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.
Auroras get their colors from atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere. During geomagnetic storms, energetic particles rain down from space, striking the air and causing it to glow. Red, green, purple and even pink are common signs of excited oxygen and nitrogen. The problem is,ย there’s nothing in the air capable of making bright orange.
Oct. 23, 2023:ย (Spaceweather.com) A recent display of auroras over Canada has experts scratching their heads. The mystery? They were orange:
โThis was a first for me,โ says Harlan Thomas, who photographed the display over Sibbald Pond west of Calgary, Alberta, on Oct. 19th. โThe orange was sublime, just incredible. The pillars in the center stayed there glowing for more than 20 minutes.โ
Auroras arenโt supposed to be orange. Consider the following: Auroras get their colors from atoms and molecules in Earthโs atmosphere. During geomagnetic storms, energetic particles rain down from space, striking the air and causing it to glow. Red, green, purple and even pink are common signs of excited oxygen and nitrogen.
The problem is, thereโs nothing in the air capable of making bright orange. Theoretically, nitrogen and oxygen (N2, N2+, and O2+) can produceย emissionsย at orange wavelengths. However, these emissions are very weak compared to other colors produced by the same molecules. Any orange should be overwhelmed.
Aurora colors produced by atoms and molecules in Earthโs atmosphere. [more]
The answer may be hiding in plain sight. Take another look at Thomasโs photo. Bright red auroras appear on top, overlapping green auroras lower down. Red and green mixing together may have produced the yellow-orange glow.
Indeed, aurora physicist Kjellmar Oksavik of the University of Bergen in Norway believes thatโs the correct explanation:
โRed auroras are formed by low-energy electrons colliding with atomic oxygen at high altitudes (200-400 km). Here, oxygen atoms are excited into a quantum state called O(1D), where they can emit a red photon at 630.0 nanometers,โ Oksavik says.
โGreen auroras are formed by higher-energy electrons penetrating deeper and colliding with atomic oxygen at lower altitudes (100-150 km),โ he continues. โHere, oxygen atoms are excited into a state called O(1S), where they emit a green photon at 557.7 nanometers.โ
โIn between, there can be a mixing of the two processes, which fools the camera and eye to believe that it is orange. In reality, it is both red and green at the same time,โ he says.
More examples of orange recorded during the Halloween Storms of 2003. Credit: Jay Edwards [more]
Oksavik points out one more thing in Harlan Thomasโs photo: โIt beautifully reveals the alignment of Earthโs magnetic field. The bright pillar in the center is a textbook example of a very tall auroral ray. These are aligned along the magnetic field and caused by a broad energy spectrum of electrons [raining down from space]. Slower electrons collide high up (red light), while more energetic electrons travel further down into a much denser atmosphere (green light).โ The overlap naturally produces a yellow-orange glowโno mystery molecule required.
The Sun is the source of most of the energy that drives the biological and physical processes in the world around usโin oceans and on land it fuels plant growth that forms the base of the food chain, and in the atmosphere it warms air which drives our weather.
Itโs by far the most important scientific question of our age: Do human emissions of CO2 and other such โgreenhouse gasesโ cause significant global warming, aka โclimate changeโ? Based on the belief that an affirmative answer to that question is a universally accepted truth, our government has embarked on a multi-trillion dollar campaign to transform our economy by, among other things, eliminating hydrocarbon fuels from electricity generation (without any demonstrated workable plan for the replacement), outlawing the kinds of vehicles we currently drive, suppressing fossil fuel extraction, banning pipeline construction, making all your appliances work less well, and much more. Express any doubt about the causal connection between human activities and climate change, and you could very well get labeled as a โclimate denier,โ fired from your academic job, demonetized by Google or Facebook, or even completely ostracized from polite society.
But is there actually any real proof of the proposition at issue? In fact, there is not.
I had two important posts on this subject back in 2021: one from January 2, titled โCausation Of Climate Change, And The Scientific Method,โ and the other from October 28, titled โโThe Climate Is Changing And Human Activities Are The Causeโ: How, Exactly, Do We Know That?โ Those posts covered the basics of how causation is generally established under the scientific method. Those posts also reviewed certain articles published at the time that gave good reasons to doubt the truth of the proposition that human greenhouse gas emissions are a main driver of significant climate change. Go to those posts for discussions of and links to the 2020/21 articles that I reviewed at the time.
The reason for todayโs post is that a couple of important new articles have come to my attention that further make clear that the proposition that human activities, particularly โgreenhouse gasโ emissions, are causing significant climate change has not been proved and, based on existing data, cannot be proved. Iโll provide links and summaries, and let you draw your own conclusions as to the significance of these new articles.
But before that, letโs review one more time the basics of how causation is extablished under the scientific method. This is from my January 2, 2021 post:
We start with the basic maxim that โcorrelation does not prove causation.โ Instead, causation is established by disproof of all relevant alternative (โnullโ) hypotheses. Everybody knows how this works from drug testing. We canโt prove that drug A cures disease X by administering drug A a thousand times and observing that disease X almost always goes away. Disease X might have gone away for other reasons, or on its own. Even if we administer drug A a million times, and disease X almost always goes away, we have only proved correlation, not causation. To prove causation, we must disprove the null hypothesis by testing drug A against a placebo. The placebo represents the null hypothesis that something else (call it โnatural factorsโ) is curing disease X. When drug A is significantly more effective at curing disease X than the placebo, then we have disproved the null hypothesis, and established, at least provisionally, the effectiveness of drug A.
And yet somehow these principles donโt apply in the field of climate science. Instead, all the inside clique of the climate science community have decided to agree that the new way to prove causation is to show really, really good correlation with the preferred hypothesis, in which case subjecting the proposition at issue to a test of invalidation against a null hypothesis can be dispensed with. The climate science community calls its system for establishing causation โdetection and attributionโ studies. The basic idea is to come up with a model (i.e., a hypothesis) that predicts global warming based on increased greenhouse gases, and then collect data that show a very close match between what the model predicted and the data. Correlation with the model predictions is the claimed proof of causation. There are hundreds of such studies in the climate literature. My January 2, 2021 post linked to a classic of the genre, a 2018 IPCC-sponsored article written by a collection of some 36 co-authors who constitute a virtual โwhoโs whoโ of the insiders of the climate science cult (e.g., Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley, Ben Santer, etc., etc., etc.). The title is โDetection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.โ Key quote:
There is a wide range of evidence of qualitative consistencies between observed climate changes and model responses to anthropogenic forcing, including global warming, increasing land-ocean temperature contrast, diminishing Arctic sea-ice extent, glacial retreat and increases in precip- itation in Northern Hemisphere high latitudes.
Just get yourself enough โqualitative consistenciesโ with your hypothesis and proof of causation will be yours!
The authors of the two new papers beg to differ. First, we have a paper by John Dagsvik and Sigmund Moen of Statistics Norway, dated September 2023, titled โTo what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?โThis paper is particularly significant because it has been issued by a governmental agency โ the government statistical agencies being otherwise all in lockstep in support of the human-caused global warming narrative. Excerpt from the Dagsvik and Moen paper (page 5):
At present, there is apparently a high degree of consensus among many climate researchers that the temperature increase of the last decades is systematic (and partly man-made). This is certainly the impression conveyed by the mass media. For non-experts, it is very difficult to obtain a comprehensive picture of the research in this field, and it is almost impossible to obtain an overview and understanding of the scientific basis for such a consensus (Koonin, 2021, Curry, 2023). By looking at these issues in more detail, this article reviews past observed and reconstructed temperature data as well as properties and tests of the global climate models (GCMs). Moreover, we conduct statistical analyses of observed and reconstructed temperature series and test whether the recent fluctuation in temperatures differs systematically from previous temperature cycles, due possibly to emission of greenhouse gases.
And the conclusion of Dagsvik and Moen (from the abstract):
[W]e find, . . . that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.
A good deal of the discussion in Dagsvik and Moen covers various deficiencies and inadequacies of the existing temperature data series โ inadequacies that make it impossible to draw conclusions from existing data about causation of temperature increases from human greenhouse gas emissions. Here is one comment on the data from page 10 that I find particularly significant:
For all three surface air temperature records, but especially NCDC and GISS, administrative changes to anomaly values are quite often introduced, even for observations several years back in time. Some changes may be due to the delayed reductions of stations or addition of new station data, while others probably have their origin in a change of technique to calculate average values. It is impossible to evaluate the validity of such administrative changes for an outside user of these records.
For more than you will ever want to know on that subject, see my thirty part series โThe Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.โ Bureaucrats altering the data to support their preferred narrative have rendered the data completely useless for any legitimate public policy purpose.
A second important new paper is from Antonis Christofides and co-authors dated September 26, 2023. They introduce their paper with a long post of that date at Climate, Etc. titled โCausality and Climate.โ The part of the full technical paper relating to the climate science application can be found at this link. If you go to that last link and try to read through it, you will find technical math that will quickly have your head swimming, even if you are a quasi math geek like myself. However, their fundamental point as to causality in climate science is not very complicated: if you plot recent temperature increases against increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, itโs the temperature increases that come first, and the CO2 increases follow. Thus, if there is causality, it must be that the temperature increase is causing the CO2 increase, rather than the other way around.
Here is the key chart from the post at Climate, Etc.. The authors present it as a quiz: look at the chart, and the explanations, and without any further mathematical analysis, draw a conclusion as to the direction of causation:
Why does this remind me of the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition skit?
New Research: The World May Have Crossed a Solar โTipping Pointโ
By UNIVERSITY OF EXETER OCTOBER 19, 2023
The world may have crossed a โtipping pointโ that will inevitably make solar power our main source of energy, new research suggests.
The study, based on a data-driven model of technology and economics, finds that solar PV (photovoltaics) is likely to become the dominant power source before 2050 โ even without support from more ambitious climate policies.
However, it warns four โbarriersโ could hamper thisโฆ
Decarbonisation plans across the globe require zero-carbon energy sources to be widely deployed by 2050 or 2060. Solar energy is the most widely available energy resource on Earth, and its economic attractiveness is improving fast in a cycle of increasing investments. Here we use data-driven conditional technology and economic forecasting modelling to establish which zero carbon power sources could become dominant worldwide. We find that, due to technological trajectories set in motion by past policy, a global irreversible solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies.
Nobody Expects โthe Momentum of the Solar Energy Transitionโ!
The authors suggest that solar power will become the dominant power source by 2050 without โmore ambitious climate policies.โ However, four barriers could stand in the way.
Nobody expects โthe momentum of the solar energy transitionโ! Our chief barrier is grid resilienceโฆ grid resilience and access to financeโฆ grid resilience and access to financeโฆ Our two barriers are grid resilience and access to financeโฆ and supply chainsโฆ. Our three barriers are grid resilience, and access to finance, and supply chainsโฆ and an almost fanatical devotion to silencing political oppositionโฆ Our fourโฆ noโฆ Amongst our barriersโฆ are such elements as grid resilience, access to financeโฆ Iโll come in again.Apologies to Monty Python
Overcoming the Solar Barriers
โGrid Resilienceโ: Only use electricity only when the sun is shining.
Grid resilience: Solar generation is variable (day/night, season, weather) so grids must be designed for this. Dr Nijsse said: โIf you donโt put the processes in place to deal with that variability, you could end up having to compensate by burning fossil fuels.โ She said methods of building resilience include investing in other renewables such as wind, transmission cables linking different regions, extensive electricity storage, and policy to manage demand (such as incentives to charge electric cars at non-peak times). Government subsidies and funding for R&D are important in the early stages of creating a resilient grid, she added.
Access to finance: Solar growth will inevitably depend on the availability of finance. At present, low-carbon finance is highly concentrated in high-income countries. Even international funding largely favors middle-income countries, leaving lower-income countries โ particularly those in Africa โ deficient in solar finance despite the enormous investment potential.
Supply chains: A solar-dominated future is likely to be metal- and mineral-intensive. Future demand for โcritical mineralsโ will increase. Electrification and batteries require large-scale raw materials such as lithium and copper. As countries accelerate their decarbonization efforts, renewable technologies are projected to make up 40% of the total mineral demand for copper and rare earth elements, between 60 and 70% for nickel and cobalt, and almost 90% for lithium by 2040.
Political opposition: Resistance from declining industries may impact the transition. The pace of the transition depends not only on economic decisions by entrepreneurs but also on how desirable policymakers consider it. A rapid solar transition may put at risk the livelihood of up to 13 million people worldwide working in fossil fuel industries and dependent industries. Regional economic and industrial development policies can resolve inequity and can mitigate risks posed by resistance from declining industries
โEven without support from more ambitious climate policiesโ
Can someone please explain to me how they plan to overcome these barriers โwithout support from more ambitious climate policiesโ (AKA massive government intervention)?
Nijsse et al., 2023 envisions the following energy transition:
Nijsse et al., 2023 envisions the following energy transition:
The loss of solar generation was accompanied by the usual midday doldrum. 4,904 MW of solar and wind generation tool a lunch break that day. Fortunately, it occurred on a Saturday, the high temperature was only 63 ยฐF and natural gas-fired generation quickly ramped up to fill the gap.
All of the blather about the โenergy transitionโ omits a very pertinent fact: There has never been an energy transition. Nor will there ever be an actual energy transition unless we manage to harness nuclear fusion.
We never transitioned from traditional biomass to fossil fuels. On a per capita basis, we consume as much โtraditional biomassโ for energy as we did when we started burning coal. We have just piled new forms of energy on top of older ones. Now, we have changed the way we consume energy sources. In the 1800โs the biomass came from whale oil and clear-cutting forests. Whereas, todayโs biomass is less harmful to whales and forests.
From 1800 to 1900, per capita energy consumption, primarily from biomass, remained relatively flat; as did the average life expectancy. From 1900 to 1978, per capita energy consumption roughly tripled with the rapid growth in fossil fuel (coal, oil & natural gas) consumption. This was accompanied by a doubling of average life expectancy. While I canโt say that fossil fuels caused the increase in life expectancy, I can unequivocally state that everything that enabled the increase in life expectancy wouldnโt have existed or happened without fossil fuels, particularly petroleum.
Itโs simply absurd to claim that solar power will ever become the dominant power source, with or โwithout any further climate policies.โ Nobody should expect an energy transition. Wishful thinking dressed up as scientific research just encourages politicians to make bad policy decisions.
The Government has urged developers to โact fairlyโ after some of the UK largest wind farms delayed taking up “green” Government contracts, potentially allowing them to earn hundreds of millions of pounds more from consumers during the energy crisis.
Campaign group Net Zero Watch says that the wind industry has effectively admitted that it has been deceiving the British public over the cost of the energy โtransitionโ. RWE Renewables has just told the Government that it needs its subsidy โstrike priceโ to rise by 70% if any more wind farms are to be built.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
โRishi Sunak has said that there has been a long-term deception of the British public. RWEโs demand for more subsidy confirms it. The Green Blob has been lying about renewables costs for years. The truth is that wind power is expensive, and becoming more so. The energy โtransitionโ is a transition to poverty, but few in Westminster seem to have the guts to say so.โ
Notes for editors
For many years, the wind industry has claimed that they had seen a dramatic fall in costs, and signing โContracts for Differenceโ (CfDs) to deliver power at extraordinarily low prices. This was subsequently revealed as a scam, with windfarms refusing to activate CfD contracts, and making hundreds of millions in windfall profits as a result.
RWEโs demand for a dramatic increase in the subsidy shows that the industry is now being forced to make bids that better reflect the true costs of windfarms.
ESGโ (Environmental, Social and Governance) meets Germany. This is really nothing more than climate communism.
Fundamental rights – Article 3: (3) No one shall be discriminated against or given preferential treatment because of his sex, descent, race, language, homeland and origin, faith, religious or political opinions. No one should be discriminated against because of their disability.
Not only politicians, but also companies are starting to get hysterical when it to comes to climate. There are now drastic wage cuts if employees drive or eat meat.
Germanyโs APOLLO NEWS here reports that soccer club VfL Osnabrรผck is now โpenalizing its employees with climate fines.โ
โBased on an individual COโ footprint calculated by the club, deductions are made from their salaries as a penalty for climate-unfriendly behavior,โ reports the German site.
As itโs probably a dream of many people to be employed by a professional sports team, the club will probably get away with it. Unhappy employees can be easily replaced.
But in the current environment of a severe skilled workers shortage, other companies may be extremely hesitant to enact such a draconian and personally intrusive policy. It also likely violates German labor law. In any case, VfL Osnabrรผck does show just how loony the climate craze is getting.
According to the APOLLO site: โThe soccer club calculates the amount of salary that is deducted based on things like how far its employees travel to work or how much meat they consume.โ
According to the VfL Osnabrรผck site: โCommon good clause: VfL employees compensate for professional COโ emissions.โ
Yes, in its employment contracts with the workers, VfL Osnabrรผck has a public welfare clause which states the employee pledges โto actively support the clubโs orientation toward the common goodโ and also contains โa mandatory reference to the compensation of occupational COโ emissions.โ
According to APOLLO, VfL Osnabrรผck โsurveysโ the โCo2 footprintโ of each employee, which is based on, among other things, the length of the commute and eating habits.
โCompensation takes place by deducting the corresponding monetary value directly from the employeeโs salary.โ VfL Osnabrรผck calls what amounts to a penalty tax โa direct monetary incentive to change behavior.โ
The club mentions again and again that itโs all about protecting our grandchildrenโs future.
When asked by German national daily Die Welt, the club refused to provide the exact wording of the employment clause, citing โconfidentiality and secrecyโ.
Politician Steffen Kotre appears to be among the first German officials to realize that his country has gotten the shaft since the start of the Ukraine War by having to purchase more expensive, dirtier energy from the United States than what they were getting before from Russia.
Kotre recently called for the reversal of that policy and for Germany to once again take advantage of Russian natural gas flowing through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Jimmy, along with The Convo Couch host Craig Jardula and Americansโ Comedian Kurt Metzger, discusses the royal scr*w job the U.S. has put on much of Western Europe, Germany included.
Climate change can play a major role in affecting young peopleโs mental health, according to a new report from the American Psychological Association but why are the left so afraid of climate change?
Why are the left so afraid of climate change? What is they want to preserve exactly? The whole concept doesnโt pass the simplest credibility check. They want to preserve the world for future generations they often say. But the world they want to preserve doesnโt include them themselves (they will be dead) nor their children (they donโt have children) nor their past (they believe preserving a cultural or historical past is racist), nor their language (again, racist) art (racist), music poetry ideals myths stories ethics (all racist). Why would say a Briton want to fight so hard as to make his one life on this Earth unbearable, intolerable, just to leave Britain a sort of temperate version of say a Dakka or Karachi suburb?
I donโt get it. They say they want narwhals and lemurs and platypuses around but they arenโt even prepared to take forceful action to preserve a hedge (which is the closest in terms of biodiversity and species richness they will ever get to Amazonia).
There is no one answer, but a distribution of them. We speak here of the untutored, non-Experts who react violently over โclimate changeโ. By โuntutoredโ, I mean those who cannot, or not do, or will not understand any of the fundamental physics and other massive complexities and uncertainties involved in three dimensional fluid flow over a rough differentially heated sphere. I mean regular people who have learned the minimum they need to support their beliefs.
For this set of people, particularly young people, there is one predominate answer:
Incessant propaganda.
Maybe you recall that New Jersey school that from Kindergarten through high school teaches โclimate changeโ in every single class; yes, including gym. The level of science of these classes has to be on the order of a Bill Nye fever dream.
NPRโsurprise!โrecently did a follow up on this school.
Lansing and her classmates had spent weeks researching the impacts of human-caused climate change on their communities and their own lives. Their bas-relief tiles and the three-dimensional images sculpted onto them represented something each of them learned.
Lansingโs tile featured a blueberry branch โ a nod to the rich agricultural heritage of New Jersey, which has earned it the nickname โthe garden state.โ
โA lot of those things that we are used to seeing arenโt going to be able to be grown here with the continuing climate change,โ said Lansing, who comes from a family that grows their own food.
NPR claims โclimate change education has been empowering.โ Empowering. A favorite woke word. It canโt here mean educated, because none of these kids learned any physics. It can instead only mean a false earnestness glued to a quasi-religious morality. One which gives purpose and meaning to life, especially now that Christianity is fading so rapidly.
A junior in high school said, โAs a little kid, I was really scared of the changes in the extreme weather that was going on around me and missing school because of hurricanes.โ
This is New Jersey, remember, where the weather is as tumultuous as Methodist church service. There is therefore no justification for her fear. Not in Reality. Not from observation. That fear can only have been inculcated by a relentless barrage of propagandaโa barrage that can be resisted only by a few.
This kid continues: โ[My teacher] telling me why these were happening made me feel like I could do something about it even though I was like 11.โ (By โlike 11โ did she mean 10? Or 12?)
This kidโs mind was first addled by ignorant or unscrupulous teachers who falsely taught her there was reason to panic, and then those teachers comforted the very panic they induced by given that kid a false sense of โempowermentโ. Error compounding error. Madness.
It is no wonder the young are ejected from โeducationalโ factories with the mindsets of Mrs. Jellyby, who you will recall from Dickensโs Bleak House, a woman who โcaredโ so deeply about the miseries in Africa that she entirely forgot her own family. These kids come out wanting to save โthe worldโ, but know nothing of their own neighborhoods.
For confirmation, here is a report from the Experts at the American Psychological Association. Which one source summarizes: โClimate change can play a major role in affecting young peopleโs mental health.โ
Now it is impossibleโit is not possibleโthat a few tenths of a degree change in some artificial index could affect anybodyโs โmental healthโ. Unless they first have been severely propagandized and had their minds addled by Experts. Which is precisely what is happening.
One of these Experts, unable to help herself about the addling, nevertheless sees its harms, vaguely:
[Expert] is also concerned about how climate change could influence young adults who are making decisions about their career and relationships. The report identified that the consequences of extreme weather and climate anxiety affected decision-making, impaired cognition and lower levels of self-control.
Impaired cognition!
I challenge you to find a better two-word summary of our predicament.
This synthesis paper summarizes published proxy climate evidence showing the spatial and temporal pattern of climate change through theย Holoceneย in Arctic Canada and Greenland.ย
Itโs quite a powerful study because of its wide geographical coverage, unlike other studies that focus on one particular proxy in one location.
Below is the key graph. Itโs measured in SDs, but illustrates how temperatures plunged around 3000 years ago, and notably since the Middle Ages:
Figure 2 also shows the area of the Greenland ice sheet, which reached post ice age minimum about 4000 years ago, and was at a maximum at the end of the Little Ice Age:
Germany, Britain, France and Japan are the biggest backers so far of the UN fund, which was set up to channel money to help poorer nations meet their targets to reduce CO2 emissions, develop clean energy and adjust to a warming world. Good joke- next one.
Untold millions of people throughout the world are facing a genuine threat โ but emphatically not from a changing climate. Rather, we may be closest to World War III since the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred 61 years ago this month, in October 1962.
Barring a widening of the conflict in the Middle East, the United Nationsโ 28th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP28) will take place just five weeks from now in the United Arab Emirates, in the very neighborhood of the fighting.
With war breaking out and wider conflicts on the brink, this annual UN climate summit seems more obtuse and irrelevant than ever. Nonetheless, count on many world leaders and delegates to declare the summit is more important than ever; that the worldโs climate is now โboilingโ and headed for catastrophe that dwarfs a potential World War.
Millions of people worldwide would beg to differ from this climate hysteria, especially after recent tragic and ongoing events. More than 1,200 Israeli civiliansโmen, women, and childrenโwere massacred October 7th by Hamas terrorists who govern the Gaza Strip that borders southern Israel. More than 200 hostages were kidnapped by the same in the hopes of buying time to prepare against a full-scale invasion by Israel of Gaza in retaliation.
On Israelโs northern border with Lebanon, the Hezbollah terrorist group is threatening a two-front war against Israel, with numerous military skirmishes underway. Looming over all of this is the Islamic Republic of Iran, just across the Persian Gulf from the upcoming climate summit in Dubai, UAE. Iran has long supported Hamas and Hezbollah to harass and threaten Israel, while Israel has surreptitiously sought to thwart Iranโs development of a nuclear weapon.
With the massacre on October 7th, Iran has significantly upped the ante in its war against the Jewish state, and it threatens further escalation if Israel counters with a full invasion of Gaza.
Meanwhile, the United States is beefing up its naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean Sea within firing range of the Israeli/Gaza/Hezbollah war, and its bases in Iraq and Syria are being fired upon by Iranian proxies. Some politicians in the U.S. are openly threatening war with Iran, which, incidentally, is allied with Russia, which is fighting in Ukraine, which in turn is being sustained by the U.S. with more than $100 billion and counting.
Then there is China, which has been flying military aircraft into Taiwan airspace and sending ships into Philippine territorial waters.
If history is not repeating itself from the two world wars in the 20th century, it is eerily starting to rhyme โ meaning military hostilities between neighboring countries with different alliances can rapidly escalate into wider conflicts and world wars. That is what occurred in 1914 and 1939. It could happen again suddenly.
This military tinderbox will make a bigger mockery of the climate-change-existential-threat chorus next month in Dubai, which will be strewn with hysterical warnings of having eight, ten, twenty-seven, or eighty years remaining on the planet before the tipping point, the point of no return, climate Armageddon, blah blah blah.
It all rings hollow, and more so than ever.
Amazingly, right after the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians, President Joe Bidenโs spokesman stood by the presidentโs climate existential hysteria spoken in September. Mr. Biden said, โthe only existential threat humanity faces โ even more frightening than a nuclear war โ is global warming; going above 1.5 degrees in the next ten years;โ to which spokesman John Kirby, after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, doubled down to say climate change โactually threatens and is capable of wiping out all human life on earth over time.โ
Even when you view climate change hysteria in isolation, apart from spreading wars, such arguments proffered by the Biden administration, the UN, and so many others funded by governments and sundry billionaires do not stand up to scrutiny. The most recent refutations come from the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) of more than 1,800 scientists and professionals, which asserted โthere is no climate emergencyโ and debunked numerous other climate-related shibboleths.
In addition, nearly two dozen climate researchers, led by Dr. Ronan Connelly of the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Science, recently disputed the findings of the UNโs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which claims that slight planetary warming is mostly human-caused. In fact, the study led by Dr. Ronan found that the IPCC failed to acknowledge natural factors such as solar effects also influence climate. Who knew the sun mattered when studying climate trends?! Evidently, not the UNโs IPCC bureaucrats.
Notwithstanding the CLINTEL declaration, another dispute with the IPCC, and escalating conflict and war in both hemispheres, itโs on to Dubai, which, to quote Shakespeareโsย Macbeth, has all the makings of more โsound and fury, signifying nothing.โ
He has researched and advocated for a variety of policy issues, including education reform and fiscal policy, both in the non-profit sector and in government in the administration of former New York Governor George Pataki.
He previously wrote and edited The Chalkboard weblog for the NY Charter Schools Association, and has been published in numerous media outlets, including The Hill, New York Post, Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Matthew Lau reviews Thomas Sowellโs latest book Social Justice Fallacies in a Financial Post article: No sacred cows in Thomas Sowellโs takedown of social justice fallacies. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
In his latest book, renowned economist and author demolishes the myths that underpin the social justice movement.
Thomas Sowell, age 93, famed economist and author of more than 40 books, last month published his latest: Social Justice Fallacies. In it heย asserts plain facts such as that life is unfair and central planners are fallible, realities too often ignored orย downplayed by those looking to impose top-down visions of โsocial justice.โ
Among his targets are:
price controls,
minimum wage laws,
the myth that American Black poverty is due to systemic racism,
high marginal tax rates,
teachers unionsโ monopoly on schooling,
exaggerations of income inequality by people who ignore income mobility,
affirmative action,
โsex educationโ in public schools (Sowell uses the scare quotes repeatedly)
To each of these and many other things, Sowell brings facts, examples, and statistics.
On the notion that the United States is a systemically racist or white supremacist society, Sowell notes that the median incomes of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry are higher than those of white Americans. Citing a 2019 U.S. Census Bureau survey, he points out that โamong full-time, year-round male workers, Asian Indian males earned over $39,000 a year more than white male full-time, year-round workersโ โ an unlikely outcome if white supremacy were pervasive.
Black family poverty has long been higher than white family poverty but, as Sowell explains, the poverty rate of Black married-couple families is consistently below the national poverty rate. โIf black family poverty is caused by โsystemic racism,โโ he asks, โdo racists make an exception for blacks who are married?โ
Another case-closing rhetorical question from Sowell: โAre Asians โkept outโ of professional basketball or Californians โkept outโ of the National Hockey League?โ In American sports, he notes, โBlacks are very over-represented in professional basketball, whites in professional tennis, and Hispanics in Major League Baseball.โ There are more NHL players from Sweden than California even though Sweden is on another continent and has about one-quarter Californiaโs population. But these facts do not mean professional sports leagues all engage in racism or other bigotry.
No affirmative action or other initiative is needed to โcorrectโ these unequal outcomes between groups.
If Sowellโs arguments about government economic control, race, economic disparities and other questions sound familiar, it is because he has written on these issues for decades. The same fallacies he and others have repeatedly debunked keep reappearing and need to be whacked down again and again โ which Sowell continues to do.
In Social Justice Fallacies, Sowell again attacks racial preferences in university admissions, arguing that admitting minority students into university programs for which they are not academically qualified does them no favours. Black students at the 80th percentile are very good students but putting them into elite programs where their classmates are in the 99th percentile sets them up for failure. Under affirmative action, Sowell writes, most Black students admitted to the University of California (Berkeley) during the 1980s failed to graduate.
Another policy that activists promote in the name of social justice, but that hurts Blacks:ย minimum wage laws, which the data showย significantly increase Black teenage unemployment by pricing many of them out of jobs.
There are no sacred cows in Social Justice Fallacies. Sowell argues that โsurrogates who introduced โsex educationโ into public schools in the 1960sโ were pre-empting parentsโ decisions about when and how to teach their children about sex. He points to data showing that before such education was introduced venereal diseases and teenage pregnancies had been declining for years, but after its introduction teenage pregnancies rapidly rose and the incidence of venereal diseases either rose or declined less rapidly than before. These facts alone do not prove causation between public school โsex educationโ and venereal diseases and teenage pregnancies, but they are not encouraging, either.
Explaining facts and demolishing fallacies, as Sowell does, is important. When activists distort reality by fashioning narratives to justify their top-down initiatives, they often cause more harm than the original injustices (whether real or perceived) they say they want to correct.
Citing Barack Obamaโs memoir, Dreams from My Father, Sowell gives the example of a young Black man who wanted to become a pilot but decided not to pursue it because he thought the Air Force would never let a Black man fly. Sowell points out this was decades after a whole squadron of Black American fighter pilots flew in World War II.
โWhoever indoctrinated this young man,โ Sowell concluded, โdid him more harm than a racist could have, by keeping him from even trying to become a pilot.โ
In Addition, Thomas Sowellโs Wisdom and Scholarship on Affirmative Action
With affirmative action suddenly coming under political attack from many directions, and with even liberals backing away from it, we need to question not only its underlying assumptions but also what some of the alternatives are.
At the heart of the affirmative action approach is the notion that statistical disparities show discrimination. No dogma has taken a deeper hold with less evidence โor in the face of more massive evidence to the contrary.
A recent story in the Wall Street Journal revealed that more than four-fifths of all the doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodians. That is about the same proportion as blacks among basketball stars. Clearly, neither of these disparities is due to discrimination against whites.
Nor are such disparities new or peculiar to the United States. In medieval Europe, most of the inhabitants of the towns in Poland and Hungary were neither Poles nor Hungarians. In nineteenth-century Bombay, most of the shipbuilders were Parsees, a minority in Bombay and less than one percent of the population of India.
In twentieth-century Australia most of the fishermen in the port of Freemantle came from two villages in Italy. In southern Brazil, whole industries were owned by people of German ancestry and such crops as tomatoes and tea have been grown predominantly by people of Japanese ancestry.
Page after pageโif not book after bookโcould be filled with similar statistical disparities from around the world and down through history. Such disparities have been the rule, not the exception.
Yet our courts have turned reality upside down and treated what happens all over this planet as an anomaly and what is seldom found anywhereโproportional representationโas a norm.
Why are such disparities so common? Because all kinds of work require particular skills, particular experience, particular locations and particular orientations. And none of these things is randomly distributed.
Local demagogues who thunder against the fact that Koreans run so many stores in black ghettoes merely betray their ignorance when they act as if this were something strange or unusual. For most of the merchants in an area to be of a different race or ethnicity from their customers has been commonfor centuries in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, Fiji, the Ottoman Empire and numerous other places.
When German and Jewish merchants moved into Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, they brought with them much more experience in that occupation than that possessed by local Eastern European merchants, who were often wiped out by the new competition. Even when the competition takes place between people who are racially and ethnically identical, all kinds of historical, geographical and other circumstances can make one set of these people far more effective in some activities than the others.
Mountain people have often lagged behind those on the plains below, whether highland Scots versus lowland Scots or the Sinhalese in the highlands of Sri Lanka versus the Sinhalese on the plains. The Slavs living along the Adriatic coast in ports like Dubrovnik were for centuries far more advanced than Slavs living in the interior, just as coastal peoples have tended to be more advanced than peoples of the interior hinterlands in Africa or Asia.
Some disparities of course have their roots in discrimination. But the fatal mistake is to infer discrimination whenever the statistical disparities exceed what can be accounted for by random chance. Human beings are not random. They have very pronounced and complex cultural patterns. These patterns are not unchanging. But changing them for the better requires first acknowledging that โhuman capitalโ is crucial to economic advancement.
Those who make careers out of attributing disparities to the wickedness of other people are an obstacle to the development of more human capital among the poor.
There was a time, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan lagged far behind the Western industrial nations because it was lacking in the kind of human capital needed in a modern economy. Importing Western technology was not enough, for the Japanese lacked the knowledge and experience required to operate it effectively.
Japanese workmen damaged or ruined machinery when they tried to use it. Fabrics were also ruined when the Japanese tried to dye them without understanding chemistry. Whole factories were badly designed and had to be reconstructed at great cost. What saved the Japanese was that they recognized their own backwardnessโand worked for generations to overcome it.
They did not have cultural relativists to tell them that all cultures are equally valid or political activists to tell them that their troubles were all somebody elseโs fault. Nor were there guilt-ridden outsiders offering them largess.
Affirmative action has been one of the great distractions from the real task of self-development.When it and the mindset that it represents passes from the scene, poorer minorities can become the biggest beneficiaries, if their attention and efforts turn toward improving themselves.
Unfortunately, a whole industry of civil rights activists, politicians and miscellaneous hustlers has every vested interest in promoting victimhood, resentment and paranoia instead.
Affirmative Action Around the World
While controversies rage over โaffirmative actionโ policies in the United States, few Americans seem to notice the existence or relevance of similar policies in other countries around the world. Instead, the arguments pro and con both tend to invoke history and traditions that are distinctively American. Yet group preferences and quotas have existed in other countries with wholly different histories and traditionsโand, in some countries, such policies have existed much longer than in the United States. What can the experiences of these other countries tell us? Are there common patterns, common rationales, common results? Or is the American situation unique?
Ironically, a claim or assumption of national uniqueness is one of the most common patterns found in numerous countries where group preferences and quotas have existed under a variety of names. The special situation of the Maoris in New Zealand, based on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, is invoked as passionately in defense of preferential treatment there as the unique position of untouchables in India or of blacks in the United States.
Despite how widespread affirmative action programs have become, even the promoters of such programs have seldom been bold enough to proclaim preferences and quotas to be desirable on principle or as permanent features of society. On the contrary, considerable effort has been made to depict such policies as โtemporary,โ even when in fact these preferences turn out not only to persist but to grow.
Official affirmative action or group preference policies must beย distinguished from whatever purely subjective preferences or prejudices may existย among individuals and groups. These subjective feelings may of course influence policies, but the primaryย focus here is on concrete government policies and their empirical consequencesโnot on their rationales, hopes, or promises, though these latter considerations will not be wholly ignored. Fundamentally, however, this is a study ofย what actually happens, rather than a philosophical exploration of issues that have been amplyโif not more than amplyโexplored elsewhere.
The resurgence of group preferences in societies committed to the equality of individuals before the law has been accompanied by claims not only that these preferences would be temporary, but also that they would be limited, rather than pervasive. That is, these programs would supposedly be limited not only in time but also in scope, with equal treatment policies prevailing outside the limited domain where members of particular groups would be given special help.
Similar reasoning was applied in the United States to both employment and admissions to colleges and universities. Initially, it was proposed that there would be special โoutreachโ efforts to contact minority individuals with information and encouragement to apply for jobs or college admissions in places where they might not have felt welcome before, but with the proviso that they would not be given special preferences throughout the whole subsequent processes of acceptance and advancement.
Similar policies and results have also been achieved in less blatant ways. During the era of the Soviet Union, professors were pressured to give preferential grading to Central Asian students and what has been called โaffirmative gradingโ has also occurred in the United States, in order to prevent excessive failure rates among minority students admitted under lower academic standards. In India, such practices have been referred to as โgrace marks.โ Similar results can be achieved indirectly by providing ethnic studies courses that give easy grades and attract disproportionately the members of one ethnic group. This too is not peculiar to the United States. There are Maori studies programs in New Zealand and special studies for Malays in Singapore.
In the job market as well, the belief that special concerns for particular groups could be confined to an initial stage proved untenable in practice.
Initially, the term โaffirmative actionโ arose in the United States from an executive order by President John F. Kennedy, who called for โaffirmative action to ensure that the applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin.โ In short, there were to be no preferences or quotas at all, just a special concern to make sure that those who had been discriminated against in the past would no longer be discriminated against in the futureโand that concrete steps should be taken so that all and sundry would be made aware of this.
However, just as academic preferences initially limited in scope continued to expand, so did the concept of affirmative action in the job market.
A later executive order by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 contained the fateful expressions โgoals and timetablesโ and โrepresentation.โ In December 1971, yet another Nixon executive order specified that โgoals and timetablesโ were meant to โincrease materially the utilization of minorities and women,โ with โunder-utilizationโ being spelled out as โhaving fewer minorities or women in a particular job classification than would reasonably be expected by their availability.โ Affirmative action was now a numerical concept, whether called โgoalsโ or โquotas.โ
This confident pronouncement, however, presupposed a degree of control which has proved illusory in country after country. Moreover, โwhen and where there is social and economic inequalityโ encompasses virtually the entire world and virtually the entire history of the human race. A โtemporaryโ program to eliminate a centuries-old condition is almost a contradiction in terms.
Equality of opportunity might be achieved within some feasible span of time, but that is wholly different from eliminating inequalities of results.
Even an approximate equality of โrepresentationโ of different groups in different occupations, institutions or income levels has been a very rareโor non-existentโphenomenon, except where such numerical results have been imposed artificially by quotas. As a massive scholarly study of ethnic groups around the world put it, when discussing โproportional representationโ of ethnic groups, โfew, if any societies have ever approximated this description.โ
In short, the even representation of groups that is taken as a norm is difficult or impossible to find anywhere, while the uneven representation that is regarded as a special deviation to be corrected is pervasive across the most disparate societies. People differโand have for centuries. It is hard to imagine how they could not differ, given the enormous range of differing historical, cultural, geographic, demographic and other factors shaping the particular skills, habits, and attitudes of different groups.
Any โtemporaryโ policy whose duration is defined by the goal of achieving something that has never been achieved before, anywhere in the world, could more fittingly be characterized as eternal.
The Jimmy Dore Show
You must be logged in to post a comment.