required to fight hydrogen-related fires, employers must provide workers with necessary protective gear to protect them from such invisible flames and potential explosion hazards. There are several OSHA standards that may apply to employers who produce or use hydrogen.Source: https://www.osha.gov/green-jobs/hydrogen/fire-explosion
The plan is, vehicles containing 10s of litres of compressed gas which is capable of leaking through the tiniest crack, has no smell, cannot be reliably odourised to warn people of leaks, burns with a flame so hot that it is invisible, ignites and explodes violently with a very low activation threshold, over a wide range of hydrogen / air mixtures, will be parked adjacent to and sometimes inside the builtin carports in peopleโs homes.
If you suspect an automobile hydrogen leak, you are supposed to what? Call the fire brigade and explain you have a bad feeling? Because you wonโt be able to see the fire, or even tell for sure it is there, unless you get close enough to be incinerated. Do you don specialist safety equipment whenever you want to go for a drive, just in case? Who is going to provide the training in the use of the safety equipment? Do you inspect your vehicle every morning using infrared or ultraviolet goggles, or whatever is required to make those terrifying hydrogen fires visible?
And whatever you do, donโt let your husband or wifeโs EV be parked next to your hydrogen car. No insurance policy will cover that, at least, not after the first few โincidentsโ.
In his absence, weโre pleased to present a special edition ofย The Mark Steyn Showย in which Mark talks to Marc Morano aboutย The Great Reset. To watch the show, simply click above.
โAs he mentioned on last nightโs show, Mark is still recuperating from his heart attacks and having to build up his strength to get back to full output. Having done three great shows with some of his most popular guests this week, heโs retreating back to his iron lung for a long weekend.
But never fear: In his absence, weโre pleased to present a special edition of The Mark Steyn Show in which Mark talks to Marc Morano about The Great Reset. To watch the show, simply click above.
Mr Morano is a bestselling author with a particular reputation as a debunker of climate alarmism. In his latest book The Great Reset he looks at how the models of the Covid lockdowns and of global-warming hysteria are now being applied more broadly to a fundamental โresetโ of the assumptions of life in a developed society. He talks to Steyn about how advanced the Great Reset is, and the figures behind it, some known, some less so.
~Among the benefits of Mark Steyn Club membership is that you can enjoy The Mark Steyn Show in any medium you desire: video, audio or text. So, if you find Steyn and his guests more convivial in non-visual form, please log-in to our Audio and Transcript versions. To listen to the above show, simply click here.
~The Mark Steyn Showย is a special production ofย The Mark Steyn Club. We appreciate that membership is not for everyone, but, if youโd like to find out more about it, please seeย here. Another advantage of membership is access to our comments section. So, if you take issue with anything either of the Mark-Marcs said on the show, then feel free to comment away below.โ
As Europe emerges from a mild winter with gas storage close to record levels, it must brace for another costly race to replenish its reserves on the international market.
The Astora natural gas depot, which is the largest natural gas storage in Western Europe, is pictured in Rehden, Germany, March 16, 2022. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer
As Europe emerges from a mild winter with gas storage close to record levels, it must brace for another costly race to replenish its reserves on the international market.
European gas prices rallied in the run-up to Moscowโs invasion of Ukraine began almost exactly a year ago and they leaped to record highs when Russia subsequently cut supplies of relatively cheap pipeline gas. [emphasis, links added]
Although European prices have eased to around 50 euros ($53) per megawatt-hour (MWh) from last Augustโs peak of more than 340 euros, they remain above historical averages.
That means European governments face another huge bill to refill storage before peak winter demand.
To ward off market volatility and protect against shortage, they will have to repeat the exercise annually until the continent has developed a more permanent alternative to the Russian pipeline gas on which it depended for decades.
Analysts and executives say theย amounts already in storage will help, as will anย increase in French nuclear generationย following unusually extensive maintenance.
โThe situation on the gas market is currently no longer so tense,โ Markus Krebber, CEO of RWE, Germanyโs biggest utility, told Reuters.
He did not expect any repeat of last yearโs record price spike, but also said โone must not lull oneself into a false sense of security.โ
Similarly, analysts cautioned against leaving it too late to buy for future delivery.
โWe do not expect filling storage to be as costly next summer as it was this past year,โ Jacob Mandel, senior analyst at Aurora Energy Research, said.
โThat said, firms that rely on spot supply to fill storage, rather than hedge against future price jumps, will risk paying similar costs to last summer.โ
He estimated buying gas over the summer months would cost โ2-2.5 times more on a per unit basis than it had been pre-crisisโ and that European governments last year spent tens of billions of euros on supplies.
That was even when they had received significant levels of Russian gas on long-term contracts before the shutdown of the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany in August.
Author calls for news media to report empirical facts accurately
London, 24 February โ The Global Warming Policy Foundation has today published its periodic review of hurricane activity around the world. The author, climate writer Paul Homewood, says that official data is absolutely clear: they are not getting worse. Indeed, there is some evidence that they are less active in recent years.
Homewood says:
“2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980, and this comes against long-term hurricane activity trends that are essentially flat.”
And Homewood calls on journalists to start reporting these undisputed facts to the public:
“While scientists are quite clear that we are not seeing a dramatic increase in hurricanes, or even any increase at all, the public have been conned into thinking that tropical storms are getting worse. Itโs high time the mainstream media came clean and told people what is really going on.”
Executive summary It is widely believed that hurricanes are getting worse as a consequence of climate change. This belief is fuelled by the media and some politicians, particularly when a bad storm occurs. This belief is reinforced because the damage caused by hurricanes is much greater nowadays, thanks to increasing populations in vulnerable coastal areas and greater wealth more generally.
But is this belief correct, or is it a misconception? This study has carefully analysed official data and assessments by hurricane scientists, and finds:
โข 2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980. โข The apparent long-term increase in the number of hurricanes since the 19th century has been due to changes in observational practices over the years, rather than a real increase.
โข Data show no long-term trends in US landfalling hurricanes since the mid-19th century, when systematic records began, either in terms of frequency or intensity.
โข Similarly, after allowing for the fact that many hurricanes were not spotted prior to the satellite era, there are no such trends in Atlantic hurricanes either.
โข Globally there are also no trends in hurricanes since reliable records began in the 1970s.
โข Evidence is also presented that wind speeds of the most p
owerful hurricanes may now be overestimated in comparison to pre-satellite era ones, because of changing methods of measurement. โข The increase in Atlantic hurricanes in the last fifty years is not part of a long-term trend, but is simply a recovery from a deep minimum in hurricane activity in the 1970s, associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
These findings are in line with those of hurricane scientists generally, as well as official bodies such as NOAA and the IPCC.
You must be logged in to post a comment.