Daily Commentary – Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 – Ted Turner Says Obama Screwed Up on Climate Change
- Turner believes that climate change legislation is more important than health care, and that Obama should have made it his first priority.
Julian Assange’s Information Coup: The Long Tail of Regime Change
Turns out there’s a fairly clear answer to the question Why is Julian Assange doing this? Anyway, it’s as clear as the topic of human motivations ever really get. Back in 2006, Assange wrote a couple of essays on the topic of conspiracy and control. He takes the position that all authoritarian structures are conspiracies of power. His thoughts are interesting. Their may even be some truth to some of what he says. In any case, if you want to understand his motivation, grasp what he’s saying here:
Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).
A bit later he asks “How can we reduce the power of a conspiracy to act?”
We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment. We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to …
When we look at a conspiracy as an organic whole, we can see a system of interacting organs, a body with arteries and veins whos blood may be thickened and slowed till it falls, unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment.
This is the intellectual foundation of his thoughts on leaks. If you break the links between conspirators, you decrease their control. The “traditional” way is to do this is to cut off the head of the snake, but what Assange is suggesting here is that technology has given him another way to accomplish the same goal. Call it the long tail of regime change. Instead of taking out one very high value conspirator, you could attempt to break the links between lots of low level conspirators by making them too paranoid to communicate. In a second essay, he expands on this idea:
To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.
We must understand the key generative structure of bad governance. We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity.Most importantly, we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling and effective action to replace the structures that lead to bad governance with something better.
In case it wasn’t clear before, Assange is equating the modern state with a vast authoritarian conspiracy. What he wants is regime change, an information coup. One guess who the enemy is in Assange’s mind:
Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out.
Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called “the Fox News effect”.
Before you conclude that Assange is just another moonbat, consider that some of what he says is undeniably true. For instance:
Let us consider two closely balanced and broadly conspiratorial power groupings, the US Democratic and Republican parties. Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondence — let alone the computer systems which manage their subscribes, donors, budgets, polling, call centres and direct mail campaigns?They would immediately fall into an organizational stupor and lose to the other.
He’s right. Indeed, you can take his example further by imagining what would happen to, say, the DNC, if it suffered a massive Wikileak of secret data. Can you imagine the sort of things that Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod and David Plouffe say outside public hearing? It seems entirely possible that a leak of the contents of their e-mail for one month would be exceedingly damaging to them, possibly even career ending.
What Assange is doing is applying that same principle to governments en toto. He is attempting to break down the power of entire nations, starting with the US, by exposing what they really think behind closed doors. And in fact, some of his leaks may have already hurt us internationally. They certainly show us having a lot less respect for our allies than might be expected. It remains to be seen whether Secretary Clinton’s apology tour can undo the damage.
Putting aside, for a moment, the question of whether Assange has broken the law or merely acted as a journalist, I see a fundamental problem with his theory. The truly authoritarian regimes-Russia came off as a mafia state in the latest wikileaks – are beyond caring what the people think. As we’ve seen in the past two years, Russia has a bullet ready for every journalist who criticizes the state. The same is true in Saudi Arabia. The people there may not like their rulers speaking ill of Iran and its leaders, but what are they going to do about it? There are a lot of places in the world where the pen is not mightier than the sword.
The only place where Assange’s theory could make a difference is in a robust democratic society where people already have the power to make changes based on new information. This means that, on a global scale, Assange’s method of regime change, if it works at all, will only affect those nation-states that need it least. And isn’t this always the problem with anarchy? It doesn’t serve justice-which requires a structure and some authority to punish individuals-it benefits the strong and the ruthless who get along best without those hindrances.
Think of Assange’s Wikileaks as a moderately potent anti-biotic injected into the global body politic. It may seem to do some good initially as it wipes out some of the hypocrites clogging up the corridors of power, but that really only clears territory for the truly insidious threats who are immune.
[HT: zunguzungu for the essays]
The Apocalyptic Fantasies Of The U.N. Council On Climate Change, Cancun, Mexico
Last Thursday and Friday, I spent some time in Cancun, Mexico at the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference. Specifically, the Eco Village they created which was intended to imagine a more eco-friendly future. Mad Maxian was more like it.
I put together a video to try to capture the cultishness of it all. Please understand, what you’re about to view is in no way an exaggeration of the overwrought propaganda found there. In fact, I left out the most appalling footage I shot-a 12 year old girl who related her belief that the world would end in “three or four years”.
Hundreds of children came through the exhibits having their minds filled with frightening images and distorted science. In addition, there were the World Vegans-a religious group with acolytes enthusing about the lifestyle. There were South Korean and Chinese folks dressed in weird traditional garb but with the open, blank faces of true believers. It was creepy.
The whole thing was creepy.
Here’s the video:
When I asked my fellow Americans For Prosperity travelers their thoughts about the place, some express surprise at how obvious it all was. The Eco Village was exactly what you’d imagine a smelly hippie eco-hypocrite to put together as a gift to Gaia.
The whole place was unimaginative, dark, miserable and predictable. They even had a one-world currency! But it wasn’t utopian. Nay. It was dystopian. In fact, (and you’ll see this in the clip) there were two globes-one was healthy looking and the other dead. The healthy one had no dwellings, and tellingly, no people. The destroyed one was blackened and dead and had high rises.
Anyway, we can only hope that this Climate Change business is just one more failed lefty fad, because it’s just disgustingly awful. Probably not, though. They have to feel morally superior somehow and Lord knows it won’t be by darkening a church’s door. Gotta find religion somewhere.
Broncos Quickly Change Course and Dismiss McDaniels as Their Coach – New York Times
Seattle Post Intelligencer |
Broncos Quickly Change Course and Dismiss McDaniels as Their Coach
New York Times Jack Dempsey/AP Josh McDaniels is the third coach fired in the middle of the season, following Wade Phillips and Brad Childress out the door. By JUDY BATTISTA Just a week ago, the Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen vowed that Josh McDaniels would return … Josh McDaniels fired as Broncos coach Timing of McDaniels firing allows Broncos to move forward Mort: Broncos could fire McDaniels for cause |
As Cancun climate talks plod along, the world copes with Hell and High Water – Pachauri: Climate change impacts are ‘here and now’
As the world’s environmental ministers arrive in Cancun, Mexico, for the 19th year of negotiations to address global warming pollution, new climate disasters are killing people across the planet. IPCC chief Dr. Rajendra Pachauri warned Friday at a forum on communicating climate science that the impacts of climate change are here and now. Brad Johnson has the double story.
The slow-moving climate talks are hobbled by insufficient amibition, and uncertainty over whether the United States or China — the world’s largest climate polluters — will follow through with their Copenhagen Accord commitments. The Obama administration’s stated commitment to cut pollution by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, after Republican climate deniers killed cap-and-trade legislation, now depends on whether the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned greenhouse standards survive a polluter onslaught.
Meanwhile, the building heat trapped by billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution is fueling catastrophic changes in the world’s climate system predicted years ago by scientists:
– The worst wildfires in Israel’s history, fueled by record warmth and drought during the cele, “have destroyed large sections of Israel’s northern area” and killed 41 people. Four days of intense battle during the celebration of Hanukkah, with assistance from Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Russia, France, Britain, Switzerland, Spain, US, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, Azerbaijan and others, have finally begun to bring the devastation under control.
– Forty-two separate wildfires are burning in neighboring Lebanon, which has the same tinderbox conditions.
– Dynamic winter-storm systems driven by the rapidly warming Arctic have plunged much of Europe into killer cold weather for the second year in a row, months after a summer of record heat and precipitation. Up to 30 people have frozen to death in Poland, and thirty more killed in the rest of Europe.
– Floods have hit Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia after “three weeks of torrential rains,” forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
– Thousands of people have been evacuated amid catastrophic floods in Australia that have already destroyed $ 500 million in crops, with rivers still rising.
Thunderstorms, high winds and tornadoes ripped through the southern United States, injuring at least 30 people, destroying buildings, toppling trees, flooding highways and forcing schools to close.
– New Zealand is facing an intense heatwave and its third consecutive summer of drought.
Speaking at the funeral of a teenage volunteer firefighter, President Shimon Peres said the wildfire “disaster taught us that all of us, Jews, Arabs, Druze, and other peoples, share the same fate.”
In a related WonkRoom cross-post, IPCC chief Pachauri warns the impacts of climate change are “here and now.”
Pachauri, the chair of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that scientists need to do a better job explaining that global warming is not a distant threat, but a present reality:
It is important for us to emphasize the fact that climate change and its impacts are not something in the future. They are here and now. And I am afraid the scientific community has not been very effective in communicating this message, and I hope that we can do something about it.
Pachauri made his remarks at the Climate Change Communication Forum held in association with the ongoing international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. In his speech, he also argued it is important for people to understand the successes already achieved in tackling global warming pollution, particularly the “win-win” solutions such as energy efficiency that improve both environmental and economic health.
– Brad Johnson
Related Hell and High Water posts:
- Another extreme drought hits the Amazon, raising climate change concerns
- NASA reports 2010 hottest year on record so far
- Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse
- Exclusive interview: Keven Trenberth, head of NCAR’s Climate Analysis Section on the link between global warming and extreme deluges
- NASA’s Hansen: Would recent extreme “events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?” The “appropriate answer” is “almost certainly not.”
- Masters: “Strongest storm ever recorded in the Midwest smashes all-time pressure records”: ‘Weather bomb’ hits Midwest with power of major hurricane.
- High Water: Coastal North Carolina’s second 500-year rainfall in 11 years
- Stunning NOAA map of Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge
- Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”
- Russian Meteorological Center: “There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”
- Juan Cole: The media’s failure to cover “the great Pakistani deluge” is “itself a security threat” to America
- Media wakes up to Hell and High Water: Moscow’s 1000-year heat wave and “Pakistan’s Katrina”
As Cancun climate talks plod along, the world copes with Hell and High Water – Pachauri: Climate change impacts are ‘here and now’
As the world’s environmental ministers arrive in Cancun, Mexico, for the 19th year of negotiations to address global warming pollution, new climate disasters are killing people across the planet. IPCC chief Dr. Rajendra Pachauri warned Friday at a forum on communicating climate science that the impacts of climate change are here and now. Brad Johnson has the double story.
The slow-moving climate talks are hobbled by insufficient amibition, and uncertainty over whether the United States or China — the world’s largest climate polluters — will follow through with their Copenhagen Accord commitments. The Obama administration’s stated commitment to cut pollution by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, after Republican climate deniers killed cap-and-trade legislation, now depends on whether the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned greenhouse standards survive a polluter onslaught.
Meanwhile, the building heat trapped by billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution is fueling catastrophic changes in the world’s climate system predicted years ago by scientists:
– The worst wildfires in Israel’s history, fueled by record warmth and drought during the cele, “have destroyed large sections of Israel’s northern area” and killed 41 people. Four days of intense battle during the celebration of Hanukkah, with assistance from Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Russia, France, Britain, Switzerland, Spain, US, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, Azerbaijan and others, have finally begun to bring the devastation under control.
– Forty-two separate wildfires are burning in neighboring Lebanon, which has the same tinderbox conditions.
– Dynamic winter-storm systems driven by the rapidly warming Arctic have plunged much of Europe into killer cold weather for the second year in a row, months after a summer of record heat and precipitation. Up to 30 people have frozen to death in Poland, and thirty more killed in the rest of Europe.
– Floods have hit Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia after “three weeks of torrential rains,” forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
– Thousands of people have been evacuated amid catastrophic floods in Australia that have already destroyed $ 500 million in crops, with rivers still rising.
Thunderstorms, high winds and tornadoes ripped through the southern United States, injuring at least 30 people, destroying buildings, toppling trees, flooding highways and forcing schools to close.
– New Zealand is facing an intense heatwave and its third consecutive summer of drought.
Speaking at the funeral of a teenage volunteer firefighter, President Shimon Peres said the wildfire “disaster taught us that all of us, Jews, Arabs, Druze, and other peoples, share the same fate.”
In a related WonkRoom cross-post, IPCC chief Pachauri warns the impacts of climate change are “here and now.”
Pachauri, the chair of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that scientists need to do a better job explaining that global warming is not a distant threat, but a present reality:
It is important for us to emphasize the fact that climate change and its impacts are not something in the future. They are here and now. And I am afraid the scientific community has not been very effective in communicating this message, and I hope that we can do something about it.
Pachauri made his remarks at the Climate Change Communication Forum held in association with the ongoing international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. In his speech, he also argued it is important for people to understand the successes already achieved in tackling global warming pollution, particularly the “win-win” solutions such as energy efficiency that improve both environmental and economic health.
– Brad Johnson
Related Hell and High Water posts:
- Another extreme drought hits the Amazon, raising climate change concerns
- NASA reports 2010 hottest year on record so far
- Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse
- Exclusive interview: Keven Trenberth, head of NCAR’s Climate Analysis Section on the link between global warming and extreme deluges
- NASA’s Hansen: Would recent extreme “events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?” The “appropriate answer” is “almost certainly not.”
- Masters: “Strongest storm ever recorded in the Midwest smashes all-time pressure records”: ‘Weather bomb’ hits Midwest with power of major hurricane.
- High Water: Coastal North Carolina’s second 500-year rainfall in 11 years
- Stunning NOAA map of Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge
- Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”
- Russian Meteorological Center: “There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”
- Juan Cole: The media’s failure to cover “the great Pakistani deluge” is “itself a security threat” to America
- Media wakes up to Hell and High Water: Moscow’s 1000-year heat wave and “Pakistan’s Katrina”
Judd Gregg concerned with metaphorical “force-five hurricane,” but not actual climate change
Worried that “there is something catastrophic” that will happen to the economy within years, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) pleaded for action on the budget deficit in a Fox News interview today, using incipient climate disasters in a forceful metaphor. Brad Johnson has the story.
Gregg sharply criticized those who would “do nothing” about a metaphorical “force-five hurricane in five years”:
I genuinely believe there is something catastrophic, I can’t tell you that it’ll happen within the next 2 years. I can tell you within the next five years it will happen. If there’s a force five hurricane in five years, and you know it’s going to hit your shoreline in five years, do you do nothing about it?
Watch it:
Like the rest of his caucus, Gregg has taken a do-nothing policy when it comes to the threat of actual climate disasters, even though they have been dramatically increasing in his own state.
In March 2009, Gregg slammed Obama’s proposed climate action outline, calling it a “non-starter.” A month later, Gregg voted repeatedly to preserve the filibuster for green economy legislation, even if “the Senate finds that public health, the economy and national security of the United States are jeopardized by inaction on global warming.”
After the House passed major legislation to reduce the threat of climate disasters, Gregg again stood up to do nothing. “I think cap and trade has a long road here obviously,”, Gregg said in February 2010, opposing the work by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) to draft climate policy. “I think it’s more logical to focus on those things we can do in the short term.”
He then co-sponsored and voted for Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) failed attempt to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse pollution is an imminent threat — which notes the “conclusion in the assessment literature that there is the potential for hurricanes to become more intense with increasing temperatures (and even some evidence that Atlantic hurricanes have already become more intense).”
– Brad Johnson, in ThinkProgress cross post.
Climate Change Scheme in Jeopardy: Scramble on to Retool Messaging Effort
**Written by Doug Powers
Those prayers to Mayan Moon Goddess Ixchel so far aren’t working:
The number of Americans who believe that global warming is a scientific fact has been dropping, and environmental groups and climate scientists who say the evidence for warming is clear are scratching their heads over this reversal and scrambling to find a new strategy.
Three years ago, former Vice President Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for publicizing the threat of climate change with his book and documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. After that, scientists rejoiced, says Dan Lashof, director of the Climate Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
“We in the scientific community by and large said OK, the science debate is over, we are moving our efforts into what we are going to do about it. And that left the science debate in the public largely untended,” he says. “That has been recognized as a strategic error.”
A plot to redistribute the world’s wealth based on a movie produced by a guy who profits greatly from the solution to the “crisis” — why would anybody have a problem with that?
This sounds like the Democrats excuse going into the elections last month when it was clear their takeover ploys were being resoundingly rejected by the voting public: “It’s not that our plan is bad, it’s that we’re not communicating it well enough.”
So the global warmists want help with their message? I ran across this advice to be heeded in the comments at Free Republic:
hyperbole is like antibiotics. If you use it all the time in high doses for everything, and even when you don’t need it, the stuff loses its effectiveness.
Additionally, if the climate change alarmists really want to know what’s wrong with their message, they need look no further than some of the enviro-hypocrites who run their movement. People might be more inclined to believe Al Gore’s “we’re all gonna die unless we cut our carbon output” if Gore appeared in the least to believe it himself. Gore admitting that he peddled a super-expensive “green” failure merely for political gain doesn’t help the cause either.
Here’s another messaging problem: Flying people from 194 countries from all over the world to Cancun, Mexico to talk about the need to greatly reduce unnecessary long-haul flights? Those kinds of enviro-punchlines don’t exactly make the global warming “threat” reek of immediacy.
**Written by Doug Powers
Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
Weekend News Update: Rise in Canadian flood claims tied to climate change; Lisa Jackson vows to maintain ‘aggressive environmental agenda’
Prokaryotes and others can post links here to interesting weekend news/links.
Rise in flood claims tied to climate change
Canadian insurance companies are facing unprecedented growth in claims and payouts for water-related home damage, and industry experts lay the blame squarely on climate change.
In 2009, insurance payouts nationwide totalled $ 5.3-billion, with more than half of claims being paid for extreme weather events.
Heavy rainfall causing flooded basements was the main culprit, costing the insurance industry $ 1.3-billion in 2009.
For many years, fire damage was the most expensive cost for companies, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.
But 10 years ago, water damage claims started to increase, until 2005 when they surpassed fire costs.
Today, the bureau reports that water damages account for more than half of all insurance claims.
“Now that comes from, of course, the washing machine that break down, but it’s also the fact that the municipal infrastructure has not been designed to withstand what we are experiencing, and the fact that the climate has changed,” says Robert Tremblay, research director at the bureau.
While world leaders and UN bureaucrats discuss strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Canadians are already feeling the effects of climate change, including flooded basements after heavy rain.
That means cities and citizens need to adapt, says the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM).
“For most of the country, the infrastructure is not built for the climate that we are now starting to see,” argued Brock Carlton, the federation’s CEO….
New reality means heavy rain, extreme weather
As for the science of climate change, the increase in the severity of extreme rain events is undeniable, environment experts say.
Climate modelling research has found that on a global scale there is a steady upward trend in heavy precipitation, according to Dr. Francis Zwiers, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, and former director of Environment Canada’s climate research branch.
“That means, you know, additional flooding [and] more frequent events when people will have to mop out their basements,” says Zwiers.
Related Post: Study finds global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse.
Jackson vows to maintain ‘aggressive environmental agenda’
BOSTON — The Obama administration is committed to an “aggressive environmental agenda” that goes beyond what was achieved during the past four decades, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said today during a speech at Harvard University.
Jackson spoke during a conference that featured appearances by several leading lights of the environmental movement, including EPA’s first administrator, Bill Ruckelshaus, and former Vice President Al Gore, who spoke to agency officials during an invitation-only luncheon.
The event capped a week of events celebrating EPA’s 40th birthday and also previewed the case the agency will make when the balance of power on Capitol Hill shifts toward the Republicans next year.
High-ranking Republicans have vowed to keep Jackson and other top officials tethered to the witness stand, pushing Congress to block regulations that they feel would harm the economy.
But while voters may have been concerned about federal bureaucracy when they cast their ballots last month, polls still show that they want the government to protect public health and the environment, Jackson said. In the past, Democrats and Republicans have worked together to put those programs in place, she said.
The agency will move forward with rules such as the “toughest smog standards in history,” Jackson said, as well as the agency’s first-ever limits on mercury from cement kilns.
“Some think it’s time to roll back the clock on those advances, but we know that is not what the American people want,” she said. “This is the time to use this agency, built and shaped through bipartisan and nonpartisan actions, to serve this country. We can do that. As easy as it is to tear down, or to roll back, it’s actually only what we build, and what we advance, that lasts beyond elections and politics.”
Did McCain Change?
Ta-Nehisi asks:
There's some sense that the press, in 2000, was basically hoodwinked by McCain. I'm sympathetic to that argument, and basically agreed with it, until I read this. I don't know Jim to be the sort to be taken in by press access and banter, so I am tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Still, I'd like to hear more about the 1980s McCain that Jim is referencing. I don't know much about McCain during those years-except that he opposed the MLK holiday.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Pachauri: The Impacts Of Climate Change Are ‘Here And Now’
The Wonk Room is reporting and tweeting live from the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.
The impacts of climate change are here and now, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri warned yesterday at a forum on communicating climate science. Pachauri, the chair of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that scientists need to do a better job explaining that global warming is not a distant threat, but a present reality:
It is important for us to emphasize the fact that climate change and its impacts are not something in the future. They are here and now. And I am afraid the scientific community has not been very effective in communicating this message, and I hope that we can do something about it.
Watch it:
Pachauri made his remarks at the Climate Change Communication Forum held in association with the ongoing international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. In his speech, he also argued it is important for people to understand the successes already achieved in tackling global warming pollution, particularly the “win-win” solutions such as energy efficiency that improve both environmental and economic health.
Climate Hysteria Today: Why, Yes, England’s Snow And Cold Is Caused By Climate Change
It’s simply amazing what greenhouse gases can do, isn’t it? From jolly ole England
As a blanket of snow settles across the country, train services grind to a halt and roads become impassable, you could be forgiven for thinking that global warming seems more remote than ever. But yesterday, the World Meteorological Organisation announced that 2010 is almost certain to rank among the three warmest years since records began in 1850 – and it has long been accepted that one of the effects of climate change could be an increase in the frequency of harsher, Continental-style winters.
So which is it? Is it the vagaries of the elements that we should be cursing through our chattering teeth, or the carbon emissions from Chinese smokestacks?
Well, the most alarming way in which temperatures in Britain could fall significantly is through a decline in the warm Atlantic current that maintains our mild climate. Although our weather depends on turbulent events in the atmosphere, these are shaped – in the long term – by the oceans, whose currents transport vast amounts of heat around the planet. Ancient records show that if these slowed or stopped, temperatures could drop by up to 10C within decades.
Believe it or not, there is actually real science to support that notion, yet, considering there has barely been any change to Gulf Stream, and it would take a catastrophic change, this is simply more alarmism cooked up to protect their pet cult’s doctrine. Oh, wait, look, the same article goes on to say
On this count, however, there is good news. According to Prof Mark Maslin, of University College London, there seems – at present – “to be no evidence of changes in the Atlantic circulation which could account for the last two harsh winters”. There are, he says, shorter-term patterns in ocean circulation which have a major effect, and have been linked to the severe winters in the 1940s and 1960s. But again, that is probably not the case today.
So, it’s not a change to the Atlantic circulatory pattern. Hmph. So, let’s just make it up, OK?
But before we write off our current cold snap as the British weather playing its usual tricks, we still need to explain why the Arctic high pressure has strayed so far south. And here, says Prof Maslin, is the more likely, and more subtle, link with climate change. “For me,” he says, “this shows that the climate is becoming more dynamic, and thus large shifts in the wind patterns are possible – in this case, sub-tropical air being trapped further south than usual.”
In other words, we need to remember that while the average temperature is rising, climate change also delivers more extreme weather, from chills to heatwaves. Today, we’re stocking up on snowshoes – but best to invest in some air-conditioning as well.
So, all you Britainers need to stop using so much fossil fuels….what’s that?
Motorists have been urged not to panic buy at the pumps amid reports of fuel shortages in some parts of the country.
The Retail Motor Industry Independent Petrol Retailers Association says the big freeze is leading to “critical” shortages in places.
Oh, come on, suck it up, buttercup. Suffering some frostbite and death to stave off globull warming is a small price to pay.
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach. sit back and Relax. we’ll dRive!
Judd Gregg Concerned With Metaphorical ‘Force-Five Hurricane,’ But Not Actual Climate Change
Worried that “there is something catastrophic” will happen to the economy within years, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) pleaded for action on the budget deficit in a Fox News interview today, using incipient climate disasters in a forceful metaphor. Gregg sharply criticized those who would “do nothing” about a metaphorical “force-five hurricane in five years”:
I genuinely believe there is something catastrophic, I can’t tell you that it’ll happen within the next 2 years. I can tell you within the next five years it will happen. If there’s a force five hurricane in five years, and you know it’s going to hit your shoreline in five years, do you do nothing about it?
Watch it:
Like the rest of his caucus, Gregg has taken a do-nothing policy when it comes to the threat of actual climate disasters, even though they have been dramatically increasing in his own state.
In March 2009, Gregg slammed Obama’s proposed climate action outline, calling it a “non-starter.” A month later, Gregg voted repeatedly to preserve the filibuster for green economy legislation, even if “the Senate finds that public health, the economy and national security of the United States are jeopardized by inaction on global warming.”
After the House passed major legislation to reduce the threat of climate disasters, Gregg again stood up to do nothing. “I think cap and trade has a long road here obviously,”, Gregg said in February 2010, opposing the work by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) to draft climate policy. “I think it’s more logical to focus on those things we can do in the short term.”
He then co-sponsored and voted for Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) failed attempt to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse pollution is an imminent threat — which notes the “conclusion in the assessment literature that there is the potential for hurricanes to become more intense with increasing temperatures (and even some evidence that Atlantic hurricanes have already become more intense).”
Change comes late to Kyrgyzstan
At a kind of moderated town hall in Bishkek on her Central Asian swing today, Hillary Clinton spoke to the Kyrgyz — rather charitably perhaps — about sexism:
It requires, for a woman, usually in today’s world still, an extra amount of effort because I think it’s — the fact that women are still sometimes judged more critically. If you are in the courtroom or you are presenting a case, it still is a fact — and this is not just in Kyrgyzstan, this is everywhere — that when a man walks into a courtroom it’s rare for someone to say, "Oh, look what he is wearing." But if you walk into a courtroom, or any young woman walks into a courtroom, people are going to notice. And that will be an additional requirement that you have to meet.
Perhaps, Dan Amira speculates, the moderator wasn’t listening, as this question followed moments later:
MODERATOR 1: OK. Which designers do you prefer?
SECRETARY CLINTON: What, designers of clothes?
MODERATOR 1: Yes.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Would you ever ask a man that question? (Laughter.) (Applause.)
MODERATOR 1: Probably not. Probably not. (Applause.)
UN Climate Change Summit Dispatch: The Eco House Of The Dystopian Future
Imagine Blade Runner meets America circa the Donner Party and you have some idea of what the Greens have in mind for the Eco House of the Future. That is, your hovel will have weirdly high-tech flat screens and computers plugged into outlets but you will wash your clothes with a (built in!) washboard and the excess water will flow out to the porch to hydrate your tomato plants because there are no more grocery stores because of the apocalypse.
The future. Your dreams. All hopes. Dead. And if not dead, so miserable you want to die.
You might be thinking that I’m exaggerating a bit much. Wait until you see my video of the eco-friendly “bathrooms” at the site of the House of the Dystopian Future and then, we’ll chat.
The image that kept coming back to my mind, well, two of them actually, were the World Fairs of yore and the Epcot Center. Optimism, embracing technology, expansive ideas and underlying it all a sunny belief that technology and knowledge will power the future and make the world a better place animated engineers and guys like Walt Disney.
Not so the Climate Change Crowd. The Eco House experience felt like getting a sneak peak into brainwashed cult behind-the-scenes where everyone silently hoped for destruction so they could be proved right. Ha ha! The world is destroyed, we predicted it, and you’re to blame!
What did you miss at the Eco House of the Dystopian Future? There were unimaginative displays in unventilated buildings. (No air conditioning-to be expected. Still, the weather is gorgeous and a delightful breeze blew and had anyone had a rudimentary knowledge of engineering or even the sense to get the concept of cross breezes, it would have been fine. Instead, it was dank, dark, enclosed, sweaty and oppressive.)
Children marched through with sing-songy tour guides giving them scary statistics and asking leading questions.
“Do you want the world to be full of trash?”
“Nooooo!” yelled the six year olds.
Speaking of exploitation, in the pavilion full of booths, a couple stood out. At one booth, the international Boy Scouts occupied a corner with posters of discredited science. Remember the Hockey Stick that isn’t? And then the boys answered your questions. At another booth, children spoke of impending doom. It was Disaster 101 by the children, for the children. These wide eyed true believers were a study in childlike hope and rancid adult pessimism. You’ll see what I mean when I upload the video. In it, you’ll meet a twelve year old girl-gorgeous and sweet and guileless and being used to propagate the worst view of the world and the future.
Leaving the Eco House of the Dystopian Future, I thought about how glad I am to not have to hang around these sorts of folks all the time. Doomsdayers are a miserable bunch no matter the religious cult they belong to, but this one is particularly misery-inducing.
The eco-alarmists paint a picture of sorrow and destruction and wish for people to become righteous now by turning the world back to some sort of agrarian-techno ideal that would have people living primitive lives.
Even the technology was miserable, though. It wasn’t some shining example of futuristic engineering that would solve ecological problems. Rather, the technology was stagnant, today’s answers to yesterday’s problems and mostly focused on entertainment through TV’s and video games-though one gets the impression that those were thrown in there to show videos of the future but that the future would be more mud hut than Mac.
The future, in short, was the past. And it was a sad post-apocalypic past that exists because there are no other better options.
Leftists like to paint the right as fear mongers. Well, the Eco House Of The Dystopian Future was rank with one emotion: fear. The literature, the posters, the home design, the apologists all reeked of fear.
Short on solutions, short on science, and long on the problem, and excruciatingly long on emotion, the Eco House encapsulated the Green movement quite nicely: Life is awful and it’s your fault.
My conclusion? If we’re all going to die anyway, I’d like to go in style, thank you. Please give me that steak medium rare. Also turn down the air conditioning, gas up my SUV, and load up my (energy saving and water sparing) washing machine. Time is short. Better enjoy it while I can.
The eco house of the future looks a lot like the past except bleaker. While the lefties kvetch, hopefully the capitalists are creating some life saving, energy sparing, option-expanding technology. My bet’s on them.
*Melissa is writing from Cancun and is with a group from American’s for Prosperity.
