Giveaways Dept.: Asthmatics, You’re Next!

     The contemporary Left is all about targeting: what groups it can enlist in its Cause, and what groups it can indict as enemies to be annihilated. At irregular intervals it will release a trial balloon, intended to test whether a particular group is seducible with the right offer, or vulnerable enough to be targeted. The latest such balloon appeared in Time magazine:

     According to a new study published in BMJ Open, the familiar lightweight, pocket-sized aerosolized inhalers that make breathing easier for so many of the 235 million people worldwide who suffer from asthma may be choking the planet on a powerful greenhouse gas they release in the process...

     The researcher compared the greenhouse gas emissions of aerosol pumps—known as metered dose inhalers (MDI)—with dry powder inhalers (DPI), which are shaped something like a hockey puck and are activated simply by inhaling...

     The problem with MDIs is not carbon dioxide (the most common greenhouse gas), but rather methane, which represents a far smaller share of greenhouse emissions, but a much more powerful one, with up to 84 times the heat-trapping power of CO2. Even the least polluting inhaler was found to emit methane at levels equal to up to 10 kg (22 lbs.) of carbon dioxide into the air over the course of its 200-puff lifetime.

     Well, that settles that! We can’t have asthmatics breathing freely if the price is the death of the planet! As Jim Treacher puts it:

     Oxygen is just like any other natural resource. You should use as little of it as possible. For asthmatics, this is easy: Just throw away your inhalers. Before you know it, the problem will solve itself.

     Time admitted many years ago that when it came to environmentalism, it had abandoned objective journalism in favor of issue advocacy. So the tenor of the cited article comes as no real surprise. What might be a wee bit disconcerting is the implication that inhalers are a public-policy “problem:” i.e., that “we” can’t afford to allow asthmatics the inhalers that keep them alive.

     Somehow, environmentalists always wind up exhorting “us” to kill off those who offend their goddess.

     Remember these two “environmentalists?”

     "Every one of you who gets to survive has to bury nine," Eric Pianka cautioned students and guests at St. Edward's University on Friday. Pianka's words are part of what he calls his "doomsday talk" -- a 45-minute presentation outlining humanity's ecological misdeeds and Pianka's predictions about how nature, or perhaps humans themselves, will exterminate all but a fraction of civilization.

     Though his statements are admittedly bold, he's not without abundant advocates. But what may set this revered biologist apart from other doomsday soothsayers is this: Humanity's collapse is a notion he embraces.

     Indeed, his words deal, very literally, on a life-and-death scale, yet he smiles and jokes candidly throughout the lecture. Disseminating a message many would call morbid, Pianka's warnings are centered upon awareness rather than fear.

     "This is really an exciting time," he said Friday amid warnings of apocalypse, destruction and disease. Only minutes earlier he declared, "Death. This is what awaits us all. Death." Reflecting on the so-called Ancient Chinese Curse, "May you live in interesting times," he wore, surprisingly, a smile.

     So what's at the heart of Pianka's claim?

     6.5 billion humans is too many.

     In his estimation, "We've grown fat, apathetic and miserable," all the while leaving the planet parched.

     The solution?

     A 90 percent reduction.

     That's 5.8 billion lives -- lives he says are turning the planet into "fat, human biomass." He points to an 85 percent swell in the population during the last 25 years and insists civilization is on the brink of its downfall -- likely at the hand of widespread disease.

     "[Disease] will control the scourge of humanity," Pianka said. "We're looking forward to a huge collapse."

     And:

     This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

     He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

     What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides....

     The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom....

     Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.

     We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves. A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her....

     Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are heedlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic countries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.

     Eric Pianka and Pentti Linkola are not “extremists.” They are the endpoint of all “environmentalist” cant: the assertion that something – anything! – is of a higher priority than human life and well-being, and that human lives and freedoms must be sacrificed to it.

     Of course, if you dare to ask them “Why?” you’ll be shouted down, denounced, possibly assaulted or murdered. Asking “Why?” is forbidden. The titans of environmentalism are gods. One does not ask “Why?” of a god. One does not question his decrees or inquire into their bases. One certainly does not ask them why we always find them deep in bed with the central planners, the socialists, and other assorted advocates of totalitarianism.

     I can’t help recalling this dead giveaway by one of the villains from Atlas Shrugged:

     “It’s a great responsibility,” said Eugene Lawson, “to hold the decision of life or death over thousands of people and to sacrifice them when necessary, but we must have the courage to do it.” His soft lips seemed to twist into a smile.

     Today: asthmatics. Tomorrow: who can say? It might be cardboard-box makers, or Internet service providers, or Catholics. If the life of the planet is at stake, no one is permanently exempt.

     Really, Gentle Reader: Isn’t it lock and load time yet?

Quickies: The Roots Of Economic Expansion

     When I read about the posturings of the anti-fossil-fuels campaigners -- here’s a recent example -- it causes me to wonder whether portions of the human race have been devolving. Such persons aren’t thinking. Perhaps they can’t, but it’s indisputable that they aren’t.

     The marvelous increase in general well-being among men, these past three centuries, has roots in a number of developments. All of them were necessary, though none were sufficient in isolation. One that’s all too often overlooked is the ability to travel steadily increasing distances in a modest amount of time.

     If your zone of economic interaction is limited to how far you can walk in an hour or two, you will be confined to working for and trading with only those persons very close to you. That’s a severe limitation on your economic betterment, for reasons that ought not to require explanation. The emergence of methods of transportation that permitted an individual to travel twenty miles or more in an hour expanded his economic zone by more than 1000%. It also made concentrations of labor possible – and that made mass production, with all the blessings it’s conferred upon us, possible as well.

     It could not and would not have happened without oil-based fuels, which offer the greatest usable energy per unit mass for powering a moving vehicle.

     That condition persists today. Speaking strictly of movable platforms, nothing comes near to the power or flexibility available from oil-based fuels. Electric vehicles are both sharply limited in range and utility, carry downsides of their own that are seldom discussed...and conceal the emissions produced by their power plants by shifting the burden to the local electric utility.

     Would electricity generated by nuclear plants change the calculus? Yes, somewhat. The electric car would still have other drawbacks, including the negative aspects of making the battery systems and disposing of them once they’ve worn out, but the emissions problem would have been addressed. However, the very forces that oppose fossil fuels are even more opposed to nuclear power.

     All of which leads me to a sad conclusion: These folks hate people. They want us all to be dirt poor: to starve while freezing in the dark. So the next time you confront an anti-fossil-fuels crusader, ask him, quite loudly:

“Why do you hate the poor?”

     Make sure to be conspicuously armed, of course.

Burning River Re-Visited

As I've written before, I grew up in Cleveland.

Well, technically, Lakewood, the nearest Western suburb. We share the same lake view. As a kid, on the 4th of July, we would gather near the Lakewood Park fence to watch the fireworks, and get a 2-for - we could see both Lakewood's and Cleveland's fireworks from that vantage point. One year, when an accident caused most of the Cleveland fireworks to erupt in just a few minutes, we were able to see it, then enjoy our own fireworks for the rest of the time.

Trips to Cleveland, via the Rapid Transit, the local commuter train, were always fun. We saw the then-busy industrial activity along the route. In the warmer months, we hurriedly closed the windows that had been opened for ventilation once we passed the 25th street station. The smell of the steel mills always included a hefty dose of sulphur. Ohio coal is quite high-sulphur, and gives off that familiar rotten-egg smell you might remember from chemistry class.

One time, when a prior train broken down in the station backed up following trains, my train was stuck for an extended period of time - I think only around 10 minutes. But, that was long enough to cause most of the passengers to face a dreadful situation. It was a terrible choice - keep the windows closed, and sweat, or open them, and gag on the nasty smell.

Lake Erie suffered from that pollution of the Cuyahoga River. The lake regularly churned up dead fish, and the odor wasn't pleasant. The lakeshore had become a dumping ground for trash. Few locals used the lake for swimming - like most of my friends, I preferred the local pools. Those that took the trip to Edgewater or Huntington beaches generally had some underage drinking and partying on their minds.

So, when the river's burning caused the lake to became a flashpoint for environmental activism, I was on board with it all. Above is a picture of the lake before cleanup.

Turns out the story about the burning lake was more nuanced than we had been told - as we are now finding out about a lot of "truths" we'd been fed in those times.

Much of the story was not told at the time - Cleveland got a lot of blame for what wasn't their fault.

The Cuyahoga River - the name means Crooked River - originates in the upmost corner of the state, in Ashtabula county. It travels down to Akron - where a lot of the pollution, including sewage, originates - then snakes up to empty into Lake Erie.

The last part, when Cleveland's industries were active, did add to the pollution. One factor that is little known is that both the river and the lake are quite shallow. For that reason, any pollution has a greater effect than on other lakes in the Great Lakes system. Keep in mind that, as the water moves toward the Atlantic, the aggregate pollution increases - Erie has what it produces, plus some residual from the other lakes to the west.

For contrast, here's a picture of Lake Erie at Cleveland today

And, the Cuyahoga River many years after the fire.

They Never Quit...

     ...and they never give delivery dates in the proximate future:

     Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it’s devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being at scale.
     Species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than that of the natural rate over the previous 65 million years (see Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School).
     Since 2000, 6 million hectares of primary forest have been lost each year. That’s 14,826,322 acres, or just less than the entire state of West Virginia (see the 2010 assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN).
     Even in the U.S., 15% of the population lives below the poverty line. For children under the age of 18, that number increases to 20% (see U.S. Census).
     The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 (see United Nations' projections).
     How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain?

     It startled me to see this kind of absolutely fallacious anti-capitalist doom-shouting in Forbes. (Capitalist Tool!) Drew Hansen raves as if he were the reincarnation of Thomas Malthus – the young, stupid Thomas Malthus. Do you think he’s heard of Norman Borlaug? Is he aware that it’s the Third World nations that are suffering the net loss of forests and arable land, whereas the First World countries are replenishing them as fast as we exploit them? Is he aware that the “extinctions” are nearly all of unimportant micro-organisms, and that they’ve been going on for millennia?

     I could go on, but there’s little point. You’ll never find a leftist doom-shouter who can cope with the arguments and evidence in Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource, or who’s willing to answer simple questions about the priority of human well-being over resource “consumption” or environmental “destruction.” Every one of them is an Eric Pianka or a Pentti Linkola at heart, slavering for mass death. The environment is their deity and capitalism is their devil – and by “capitalism,” I mean you and me, Gentle Reader.

     Mentioning that resource prices have dropped in real terms over the past fifty years, which utterly defeats the claim that they’re becoming “scarcer,” would evoke Hansen’s condemnation. “You can’t measure these things in monetary terms! There are values involved!” Mentioning that the solar system is chock-full of resources of every kind, all just waiting to be reaped, would make Hansen and his ilk haul out the crucifixes and pointed stakes. “You want to launch rockets? That would use up irreplaceable resources and soil our precious environment! Use the money to feed the poor!” As if “feeding the poor” were a shortcut to anything but more and more “poor.” (“We can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for.” – Thomas Mackay)

     But what really goosed me in a tender place was Hansen’s selection of 2050 as his disaster-delivery date. That’s 31 years from now. Granted, it’s a little nearer than the warmistas’ promise of global heat death – by the way, if you read further into the article, you’ll see that Hansen’s a warmista along with all the rest — but it raises the question: How did he pick that date? Does he like it for the zero at the end? So round, so firm... Or did someone else – one of the left-wing sources he cites throughout his article, perhaps – pick it for him?

     Hansen and his kind are playing to a particular audience: those who need to embrace a Cause that would allow them to feel relevant and superior to the uncommitted. Perhaps Hansen himself feels that need. Or perhaps he’s merely an ignoramus who’s been led into apocalyptic fantasy by other, glib environmental doom-shouters. It’s important to keep track of such persons, though. Not only must one stand ready to contradict them; they’re a great source of comedy material.

The Indoor Life: A Reflection

     Yesterday, in response to the promptings of the C.S.O., I bought her a grill. It’s a nice grill, a Weber, all stainless steel and (supposedly) easy to clean and maintain. The C.S.O. was exceedingly pleased by the acquisition. As I have not inherited the grilling gene, I was baffled.

     “Why,” I asked her, “did you want a device that would compel you to cook outdoors, among the insects, the ragweed, and the grass clippings, where at any moment your life could be snuffed out by a falling jet engine?”

     The C.S.O.’s reply was typical, and typically brief: “Troglodyte!”

     For those of you who suffered a “public school” education, that means cave dweller. And yes, nearly all of my day is spent under a good sturdy roof. (Our home was built in 1959, when Long Island was the beating heart of the defense aviation industry. if you fail to see the relevance, remember those falling jet engines.)

     But of course, such an exchange is merely grist for a writer’s mill. It caused me to reflect on the changes in American life patterns over the years since the Civil War / War Between the States / Late Unpleasantness. (Choose your regionally preferred expression.) One of those changes is how many of us are, like me, “People of the Roof.”

     It’s expressed in all our institutions and practices. We work indoors. We sleep indoors. Mostly, we eat indoors. We partake of our most common entertainments indoors. The outdoors is now where most Americans go on occasion, whether to go under a different roof, to discharge some obligation, or for a recreational purpose. (I maintain that when you’re in your automobile – convertibles excepted – you’re still indoors...and how, pray tell, do you store your vehicle? In a garage or under a carport, perhaps?)

     The homes of working-class Americans have larger rooms than they did a century ago, in part because so little of life was lived indoors. You don’t need big rooms, or need to pay for them, if you only use them to keep the rain off the kids. Homes with large rooms were the hallmark of the wealthy: the financiers and industrialists, and a scattering of the professions.

     The things we play with have become ever more outdoors-indifferent. Some are outdoors-hostile. And we spend an increasing fraction of our time playing with such devices.

     But the outdoors is still there. (Trust me on this; I checked.) And it still offers its opportunities and pleasures. It would be well for us to enjoy it a bit more than we do – not for any abstract reason, but because if we don’t we might wake up some day to find that it’s all been taken away from us. And I don’t mean by overdevelopment.

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     Many years ago, when “in a mood,” I wrote an essay about the nature of outdoor beauty. Beauty, whether one claims that it’s an objective characteristic or solely in the eye of the beholder, is an event: It occurs when a man encounters something upon which he confers a strong positive aesthetic evaluation. “This is beautiful,” he says, audibly or otherwise. But as with all things that occur within a human mind, the beauty event cannot occur unless the beautiful thing is experienced, made perceptible by our sensorium.

     I’ve misplaced that early essay. However, I recall clearly and specifically the thrust at which I aimed it: If beauty is an event that requires an encounter between the beautiful thing and a conscious human being, then it depends critically on the accessibility of the beautiful thing to the human mind. The car one drives and the road one drives along to surround oneself in the beautiful landscape are as important to the beauty event as the landscape itself!

     Human ingenuity has greatly expanded the number of beautiful outdoor things to which men have access. But another sort of human ingenuity is gradually stealing them.

     The green bigots (Thomas Sowell) have gradually eroded the methods and means by which Americans can access outdoor beauties. Ever more scenic sites are being closed de facto to the general public, merely by making access to them too difficult for most of us. Unless you’re a fit-as-a-fiddle hiker or backpacker with oodles of free time, that is. This is a reversal of one of the few positive trends of the Twentieth Century: the opening of access to more places to more Americans.

     The green bigots’ usual rationale is “preservation.” (Note: not conservation.) This, of course, means preservation from normal Americans and reservation to the green bigots. It’s a large-scale form of theft: the theft of our opportunities to experience natural beauty. It’s being carried out under color of law, which makes it doubly vile.

     I could go on, and sometimes I do. But the most important thing is to highlight the trend involved, whereby supposedly “environmentally minded” sorts are depriving those of us with Airstreams or Winnebagos of the enjoyment of outdoor beauties. I doubt we’d be as numb to it as we are, were we not always peering into a smartphone screen or crouched before a keyboard.

     And now, in the troglodytic spirit from which this essay was written, a little music for you...very little:

Environmentalists With The Masks Off

     There’s a near-perfect correlation between the espousing of environmentalist views and hostility toward Mankind. That hostility includes an aversion to human reproduction:

     Current anthropogenic climate change is the result of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere, which records the aggregation of billions of individual decisions. Here we consider a broad range of individual lifestyle choices and calculate their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries, based on 148 scenarios from 39 sources. We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). -- “The climate mitigation gap”

     The summed emissions of a person’s descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him, may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent. Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. A person’s reproductive choices must be considered along with his day-today activities when assessing his ultimate impact on the global environment. -- “Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals”

     Based on per capita consumption — on an individual basis — there isn't much more growth in the amount we can consume, according to Bernstein's Neil Beveridge and team in a note on Friday....per capita consumption may not have more room to increase. -- Akin Oyedele

     “Having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet. Have one less and conserve resources.” – Feminist writer Jill Filipovic

     The consistency is remarkable: Travel less! Consume less! Use expensive, unpleasant, garish lightbulbs! Have fewer children! All in the name of “reducing carbon.” Perhaps we could all stop exhaling for a few decades, as well. These folks would approve, I’m sure.

     Jim Geraghty thinks it’s left-wing narcissism:

     “I’m a childless adult, telling all of you people out there to stop having children.” “I’m a vegan, telling you that you have to stop eating meat.” “I’m an urbanite who doesn’t own a car, telling you that your automobile is destroying the planet and gas taxes should be higher to support the costs of mass transit.” The not-so-subtle subtext is, “why aren’t you more like me?”

     Perhaps that’s so in a few cases, but I can’t see it as applied to the great mass of the Left. The self-regard of the Leftist arises from his assumption of moral and intellectual superiority to the rest of us. If we all shared his views, there’d be no one to whom he could self-righteously compare himself. He needs us.

     The common factor – the hostility toward the normal lives of Americans and others of the First World – suggests a need to hate. That, too, is consistent with the Left’s assumption of greater intelligence and higher morals. Of course, were they to achieve the position of unlimited power they seek, their whole game would burn itself out shortly after their victory dance. But Leftists don’t think long term. Indeed, there’s some question as to whether they think at all.

     As data accumulates – particularly through Leftist self-disclosures – it becomes ever more definite that nothing really matters to them apart from their absolute emotional need to feel superior. That they should seek that sense of superiority by submerging themselves in hatred-suffused movements funded and directed from the top down by wealthy would-be dictators is nothing new. The history of socialist and communist movements is quite consistent that way.

     If any one aspect is more of a giveaway than the rest, it’s the Left’s hostility toward children:

     Well, let me just put a stop to this shit right now. You can give me gold-plated day care and an awesome public school right on the street corner and start paying me 15% more at work, and I still do not want a baby. I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding. No matter how much free day care you throw at women, babies are still time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. No matter how flexible you make my work schedule, my entire life would be overturned by a baby. I like my life how it is, with my ability to do what I want when I want without having to arrange for a babysitter. I like being able to watch True Detective right now and not wait until baby is in bed. I like sex in any room of the house I please. I don’t want a baby. I’ve heard your pro-baby arguments. Glad those work for you, but they are unconvincing to me. Nothing will make me want a baby. -- Amanda Marcotte

     I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell Filipovic or Marcotte that they were babies, once. “Be glad your mother chose life” cuts no ice with those who hate Mankind...because the objects of their hatred include themselves.

     Feel free to suggest suicide to the next environmentalist that starts haranguing you. I do!

The PDOOMA Series

     [Owing to the return of the global warming evangelists and their claims that President Trump has doomed us all by pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords, I’ve decided to reissue these four essays, which first appeared at Eternity Road in late 2009 and 2010. Some of the links are dead, but as they were links to other Eternity Road essays, you shouldn’t let it trouble you. -- FWP]

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1. PDOOMA!

     The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases. -- Sir Josiah Stamp

     If it cannot be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. -- Robert A. Heinlein

     43.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot. – Author unknown

     Among the eternal verities of the engineering trade is this:

What matters most about any figure injected into a technical discussion is its error bar.

     The size of the error bar -- in layman’s terms, the amount by which the figure cited could be high or low -- determines whether the figure is worthy of consideration, as evidence or as support for some proposed solution to a problem.

• A small error bar, which indicates high confidence in the figure, enhances the authority of the figure.
• A large error bar, which indicates low confidence in the figure, renders the figure suspect and unreliable.
• An unknown or undisclosed error bar indicates that the figure is a PDOOMA.

     PDOOMA, one of engineering’s most beloved acronyms, stands for “Pulled Directly Out Of My Ass.” The figure is almost certainly guesswork or worse -- in extreme cases, pure fiction. The best giveaway to a PDOOMA figure is the absence of an error bar.

     The PDOOMA figure is becoming a major player in political rhetoric. Conservatives have had to cope with quite a few of them in recent years. Because we prefer not to fight too many duels -- ammunition has gotten quite expensive, y’know -- we usually refrain from calling the PDOOMA's proponent a liar. The usual conservative response to a PDOOMA from a left-liberal is simply to dispute the figure's accuracy, or perhaps its relevance. But the unprecedented proliferation of political PDOOMAs has made that approach counterproductive. As Ann Coulter said in her book Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right, we find ourselves passing over quite a lot of leftist fiction so we can concentrate on the lies of earth-shaking magnitude.

     Here are a few PDOOMAs of recent vintage:

• Al Gore's claim that, if nothing is done about "global warming," Earth will experience a sea level rise of twenty feet.
• Marian Wright Edelman's claim that every extra dollar devoted to Head Start funding would ultimately save $3.35 in federal and state welfare expenditures.
• Congressional Democrats claim that $500 billion can be squeezed out of Medicare expenditures over the next ten years by "eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse."
• Barack Hussein Obama's "47 million Americans can't get health insurance."
• Barack Hussein Obama's "650,000 jobs created or saved" by the $787 billion stimulus bill.

     ...and not an error bar in the lot.

     The most annoying aspect of these PDOOMAs is how hard it is to get their promulgators to stand their ground and defend it. When challenged, they immediately change the subject, or attack the objector -- and subsequently act as if the PDOOMA went unchallenged, and should be taken as authoritative and trustworthy. But left-liberalism being inherently fraudulent and treacherous, perhaps this is only to be expected.

     The proliferation of PDOOMAs on the subject of health care has slowed down somewhat in recent weeks, but there remain a couple that animate the Democrats' drive for the nationalization of American medicine. One is the "47 million uninsured" canard. No responsible analyst would propound such a figure without also stating how he'd arrived at it, what the error bar is, and whether factors other than the politically potent implication of unaffordability play a part in a significant fraction of the total. The last of those is a particularly important question at a time when among America's most important social ills is our problem with illegal immigration.

     But no field beats "global warming / climate change" for reliance on the PDOOMA. The whole "discipline" is PDOOMAs from first to last. Global temperature assessment is inherently fraught with major uncertainties. Measurements of global temperature have error bars of several Centigrade degrees. The recent revelations of wholesale distortion and data-dredging at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, apparently carried on shamelessly by hundreds, if not thousands, of the best known "global warming" flacksters in the world, should be a lesson to us about the probity of "scientific measurements" advanced to serve a political cause. Self-nominated "scientists" are just as capable of deception, including self-deception, as any other human being...especially when vast quantities of money are at stake.

     If there's an irony over this originating from the Right, it would be that, since left-liberals are generally aware that their own "statistics" and "projections" are PDOOMAs, they instinctively reject figures that countervail their contentions. For example, it will do you no good in a conversation with a gun-control advocate to cite Florida's impressive decrease in violent crimes after it became a shall-issue state -- very nearly 80% over the first two years. He'll assume you made it up. Nor will he bother to check it for himself; it violates Holy Leftist Writ about the evil of firearms, and that's all he needs to know. Neither can you make any headway with a rabid welfarist by pointing out that the Reagan-era tax rate cuts correlated with federal revenue increases of over $390 billion per year by 1989. "Tax cut" is profanity to a statist of any stripe; you simply have to be lying.

     In other words, you can't persuade a left-liberal by using facts.

     Indeed, it might not be possible to persuade a left-liberal by any means available to Man. Left-liberal Causes, being quasi-religious in nature, receive devotion of religious intensity from their devotees. That's why they're unabashed about their use of PDOOMAs. The end justifies the means; no deception is out of bounds if it serves Ultimate Truth.

     Depressing, especially to one who respects the connection between numbers and reality.

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2. PDOOMA! Part 2: The Trouble With Temperature

     There's already been a lot of discussion of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit document leak. The documents have been authenticated by persons at the institution and pored over by thousands of readers. The implications of the statements therein are utterly damning for the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) thesis. Perhaps worst of all is the annotated FORTRAN 90 source code for one of the CRU's key climate models, which clearly attempts to turn sow's-ear temperature data into a silk purse of AGW confirmation by a range of manipulations too sordid for a serious scientist to bear. Though we cannot expect AGW's political backers to run up a white flag just yet -- there's too much money and power at stake -- nevertheless, it's clear that we have the warmistas on the run.

     Yet, in all the Sturm und Drang that's flown over the AGW issue, there's a question your Curmudgeon has been waiting for someone to ask, but which has unaccountably never been raised in any forum:

What is the current temperature of the Earth?

     "Global warming" must surely refer to the temperature of the globe, no? Or at least, to the temperature of that part of the globe that's relevant to its resident organisms: the upper crust, the oceans, and the atmosphere. So what is it? If the Earth is getting warmer, then its temperature today must be higher than what it was at some relevant past moment, right? Right?

     The Earth doesn't have a convenient orifice into which to stick a thermometer, does it? Worse, if it did, it wouldn't tell us anything particularly useful.

     Of course, a dedicated warmista would wave the question aside as "naive," no doubt with a considerable display of irritation. He'd be equally likely to dismiss its reductionist versions: what's the current temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, or of the Atlantic Ocean, or of the Gulf of Mexico, et cetera. But that doesn't mean that the questions are meaningless or irrelevant to the subject. Indeed, they're the most important questions of all.

     Their importance lies in this: They cannot be answered satisfactorily, now or ever.

     The temperature of a large body is inherently unknowable. Temperature, like simultaneity, is a local phenomenon: the larger the locale, the less certain one's determinations will be. Your Curmudgeon could fairly assume that the air temperature over the Fortress of Crankitude will be about the same as that over its next-door neighbor at any given instant, but he'd guarantee that it will differ from the temperature over a house a mile or two away. Since the two key thermal aspects of life on Earth, the atmosphere and the oceans, are chaotic systems characterized by continuous fluctuations of unknown magnitude, their temperatures are as unknowable as the length of the coastline of Norway.

     The situation is actually worse than that. Temperature is supposed to correspond to the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the substance whose temperature one is taking. It's an empirical sort of metric, since we can't actually measure the kinetic energy of all those little particles and take their average; instead, we use a correlation to the expansion of some substance, such as mercury or alcohol. If, when exposed to the thing whose temperature is to be taken, a fixed mass of our chosen metrical substance expands by so much, we say its temperature is thus-and-such...which completely ignores the prior mechanical and thermodynamic state of the metrical substance itself.

     In short, the state variable called temperature is one of the least precise of all the measures known to physics, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Any good physicist will tell you this, Sunday-supplement gee-whiz references to such things as the temperature of the Earth's core or the surface of the Sun notwithstanding.

     This makes "investigations" such as AGW a fool's errand.

     We have a natural sense, direct from our nerve endings, for "hotter" and "cooler" as those conceptions apply to small objects and local conditions. That shouldn't be allowed to fool us into thinking we can know the temperature of a large region or a large body with arbitrary precision -- and the precision required to invest any credibility in the representations of the warmistas is unbelievably fine, measured in tenths of a Centigrade degree. But that level of precision is what the warmistas have sought to sell us.

     The AGW thesis has been a con job from first to last, a castle of power-seeking lies built on a foundation of fantasy-precision sand. That it should have come tumbling down at the slightest of temblors was only to be expected. As we in the software trade like to say:

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

     Perhaps we don't say it often enough.

---

3. PDOOMA! Part 3: Clarity About "The Environment"

     The East Anglia CRU document leak and its sequels are proving to be everything a freedom-minded man could have wished. The entire edifice of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) promoters has collapsed as its leading lights proffer ever less credible explanations for the materials revealed. The FORTRAN 90 source code to the CRU's principal climate model is particularly valuable for the embedded comments, which make it plain that massive data fudging was performed to produce even a semblance of AGW hazard.

     Which makes this a nearly perfect time to talk about environmental issues in general.

***

     Back in the Sixties, Americans became receptive to suggestions that air pollution was a problem to be addressed. The air in our major cities was admittedly less than pleasant, owing in part to industrial emissions, in part to automobile exhaust, and in part to the unavoidable consequences of packing large numbers of people into a small space. Political will was marshaled; Washington emitted laws and regulations concerning effluent control, of which the best known are those pertaining to car exhausts. Automakers and manufacturers resisted at first, but eventually submitted to the new dictates.

     Urban air got steadily cleaner and clearer. At least some of the credit does belong to the pollution control laws. In particular, what comes out of a modern car's exhaust pipe is far less noxious than the emissions of its Sixties forebears. That the cost of these measures was considerable is undeniable. That a federal solution was optimal is open to dispute.

     A "vertical" city with a high population density, such as New York or Chicago, has a number of alternative approaches to the problem of automobile-generated air pollution. Granted that one of these is literally forbidding cars to emit noxious fumes. But there are others, some of which address the air-quality problem simultaneously with other matters that are arguably as important: taxing industrial effluents by weight; closing the core of the city to personal motor vehicles; instituting high-quality mass transit. All of those approaches, being localized, could be locally adjusted to changes in the situation without involving the federal government.

     A "horizontal" city, such as Milwaukee or Indianapolis, will have a harder time instituting good, city-wide mass transit, but by the same token its geographical dispersion will render its air pollution problems less intense. If it has any Manhattan-like dense zones, those could be closed to personal vehicles, provided municipal transit is made available. The value of local control of the relevant ordinances is the same as it would be to a "vertical" town.

     Had America's cities adopted such local approaches to local air quality, in all probability they would have achieved as satisfactory a reduction of their air pollution problems as has federal intervention -- and without surrendering more control over their affairs to a federal government already well beyond its Constitutional sphere. But the era was excessively favorable to the federalization of just about everything.

***

     The other objective environmental problem of note is fresh-water pollution. There has never been much of a "personal" component to this; most pollution of fresh water sources is caused by industrial effluents and the rain-driven runoff of agrochemicals. Robert A. Heinlein noted in his book Expanded Universe that the easy way to deal with industrial effluents into fresh-water rivers and streams is to compel factories to put their water input immediately downstream from their effluent output. The negative feedback that would provide would be sufficient by itself -- and once again, the matter could be left to local ordinances, rather than having to federalize it.

     Agrochemicals present a stiffer problem, as they're vitally necessary to modern agriculture and no one can stop the rain from falling. Technological approaches are possible; for example, many important fertilizers and pesticides are susceptible to being "fixed" into the soil, or made mechanically adhesive to the leaves of plants. However, there doesn't seem to be a perfect answer, though perfection isn't something mere humans should expect to achieve, however hard we might strive toward it.

     The great chimera of the day is the pollution of subterranean fresh-water aquifers. Barring the excavation of deep-shaft mines in residential neighborhoods, this is flatly impossible. The soil is itself a cleansing mechanism; as water seeps through it, the soil leaches away virtually anything it might have carried on the surface. Indeed, Man has not yet produced a water-sanitizing system nearly as effective or efficient as a hundred feet of good old mother Earth.

***

     Thus we dispose of the two objective environmental problems of modern technological society. All else, regardless of the motivations or protests of the source, is froth and gas:

• Clear-cutting the Amazon Basin? Not to worry; the world's oxygen supply is more than adequate, nor are the ocean plankton or the rest of the planet's green biomass about to go on strike.
• Holes in the ozone layer? Another of the classic bug-bears. The holes over the poles have been there for centuries; they're an effect of the high-altitude radiation belts and their interaction with the Earth's magnetic field. They wax; they wane, and then they do it all over again.
• Animal species disappearing? Which animals, please? Few of the world's macroscopic species are endangered by anything but superstition. None of the animals most prominently cited as endangered are critical to any aspect of any regional ecology. In addition, many of the claims are fraudulent, contrived by treating a local population of some species as an independent species in its own right. That's the case with the spotted owl, on whose behalf anti-lumber-industry agitators nearly shut down logging operations in the Pacific Northwest for several years.
• Auto-immune disease induced by chemical exposure? This is rot. The various "experts" paid to testify to it by plaintiffs' lawyers are entirely unable to provide scientific support for their notions.
• Loss of "wetlands?" "Wetland" is merely a more attractive word for "swamp." Draining swamps reduces communicable diseases and saves lives. There is no ecological requirement for the mosquito.

     There are other fashionable environmental causes, but none known to your Curmudgeon are any better grounded than those above. The above are sufficiently representative to assert that the point has been made.

***

     Needless to say, what your Curmudgeon has written here is blasphemy to the environmentally correct. But then, these "green bigots" (Thomas Sowell) put anything and everything ahead of human freedom and human flourishing. They disguise their true agendas well...until something like the East Anglia CRU document leak occurs, and we see them scramble for another justification for their demands.

     An incident from some years ago has much point. Your Curmudgeon was visiting a friend who lived at that time in the Mojave Desert, a large stretch of sand essentially devoid of life and useless for anything but dune-buggy racing and weapons testing. On one occasion when driving through the desert on the way to one of its few tourist attractions, we passed some obvious dune-buggy tracks, causing your Curmudgeon's friend's wife, a rather extreme environmentalist, to say that "when you scar the desert, it doesn't heal."

     Being a guest, your Curmudgeon forbore to comment, but he was thinking furiously. What "scar?" What would constitute "healing?" If disturbing the distribution of the sand in a barren stretch of desert should be forbidden, what human impacts on the environment should be permitted?

     In the view of the true-green environmentalist, that last question is too dangerous to answer candidly. It leads to places he wants no one to go who isn't already sworn to the cause.

     Food for thought.

---

4. PDOOMA! Part 4: The Masks Are Now ALL The Way Off!

     It has been said, and truly, that "three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." Well, there might be more than three up to their eyelashes in the anthropogenic-global-warming mire, but not a lot more:

     The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was“only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

     “Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

     Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

     Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.

     So more than just the temperature data was faked, fudged, and massaged into a warm glow, eh? As a certain Vulcan second officer might say, "Fascinating."

     Not that the "research data" put forward in support of the AGW thesis was ever trustworthy or compelling. Various inherent difficulties about the matter from an analytical perspective alone would have guaranteed a great deal of skepticism from honest scientists even if we'd never learned of the East Anglia frauds. Now we know that it wasn't just us hoi polloi who smelled something corrupt in it. Given the amounts of money and pressure national governments and the UN have mobilized to get the scientific community onto the AGW bandwagon, there can be little doubt that many geophysicists were approached about signing on to the IPCC's deceits, and turned them down.

     We appear to have dodged a bullet. We must take care not to allow our political class to shove us back into its path.

Creating Useful Simulations

     As the warmistas are still banging their pots and pans together and shrieking that their climate models “prove” that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a real effect that will have catastrophic consequences if not drastically curtailed, it occurred to me that it might be useful to post some of what I’ve learned about simulation, so that those of us who are skeptical of the whole thing will have more ammunition for their tussles over it.

     I have some standing in the field, having spent forty years doing simulations for various purposes. While the technicata are fascinating to others doing such things, what really matters are the validity rules: what one must do to make one’s program a true simulation of a real process, rather than a fanciful look at a process that only exists within the simulation.

     The fundamental rule of simulation validity contains all the others:

The simulation must replicate all the relevant processes within the thing being simulated.

     The fun begins with the question “What constitutes a relevant process?”

---

     As we’re mostly interested in the problem of climate modeling, we’re concerned with energy flows into and out of the atmosphere: all the sources and sinks of energy that could affect the global temperature (assuming that a “global temperature” of some sort is truly relevant). Some energy sources and sinks can be dismissed as “trivial:” the input from the flapping of birds’ wings, for example. However, there are several others that are clearly significant:

• Sources:
  1. Solar input.
  2. Cosmic radiation input.
  3. The production of heat by human energy generation.
  4. Other biological activity.
  5. Vulcanism.
• Sinks:
  1. Heat lost to space.
  2. Heat absorption by the oceans.
  3. Heat absorption by the Earth’s solid mass.

     Each of these things is controlled by processes which must be simulated in their own right – and none of them are simple. For example, cosmic radiation, while a relatively small source of heat, affects cloud formation, and clouds are a critical factor in the insulation of the atmosphere. When the Sun is especially active, the solar wind is strong, which reduces the input of cosmic radiation. That causes clouds to form at a different rate, and to have a different average mass, volume, albedo, and longevity.

     Certain important processes are incompletely understood. For example, our Sun is a variable star. Its output varies by about four percent (4%) around its mean. Therefore, so does the solar input to our atmosphere’s energy system. As the Sun is overwhelmingly the largest source of atmospheric heat, this is a significant roadblock to the creation of a useful climate simulation. No climate model yet created has accounted for that variation, which is likely the key to explaining geologically recent climate changes such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

     Another incompletely understood process is convection at the top of the atmosphere. Energy, as every first-year physics student learns, is only transferred from one medium to another in three ways:

1. Conduction;
2. Convection;
3. Radiation.

     Recent studies of the convection between the uppermost atmospheric layers and the solar wind suggest that there’s more energy transfer taking place there than was previously believed. However, because the top layers of the atmosphere are thin and interact with both the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field, researchers do not yet have an adequate understanding of that process. Therefore, climate modelers cannot plausibly claim to have sufficiently accounted for it in their models.

     The warmistas’ models concentrate on a couple of processes they believe dominant, and slough all others or treat them as negligible. Their favorite, of course, is the “greenhouse effect:” the increased heat retention of a gas allowed to trap an increasing amount of carbon dioxide. This effect has been demonstrated, but only in closed systems free of several important properties and processes in the Earth’s atmosphere. Those closed systems, for example, don’t form clouds. They don’t contain biological entities that react to changes in their environment. And of course, they can’t and don’t account for changes in radiative input such as the Sun undergoes.

     Scant wonder the climate models are all over the map, and have failed to produce predictions accurate even to within a generous error allowance. They’re not modeling the Earth’s atmosphere, with its complex energy-transfer and feedback processes; they’re modeling uniquely simpler systems that include only a portion of those processes, as if the others were of no importance, and claiming that their models reflect atmospheric reality.

---

     To sum up: a simulation is useful only to the extent that it incorporates all the significant mechanisms in the thing being simulated. If those mechanisms are themselves incomplete or uncertain, the simulation will be useless, possibly even misleading. I submit that that is a wholly adequate justification for dismissing claims of anthropogenic global warming made on the basis of climate models.

     However, it is reasonable to suspect that the warmistas are principally interested in something other than scientific knowledge. Their drive for political power, and the eager cooperation they’ve received from statists of various stripes, suggests that the models are mainly a means to an end. That end, to the best of my ability to discern its lineaments, will not be favorable to freedom.

     If I am correct in this surmise, the whole of the AGW drumbeating comes down to a search for a justification for totalitarian control over the world economy: a degree of power over human activity no tyrant has ever achieved, on the grounds that if it’s not granted to them, “we’re all going to fry.” That’s a card-palming any three-card monte hustler would be thrilled to execute successfully.

     I am reminded of a classic gag: A cop on a nightshift beat comes upon a drunk running his hands through the grass around a lamppost. Of course he asks the drunk what he’s doing. The reply: “I dropped my keys about fifty feet away.”

     Bemused, the cop asks the drunk, “Then why aren’t you looking for them over there?”

     The drunk replies, “The light is better here.”

The Great Global Warming Swindle

     This movie:

     ...constitutes a complete refutation of all the claims of the global warming / climate change drum-beaters. If you haven’t yet viewed it, I strongly urge you to do so.

     Incidentally, by using this video downloader, you can download a copy to keep. By using this video converter, you can upscale it to a decently high resolution for a properly large television screen. I use both these utilities and recommend them highly.

Doomsayers

     Ever since our media “went national,” the path to greatest exposure has been to maximize the drama. There’s some development or trend you want people to know about? Predict the most dramatic, all-enveloping consequences you can make sound plausible. Reporters and editors will give you more attention than those who speak in more moderate, wait-and-see terms and tones.

     Consider the case of Comet Kohoutek, which passed close to Earth in 1973:

     Due to its path, scientists theorized that Kohoutek was an Oort-cloud object. As such, it was believed that this was the comet's first visit to the inner Solar System, which would result in a spectacular display of outgassing. Infrared and visual telescopic study have led many scientists to conclude, in retrospect, that Kohoutek is actually a Kuiper-belt object, which would account for its apparent rocky makeup and lack of outgassing.

     Before its close approach, Kohoutek was hyped by the media as the "comet of the century". However, Kohoutek's display was considered a let-down, possibly due to partial disintegration when the comet closely approached the Sun prior to its Earth flyby. Since this was probably the comet's first visit to the inner Solar System, it would have still contained large amounts of frozen volatiles since its creation. Although it failed to brighten to levels expected, it was still a naked-eye object.

     What few remember about that “let-down” is that a substantial number of astronomers differed dramatically with those who predicted a “spectacular display.” Many advised those interested in observing Kohoutek’s approach to acquire field glasses or low-power telescopes for the purpose. But those predictions were almost completely ignored by the media.

     The moral here should be obvious.

---

     For several decades now, April 22 has been designated “Earth Day,” an occasion for all sorts of pointless sacrificial gestures toward that great Leftist shibboleth, “the environment.” Via Cold Fury comes a link to a list of the predictions made by “Earth Day” promoters on its first “celebration.” Here are a few choice samples:

     1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

     4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

     6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

     8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

     13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

     14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

     15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

     18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

     Not one of the apocalyptic predictions made on “Earth Day 1970” came even close to true. However, every one of them received respectful attention from the major media. The reporters and editors who decided to trumpet those prophecies of doom never recanted their decisions...and often blared quite similar, and similarly wrong, forecasts of disaster over the years to come.

     The media’s guiding maxim was once “If it bleeds, it leads.” Today the formula would probably be something like “Disaster is our master.” Nor does the subsequent failure of the predicted catastrophe to occur have any noticeable effect on subsequent editorial decisions.

---

     Economist Julian Simon tried his best to dampen the cataclysmic choruses by applying facts and reason. His 1983 book The Ultimate Resource (expanded and reissued in 1998 as The Ultimate Resource 2) is a compendium of his arguments for a more temperate assessment of such predictions. Needless to say, the media were not interested, even though in every case he addressed, Simon has been proved right by events.

     That’s the media for you. Screams of approaching doom sell newspapers and commercial slots. Reasoned assessments of observable developments well supported by the available evidence do nothing for circulation. If this begins to sound to you as if the “news media” are in some business other than reporting the actual news, you’re not alone.

     What’s that you say? Might the doomsayers and the media be cooperating, albeit without conscious collaboration, to promote something more than just the sale of newspapers and air time? Quite possibly. The doomsayers want to be noticed, appreciated, and funded. The media perpetually seek access to persons in high office, and influence over their decisions. And those persons in high office are ever on the lookout for ways in which to increase their power, prestige, and perquisites. There does seem to be a zone of mutual interest among those agendas.

     Have a nice day.

Quickies: Trends In Education

     Once again, the indispensable Joanne Nova has the story:

     The National Centre for Science Education (NCSE) surveyed 1500 teachers across the US, and were shocked that a third bring dangerous climate material in to the class.

     “At least one in three teachers bring climate change denial into the classroom, claiming that many scientists believe climate change is not caused by humans” says NCSE programs and policy director Josh Rosenau....

     Worse, half of the surveyed teachers have allowed students to discuss the supposed ‘controversy’ over climate change without guiding students to the scientifically supported conclusion.” Scarier still: three out of five teachers were unaware of, or actively misinformed about, the near total scientific consensus on climate change.

     Here’s the link to the source story.

     It saddens me to say it, but at this time, in our deteriorated state of communication and civilization, an important guide to periodicals is to immediately disregard any publication with the word Science in its title or subtitle. Even academic journals of (formerly) high repute have been colonized by left-wing propagandists.

     Miss Nova’s concluding observation is a killer:

     Repeat after me: Science is the study of opinion polls.

     ‘Nuff said.

Quickies: Another Thumb In The Eye Of The Warmistas

     Australian jewel Joanne Nova has the story:

     A new nature paper shows how little we know about the oceans and the whole carbon cycle. A paper (with 64 names!) suggests that phytoplankton might be sucking out extra CO2 from the sky and dumping it in Davy Jones’ Locker at the bottom of the deep blue sea. It’s more evidence that carbon trading, carbon sequestration, and mitigation are a worthless waste of money. All those windmills just got a bit more pointless.

     Lots of living things absorb carbon, but phytoplankton seem to be more important than the others. The best predictors of sinking carbon were viruses of certain cyanobacteria. Few of the “thousands of phytoplankton species have been studied in this way”.

     Apparently, this has been quietly understood for a while now:

     Mar. 17, 2013 — Models of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans need to be revised, according to new work by UC Irvine and other scientists published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience. Trillions of plankton near the surface of warm waters are far more carbon-rich than has long been thought, they found. Global marine temperature fluctuations could mean that tiny Prochlorococcus and other microbes digest double the carbon previously calculated....

     In making their findings, the researchers have upended a decades-old core principle of marine science known as the Redfield ratio, named for famed oceanographer Alfred Redfield. He concluded in 1934 that from the top of the world’s oceans to their cool, dark depths, both plankton and the materials they excrete contain the same ratio (106:16:1) of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.

     But as any gardener who has done a soil test knows, amounts of those elements can vary widely. The new study’s authors found dramatically different ratios at a variety of marine locations. What matters more than depth, they concluded, is latitude. In particular, the researchers detected far higher levels of carbon in warm, nutrient-starved areas (195:28:1) near the equator than in cold, nutrient-rich polar zones (78:13:1).

     An assumption disproved! Fancy that.

     “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it – no matter if I have said it! – except it agree with your own reason and your own common sense.” -- Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha,

Quickies: Where The Aliens Are / Aren’t

     Extrasolar planets seem to be pretty common; at least, something over 2000 have already been detected and mention of new ones occurs fairly frequently. The theory runs that planets are the only suitable wombs for life – i.e., that life will not develop in interplanetary or interstellar space – so as planets have been found, so has the hope that one will eventually appear that has brought forth life.

     There are several assumptions buried in there that seldom get taken out for a close look, but let that pass for the moment. Note that the warmistas can’t bear to let even this sort of speculation lie fallow:

     Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, said astrobiologists from the Australian National University (ANU).

     In research aiming to understand how life might develop, scientists realized new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

     “The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra from ANU.

     “Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”

     “Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable.”

     About four billion years ago, Earth, Venus, and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox.

     Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, said Charley Lineweaver from ANU.

     “Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet’s climate,” he said.

     Don’t bother trying to wrap your mind around the concept of “astrobiologists” before any actual extraterrestrial life has been detected. As if that weren’t bad enough, comes then the notion that fragile “early life,” rather than adapting to variations in planetary climate, is required to control it!

     The brilliant Joanne Nova explodes this nonsense with a single graph:

     The Brilliant Gaiian Bottleneck theory reckons that intelligent life has to get smart fast enough to control the climate and stabilize things before they get killed off by climate change.

     In studying how life might develop on other planets, the scientists realized that early critters likely had a hard time quickly evolving to their heating or cooling planets and did not survive. So essentially the reason we haven’t found any aliens yet is that quite simply while the percentage of life-sustaining environments could be high enough, they’re not around long enough for them to evolve from the pools of primordial life. — PopHerald.com

     Because humans need a stable climate to evolve in, right. Like this?

     Facts are such stubborn things. As Nova concludes, most pointedly:

     Seriously – a journal published this wild speculation based on no data and a sample size of one? And the only case study they have (us) contradicts the theory? Welcome to government funded science.

     Indeed.

Quickies: The Shoe Has Dropped

     This was foreordained:

     WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday announced that he had rejected the request from a Canadian company to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, ending a seven-year review that had become a flash point in the debate over his climate policies.

     Mr. Obama’s denial of the proposed 1,179-mile pipeline, which would have carried 800,000 barrels a day of carbon-heavy petroleum from the Canadian oil sands to the Gulf Coast, comes as he is seeking to build an ambitious legacy on climate change.

     “The pipeline would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy,’’ the president said in remarks from the White House.

     The move was made ahead of a major United Nations summit meeting on climate change in Paris in December, when Mr. Obama hopes to help broker a historic agreement committing the world’s nations to enacting new policies to counter global warming. While the rejection of the pipeline is largely symbolic, Mr. Obama has sought to telegraph to other world leaders that the United States is serious about acting on climate change.

     With the December meeting in Paris drawing ever nearer, The Won simply had to “lay down a marker” to assure his enviro-fascist supporters that he would carry their banner and no one else’s. To do otherwise would have weakened the Democrats’ hold on the Green Bigots, possibly to the point of alienating them. Other factions within the Democrats’ coalition, particularly the unions, will be displeased, but it’s unlikely to shake their long-time alliance with the Party of Treason.

     This country is closely webbed with pipelines. The Keystone XL pipeline would have brought Canadian tar sands oil to refineries better able to handle it than any other processing center in the world. American refineries are the world champions at minimizing risks of spillage and undesired effluents. But just because the pipeline won’t be built doesn’t mean the oil won’t be sold and shipped to someone – and that someone will take greater risks and release more effluents than would the American refineries to which it would otherwise have gone. Therefore, if Obama were truly serious about reducing environmental hazards as he claims to see them, he would have approved the pipeline. The above decision has revealed his stance, like so many others, to be wholly fraudulent, adopted for political reasons alone.

     No surprise there, either.

REALLY Quickies: Climate Change Hate Speech.

     Thomas Lifson of American Thinker provides a round-up of extraordinary cases:

     Failing to convince the public that global warming is an urgent cause for concern, hysterical fear-mongers are turning to the armory of tyrants, and demanding punishment for those they call “deniers,” consciously inking Holocaust denial. The recent rebranding of their cause as “climate change” creates a certain awkwardness, as nobody denies that climate has and always will change. Glaciers, after all, covered a good part of the northern tier of the United States, carving out the Great Lakes, for example.

     Nonetheless, the hysterics demand that “climate change deniers” be punished, even killed, and the call extends from the spittle-flecked fanatics to the usually sober New York Times (see below). Christopher Monckton, the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has compiled a valuable list of those calling for the abrogation of free speech and punishment of dissidents.

     Please read it all. If it doesn’t make you furious, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed.

     There is no more vicious, utterly unscrupulous interest group in the world than the environmentalist Left. I haven’t the slightest doubt that the enviro-fascists would hold trials and issue execution orders for those who dissent from their religion, were they reasonably assured of getting away with it. Inasmuch as they get quite a lot of deference and support – not all of it covert – from governments, it’s a prospect with a non-zero probability of occurrence.

"Global Warming" And Rational Analysis

Daniel J. Mitchell makes a surprising, yet illuminating statement in the following headline:

The Radical Environmental Agenda Should Be Rejected, Even If Global Warming Is Real

Mitchell's article is about the use of cost-benefit analysis to determine when "enough is enough." Environmentalists almost unanimously reject that approach. They tend toward the "one molecule is too many" standard for environmental cleanliness, wherein a single disfavored particle in the air, water, or soil constitutes an obligation to remediate, regardless of the costs or benefits.

It's lunacy, of course, but on no subject no more so than on "global warming."

Imagine, for example, that it were objectively verifiable that present trends continuing, the mean surface temperature of the Earth would rise one Centigrade degree (1.8 Fahrenheit degrees) by 2100 A.D. Has anyone asked the following questions?

1. What would the actual consequences be? Is it possible to determine them beyond a reasonable doubt?
2. Might the extra ambient energy be a good thing rather than a bad one -- particularly for Mankind?
3. If we stipulate for argument's sake that the temperature increase would be a bad thing for Mankind, just how bad would it be? Would it be less costly and disruptive to adapt to it than to attempt to prevent it?
4. Assuming adaptation to be "off the table" for unspecified reasons, just how bad would the impact on Mankind be? Would it be worse than having to turn on the air conditioner two weeks earlier each year? How would we know?
5. What additional resources might Man in 2100 have with which to cope with the rise in temperature?

Note that my focus in the above is the effect on Mankind. That is the only standard by which to judge the impact of an environmental change, whether it's as subtle as a one-degree turn in the jet streams or as dramatic as an asteroid strike. Any standard that demotes the well-being of humans below some other consideration is inadmissible for moral reasons.

Environmentalists refuse to accept that. Not even the ones who don't secretly worship moss, rocks, and dirt. It pulls their fangs, leaves them with no avenue of advance.

The key question, of course, is why.

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Quite a number of "environmentalists" are nothing of the sort. Their true aim is, as Mitchell notes, the elimination of the free market: capitalism. It offends them for reasons that vary from one to the next. In some cases, the reason is that capitalism promotes individualism and political freedom.

One way to separate those unreformables from the rest is to use Michael Cloud's "Isolating The Issue" approach:

"Suppose I could demonstrate to you, by use of objective evidence, that your belief that capitalism is bad for the environment is incorrect -- that in fact it's better for the environment than any other economic system. Would that persuade you to re-evaluate your position?"

If the environmentalist's answer is a sincere yes, he's reachable by evidence and reasoning; there's a reason for the conversation to continue. But if his answer is no, or if he waffles by attempting to change the reason he opposes capitalism, his agenda isn't improving the environment; it's the destruction of capitalism. He regards all other considerations as means to that end.

You cannot reach such a person by rational argument.

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The multiply attributed saying that "You cannot reason someone out of a position he did not reason himself into" is one of the most significant insights in political discourse. It's especially pertinent to discussions of environmental concerns. Many an environmentalist is reachable by reason, but many others are not. Indeed, the attempt to do so has purely negative consequences.

Coincidentally, today Doug Ross cites an unusually useful list: 25 ways to avert arguments unfavorable to the Left. You will most frequently see the following ones as responses from unreformables to reasoned argument against environmental radicalism:

2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.

4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues.

5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.

7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could be taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.

8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough 'jargon' and 'minutia' to illustrate you are 'one who knows', and simply say it isn't so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely why or citing sources.

18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'

19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the 'play dumb' rule. Regardless of what material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed or withheld, such as a murder weapon.) In order to completely avoid discussing issues, it may be required that you to categorically deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.

24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction of their character by release of blackmail information, or merely by destroying them financially, emotionally, or severely damaging their health.

Note how often #24 appears in contemporary political interplay. Environmentalist unreformables have used it more often than most others.

Inasmuch as the above responses to your rational analysis indicate clearly that your approach has achieved nothing, at the very best you've just wasted your time and energy. You might also have evoked a destructive response aimed at you personally as "an enemy of the cause." That suggests that your first duty when entering the fray is to determine whether your opponent is persuadable at all, by the "Isolating The Issue" technique or otherwise.

When the specific subject is "global warming / climate change / climate disruption," the stakes are at their highest, for this chimera is being used as a reason to impose totalitarian control, by a world government, over every last one of Man's activities. He who actively desires such an outcome, rather than deploring it as an unfortunate survival necessity, imagines himself as one of its commissars. You could no more persuade him out of his thesis than you could stop the rotation of the Earth.

Here are the strongest rational arguments against the "global warming" chimera. Use them if and only if you have first established that your opponent is potentially persuadable. If he isn't, walk away, swiftly and without regret. His convictions constitute a faith -- a religion -- and there's no point arguing religion with a "true believer."