Pollution And Cities
The post I did about the more than slightly false claims on the meme about the EPA has been getting a lot of attention lately, so I thought that I would expand upon it. Lets start with that post here.
Climate
Overshoot Day?
I think that there is a certain amount of hubris I deciding that there is limited amount of resources that we can use very year. We are yet again approaching “overshoot day.” Last year was August 13th. Since I guess we used too many this year it is apparently August 8 or next Monday.
Shrinkage
When Sarah Hoyt talked about the new normal she didn’t discuss just what that means. Well, while it’s not a conspiracy, in order to keep the price point in inflation, many of the things that we buy for consumption have been shrinking for some time. Like ice cream containers. Or package sizes in frozen foods. And one thing that most people haven’t noticed, but probably should have, toilet paper.
How A Smear Grows
The Nation has yet another attack on Exxon for “environmental crimes” due to the appearance of that fifty odd year old Humble Oil report. I’ve posted about this before. Here’s the Nation’s post.
On April 13, ExxonMobil filed suit to block a subpoena issued by the attorney general of the US Virgin Islands. Following revelations from the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News, the subpoena charged that the company may have violated the territory’s anti-racketeering law. It questioned whether Exxon told investors, including the territory’s pension fund, one thing about climate change (that it wasn’t a danger) while its own scientists were privately telling its management the opposite….
What’s more, by enabling increased global warming, Exxon’s alleged lying has damaged many people around the world. Crucially, the victims include investors and business owners. The poor suffer first and worst from climate change, but they rarely file—much less win—lawsuits against polluters. But when people of means are damaged, they don’t hesitate to sue for compensation…
Exxon’s exposure on this front is immense. If the allegations are true, the oil giant has in effect transferred massive amounts of risk and loss onto the rest of the market and virtually every business enterprise in it. By confusing the debate, Exxon helped delay government action against climate change. The company made buckets of money, but the resulting higher temperatures and extreme weather events have cost investors, governments, businesses, and ordinary people many billions, with much larger costs ahead. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, has warned that as climate change intensifies, “parties who have suffered loss or damage [may] seek compensation from those they hold responsible….”
Nor is the right’s cheerleading without its complications for Exxon. The right conflates the First Amendment argument with its cuckoo belief that climate change is a hoax, but Exxon has a different goal: to protect its public image. Exxon needs to be perceived as a good corporate citizen, and in 2016 a good corporate citizen doesn’t deny climate change.
Note that last sentence. “in 2016 a good corporate citizen doesn’t deny climate change. As an engineer who’s worked on scientific instruments and somebody who’s been around science at all sort of level for a long time this is appalling on a bunch of levels. First, who are the Nation to decide what a good citizen is, corporate or otherwise. Second, in a free society, it isn’t the citizen’s role to affirm or deny anything. It’s the government that’s required to make it’s case. Which you don’t do with nuisance lawsuits and legal extortion threats. Third, when presenting science you need to base what you say based on what you know, not what you believe.
Always A New Way To Obscure The Truth
Ran into this:
Climate Feedback works like this: Using the new web-annotation platform Hypothesis, scientists verify facts and annotate online climate articles, layering their insights and comments on top of the original story. They then issue a “5-star” rating so readers can quickly judge stories’ scientific credibility. Recognized by NASA, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and California Gov. Jerry Brown among others, Climate Feedback is already improving journalistic standards by flagging misreported climate science in mainstream outlets; earlier this month, for example, scientists took apart Bjorn Lomborg’s misleading op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. This is only a hint of what Climate Feedback has in store as it begins to aggregate those credibility scores into a wider index, rating major news sources on their reporting of climate change as part of a new Scientific Trust Tracker.
To that end, Climate Feedback is launching a crowd funding campaign on April 27 around the hashtag #StandWithScience, supported by leading climate minds like Profs. Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes and others. I invite you to take a look at this sneak preview of our campaign (NOTE: please do not share publicly before April 27). The Exxon climate scandal has already made its way into the 2016 election season, but few have discussed the role the media has played enabling corporate interests to sow doubt about the science of climate change, which has long confused the public and undermined political support for dealing with the issue. As 350.org founder Bill McKibben said of Climate Feedback: Scientists are just about ready to come out of the lab and get more active and when they do, it will make a remarkable difference.
The site is already active with some feedbacks already
Here’s the way that they are going.
The pro AGW articles get good scores and skeptical articles get downchecked.
If nothing else it shows how politicized other sciences other than climatology are. Considering that these people are scientists, or at least sitting scientist positions, one would think that data would override opinion. But looking at the comments, I see more personal attacks and unsupported opinions than I see any real data.
This is not atypical from the climate crowd. Rather than present scientific arguments the climate crowd insists on attacking strawmen, smearing the other side and changing the subject when pressed. What noticeably absent is references to real science that has data and experiments to back up their hypotheses. You can predict all you want, but, in the end, for you to be actually doing science and not acting like a cult, the predictions must fit the data collected.
It’s pretty obvious that, when it comes to climate, the data hasn’t gone the same way as the predictions made by the computer models. In real science the knowledge that a model doesn’t fit the data means that you need new models. In climate science it means that you persecute the people pointing out that the models aren’t working.
http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/15/bill-nye-science-guy-open-to-jail-time-f
That’s because like all romantics the climate crowd wants reality to be what they say it is, not what it really is. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are more polar bears than ever, the ice hasn’t gone away in the arctic and it’s cold today in early May. None of which has any relevance to climate, but that never stops the climate cultists. but their climate cargo cult only continues to exist because it’s useful to those who want still more power over everybody’s life.
From the beginning the environmental movement has been a mishmash of cargo cult science sounding stuff, romantic idealism and an attempt to revive dead ideologies with a new focus. The cultish aspect of CAGW can be seen by the desperate need to suppress any opposing viewpoints. Add to that the desire of many to use climate science as an excuse to obtain vast powers and wealth from the rest of us through rent seeking on a truly massive scale and this isn’t science, it’s tyranny.
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/earth-day-founded-under-false-pretenses/
Real science doesn’t need webpages like climate feedback. Real science can stand on it’s own and indeed invites dissension and healthy skepticism. That’s because real science isn’t an end it’s a journey and no matter how well thought a theory is it can still be found wrong by new data.
Here’s Richard Feynman about how science works.
If the guess, no matter how beautiful it seems, doesn’t match observed data it’s wrong. Well the climate models do not fir the known data. Sanity and science would say that that means that they are wrong, end of story. As far as the climate feedback types are concerned that means that the data is wrong simply because you are attacking the cult’s precepts. The consequences of their behavior are devastating for science, policy and millions of individuals who are the victims of the policies enacted as result of the climate cult’s actions and the rent seeking control freaks who use them. I stand with science, not the actions of a greedy misguided cult.
A Conspiracy Against Law?
What do you do when a large number of the officials in charge of enforcing the law conspire to break the laws they are sworn to uphold.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/04/a-conspiracy-so-intense.php
Now I’m not an attorney, but Glenn Reynolds is and he’s completely clear that what the Attorney’s Generals, including my state’s Attorney General are doing is, in fact a crime.
Earth Day, Founded Under False Pretenses
With the oncoming onset of the annual Spring rituals for the Gaia faith it’s important to remember where all that came from. While we listen to the sermons of the high priests and the cadences among the ruins of our once great civilization, it’s important to remember how this all started and why we are here.
I suppose it’s more than a little symbolic that the Earth Day founder composted his girl friend. I suppose he considered her “excess population” If so, that wasn’t the first body created in the cause of excess population and wouldn’t be the last.
Maurice Strong RIP
Never heard of Maurice Strong? Well that’s no surprise, very few people have. But they’ve felt his influence across the globe for the last forty years or so. He’s been the power behind the throne for most of the green agenda, topping off with the UN’s Agenda 21. Now that he is gone perhaps we start to see sanity return. Or not.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/01/ding-dong-godfather-global-warming-dead/
A Certain Level Of Elite Disconnect
The New Yorker has been the home of elite thinking for decades. So it’s no surprise that you see pieces like this.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/congress-moves-to-sabotage-the-paris-climate-summit
The attitude of the elites seems to be that the President is a king who can decree and it’s law. Unfortunately for elite sensibilities we live in a Republic where we the people elect representatives to keep an eye on our interests and elect new ones when we the people feel that out interest are being damaged.
Now the president can say whatever he wants at COP21. The fact is that the things he proposes will have drastic economic effects which lead to things like this:
Even as he spoke, congressional Republicans were doing their best to undermine him. That same day, the House approved two resolutions aimed at blocking regulations to curb U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. The first would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing rules aimed at cutting emissions from new power plants; the second would prevent the agency from enforcing rules targeted at existing power plants. Together, these rules are known as the Clean Power Plan, and they are crucial to the Americans’ negotiating position in Paris. (The Clean Power Plan is central to the United States’ pledge, made in advance of the summit, to cut its emissions by twenty-six per cent.) The House votes, which followed Senate approval of similar resolutions back in November, were, at least according to some members, explicitly aimed at subverting the talks. Lawmakers want to “send a message to the climate conference in Paris that in America, there’s serious disagreement with the policies of this president,” Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican, explained.
I don’t think that a representative from Kentucky where coal is a HUGE business is going to support the destruction of his state’s major industry. At least not if he wants to remain in office. Of course the House votes and the Senate votes are the result of what the President has Already done.
The fact is that the votes demonstrate just how far the president has gone in overreaching his executive authority. The initiative for a move to change emission rules of this magnitude should come from legislation, not arbitrary executive action.
Arbitrary executive action seems to be what the elites want. The article bemoans the fact that the President can’t get any agreement ratified by the Senate. Flyover land to the New Yorker, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
Meanwhile, the impossibility of getting an agreement ratified by the U.S. Senate puts yet another constraint on negotiations. While many countries are pushing for a legally binding treaty, the Obama Administration is insisting on a sort of legal chimera—partly binding, partly not—so that, if there is a pact, it won’t require Senate approval. (The Washington Post has a good rundown on this particular problem.)
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s done that way to prevent a President from committing the country to actions without the consultation and review of the States and the people. After all the people are going to be living with the costs and consequences of any agreement. They are supposed to have a voice.
The article concludes with a typical logical fallacy by showing a bunch of tweets from the Republican Presidential candidates to judges apparently from the climate crew and having them score the tweets. Michael Mann says a typical comment.
That Republicans would try to undercut the Administration’s efforts to do something—anything—to reduce carbon emissions is no surprise. Willful ignorance about climate change has become a point of pride among elected officials in the G.O.P. Recently, the Associated Press asked a panel of eight scientists to assess the accuracy of Presidential candidates’ tweets on climate change using a scale of zero to a hundred. (The tweets were shown to the scientists without the candidates’ names, to guard against bias.) All nine of the Republican candidates graded got failing scores. Donald Trump, for instance, received a fifteen, while Ben Carson got a thirteen and Ted Cruz a six. “This individual understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, who served as one of the judges, wrote of Cruz’s statements. “That sort of ignorance would be dangerous in a doorman, let alone a president.”
Taking solace in a “fact check” report that contains no facts and just the opinions from people who have a vested interest in the climate scam is typical of people who themselves would rather not address the real issues.
The real issue, that the cloud people at the New Yorker and by and large the rest of the media is ignoring as hard as they can is that the Democrat Blue Model is causing great damage to the people of this country. Our elites are caught in a bubble of their own making and their stuck in their mind traps. They’ve become unconcerned with the concerns of the rest of us or even their own long term survival. Because what happen out in the hinterlands does have an impact in the suburbs od Washington and New York.
The cloud people don’t understand that when they say that global warming is the greatest threat, we the people know that what they really mean is “you peasants will be denied the opportunity to grow and live your lives as free people.” We understand that the goal of the cloud people is total control over we stupid rubes who don’t have fancy parchments from Ivy Covered Snob Factories. We also know that if we let the cloud people continue run things that their cultish following of fantasies will ruin everybody’s lives. We also know that in a society that still is more or less free we can tell them to go to hell and make it stick.
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NYC Then And Now, How much Impact Did Government Pollution Laws Have?
Recently a friend posted this on his Facebook wall. It’s one of those endless memes from Occupy. This one is demonstrating how much environmental regulations needed because of how bad it was in the past. Probably this is part of the push to get people to support the Administration’s new Ozone and other policies which are likely to have ruinous consequences for the economy. The question I asked myself, do these pictures represent reality, or are they part of a lie.
Well the top picture apparently came from this article on Mother Jones Magazine which ran a bunch of pictures done by the EPA back in the 1970’s purporting to show how bad things were.
The Arts Mechanical 