by Judith Curry
The apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the climate “crisis” has numerous victims. Children and young adults rank among the victims of greatest concern.
Numerous academic studies have highlighted the psychological health effects of climate change on children and young adults, including elevated levels of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, increased incidences of suicide, substance abuse, social disruptions including increased violence, and a distressing sense of loss.
The psychological injuries to children associated with climate change are featured prominently by Our Children’s Trust which is “representing and supporting youth securing their legal rights to a safe climate.” This group sponsored the lawsuit Juliana vs. the United States, plus lawsuits in virtually all of the U.S. states and globally including Netherlands and Colombia. A key rationale for these Complaints/lawsuits is the psychological harm being inflicted on the Youth Plaintiffs. Here is one example from the Juliana complaint:
“Defendants have caused psychological and emotional harm to Kelsey as a result of her fear of a changing climate, her knowledge of the impacts that will occur in her lifetime, and her knowledge that Defendants are continuing to cause harms that threaten her life and wellbeing. As a result of the acts and omissions of Defendants, Kelsey believes that she will not be able to continue to do all of the things described in this Complaint for her life, health, and enjoyment, nor will she one day be able to share those experiences with her children.”
This is by no means the worst/alarming statement by the Youth Plaintiffs that I’ve seen, but it is the first one I spotted in a search of the Juliana Complaint.
Lise Van Susteren, a clinical psychiatrist, submitted an Expert Report on Behalf of Juliana et al. From her introduction:
“The science and literature show that a vast range of health impacts, including mental health impacts, from climate change are already impacting, and expected to impact in increasingly harmful ways, our most vulnerable population, children. Climate change is already harming children, including these youth Plaintiffs, psychologically, and this suffering increases as climate change worsens and as the federal government continues to exacerbate the dangers of climate change and does not act to stop the climate crisis. This report focuses on the current and expected psychological harms facing children as a result of climate change, and the menacing conditions that threaten future harm, if no meaningful action is taken to address climate change by the federal government. I discuss both acute and chronic climate harms because climate change has short- and long-term impacts on mental health. I discuss how these harms are worse because the federal government, including these defendants, are causing the harm and failing to properly respond to the threats posed by climate change. I also discuss why children, including some of the Plaintiffs in this case, are experiencing disproportionally harmful, and what I expect to be life-long, mental health impacts, as a result of climate change and the government’s role in causing it.”
I have personally received emails from children and young adults suffering from such effects, which were featured in previous blog posts [link] [link] . I have received numerous additional emails from teens and young adults that are very sincere and communicating with me because they are grasping for reasons not to be so depressed about this issue. These psychological injuries, at least in some individuals, seem real to me.
There is little basis in the IPCC assessments for a level of alarm that would induce such psychological effects — even in context of the IPCC’s numerous erroneous assumptions and dubious judgment calls that were outlined in my previous blog post The climate crisis isn’t what it used to be . The apocalyptic and misleading rhetoric in the media and political discourse about climate change is arguably the driving impetus of these adverse psychological health effects.
In context of a complex scientific and political debate, there are strong incentives to raising the alarm about climate change. Media gets more clicks and views with alarming stories. Activist campaigners get attention and funding. Researchers who position themselves in the mainstream of apocalyptic rhetoric receive media attention, professional recognition from increasingly activist professional societies, and greater funding opportunities. Politicians that emphasize alarming climate scenarios seek the authority to distribute significant resources to fix the problem according to their own political values.
Are the adverse psychological impacts on children and young adults merely collateral damage of this complex debate on climate change, or are children being used as political tools? It is well known that children are fostering climate change concern among their parents [link] [link], providing a motivation for apocalyptic messaging targeted at children and young adults.
Harmful rhetoric
The presentation of climate change to children is far more alarming and less nuanced than what adults are exposed to. Stories of the coming climate apocalypse have become commonplace in schools, textbooks, churches, movies and even children’s books. A prominent example is the book “Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg’s Call to Save the Planet,” a picture book aimed at ages 3-8. The book’s overarching message is summed by this statement in the book: “There might not be a world to live in when she grows up. What use is school without a future?”
Media targeted at teens and young adults portrays relentless doom. The 2018 U.N. warning that governments need to take action on climate change within 12 years led Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to incorrectly conclude that millennials fear “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” The website of the U.K.-based group Extinction Rebellion warns that “societal collapse and mass death are seen as inevitable by scientists and other credible voices.”
The world’s teens and young adults seem to have gotten the message: A 2021 study polled 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 from numerous different countries, and found that over half thought that humanity was “doomed” because of climate change [link]. Further, there is an explicitly political message being fed to teens and young adults as evidenced by this finding from the study: “Climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government response and associated feelings of betrayal.”
However, there is growing alarm about alarmism among climate activists [link]. There is a fierce debate about whether more pessimistic messaging energizes people to fight climate change or causes them to conclude the world is doomed and tune out, leading us down a path of inaction.
Some voices are suggesting that we would all be better off if we dialed down the hyperbole about climate change. Kate Marvel, climate scientist at Columbia University and science communicator, states: “This message of ‘We’re all going to die, how dare you say there might be something we can do’ … that’s just not supported by the science.” “There are so many futures between doomed and fine.” “I’m not saying we can all rest, and I’m not saying we live in the best of all possible worlds. But one can have a sense of optimism by working towards a solution.”
Educational curricula
Public school districts in the U.S. are adopting curricula on climate change that portrays climate change only in context of human causes and as a peril beyond dispute, emphasizing worst case scenarios — actual climate science seems to be ignored in the curricula. Further, there is an explicit objective that students should respond through activism. The materials used in these curricula include those from UNESCO Office for Climate Education and the North American Association for Environmental Education, as well as materials provided by advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club.
- Kristen Hargis of the North American Association for Environmental Education states : “There are a lot of resources out there that are … helping students draft policies as well, and getting them involved from the beginning. And this is what we want to see, this whole-institutionapproach where we’re creating this culture of climate action.”
- The Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, states : “Climate change, which results from our own behaviour, is the greatest threat to our common existence. Education is an essential tool to empower young people to take action for a more sustainable future.” The website for the UNESCO Office for Climate Education states: “These resources aim at promoting action”
The “K12 Climate Action Plan” was published by the Aspen Institute. The Commission that prepared this report includes: Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers; Becky Pringle, President of the National Educational Association; John King, U.S. Secretary of Education (Obama Administration); Christine Todd Whitman, EPA Administrator (Bush Administration) and former NJ Governor; Linda Darling-Hammond, President of the California State Board of Education; Pedro Martinez, Superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District. Their stated mission and beliefs :
- “MISSION: Our mission is to unlock the power of the public K-12 education sector to be a force for climate action, solutions, and environmental justice to help prepare children and youth to advance a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable society.”
- “BELIEFS: We believe today’s children and youth will be essential in the fight against climate change, and we must empower children and youth with the knowledge and skills to build a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable world.”
Additional statements of note:
- “Advocacy and the media will help build the narrative for supporting our schools in moving toward climate action, solutions, and environmental justice.”
- “In fact, education has been identified as an underutilized social tipping point needed for decarbonization — the process of phasing out reliance on carbon across all parts of the economy.”
Efforts to insert climate-related activism into all aspects of the curricula are squeezing out science, economics, political science, history, critical thinking, etc. in the curricula.
Children lacking resilience
The responsibility of adults is to teach children and young adults how to solve problems effectively, not to preach the end of the world. Adults also need to help children become more resilient.
The concept of psychological hardiness is an important one in many contexts (discussed previously at CE), but particularly with regards to children. The father of hardiness, Salvatore Maddi, defined hardiness as “the pattern of attitudes and skills that enables people to turn the stress of potential disasters into growth opportunities” (Maddi, 2014). There are three qualities of hardiness: challenge, control, and commitment. These qualities affect how one structures interactions with his or her environment and sustains the motivation necessary to persevere through life’s stressors. An individual who has the quality of challenge acknowledges that stressors are normal in life and sees them as opportunities to learn and grow by actively engaging with them. An individual who has the quality of control attempts to continue having an effect on his outcomes, even when circumstances are poor, rather than being passive or believing himself to be powerless. Finally, an individual who has the quality of commitment is predisposed to be involved with the people and organizations around him as opposed to acquiescence to alienation. Hardiness is positively related to a sense of meaningfulness and enhances performance and health. Hardiness is also negatively related to depression and anxiety.
Related to anti-hardiness of young people, the book The Coddling of the American Mind describes how parents’ attempts to promote their kids’ emotional well-being often instead makes them more emotionally fragile. The book argues that by succumbing to their own sense of fragility and wrapping themselves in the cloak of victimhood, young people are developing cognitive patterns similar to those of people suffering from anxiety and depression.
Hardiness in children is related to how children deal with stressful situations [link]. There is a well-documented increase in anxiety and depression over the past five decades. These studies suggest that risky or uncertain situations are opportunities for growth, which can provide children with rich experiences that can promote autonomy and self-efficacy. Instead of encouraging risky activities, parents and care-providers are becoming more restrictive. By encouraging children to take risks, parents and educators can help children to build characteristics of hardiness. As such, hardiness is similar to the concept of anti-fragility (discussed previously at CE).
Hardiness alters two appraisal components made by an individual: it reduces the appraisal of threat and increases one’s expectations that coping efforts will be successful. Hardiness is associated with the individual’s use of active, problem-focused coping strategies for dealing with stressful events. These two mechanisms reduce the amount of psychological stress one experiences. Teaching these skills to children can help them to tackle challenges with a positive attitude while also enabling them to independently reduce the psychological stress that is associated with these challenges.
Apart from ill-advised parenting, children and young adults are being used as tools in national and international political campaigns and are encouraged to be seen as ‘victims’. Blaming this unfortunate situation of psychological stress on a changing climate is incorrect, and the use of this situation to achieve political goals is reprehensible behavior that is acting to reinforce the childrens’ psychological injuries.
So much for “saving the planet for the grandchildren.” These depressed children often talk of not having their own children in the future because of climate change (such sentiments feature prominently in the Complaints organized by Our Childrens’ Trust). This is a pretty big backfire for the “suffer now so we can save the planet for the grandchildren” crowd.
JC note to the brainwashing educators of K-12 children: Children suffering from acute anxiety and depression are in no kind of shape to be effective activists. Further, in a decade or so, when it is apparent that there is no climate catastrophe, these young adults are not going to be very trustful of information from the establishment.
Children as climate activists
The most famous child activist in the world is Greta Thunberg (now 19 years old). I find Greta to be a remarkable individual in many ways. Her earlier activism seemed manipulated by adults; now as a young adult herself, she seems to be more of her own person. While I find her often mistaken in her conclusions and ensuing statements, I do not question her honesty or motives. There are other comparable young activists that I’ve seen reference to in Africa and Latin America (but I can’t easily find these).
Greta is often lumped in (inappropriately) with the teen/young adult thugs that (under the sponsorship of Extinction Rebellion , Just Stop Oil and others) are gluing themselves to roads to stop traffic, throwing tomato soup at paintings in museums, etc. Well maybe this is a step up from selling drugs, but maybe not. Last week in Germany, a bicyclist died because climate activists were blocking the roadway for emergency vehicles, preventing them from reaching the accident scene [link].
At first blush one might classify these young protestors as morons, but I suspect they are actually being paid very well for their transgressions (perhaps even reflecting hardiness by seizing an economic opportunity). The Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) seems to be coordinating funding for these organizations. Aileen Getty, heiress to the Getty oil fortune, and the Getty Foundation have apparently provided more than $4M in funding to the Climate Emergency fund. . Rory Kennedy (daughter of Robert F. Kennedy) is on the board of the CEF. Senior figures at CEF also include members of the film-making and publishing elite [link]. Extinction Rebellion is also bankrolled by the Gettys, Kennedys and other billionaire families. The Equation Campaign was launched in 2020 with a $30M pledge from two members of the Rockefeller family, heirs to the Rockefeller oil fortune [link].
And people criticize Elon Musk for wasting his fortune on things like Twitter . . .
The bottom line is that these protests are not grassroots activism, but are funded by millionaires, quasi-charities and shadowy foundations. What is needed is a counter organization analogous to Our Children’s Trust that provides litigation support for people and institutions that are harmed by the actions of these activist organizations. Sue organizations such as CEF, the individuals on their Board of Directors, and individuals and foundations providing substantial support to these organizations. I’m no lawyer, but the family of the bicyclist that was killed in Germany seems to me to have a much stronger case for a lawsuit than the lawsuits sponsored by Our Childrens’ Trust based upon childrens’ psychological injuries.
Conclusion
It is difficult to avoid concluding that children are being used as tools in adults’ political agenda surrounding climate change. This tooldom is having adverse impacts on the mental health of children and young adults.
I find the K-12 educational brainwashing by establishment educators to be particularly reprehensible. Wouldn’t it be much better for the children to learn about geology and meteorology, mass media influences on politics and society, and critical thinking about big societal issues? Wouldn’t it be great to motivate students to want to contribute to solving society’s problems and give them the academic tools to take advantage of opportunities?
But a more fundamental issue is how children are being raised, so that they are lacking in resilience and hardiness.
And finally, there are near- and long-term political implications. Does anyone think that throwing tomato soup at paintings in museums is helping the “cause”? In the longer term, all of this propaganda and brainwashing will backfire when it becomes apparent in a decade or two that there is no climate catastrophe, and young adults are rebelling against the ‘establishment’.
Judith … thank you. Another very good piece. I’m looking forward to the other parts.
I agree that the family of the German bicyclist should sue. And while it is a shame to engage in the left’s use of lawfare, sometimes one must fight fire with fire.
This fetish with fragility goes back quite a ways. Dr. Spock comes to mind, the plethora of sociological studies purporting to show negative outcomes from various sociometric variables, and the never to be outdone the 80s ‘Me Too’.
Groups like Extinction Rebellion remind me of 70s groups like the Clam Shell (and Crab Shell) Alliance. They were wrong then, they’re wrong now.
Correction … should have been: … and the never to be outdone 80s self help movement.
Judith , the cruelest abuse to date of children in the climate wars may lie in deliberately terrifying them with artificial art: I see your piece reposted beneath a lurid Hell-scape of wailing waifs on Watts Up With That, whose content providers have developed a sudden addiction to inhuman illustration.
Which AI artbot perpetrated this work ? Neural Love ? AI Image Generator, AISEO, Night Cafe?
Does this forbode the immanent replacement of Rotter and Worrall by neural architecture clones , or an epidemic of climate calendars by ( insert name of coder here)?
OTOH it all may make UNEP and CFACT climate art press releases look good by comparison:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2022/11/climate-depot-denial-dynasty-gets-nasty.html
I often wonder if there is a hardcore of 100 or 200 people involved in all these silly and dangerous XR stunts. Is it the same small group of people getting arrested at different protests? If this is true, it makes it appear as if they have greater support than they actually do.
Although I STRONGLY support someone’s right to protest, if it’s the same small group responsible for multiple incidents, they have become a nuisance, rather than legitimate protestors. They are essentially trying to hijack the political agenda.
I would suggest that people arrested at these protests be sentenced to escalating jail terms. One day in jail for the first conviction, two days for the second conviction, eight days for third, 16 for fourth, 32 for fifth etc. By the 10th conviction, these protestors would be looking at 18 months in jail.
This would force these kids to seriously evaluate their commitment to the cause and eliminate nuisance protests. If there is only a small group of 100 to 200 activists, they can’t possibly hijack the political agenda. They will either be in prison, or more likely they will simply stop.
Hopefully, their parents will run out of dope money sooner rather than later … then they will have to find a way to get dope and that is perhaps more useful to society than their activities in XR.
Can I point out (again) that many ideas essential if mainstream views are correct still make sense under other circumstances e.g. cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels and reducing food waste. See
https://regenfarming.news/articles/1699
Regards,
Iain Climie
Of course those ideas are important but they cannot do the whole job and some in fact are very limited in scope. The central issue is that fossil fuels were not just an energy add-on to older ingredients of prosperity. They led to entirely new avenues for expanding human wellbeing. Fertilizers, mining explosives, metals production, plastics etc. As for reducing food waste, much-maligned packaging, which relies heavily on fossil fuel derivatives, has been its greatest benefactor.
Great summary Judith. There is a mental health epidemic among girls and young women. It is driven not just by climate alarmism, but by intersectional ideological poison, which portrays everyone who is “white” ( a biologically meaningless category useful to ideologues) as an oppressor. This really does harm young girls.
Guterres in the meanwhile: “cooperate or perish”
Somehow this sounds less like a prophecy, and more like a death threat.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners; contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servant of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
We were supposed to rise when elders entered? Oh cr@p!
The technocratic elite love Plato. But not so much Socrates.
Neither, Bill. It is a recurring impression that led to the closing of the reactionary mind over the course of human history.
The traditional view would hold that Plato was more into episteme than techne, tho it is complicated:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/#Plat
Thanks for the link, Willard.
And just to show you that I did read it, “In some dialogues, craft (technê) and knowledge (epistêmê) seem interchangeable in much the same way as in Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues.” However, I yield to your correction, in that instead of technocratic I should have used academic/technocratic. After all, as you probably sensed, I was referring to Plato’s Republic.
Socrates indeed often blended the two, Bill. To know what is virtue, one has to delve into specific cases. Some of them are arts and crafts. They involve knowledge, which then can be used to explore the kind of knowledge virtue implies.
Platonists usually argue as if they held a deep knowledge of things, even when opponents are specialized in the kind of knowledge under question.They fail to appreciate democracies because they expect politics to be ruled by the kind of deep knowledge they have. This is where the distinction between techne and episteme is most striking,
To cater for an army of armchair warriors might be the best way to return to that tradition. The rise of populists and the discovery of the Internet by aging populations with too much time on their hand seem to coincide. It will not prevent societies from progress, but it will hinder it.
A true technocrat would simply compare numbers, say between the health crisis Judy underlines and the opioid deaths or the number of GOP guys killed by a virus while denying vaccine efficacy.
While I am critical of our society coddling our youth, at times I think I might be part of the problem.
With my mother’s permission at age 8, my cousin and I rode 8 miles round trip to a store on country roads. There is no way I would have approved of my children or grandchildren doing the same at that age.
At age 12 I got a shotgun for my birthday and regularly went hunting with my father and cousins. I would not approve of my grandchildren doing the same at that age.
I was under 9 when I took the boat out by myself without life jacket to go fishing. Our grandkids can’t get out of our sight without an adult and life jackets.
The above is a little off the mark but our youth have been so helicoptered and protected from any adversity, that they might not be prepared for questioning and thinking for themselves as well as previous generations.
When kids hear such things today such as as “ We’re on a ‘highway to climate hell,’ UN chief Guterres says” what are they to think?
I laugh at the absurdity. But without countervailing facts how else would we expect our children to react?
How many lawyers were around at that time?
I’ve said it before”: yellow journalism + propaganda = Greta’s. This represents my complete contribution to physics.
Climate change is already harming children = the false narrative. My 2nd.
What about the youth of developing countries denied access to electricity due to the UN helping to limit the use of coal fired generation.
Fretting is hardly the largest worry to the young.
Children have been co-opted for adult issues in the past with disastrous outcomes such as: Children’s Crusade (1212 AD), Nazi Youth movement (1930’s) and today’s activism for climate change. Manipulating children by adults mostly stems from adults themselves being unable to impact their own lives; hence, the need to exert control over others, and in the climate case, over children, their own as well as others. Children by themselves are not self-sufficient and able to evolve their own sense of resilience when their own lives around them exhibit that the world is unstable. Children born into single parent households; children enduring divorcing parents particularly at a young age; children witnessing abusive behavior within their own family, these and other experiences demonstrate to the observing child that adults will and do self-serving things to avoid pains and losses for which they can’t cope. Children learn mostly from their parent(s). Amass a large number of such impacted children; tell them that the world around them is falling apart and they have no hope; then provide a “Pied Piper of Hamelin” with some sort of magic flute piping to some cause that promises an “out” for their own pain, one has the ingredients for an activist movement. From my viewpoint, I see fragile adults suffering their own misery perpetuating their anxieties and depression upon theirs and others children. As is happening in the educational realm, the pushback by some parents is attracting notice and may ultimately alter the course of this current activism.
It is propaganda everywhere. Dr. Josef Goebbels used it with a great success in Germany from 1933 on.
The defendants in the lawsuit should be alarmist scientists and their minions in the media and other disciplines who sow the alarmist tripe.
Like Al Gore, Bill Nye the Not Science guy, John Kerry, etc.
Children are being used by alarmists as pawns in a cynical political game. This amounts to child abuse. In my mind, the people to be sued for psychological harm to children are those who make unrealistic assumptions, unsubstantiated assertions, and unproven/unprovable scientific claims and predictions about causes and effects of alleged climate change. A fear of the future, which is only predicted but not realized, cannot be a cause for a claim of actual harm.
However, there is actual harm being done, especially to poor and working class slobs, by the actions various governments and non-governmental groups to limit the availability of fuels for heating, electrical generation, transportation that directly affect the health and safety of people, increase costs, and lower the standard of living of billions of people. At least, that would be my counterclaim suit.
Yes, children are being exploited (though willingly) as human shields in the war against carbon.
https://rclutz.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/gifted-kids.png
And who are the adults involved in Our Children’s Trust?
Supporting Experts (the usual suspects)
Dr. James Hansen
Dr. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
Dr. Sivan Kartha
Dr. Pushker Kharecha
Dr. David Lobell
Dr. Arjun Makhijani
Dr. Jonathan Overpeck
Dr. Camille Parmeson
Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf
Dr. Steven Running
Dr. James Gustave Speth
Dr. Kevin Trenberth
Dr. Lise Van Susteren
Dr. Paul Epstein (1943-2011)
Etc
Footnote for those not aware of Aliases for the Usual Suspects:
James “Death Trains” Hansen
Ove “Reefer Mad” Hoegh-Guldberg
Jonathan “Water Torture” Overpeck
Camille “The Extincter” Parmeson
Stefan “No Tommorow” Rahmstorf
Kevin “Hidden Heat” Trenberth
What, no Red Baron? Where’s Mann-fred in the list?
The Left declared jihad on the West, demonizing everyone and thing that provides them with what they demand: the economy, morals, ethics, traditions, principles, the productive and the futures of their children. Appeals to panic, superstition and ignorance have become the tools of choice in the political grab bag of ideologically-driven haters of Amercanism.
So, if in the future if the global warming risk is adjusted greatly downwards, and the dramatic benefit of CO2 to the plant kingdom becomes recognized, should the alarmist media and alarmist climate professionals be then charged legally for their damage to the mental and physical damage caused to the children affected? Seems only fair, and perhaps the threat of such action would force the science community to return to the basic tenets of science, and the climate science reporters to return to the basic principles of responsible journalism.
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I’m with Don. If the media were held to account on their misleading and often untruthful climate change reporting surely that would put a curb to it. But who’s going to fund it? Not the billionaire families. What’s in it for them?
Given that the Courts accept the crisis how do you propose to hold them to account?
The health impacts of climate change has consistently been one of the most outrageously misrepresented in the whole climate change debate. As far as the mental health impacts on teenagers in the developed world, there is a convincing argument that this is entirely due to the misrepresentation by those arguing for a climate crisis/catastrophe compared with what is actually contained in the IPCC and other scientific reports.
In 2009, The Lancet published one of their first forays into the health impacts of climate change.
Lancet and University College London Institute for Global Health Commission
Managing the health effects of climate change
Lancet. 2009; 373: 1693-1733
On page 1699, they included a table purported to be the health impact / burden of disease form climate change measured by Disability adjusted life years (DALYs). This is consistent with the WHO burden of disease project, since reporting total mortality, incidence etc. can give very misleading pictures of what is and is not a health problem.
Taking the data presented in this table and matching to the populations at the time, and the total global burden of disease as measured by the WHO therefore made possible a calculation that the impact of climate change was approximately 0.035% on the global burden of disease.
Curiously, although the Lancet has regularly published major reports on the impact of climate change on health, the above analysis has never been updated or revised, or even reproduced. Most recently –
https://www.thelancet.com/countdown-health-climate?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_feature_lancetclimate22
Fortunately, in 2009, they also presented the data in a table that split the results into regions (Africa, East Medit., Sth Amer & Carrib, SE Asia, West Pacific (excl Developed), Developed (incl Cuba)).
This then showed that the impact on African was around 0.064% of the burden of disease, while Sth American/Caribbean only 0.007%, and the Developed countries 0.0004 %. In other words, 1 and 2 orders of magnitude less respectively. This of course leads to the conclusion that health infrastructure, and socio-economic status is the primary driver of burden of disease (for virtually everything, not just climate change impacts).
In 2009, the Lancet report did generate some critical commentary, eg. from Imdur Golanky
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)61655-X/fulltext
Which in turn did result in a reply from the authors.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)61656-1/fulltext
However the reply at best makes a claim that this is from data /modelling from 2000, and forecasts as at 2009 predicted significantly worse impacts based on scenarios which could see temperatures rise by 6 degrees. One of the main references cited in the reply (Parry et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/climate.2008.50), while listing several of the main impacts and the fact that reducing warming from the expected 5 + degrees could mitigate the worst impacts, contained no summary of this within the total burden of disease.
Again, bear in mind that the global burden of disease project was initiated because it is only by putting burden of disease of specific problems in context can a coherent global response be formulated.
“The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) began 30 years ago with the goal of providing timely, valid and relevant assessments of critical health outcomes. Over this period, the GBD has become progressively more granular.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01990-1
Disingenuously, the Lancet’s subsequent reports increasingly began discussion the “health co-benefits” of reducing fossil fuels. See 2016 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)32124-9/fulltext
While this is well known – air pollution from coal fired electricity production and vehicle emissions is estimated to be responsible for around 5% of global burden of disease. However this fails to consider that increasing fossil fuels in the developing world could have massive potential benefits in terms of reduction in burden of disease, compared to any slight increase in burden from climate change. Since the Lancet and others have (since 2009) never attempted to present a clear and honest comprehensive assessment of what the latest models and forecasts actually show for total burden of disease, we will never know. One suspects that the reluctance to take the analysis down this path is because the results would not support their case.
Took me a search for “Lancet health climate change” to find:
https://www.thelancet.com/countdown-health-climate
I see reports from 2015 to 2022.
Was this what you were looking for, Peter?
I first started looking into this in 2015, with the publication https://www.thelancet.com/commissions/climate-and-health-2015
having spent a lot of my professional life analysing health statistics. It was only when I looked at the 2009 publication that I realized that the summary of Burden of Disease was not reprised in the 2015 version. nor has it been included in any subsequent publications – which have become increasingly detailed (but less informative).
This was actually the start of my questioning the reporting on climate change – since analysing the burden of disease clearly shows that climate change is NOT the biggest public health threat of the 21st century, despite this being the headline. I have challenged my public health colleagues about these claims – and yet to receive an adequate response.
Peter,
It took me two minutes to open the last report and search for “burden”:
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821%2901787-6
Your editorials would gain in strength if it took more than two minutes to refute facts they contain, in this case your “nor has it been included in any subsequent publications.”
Take care.
Thanks for the comment, but you will find that the 2021 report does not contain any summary comparable to the 2009 report. This is a total DALYs attributable to climate change. In 2009, the Lancet authors were able to quantify this according to countries grouped by income level. So I don’t see any refutation of my original statement.
Peter,
It took me less than two minutes to find the reference under note 204:
Murray CJL, Aravkin AY, Zheng P, et al. Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. Lancet 2020;
396: 1223–49.
It’s Open Access:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30752-2/fulltext
Best of luck!
Not sure if you understand my point. Look at this headline for example – climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths per year by 2030. It has been reproduced in the media hundreds of times.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health
That represents approximately 0.5% of all cause mortality, so not particularly significant. However deaths is not a useful measure of burden of disease, which is why Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) is preferred for health cost benefit analyses and measuring the burden of disease.
So the Lancet in 2009 produced numbers which show that using DALYs, climate change is only 0.035% of the burden of disease. They didn’t include that percentage but it is easy to calculate. The 2015, and subsequent publications don’t even include that – instead diving off into extraordinary detail about estimated health impacts without ever putting it into context of the total burden of disease.
That’s the point – climate change is not a significant driver of burden of disease, yet that is what is being claimed.
Peter,
It took me less than 2 minutes to find in the 2019 report:
You might find this insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but then by your logic we might also consider the 6M deaths to the pandemic as insignificant too. Which is indeed something you did elsewhere.
My first five minutes are free of charge. After that there is a cost.
Best,
> the 2019 report
The 2021 report, that is.
This one:
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821%2901787-6
Cheers.
Wouldn’t think I ever referred to adverse health outcomes as insignificant, just that presenting numbers without context is misleading, which is exactly the case in the reference to heat related mortality that you cite.
No discussion of mortality from extreme events is complete without analysis of the displacement effect, ie. mortality is lower in other extreme events. In this case, excess deaths due to a heat wave reduces the number of persons at risk from subsequent events – a cold snap, pandemic etc.
“Without consideration of displacement effects, the net impacts of heat-wave mortality are likely to be significant overestimations.”
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/179/4/467/127517
You may not be familiar with calculating net health effects – whether mortality or DALYs, but for the Lancet authors, what they published here displays a lack of knowledge which brings their competence &/or independence into question. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case in much of the health/climate change literature.
You are probably over 5 minutes by now. Do you want my credit card number?
Peter,
It started with you saying you were convinced that health issues related to climate were entirely due to misrepresentation, after wich you plugged the usual But CAGW. You then claimed that “The Lancet never updated or revised” their study of the burden of disease. The first claim is ludicrous, and the second claim is false.
Then you jumped to But Predictions (search for “additional deaths”), and dismissed that figure as insignificant. Which is par for your course as you kept trivialize climate costs by showing absolute percentages. The same trick could be pulled with COVID numbers.
Even if I granted all the facts you wanted, underneath your shadowboxing there’s a flimsy logic. Health encompasses more than death, and climate is actually not helping everyone, e.g.:
Op. Cit.
I am not sure why you mentioned an unrelated 2014 study about Murican cities to counter the 2021 Lancet Report except to suggest that humans can adapt. If so, please read the quote you just skipped.
Please send your donation to Clowns without Borders:
https://clownswithoutborders.org/donate-clowns-without-borders/
Many thanks in advance!
You keep referring to isolated statistics which are not relevant to the point I am making. In 2009, the Lancet claimed that climate change was the greatest [public health issue of the 21st century, but the summary statistics they published in that report proved the opposite. They haven’t reproduced that summary in subsequent reports, and you haven’t produced any reference which refutes that.
The 2014 reference demonstrates another important factor (displacement of mortality) in estimating net health effects of extreme events which was not taken into account in the discussion about heat mortality.
Perhaps I should have just responded to your first comment with “No, go back and read what I wrote since you seem to have not understood it.”
Peter,
Subsequent Lancet reports cited a separate study where the summary statistics have been produced. You asserted that they stopped producing these statistics because they hid the truth or something. That’s baloney.
And no, the summary statistics do not prove the *opposite* of what they claim, whatever you might mean by that.
Please, do keep repeating yourself while pretending I am not understanding your point. It only reinforces your posturing.
” .. cited a separate study where the summary statistics have been produced”
and the citation is ……….
If the evidence and data show I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to admit it.
Since you can’t even admit that your silly talking point was false, Peter, I hope you do not mind if I won’t be holding my breath.
These are the external risk factors in the latest GBD data
Air pollution
Environmental/occupational risks
Occupational risks
Other environmental risks
climate change is not included
Air pollution is not climate change if that is what you are thinking
The climate change BOD is contained in an older WHO data set
https://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.35400
last updated 2004 – this is where the Lancet got the data for the 2009 report.
You are likely just underinformed, but wrong all the same.
And you are likely new to the Climate Ball, Peter. It could be just a flesh wound. Why you need to quadruple down is on you.
Read the exchange again. You will find the citation you are baiting me with.
None of the citations are relevant. I have been looking at this specific issue since 2015 and analysing health data since 1990. Surprise me – show me where I’m wrong.
The Climate Ball – amusing.
Perhaps more like the Emperor’s clothes.
The Emperor’s clothes would look more like your own blog, Peter. Seven years and you still have not found the time to publish any of your deeply experienced analyses on that question. Sad.
When will you correct the situation?
Being correct all the time is impossible. Being helpful most of the time is desirable.
Whenever you are ready then, Peter…
The world is waiting.
Silly me, I now discover this is a game you play with yourself. An interesting piece of online literature you have created but irrelevant to reality. Have fun
Dear Peter,
Speaking of reality, have you found the 2022 report yet?
Ta.
If the proposed solution to this problem is for the alarmist social movement to suddenly recede that is not a realistic scenario. I am a bit cynical here because I spent several years trying to get funding for educational materials to counter alarmism and got basically no response. Everyone decries the abuse but no one wants to do anything about it.
See my now dormant blog:
The Climate Change Debate Education Project
http://ccdedu.blogspot.com/
And fundraiser:
https://www.gofundme.com/climate-change-debate-education
A few groups have done a few things but it is as nothing compared to what the alarmists are doing. And in any case, merely complaining is not particularly helpful.
This is very important information that could affect your children or your place of employment.
Many mining companies will, in the long run, be adversely affected financially due to laws based on what are now proven false claims that carbon dioxide warms the planet. This may have to be challenged in court and I am a world expert available to give professional testimony probably more effectively than anyone else in the world. So please consider getting physicists you may have on staff to read my seven papers and communicate with me about joining a possible class action by late next year.
Even the IPCC gave up their original “blanket” conjecture because solar radiation can only maintain a mean of 255K at the so-called radiating altitude and, after further absorption on the way to the surface, the mean of about 168w/m^2 supports a global mean surface temperature less than 233K which is about -40°C. In fact, because of the T^4 in Stefan Boltzmann calculations and because the flux is variable both the 255K and 233K figures are higher than actual.
At least since the publication of a paper in 1992 (possibly earlier) they started to guess that back radiation was supplying into the warmer surface the extra thermal energy needed to prop up the observed 288K. People complained that such would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But they brain-washed new climatology students into thinking that only “net” results of inward and outward radiation had to increase entropy.
That’s utter garbage! For a start, their energy diagrams show more inward radiation than outward. Oh, but they think, there is also non-radiative surface cooling. So, the net result is cooling. Well, in fact there is warming most mornings where I live, so what is going on there? Radiation can have no effect whatsoever on the rate of evaporation or conduction and convection out of the surface.
The only “net” results valid for the Second Law relate to interacting systems occurring at the same time. Clausius said as much in his original statement in German in 1854 which translated reads: “Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.” The correct current version of the Second Law is the first sentence in Wikipedia “Laws of Thermodynamics” reading “… in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases.”
That is all that needs to be stated regarding the Second Law – no reference to heat or temperatures being hot or cold – just entropy never decreasing and, in practice, always increasing in any irreversible natural thermodynamic process. Such can include phase change, chemical reactions, physical redistribution of molecules by gravity to form the density gradient, etc. – not just processes involving “heat” which is the word that in physics means an effective transfer of thermal energy.
The electromagnetic energy in radiation from a source to a target is not always converted to thermal energy, that energy being represented by the kinetic energy of whole molecules. No such energy is converted from a source which is cooler than the target. So, radiation from carbon dioxide and methane in cold regions of the troposphere cannot raise the already-warmer surface temperature – as climatologists claim it does.
There is more on this in papers about stimulated emission and resonant (or “pseudo”) scattering. Only if the target were at zero K would all the energy in the radiation striking it be thermalized.
In short, climatologists have no correct understanding of radiative heat transfer, but maybe Prof Claes Johnson could help with his writings cited in my peer-reviewed 2012 paper “Radiated Energy & the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
So, after President Biden or the next brain dead one, starts a nuclear war, are the children going to ask, “…is this climate change”?
Everything is climate change. A Democrat candidate for state rep came to my door to ask for my vote last week. When I asked where she stood on the illegal immigration crisis she said that it was caused by climate change. I am being completely honest.
I told her that I am very interested in climate and wondered where she got her information. She said she was and environmental science major when she went to college. I asked her how much warming CO2 caused if doubled in the atmosphere. She didn’t know. I asked her if she had ever heard of the term climate sensitivity. She hadn’t.
I think she likely deserved a college refund. But instead, unfortunately, the taxpayers are going to support her as well as be burdened by her policies, if not this cycle then the next. It is very hard to believe that science is driving these candidates.
This weekend a 28-year-old knocked on the door to advocate for that same state rep candidate. This young woman admitted she was a full-time employee working for an out of state non-profit that flew her in by invitation of the state’s Democratic committee. She not only did not know anything about the candidate, she also knew nothing about climate change, only that it was real and existential. She graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio but grew up in California and now lived in New York. She was an English major. What a waste of talent.
At least a decade before the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was aware of the possibility of a nuclear attack. Looking back on that time it seems like we were eyeball to eyeball even before we really were eyeball to eyeball in October, 1962. Watching kids on TV get under their desks gives a different kind of meaning to the word urgency. Watching an illustration of a missile flying over the North Pole toward home gives a graphic depiction of the term existential threat. Listening to what seemed like daily updates on the 15 minute nightly news on the nuclear arms race was just part of our national consciousness.
In spite of all that conditioning, I don’t remember kids lining up at the local mental health clinic. Come to think of it, I’m not sure there were many around.
Great point, gb.
The time has come for our new voters to discover that their parents lived under constant nuclear threat. Made us stronger.
Climate change is nothing compared to the ZZs. By chance there is a simple way to vanquish them. Bend over and say thanks.
Judith,
Thank you for posting these words about our children.
They are one of the bigger concerns I have about the current course of this madness of crowds. We have a grandchild about to enter the teens. We hear about some of the school nonsense.
If you worry about children becoming depressed, spare a thought for their parents and grandparents.
I was going to write an essay about this topic and had prepared this image for the header. It conveys a mood, I hope.
Geoff S
http://www.geoffstuff.com/tomb.jpg
On a glorious spring day in the beautiful Swarthmore College campus amphitheater a graduation class of 2016 gathered with parents to hear these inspirational words:
[speech excerpt]
https://www.swarthmore.edu/commencement-2016/cindy-halpern-baccalaureate
I was the only one in the crowd that did not rise to my feet in applause.
Ron,
There are a couple of big fibs in there, real schoolboy howlers. Is this the usual result of education before graduation? You know as well as I do that –
1. “The seas will rise for 1000 years”. The seas have been rising at much the same rate for the last 8,000 years according to numerous references. There is no discernable change that can be attributed to CO2. That is firmly on the research record. Future guesses about the next 8,000 are but guesses.
2. “warming the temperature of the planet, starting at the poles. ” To the best of knowledge, there has been undetectable temperature change at the South Pole, even all of Antarctica, since hydrocarbon fuel burning intensified. Eric Steig and others debated this about 2010. Eric lost.
3. ” loss of between 17,000 and 100,000 species each year” I do not know of any research that has listed more than a few dozen species extinctions in the last 100 years. Do we awake tomorrow to a New Dawn, when we have to kick the dead beasties off the sidewalks lest we lose our footings?
4. “the date when the record high temperature for that place becomes the average temperature for that place”. This is not a scientific deduction, it is a guess. Nobody known can predict to that accuracy.
5. ” the massive and unprecedented tornadoes over the heartland, the floods, as in Miami, … , the droughts, as in Berkeley, … , the endless rain, and the fires.” None of these is new to the weather record. All have more serious examples recorded in the last 200 years.
6. “These forests were sinks for carbon dioxide, absorbing some of the greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere. Now they are burning and turning into even greater sources of these gases. ” All of those trees, unless any were buried on the path to become coal, would have produced the same volume of CO2 whether they burned, or died and decayed. These trees did not absorb CO2, they were built from it, as were all people.
7. “I am retiring to Miami and looking for a condo.’ Maybe more usefully, “I am retiring to Miami and looking for a brain.”
Geoff S
Geoff, you touched on but just a few of them. The wild fire damage in the USA has averaged 7.4 million acres a year for the last 10 years according to Congressional Research Service.
Converting professor Halpern’s claim of 650 million acres lost in a month is off by three orders of magnitude, or 8 times the area of the state of California.
The range between the record high and the daily average temperature is likely around 10C in the height of summer. The average summertime temperature in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has probably risen less then 0.5C in the last 150 years.
After her speech I emailed Professor Halpern to ask where she got her facts. She replied her son, who lives in Berkeley. Apparently neither of them gave the slightest critical analysis to the garbage they were spewing into the atmosphere to our youth.
Here, just in from Yahoo News, sea level rise has doubled since 1993.
Dave Burton in the last post just blew away such claims by digging into the actual tidal gauges and satellite data. I am wondering if part of the doubling they article is talking about is confusion with the isostatic adjustment theorized by sea level rise alarmists to explain why we don’t see the rise in the actual data.
On the eight warmest years the article does not provide the context about the natural cycles and the relatively short timespan GMST record samples represents of that signal.
In the game of pass the telephone or whisper down the lane each conveyor desires to make the story more interesting and important by carelessly making additions and subtractions until the story is many magnitudes away from the truth.
Wait…a doubling of the rate of sea level rise is actually good news since it contradicts the NYT reporting last week that it had tripled.
-Bret Stephens
https://archive.ph/OoBa0#selection-719.47-719.76
A sincere and sensitive look at the mess we have made and continue to make by telling a lie about the causes of climate changie and then spinning the rhetoric involved in fabricating that lie over and over. Perhaps the world needs a good dose of a truth drug and a return to honesty, integrity and decency as a species. Despair is never a good state of being.
.
Thank you for all you do, Dr Curry. .
Thank you Judith. I’m one of those young adults who wrote to you years ago about this: I had two big panic attacks and general anxiety disorder triggered by this topic when I was 27-30, but that concern had been with me since I was a child. Thanks to your blog and other sources, and of course the help of a therapist, I overcomed my problems succesfully. I’m now very, very angry against the establishment that created my disorder and the general nihilism I see in young people. I have a toddler now; my husband and I are very aware that we have to raise her to be hardy, and also a critical thinker. I’ll teach her optimism, instead of the doomism I saw since I was a child in the 90s. But I do despair at the amount of people that don’t want to have kids because of this issue and others…
We have to stop coddling the children!
We must protect them against “alarmists!”
How will they grow up to be resilient unless we shelter them against coddling?
Hmmm.
Fran –
Actually, apologies for nesting that under your comment. It wasn’t what I intended. Although I disagee with the thrust of your comment, I certainly didn’t mean to make light of your experience..
Fran … thank you for your comment. I wish all the best for you and your family.
Oh, and don’t worry about Joshua. He has trouble with syllogisms all the time. No doubt he’s forgotten that the left is supposed to be … kind.
The paradox Joshua underlines is real, Bill.
Also, you seem to conflate kindness with politeness. While the former is reputed to go to the Ls, the latter is supposed to be on the Cs’ side. At least historically. Now it is hard to know what the Cs have left now that they sold their souls for two justices. After four years of chaos, they are promising more.
To put a kid on a throne is neither kind nor civil.
Josh may not have gone out of his way to be kind but I think Fran easily capable of absorbing it now. He and others have toughened us all up. Thanks guys, because the alternative is to censor as they do on their controlled blog sites. This coddling of their reader is protecting them from rigors or intellectual scrutiny and is thus unhealthy IMO.
Schools should ditch race and gender studies and have much more time devoted to parsing information and developing habits to support critical thinking. Calling the teaching of ubiquitous racial oppression “critical theory” almost sounds like they wanted to fool students that they were getting something useful and valuable.
The irony is that climate alarmist believe they are toughening up the youth and preparing them for reality. This is why Al Gore got the Nobel Prize for making “The Inconvenient Truth.” And Michael Mann feels the prize is rightly his for creating the false chart featured in the movie twice, once represented falsely as a temperature reconstruction from tree ring data and a second time as Dr. Thompson’s temperature reconstruction from ice core data. The move showed the charts together confirming each other apparently unaware they were the same chart. The error was apparently due to Thompson publishing Mann’s chart in one of his ice core papers.
There was no critical thinking in the making of the movie, not even by Thompson, who was its scientific consultant. Yet this movie influenced hundreds of millions, including many current climate scientists.
Trump has done us a service with his commentary on the hankering of “conservatives” for the politeness of yore. Remember when we grew up and everyone was more civil and no one got canceled?*
*except if you were gay, minority, female, transgender, librul, or a ferner.
Say what you will about the tenets of the traditional ways, they had an ethos and knew how to kill a mockingbird.
Interesting that Joshua presumes to speak for females of latter decades. My guess is he hasn’t a clue how they felt, keeping in mind we are talking about a collection of individuals here.
Jim –
I’m sure there was a lot of variability. But I’d guess there was a large percentage of women who felt that civility should be able to vote, own property, not be treated like property, etc.
I also think that there’s a general tendency that with nostalgia for the good old days, much of what wasn’t so great gets lost in the translation. I think the whole “kids today” line of reasoning has been around since there were kids. If we think about it as a model, then things have gotten progressively worse and worse for tens of thousands of years. Somehow I’m not sure that stands up to scrutiny.
Now, now Jim … you must remember that men can menstruate and get pregnant. If Joshua wants to be a woman, who are we to tell him he can’t be?
Willard …
> Say what you will about the tenets of the traditional ways, they had an ethos and knew how to kill a mockingbird.
Yes, I don’t really know how the old culture can keep up with the new creativity … expressed so well in descriptions of individuals like ‘minor attracted persons’.
Bill, yes, silly me. I forgot.
I would not mind calling Roy Moore a minor interested person. Just like I would not mind calling Matt Gaetz a commerce interested person. I would hesitate to say if teh Donald had more groping or grabbing interests.
There are few limits as to what a polite person can express.
Oh, you forgot Roman Polanski, Willard.
Not very … kind … of you to keep him out of the club. And it’s ‘minor attracted persons’. Don’t take away the tour de force of the left.
Well, Bill, you made me look:
http://theglobalpreventionproject.org/blog/2018/8/2/what-is-a-minor-attracted-person
As a token of appreciation, I will mention Dennis Hastert and Jim Jordan. Yes. Dennis Hastert. Jim Jordan. That is all.
Just because I am so polite.
Lol. That’s even worse than this from another blog:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/09/23/hey-whats-up-with-that-method-from-1998-that-was-going-to-cure-cancer-in-2-years/#comment-2085192
Europe’s failure to develop local fossil fuels is costing the poorest of the world. Why aren’t we hearing from the left-wing people who claim to want to save the world? Hypocrites.
Bills will be high, but Europe will survive the winter: It’s bought enough oil and gas to get through the heating seasons.
Much deeper costs will be borne by the world’s poorest countries, which have been shut out of the natural gas market by Europe’s suddenly ravenous demand. It’s left emerging market countries unable to meet today’s needs or tomorrow’s, and the most likely consequences — factory shutdowns, more frequent and longer-lasting power shortages, the foment of social unrest — could stretch into the next decade.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-08/eu-energy-crisis-sparked-by-ukraine-war-to-create-blackouts-in-poor-countries
If sea level rise were seen as a real problem, we would see developers build office buildings on higher ground in New York. They aren’t doing that. Also, we don’t see plans for a dike or any other adaptation. Sea level rise isn’t an issue.
OK, I did find this … they are doing a little bit …
As a way to prevent flooding, New York City, in partnership with the federal government, is reconstructing parks and communities from East 25th Street to Montgomery Street as part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project.
“Through science-based analysis, policy and program development, and capacity building, the city’s resiliency efforts are ensuring that New York City is ready to withstand and emerge stronger from the multiple impacts of climate change, including from more frequent hurricanes, higher sea levels, extreme precipitation and more extreme temperatures,” a City Hall spokesperson told ABC News.
The $1.45 billion project, which began in fall 2020 and is set to be completed by 2025, will create a 2.4-mile “flood protection system” consisting of floodwalls and floodgates, as well as elevate parts of the region by up to 9 feet, to keep the storm surge out of the neighborhood.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/york-city-preparing-expected-rising-sea-levels-climate/story?id=83032976
Jim … raising ‘grade’ in construction is done more often than you might imagine. In Manhattan, Park Avenue was created (raised) over the railroad tracks than still run beneath it (Metro-North Railroad). There’s actually an electrical substation about 110′ below Grand Central Station, where those tracks terminate. Seattle has a fairly extensive ‘underground city’.
Adaptations to the environment have always been done.
But what, asks the informed reader, is causing the “sea level rise?” Looks to be mostly subsidence. So, NYC isn’t threatened by fossil fuels, just a sinking feeling.
Highlights
• NY City relative sea-level rate of rise is -2.851 to -4.076 mm/yr.
• NY City GNSS subsidence is -2.151 to -3.076 mm/yr.
• NY City absolute sea level rate of rise is 0.7 to 1.0 mm/yr.
• NY City relative sea-level acceleration is about +0.008 mm/yr²
• This is consistent with other tide gauges of East Coast of North America
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468013320300474
Pingback: Victims of the Faux Climate ‘Crisis’. Part I: Children – Watts Up With That?
There’s a recent Quillette piece entitled ‘Sex and the Academy’.
According to ‘Big 5’ personality assessments, there are no unique personality characteristics between men and women, but rather spectral expressions which overlap in population statistics. Theoretically, spectral differences arose from evolution of roles, female spectra being shifted or skewed toward protecting and nurturing the young. This tends to explain the group average differences such as risk aversion, and as the piece points out, appetite for truth versus social equity.
Obviously, without nurturing of infants, there can be no thriving of adults and both spectra of traits are necessary. However, as the piece points out, the academy and the voting public are now, for the first times in human history, majority female. The group average traits ( not individual! ) mean that society is now more geared toward risk aversion and protecting infants than ever before.
There is a yin yang to this. Babies need protection, but young adults need challenge, growth and development. The tendency toward protecting infants would seem to be expressed in the increasing infantalization of young adults seeking ‘safe spaces’ and a ready delusion of extinction or other climate catastrophe that they need ‘protection from’, including other ideas they find threatening.
These secular trends would not seem to be reversible any time soon, but also not a good omen.
> This tends to explain the group average differences such as risk aversion, and as the piece points out, appetite for truth versus social equity.
One thing I just love about evolution is that you can invent Just-So stories to reverse engineer whichever conclusion you prefer.
Like that there’s some inherent opposition between truth and social equity.
Anyways, this all helps explains why as a society we were so much better off before women had the vote.
Josh, one point I hope you could acknowledge is that a lot of our sociology is hard wired from evolution. And since the world is changing due to technological evolution there is a pressure to adapt through social evolution. This must be kept in mind in all human endeavors.
I did not see where TE said we need to take away any rights from women. I did see that we need to look at what changes in the sociological dynamic were caused by our cultural changes. Are women on average better nurturers? If so, is it possible that men on average have any comparable natural adaptation skills? Is there any consequences for ignoring these questions versus asking them? I always try to stay open. You call it conspiracy ideation I think.
Ron *
I don’t doubt that there’s some “hard-wiring” from evolution. I also know that (1) the interpretation of what is or isn’t hard wired is extremely complex and very much vulnerable to the cognitive biases we all carry around and (2) past assessments of what was or wasn’t hard-wired has shown over time to be subjective and as a result considered wrong.
My rule of thumb is that anyone who comes up with an assessment about the casual mechanisms of evolution that fits nearly with their ideological world view (or even their priors), or that uses a theorized evolutionary mechanism to base a value judgement about the state of the world, should recognize there’s good reason to be highly circumspect when theorizing about the causal mechanisms of evolution.
Seems to me there’s a whole lotta armchair quarterbacking about the causality of evolutionary mechanisms going on that is highly suspect.
And evolution gives us good reasons to explain why it’s highly suspect.
😐
Joshua, I applaud your skepticism and weariness of natural biases on this issue. I share that concern — I just expand it to many more areas and call it critical thinking.
But I would be remiss to ignore identical twin studies that have demonstrated that nature and nurture are roughly 50/50 partners.
Ron –
> You call it conspiracy ideation I think.
I’d say that Just-So storification about evolution and conspiracy ideation can be kissin’ cousins. They both have the potential for people to connect dots and see logical patterns when really they’re linking things arbitrarily.
> But I would be remiss to ignore identical twin studies that have demonstrated that nature and nurture are roughly 50/50 partners
I’m surprised you’d say 50/50. I would have thought you’re more an 80/20 or 90/10 (nature/nurture) kinda guy. At any rate, while twin studies are useful they’re also far from conclusive, imo, and the whole distinction between nature and nurture seems pretty problematic to me, and xeodndkng on the context more academic than useful, and I’m not entirely clear how you’re connecting that to interpreting evolution anyway as deciding what is or isn’t hard-wired and how/why evolution did the wiring are kinda distinct issues.
In our insane age where people self censor even mentions of biological sex, analyses such as these may not be repeated:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/02/women-more-than-men-say-climate-change-will-harm-them-personally/
But this is consistent with protecting the children.
The problem is that protection from imaginary threats versus real threats is that they both invoke harmful anxiety and invoke other harms in cost and adverse consequences.
Maternal instinct is not just protecting existing children, but even suppressing harm to potential children?
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/women-not-having-kids-climate-change-concerns-135015534.html
This may be just an excuse, of course, fertility rates have been declining globally, probably because of wealth for many decades.
But it does raise all those troubling issues.
A civilization which ceases to reproduce, ceases.
“ Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
Arnold J. Toynbee
jim2 | November 8, 2022 at 7:49 am in moderation.
Pingback: Children – Watts Up With That? - Lead Right News
Eighty-five percent of Gen Z respondents say they’re worried about the future in general. The vast majority cite their personal finances, the economy, the environment, and the country’s increasingly polarized political landscape as top concerns.
Nearly 90 percent of Gen Z respondents believe their generation is not set up for success and 75 percent feel they are at a disadvantage in comparison to previous generations (like baby boomers or Gen X) who are at least 42 years-old in 2022. This latest poll portrays Gen Z as overwhelmingly cynical about the post-pandemic world and what role they may one day play in it.
1 in 5 young adults are seeing a therapist
https://studyfinds.org/gen-z-mental-health-condition/
If you look at the margins in past Presidential elections, you will find we have always been polarized. Gen Z, having not been educated adequately I presume, doesn’t know this. The media, however, pound on it every day.
Billionaires emit a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person: Oxfam
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/08/billionaires-emit-a-million-times-more-greenhouse-gases-than-the-average-person-oxfam.html
Pingback: Children – Watts Up With That? - News7g
Something jim2 said above got me to react.
Quote part ” 75 percent feel they are at a disadvantage in comparison to previous generations (like baby boomers or Gen X) ”
As a pre-boomer, as a child, my generation were always terrified with ‘Sin’ and the wrath of God. Even striving to improve your lot was sometimes seen or made to seem as sinful. A mixture of ‘greed’ and lust; so many variants.
At other earlier times it was witches and their ilk, satanic rites etc; who were always out to get you.
In the sixties it was nuclear war and the end of the world in a Hiroshima world wide conflagration. The hype was always world-wide, but then the danger was real.
Today its climate, even though the sixties fear is more real today too. The youngsters don’t seem to mind the latter much. Climate is more mysterious.
Mega –
Wait. Are you saying that kids having things to fear isn’t something new and thus attributable to “alarmists.”
Could you be suggesting that the causality behind the concerning signals of poorer mental health among younger people might be multi-factorial?
Nah. I’m not going with that.
I think at all costs we need to protect our kids from people who might try to coddle them.
And we need to make sure they’re fully aware at every turn of the existential threat posed by the “alarmists.”
Joshua,
I believe there are other issues too.
I recall reading, way back in time, research that hinted that a certain level of stress was required for a healthy life.
Also many of my generation had to strive for a better life. That gave us something to look forward to and to hope for in the future. Plus living under the ‘rule’ that ‘children are to be seen not heard’. Plus, at the time, wondering why some of the very rich of my age who had everything would end it all by suicide.
The next generation had it easier. In education, in financial support, better opportunities in work and jobs, in having ‘desireables’ my generation only dreamed of. Of course we pushed our kids to achieve more than what we ourselves could rarely hope for. With some that had a negative effect. Good degrees, even doctoral, but lacking the drive to make it work and enjoyable. Seems the more one gets with little effort, the less there is left for one to enjoy achieving.
This last generation has it all, seemingly, on a silver platter. As one parent said to another, ‘the more you give them, the more unhappy it gets’.
Then there is that social demon. My generation abhorred financial debt. Today the system is rigged to keep today’s youngsters in such debt they seemingly could never repay in a lifetime. But its the only way of life they know, yet an insidious source of anxiety. Makes life seem insurmountable; ‘climate’ makes a good scapegoat.
Those many who today are starving don’t give a hoot about ‘climate’ 50 years from now. They know its due to failed harvests (drought or floods!). That’s not something new.
This is the best article Ms Curry has ever written.
There are still too many long complex Ph.D. style sentences to say this is a masterpiece, but it is very good. Well done. “Saving the Earth for the children” BS is having the opposite effect — typical of leftists — they ruin everything they touch,
Cliff –
> typical of leftists — they ruin everything they touch,
Interesting reasoning.
Given that leff versus right is always relative to some extent…
I’d say that relative to the US, all of Scandinavia is pretty much “left” in balance. Would you agree?
If so, do you think that all of Scandinavia is “ruined.?”
Asking for a friend.
When talking about what is the left, we really should go back and see how the left has evolved since the mid 19th C. Originally it was about workers, mostly industrial workers. If you’re read any Marx, or Engels, you know that Historical Materialism purports the historical role of the workers against their capitalist oppressors in moving society forward for all people. Historical Materialism, the basis of Marxist thought, was touted as ‘scientific’ but was thoroughly debunked by, among others, Karl Popper as myth. Yet, the working class was the bedrock of Marxism for quite sometime. However, the Soviet and Chinese revolutions were mainly supported by rural, agricultural peasants. Meanwhile, the working class had experienced massive gains in standard of living. By the 1950s the working class started to lose it’s appeal to Marxists. And what are we referring to when we say Marxists? The intelligentsia which Marx had, smartly, left a role in Marxism as the group who would ‘help’ the workers realize their ‘historical role’. It would seem the workers had other plans. With that minor set back, the academic guardians of Marxism set about deconstructing Western culture in any way they could, mostly through the educational system, the place of their birth. They’ve been quite successful. Rarely is there talk of workers seizing the means of production anymore, as now the battlegrounds are values and mores. The openness of Western Society/Culture has allowed Marxism to be born and survive. The real question isn’t about Scandinavia or what is the left. The question is can those who espouse traditional Western values exist and thrive in a Marxist society … the way Marxism exists and thrives in the open societies of the West? The answer is no. If you want to argue that, be my guest.
So Bill – I can’t tell. Are you saying that everything “the left” touches they ruin?
Or not?
My friend still wants to know.
Hey, Joshua.
As a hippie Marxist, how would you call Robert A. McKee?
Please try not be too PC.
I’ve tried five attempts to answer you, Joshua. Maybe tomorrow when the site calms down.
They’ll prolly show up.
Scandanavia is often held up as a leftist paradise, something those living there don’t seem to agree with.
Denmark’s then prime minister, for example, explaining in 2015 “I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” and you’d think he’d know.
Sweden meanwhile has no national minimum wage and a ‘free schools’ voucher system. Sweden’s economy boomed after WWII. In 1950 Sweden was one of the richest countries in the world and at the time, the total tax burden was just 19 percent of GDP-- lower than in the United States. So The Social Democrats thought they had everything sorted, doubled public spending between 1960 and 1980 and raised taxes with the result that the growth rate halved, and the currency was devalued 5 times in the 1980s.
in 1990, a study showed that private enterprise had not created a single net job in Sweden since 1950, while the number of public sector employees had increased by a million.
Sweden’s politicians took note and in the 1990s, marginal tax rates were reduced; markets for finance, electricity, telecom, and media were deregulated; the central bank was made independent; the pension system was reformed partly with personal accounts; private providers in health care and elderly care were welcomed; and a school voucher system was introduced. Taxes were reduced substantially, from 52 to 44 percent of GDP, and taxes on gifts, inheritance, wealth, and housing were abolished.
Most recently of course, Sweden has had a bit of an immigration problem having recently become the shooting and bombing capital of Europe
“These criminal clans have a completely different culture that makes them very difficult to tackle…We need more police and our courts and prisons need to be reinforced to deal with this situation urgently. Otherwise we will turn into a gangster’s paradise.”
Not said by some “far right nutter” but by Erik Nord, Gothenburg’s chief of police.
All leading to gains from right wing parties in their 2022 election.
You can tell your friend this.
Good morning, Joshua.
If they all show up at once the blog will burst.
I’ll break it up into a couple of posts.
My answer was that I think your friend, and anyone who says they are on the left, should read up on Marxism. I don’t want my opinion to persuade anyone. They should form their own. Parlor games like is Scandinavia leftist are only interesting if the food served is good. Why would anyone say such a thing about Scandinavia? All of those countries are capitalist and have democratic forms of government. They have liberal, green, left and conservative parties. Ask your friend if N. Korea is left. Or, Venezuela. Cuba. How about China? Are there a diverse slate of political parties in those countries? China does have state controlled capitalism. But it is just that, state controlled, and its success depends on free capitalism in the rest of the world.
> no minimum wage
You forget to tell why, Andrew. Bill will like that one.
Also, the right-wing nuts in Sweden call themselves Democrats, and they are no Tea Party. They support the welfare state, mixed economies, minority rights, even sex reassignment.
But go on with your caricature of social democrats.
Willard … do you study accretion discs or something related to black holes? If so, I don’t doubt your intellectual abilities … in that field. However, your knowledge of political science and sociology is … seemingly not as good.
Let ask you a simple question. What is the basic difference between far right libertarianism and far left communism? Do they share anything in common? I’m not looking for a thesis, so I’ll give you maximum leeway for a short answer.
Bill –
Almost anyone I know on “the left” in the US considers the form of governments in Scandinavian as targets relative to what we have here. Prolly as target governments full stop. Prolly every single one. None of them consider something like China’s government aspirational. It’s like you think everyone on “the left” walks around with a copy of The Communist Manifesto in their back pocket.
The son of a friend of mine just got married to a woman whose going to school in Denmark and they moved there very recently. He got a job there. They’re going to have a baby. They both get one year paid leave.
Of course there are issues with comparison. Homogenous population and all of that. But having a robust social welfare state as a foundational feature of government, in return for relatively high taxes, is just one of the many features that I, and every single person on “the left” I can think of, consider as definitional for being of “the left.”
Contrary-wise, their views on issues like gender surgery are far, far less uniform. It’s almost like you want selectively pigeonhole “the left” by a convenient taxonomy of categorization so as to reinforce some kind of ideology-based antipathy. Although or course we know that couldn’t be true!
Strong unions. Functional public transit. Cheap education.. Those are the types of things that characterize what “leftists” I know care most about. They couldn’t care a rats a$$ about Carl.
But I still don’t see an answer to my friend’s question. Did I miss it?
You are too generous, Bill. A monkey with a keyboard could see through Andrew’s stunt. I did not have to, since I already know about collective bargaining.
According to the Popper ratio, you are 1:0 so far:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2019/08/03/the-popper-ratio/
To even it out, you would need to quote and cite Sir Karl’s refutation you mentioned.
As for having read Marx, I do not think you did. But then I do not think the Son of Lobster did either, at least that was obvious when, on stage and facing Zizek, he had to sift through his Manifesto for talking points.
Speaking of whom, did you know that 2022 is the year the Son of Lobster is rediscovering phenomenology? Not any flavour, the Heideggerian one. The one almost all Freedom Fighters fall for at some point for some reason. Not the most loving democrat, if we believe his young lover, Hannah Arendt. Or his letters to his bro for that matter.
Never forget that *libertaire* was a French word before Cryptonuts borrowed it.
All this to say that you should beware your wishes.
Karl also.
Homogeneous. Who’s.
What else?
Found more.
I should have said *most* of them couldn’t…
… give…
… a rat’s a$$
What’s funny is that you even seem to iindiicate that you think most people on “the left” are ignorant of Marx. So you decouple “the left” from Marx. Yet you want to saddle “the left” with a Karl-based burden. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that’s for rhetorical purposes than anything else.
Snarky evasion as usual, Willard. But don’t worry I’ll help you out.
The simple answer for a difference is individual agency vs collective agency. Marx said communism was … ‘the withering away of the state.’ So, these two utopian systems have that in common.
As said, those two systems are utopian. Back in reality, Marx’s socialism, which is an intermediary form on the way to communism, is a totalitarian state system. Examples today are N Korea and China, just to name two. Your (Joshua’s) laundry list of free education, etc that characterizes your definition of the left is provided by N Korea and China. You say Scandinavia provides the list, as well. Yet we have a bit of a problem, as Scandinavia has individual rights whereas China and N Korea do not. So the accurate term to use for Scandinavia is liberal, not left.
This brings us to your confusion, my poor boy. Being on the left doesn’t mean just your laundry list of goodies. It also means taking away your individual freedoms and your culture. But you may have been brainwashed to think that individual freedoms and culture is the enemy … or, you are a real leftist, not just a liberal with a romantic attracted to the left.
Don’t take it from me. Do yourself a favor and talk to someone who lived under a socialist system. You live in Britain? Take a short trip to Estonia.
Bill –
> Ask your friend if N. Korea is left. Or, Venezuela. Cuba. How about China?
The more I think about it, the more absurd a statement like that becomes. It reminds me of a while back when Jim said “the left” in this country thinks favorably of Iran, citing the nuclear energy agreements as proof, and you hat-tipped your approval.
It’s hard to know what to do with such a bizarre misconceptions about “the left” as I live it and know it. No doubt you will find similar misconceptions about “the right” on “the left.”
But I would hope that in conversation, you would hold off from assuming that I have those misconceptions until I say something to indicate that’s the case.
Meanwhile, what do you think I should do given that your concept of “the left” is so far removed from any aspect of my lived experience? Perhaps you could point me to any evidence that you have, that anything short of a tiny minority of people who consider themselves of “the left,” think even remotely aspirationally about NoKo, or the CCP? Cuba would obviously be a more nuanced discussion, but I’ll bet that you can’t substantiate that any significant % of “the left” consider Cuba’a form of government more goal-worthy than the governments of counties in Scandinavia.
Before you Google – do we have a bet?
Good, Bill. Very good.
It was about time that facade of yours fell down. But I did not expect you that you would so readily lecture me about stuff you obviously have not read. Perhaps by sociology you were referring to that deeply intimate connection you feel with your compatriots. Who knows, and who cares? The important thing is that you succeeded in repeating “Marx” a lot of times.
As all of Vlad’s coterie got their assets seized, you may ask yourself how “free” is your capital exactly. You may also try to compare China’s government size with those of the western democracies. As the clickbaiter would say, the numbers will SHOCK you!
The short of it is that liberty is not a brand, Bill. You do now own it. Nobody does. It has nothing to do with self-centeredness.
If Freedom Fighters ought to read Adam Smith as much as they pretend to have read Karl Marx, that’d be great.
Well, I can see we have to get even more basic.
No worries, I think this will help … clear your minds. Ready?
Your confusion stems from conflating ‘left of’ with being on ‘the left’.
Yes, I’m sure you see the horror of someone with your affluent expectations living in NK. So, you’re actually both more ignorant than I thought (which is hard to believe) as you don’t see the liberal tilt towards that horror. Nah, it’s just all about being ‘left of’ those evil, unkind conservatives.
Like I said, talk to someone in places like Estonia. Just across the water from that lovely Scandinavia. Maybe that will help you to see what’s waiting at the end of your tilt … the yawning rows of teeth of that shark.
Or read Chris Hitchens. It’s probably more climate friendly.
There is nothing very basic about the idea that the Ls want our freedom and our culture, Bill. Every single populist politician with fascist tendencies tried that line. What you present as yours is a meme that rubbed on you. Perhaps your Pinochet sympathies?
In any event, not something a True Individual ought to be proud of.
I live in a worst socialist hell than you can imagine, BTW. I am Canadian.
Bill –
> Your confusion stems from conflating ‘left of’ with being on ‘the left’.
When I’m talking about “the left” I’m talking about people. Not some abstracted concept you’re carrying around in your head.
Let’s go back to what stated this – where what Cliff said is that everything leftists touch goes to ruin.
People touch things. Abstracted concept don’t touch things.
You referenced what people believed. You wanted me to queery “the left.”. One queeries people. You can’t queery abstract concepts.
Again, I ask you for an answer.
Maybe I missed it but I still haven’t seen it.
Do you agree that evething “leftists” touch- as “the left” comprised by people who touch things – they ruin? As in Scandinavia?
Seems like you’re making this question much harder to answer than it should be.
In fact, go back to Cliffs comment. He actually didn’t even use “the left.”
He talks of “leftists.”. Thaf be people, Bill.
Ahh, living under the son of Castro, ehh? Now I know why I didn’t get a thank you. No worries, I’ll continue to keep an eye on you, now that you’re that much closer, as you know I’m ready to help you see the light.
Enjoy your day!
Bill –
When you come back, maybe you’ll answer the question which prompted your entry into this discussion to begin with.
Speaking of politeness, I don’t think it’s particularly polite to continues on in a discussion where you’ve repeatedly been asked a question but never answered.
Nice slap shot, Bill. Top shelf!
Did you know that the Congress for Cultural Freedom played a role in the Cuban Revolution? Here is some breadcrumbs:
https://newrepublic.com/article/136622/congress-cultural-freedoms-ultimate-failure
Culture. Freedom, You ought to know.
Joshua ,,,
> So Bill – I can’t tell. Are you saying that everything “the left” touches they ruin?
It depends if we’re speaking of ‘the left’ or ‘left of’? Scandinavia was your original example. I call them ‘left of’. They still have a robust, free society. There is no ‘ruin’ in the sense of the demise we see in NK, Venezuela, Cuba … and even China with regard to freedoms. Those countries are ‘the left’.
We can argue from our respective camps of the pluses and minuses of being left or right … of center. Or, of each other. But implicit in that discussion/argument/debate is that we can actually engage in that. Blue team, red team, whatever … the point is the game is allowed. Scandinavia still allows the game, even though one may say they are ‘left of’. They haven’t moved anywhere near to the countries sited above, who are clearly ‘the left’.
So, yes I think ‘the left’ ruins everything it touches. And … no, I don’t think Scandinavia is ruined because it is only ‘left of’. If you think my distinction is without merit, I would only ask that you try and see the implications. You, I and Willard share many views on freedom and what a free society entails. Sometimes I think the disagreements of ‘left of’ and ‘right of’ are only the means.
And your appeal to politeness is welcomed … as politeness is often the first expression of kindness to strangers.
Bill –
> It depends…
It depends….
Cliff’s statement is basically meaningless without a definition of “leftists.” Without a definition, his statement is just an expression of identity-based antipathy.
But let’s look for clues, shall we?
> “Saving the Earth for the children”
“Saving the Earth” is the characteristic of his “leftists. So that would mean pretty much all Dems in this country, most of Western Europe, pretty much all of Scandinavia. Not much in China. Much much in Cuba. Maybe no one in Noko.
But his apparent working definition wasn’t what fit with YOUR identity-based antipathy, so you grabbed the Karl-shaped ball and ran with it
> if we’re speaking of ‘the left’ or ‘left of’? Scandinavia was your original example. I call them ‘left of’.
lol. Yeah. Left of. Left of center. Way left of you. That makes them “the left.” It makes them “leftists.”
> They still have a robust, free society.
So you arbitrarily decide that “the left” is incompatible with a robust, free society. Which of course is different than Cliff’s working definition that started all of this. Which excludes basically the entire left in Scandinavia. Which excludes the entire left in Western Europe, and the US…
How about China? Is China “the left?” Or is China authoritarian? Or is China Asian? Or is China Chinese? Is it only one and not the others?
> There is no ‘ruin’ in the sense of the demise we see in NK, Venezuela, Cuba … and even China with regard to freedoms. Those countries are ‘the left’.
So you pick one characteristic (say authoritarianism) of those countries which are vastly different along many dimensions, and decide that one characteristic defines them all, and that’s “the left,” and then use that to describe people all over the world that don’t even share that characteristic, like people who live in the US or Western Europe or Scandinavia who express concern about climate change.
> We can argue from our respective camps of the pluses and minuses of being left or right … of center. Or, of each other. But implicit in that discussion/argument/debate is that we can actually engage in that. Blue team, red team, whatever … the point is the game is allowed. Scandinavia still allows the game, even though one may say they are ‘left of’. They haven’t moved anywhere near to the countries sited above, who are clearly ‘the left’.
Here again, we have your circularity. “The left” is whatever you say it is. And your proof is that you’ve decided that “the left” isn’t anything else. So “the left,” which is widely used to describe millions of millions of people in the US and Europe and Scandinavia, who would ordinarily be called “leftists” – well, they don’t fit your oddly circumscribed yet enormously large and highly inconsistent definition.
Reminds me of this:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12608-when-i-use-a-word-humpty-dumpty-said-in-rather
> So, yes I think ‘the left’ ruins everything it touches. And … no, I don’t think Scandinavia is ruined because it is only ‘left of’.
On the political spectrum, Scandinavia is left of center. Clearly. So you can twist words into pretzels if you want, to exclude Scandinavia from those “leftists” who ruin everything they touch. If that works for you, go for it. but…
> If you think my distinction is without merit,
Yeah, sorry Bill but I have to say I do.
> I would only ask that you try and see the implications. You, I and Willard share many views on freedom and what a free society entails. Sometimes I think the disagreements of ‘left of’ and ‘right of’ are only the means.
I don’t know what you’re saying. “Only the means” for what?
> But his apparent working definition wasn’t what fit with YOUR identity-based antipathy, so you grabbed the Karl-shaped ball and ran with it
Marx’s works comprise the definition of ‘the left’. That sets one of the parameters of our discussion. If you’d like to give an example of the other parameter, the right, be my guest.
> The more I think about it, the more absurd a statement like that becomes. It reminds me of a while back when Jim said “the left” in this country thinks favorably of Iran, citing the nuclear energy agreements as proof, and you hat-tipped your approval.
It’s hard to know what to do with such a bizarre misconceptions about “the left” as I live it and know it. No doubt you will find similar misconceptions about “the right” on “the left.”
But I would hope that in conversation, you would hold off from assuming that I have those misconceptions until I say something to indicate that’s the case.
Meanwhile, what do you think I should do given that your concept of “the left” is so far removed from any aspect of my lived experience?
My answer: If you can’t accept Marxism and the countries that are examples of it, then I would have to say that ‘the left’ as you live it and know it is based on ‘left of’ rather than what the left is. My using Marx isn’t my invention to define ‘the left’. That’s what is academically accepted … universally. If you dispute that then I suggest you refute why Marxism is not the definition of ‘the left’. If you’re successful, then I’ll agree, and you will have overturned more than a century of academic thought.
However, if you accept that Marxism is ‘the left’ … then I suggest in order to move the discussion forward you/we define ‘the right’. This will allow us to then place your lived experience in a context of left-right. This is assuming that you wish to know how your lived experiences are perceived by others.
I gave a quick extreme left-right parameter set when I spoke about communism and libertarianism. To my knowledge, I didn’t make a value judgement with my comment. It came down to individual agency vs collective agency. Both were deemed stateless, in the sense that we know it.
So, if you accept those very loose but specific parameters, then I suggest you place socialism, liberalism and conservatism on our spectrum, and any others if you wish.. Once you do that, you may find your lived experience in relation to the members of that set.
If your purpose is to deconstruct the terms left-right, for whatever reason, then you can remain comfortable in your statements. But … it will be up to you to provide a platform for discussion with those who view your experiences as different than you. Deconstruction is easy, construction is hard.
So, where would you like to go?
Joshua …
If your ‘lived experience’ doesn’t have a place, in your view, in my set of isms we will indeed have a problem with our communication. My set of isms comes from my ‘lived experience’. If each of us stands on our own ‘lived experience’ without attempts at explanation beyond that all ‘lived experiences’ should just be accepted, then I would caution that there may be times when ‘lived experiences’ come into conflict. Conflict can be very unpleasant for one or both parties.
Brittany Griner, I’ll assume, had a ‘lived experience’ where vaping marijuana after a basketball game to help her de-stress mentally and physically, that didn’t come into conflict with her life in the USA. I also assume, the poor woman didn’t give it much thought about others ‘lived experiences’ in Russia where she would come into conflict and she would lose her freedom.
I see Judith’s thread here about how those with a ‘lived experience’ that our climate is heading towards a cataclysm as coming into conflict with their activities affecting the lives of others in a negative way … this thread with children. If we choose to live in a society it is incumbent on us to not only have shared means of communication, but to understand how our views are perceived, even to the point of it being perceived as cataclysmic to others. Deconstruction of cultural norms may have benefits, but not if deconstruction becomes the norm. Living in own ‘lived experience’ without regard of other ‘lived experiences’ may be pleasant for a time. Until someone closes the metal door …
Bill –
I think we’re going in circles here, but I’lll give it a shot:
> Marx’s works comprise the definition of ‘the left’. That sets one of the parameters of our discussion. If you’d like to give an example of the other parameter, the right, be my guest.
What I’m saying is that Marx is particularly relevant as one measure among a group of measures to say what is or isn’t “the left,” or more to the point, because it goes back to what Cliff introduced – it’s one measure of what is true or isn’t true of some “leftists” but not others.
Other parameters? Well, again, going back to Cliff’s comment which started all of this – people who say we should focus on saving the children from climate change. That would reference millions and millions of “leftists,” a large % of whom likely have pretty much no clue whatsoever about Marxism. And it likely wouldn’t include many “leftists” at all in China, NoKo, etc. I’ve already said all of that. Are you ignoring it? Is it just that you think it’s not relevant?
> My answer: If you can’t accept Marxism and the countries that are examples of it,
Again, Marxism is relevant to China. So are many other features. Primarily among them, authoritarianism. But capitalism is also a relevant aspect of China. It’s pretty hard to be described by one parameter only, the parameter of Marxist, and then also to be capitalist.
Again, it seems to me that your laser focus on Marxism as equaling “the left,” or even more to the point of Cliff’s comment, in and of itself defining “leftists,” leaves a lot to be desired. I’m not saying that Marxism is irrelevant to “the left” or to “leftist,” just that Marxism isn’t sufficient to define “the left” or “leftists.”
Thus, to say that “everything leftists touch goes to ruin” wouldn’t be the same as saying “everything Marxism touches goes to ruin,” even assuming that we could prove that everying Marxism touches does go to ruing.
> then I would have to say that ‘the left’ as you live it and know it is based on ‘left of’ rather than what the left is.
Right. I get that’s what you’re saying. And I’m saying that doesn’t add up for me. Because “the left” ore more importantly “leftists” is not the same as Marxism or Marxists, even if there obvious overlap in some ways (but not others).
> My using Marx isn’t my invention to define ‘the left’. That’s what is academically accepted … universally.
It’s a great appeal to authority. And I’m not going to argue whether or not it’s true. But assuming it is true, I’m saying (1) it’s not sufficient, in and of itself, to describe “the left,” and even more to the point and more emphatically, “Marxism” certainly does not suffice to describe “leftist.” and even more to the point, it doesn’t suffice as a stand-in for Cliff’s statement which by it’s very nature defines “leftists” as those who say that we should save the children from climate change (and thereby ruing everything they touch).
> If you dispute that then I suggest you refute why Marxism is not the definition of ‘the left’.
I’ve already done that!!!!
> If you’re successful, then I’ll agree, and you will have overturned more than a century of academic thought.
I’ll take your word for that.
> However, if you accept that Marxism is ‘the left’ …
Nope. It’s an element, particular in some contexts, particularly for some people. But no, I don’t accept hat “Marxism is ‘the left,” let alone accepting that Marxism is leftists, who say that “we must save the children from climate changel.”
> then I suggest in order to move the discussion forward you/we define ‘the right’.
This has already been incredibly long and complex. And now you want me to define “the right” (let alone “righties) in the comments section of this blog?!?!?!?!?!
I don’t want to be rude, but I’m not sure it’s worth either of our time for me to go on responding to the rest of your comment ad I find myself repeating what I’ve already said because I don’t think that any of it has been addressed.
> So, where would you like to go?
I don’t think I can go any further unless I get a sense you’ve actually responded to what I’ve already said. I don’t want to be rude – I’m sure that you fully believe that you have been responsive. But I just can’t see it. It seems to me that you’re just argued past pretty much everything I’ve said. I can imagine you feel the same way about my responses – so it’s prolly best we just leave it here.
“Imagine there is a fire in your house” .. 2016, Salamon
Not the words of Greta, but those of Margaret Klein Salamon. Phd psychologist..
founder of the Climate Mobilisation project, declaring a Climate Emergency, to put USA on war time footing, (emergency powers) to tackle climate change.. her writing show she is as fearful as the most extreme XR activist.. and she was instrumental in knocking XR into shape un early 2018, and was responsible for USA efforts..
She also, got Getty on board, as the money, to set up the Climate Energency Fund… Salamons success, brought in the big donors, to enable activists, the time and money, to ‘protest’ etc.
Rich children of long dead billionaires, fund the money, for activists to spend. Gives them a sense of purpose..
Thank you Dr. Curry; a voice of reason in the wilderness, which we must continue to echo …
Funny how psychiatrists and psychologists see it as their duty to induce intergenerational trauma in children.
Given the lack of hard, truly scientific, evidence that fossil fuels use will lead to a catastrophe, then all you have left is emotional manipulation.
Jim, Jim,
Evidence is in the past. Asking for evidence for the future only works on a blog. For more on the idea:
https://tinyurl.com/But-Evidence
There are of course major extinctions that involve the carbon cycle in some way. But to determine their causes is speculative and we were not there anyway. Some might add the Anthropocene extinction. Between you and me, that one is a bleeding heart fancy. We Real Men do the counting. Not metrosexual hipsters. That we wiped species at a bigger speed than ever before only counts as a level bonus.
Where were we? Ah, yes. Spychology. Who needs that when we can Always Be Closing?
But Greta! But Polar Bears! But Gaia! But our children’s future! But Save the Environment! But Sea Level Rise! But oysters! But fish! But …
Sporting good form, Jim:
https://tinyurl.com/But-Scapegoat
You know how I deal with galops. One at a time.
It warms the cockles of my heart to see someone doing something he/she/it/they/them/her loves. You seem to love the arguments, the back-and-forth, I guess what you call “climate ball”, more even than the subject of the argument. Pass the ball, Willard!
Thanks, Jim.
If you like my work, please consider donating to Clowns Without Border:
https://clownswithoutborders.org/
It is about time we repair the democratic norms Newt helped destroy, don’t you think?
Were it so simple, Willard.
Fair. We should not wait until dictators self-destruct. This may imply a better brand of populism:
https://diamond-democracy.stanford.edu/speaking/speeches/when-does-populism-become-threat-democracy
Mobbing scientists and kids and hippies might need to stop at some point,
Hi Willy,
Reread your four conditions of populism after reading this:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/energy-crisis-chips-away-europes-industrial-might-2022-11-02/
Nothing creates more “inequality” between elites and the governed than tripling the price of heat, doubling the price of everything else, and then making them unemployed.
That is climate policy in action.
And it will be hard for leaders to pivot back to sanity when the kids all think they’re about to die and are gluing themselves to roads and museums in order to draw attention to even sillier ideas.
I hope you are not still under the impression that nuclear power plants feed industries, Jefforino. For that would be even sillier than to punch underaged hippies.
You might like:
https://www.weforum.org/platforms/centre-for-nature-and-climate/articles/europe-heat-twice-global-warming-average-increase
If you only are using Euros as faire-valoir for the eternal Fight for Freedom, you might not.
Do continue to punch underaged hippies. It only makes them stronger.
Even Greta is bright enough to realize that closing nuclear power plants in order to burn Russian gas was not a “climate” policy.
EU will have to own its failures after spending billions. Protests against inflation and energy shortages will be a real problem- will climate activists be any use in solving this or will they remain in la-la land?
Looks like voters like the way DeSantis handled the COVID pandemic.
Unfortunately voters in other states liked how their governors messed up the handling of covid
I am from Michigan, I think it would be a mistake to view Whitmer’s win as an endorsement of her covid policies. Her opponent (Dixon) was an extremely weak candidate, and she ran a non-existent campaign. Many commercials attacking the R candidate and few for the R candidate. It confused me because I thought Whitmer was vulnerable, in part because of covid policies. I think someone smarter than me decided Dixon couldn’t win.
Dixon mopped the floor with Witmer in their debate. It gave her a poll surge but I think many independents had likely already voted.
Ron –
> but I think many independents had likely already voted.
That is really first class excuse-making! Do you think there were some 500k independent voters who voted early and would have changed their minds had they seen the debate?
Mention of offspring has produced the expected addition of stronger emotions and stronger beliefs in the comments here, including mine.
Some folk have gone a little overboard in expressing what they believe are problems and cures. I’ll add to that with a summary suggesting that the large, overarching problem is a surfeit of people trying tell other people how to conduct their lives.
If teaching was restricted to unemotional fact, sticking to a selection of approved, vetted textbooks, ones that were strong on observation and measurement and formal science, for example, and low on make-believe and wishful thinking, a real chance of better outcome would arise.
Here in Oz where my grandchildren are schooled, there is real harm being done by ad-libbing, undereducated female teachers in pre-school. They outnumber males by about 99:1. Source –
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-universities/2022/10/take-your-xy-chromosomes-and-begone/
Geoff S
Children around the ages of 8 to 14 years old, developmentally are keenly exploring the world, seeking their own identities all the while separating themselves from parents while connecting with peers. Greta Thunberg was such a child, and having Aspergers Syndrome and its propensity to become preoccupied by restricted interests, has been viewed by the climate catastrophe media as being tormented, a child embroiled in anger by the vision of catastrophic climate change. She is now 18 yo, and although still pre-occupied with climate change has now removed herself from the public glare by not attending COP27, declaring at least symbolically that the forum is not effective and possibly, is just down right not relevant.
Developmentally, most adolescents transition from an earlier age where they are grasping onto earth shattering themes like climate change, then, as they mature, seem to move onto adult themes in their lives including preparation for their own future and their role in it.
For adults, influencing children by hoping to capitalize upon narratives of future catastrophic, these adults seem to have forgotten that children do move on, indeed, rapidly leaving many adults stuck with their own exigency and growing irrelevance.
We will end up being the victims of the “climate crisis.” But not in the way you think. We will be made poorer, less secure, and less prosperous by the alleged climate “fixes.” Here is one of them …
The European Union is set Thursday to propose emissions rules for the continent’s last generation of combustion engines, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg News.
The trading bloc is expected to announce regulations governing the so-called Euro 7 engines, powering the final wave of petrol and diesel cars that’ll hit the market before they’re effectively banned by new emissions rules in 2035. The new framework will tighten restrictions for pollutants including carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides from 2025.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-09/eu-to-propose-rules-for-last-generation-of-combustion-engines?srnd=green
jim2 | November 10, 2022 at 6:51 am landed in moderation.
Bloomberg is sounding the alarm about how “climate change” contributed to the current November tropical storm. November tropical storms and hurricanes are not unusual. In fact, this one is pretty benign.
Tropical Storm Nicole Is Getting a Boost From Climate Change
Rare for storms to approach from the east this time of year
‘So many things are going haywire right now’: Masters
But …
Just as the leaves change color and the holiday season trickles onto the calendar, it`s difficult to imagine a tropical system forming. However, November is the last month of the Atlantic basin season, and although less busy, the year’s 11th month can produce tropical systems.
https://www.weatherbug.com/news/Hurricanes-Are-Still-Possible-in-November
and …
The Yankee hurricane of 1935 was a rare Category 2 hurricane that affected the Bahamas and South Florida in November. The sixth tropical cyclone and fifth hurricane of the 1935 Atlantic hurricane season, it developed 227 miles (365 km) east of Bermuda. It strengthened to a hurricane on November 1, initially posing a threat to the Carolinas. Subsequently, the cyclone turned southwest. It attained its peak intensity on November 3, and it made landfall near Miami Beach on November 4. The hurricane’s unusual approach toward Florida and late arrival earned it the nickname of the Yankee Hurricane.[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Yankee_hurricane
Keep a lookout for fact-free hand-wringing by the climate doomers on this latest tropical storm. Their pronouncements won’t invoke science on this because it is non-existent. And it won’t supply the context of past November storms. It will however yank at the emotions of those ignorant of both the science and the facts.
“Shortly, the public will be unable to reason or think for themselves. They’ll only be able to parrot the information they’ve been given on the previous night’s news.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Shortly is now. With a non existent unbiased press, the airwaves are filled with unchallenged falsehoods.
“Gas was $5 a gallon when I came into office.”
“Real wages have gone up under my administration “
“I reduced the debt by half.”
“Under Biden’s leadership, Social Security recipients received the largest increase in 40 years.”
“Social Security and Medicare don’t add to the deficit.”
“The Trump tax cuts caused these huge deficits”
“This is Putin’s inflation”
“ The “average federal income tax” paid by the richest Americans is 8%”
I’ve been watching this issue a bit. Since Trump came on the scene I’ve been wondering whether he’s really more of a liar than we’ve ever seen before, or just more open about lying (never really pretending he isn’t lying). I mean clearly presidents lied in the past – sometimes about more consequential issues than Trump’s constant lying, like lies about Vietnam.
Sources like CNN were very focused on Trump’s constant lying. And I fully expect sources like CNN to be less obsessed with Biden’s lying. And not to excuse Biden’s lying, but during Trump’s four years in office I don’t remember seeing a place like Fox News running anything like this:
:https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/05/politics/fact-check-biden-midterms-2022/index.html
Or this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/biden-fact-checker-100-days/
Or this:
Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel https://nyti.ms/3Mj0qyh
So that’s not to say those sourses place equal or even proportional weight in covering Biden’s lies as they did Trump’s lies.
But on the other hand, it is interesting to watch people who ignored Trump’s lying or made excuses for it, yet who were very concerned about Obama’s lying (remember “YOU LIE”?) and who are very concerned about Biden’s lying.
Now of course we can see that Trump supporters are very focused on Biden’s lies even though they ig ired or made excuses for Trump’s lies.
And we should fully expect that Biden supporters would be equally inclined to ignore Biden’s lies even as they are very focused on Trump’s lies.
The theory of motivated reasoning indicates that these kind of cognitive biases are not doled out disproportionately across ideological divides, as they are a function of basic human cognition and human psychology and should manifest more or less equally in all groups (even if there might be some individual differences, maybe).
And consistent with the theory, we certainly see folks claiming that the biases are more heavily manifest in “other” groups than they are in the groups they themselves identify with.
Well, you make the call.
Now consider this:
At Climate Etc., we have a lot of people who are very strongly ideologically aligned (along a few axes), and who align very strongly among an identity-based dimension, who constantly make the argument that cognitive biases (and lying, of course) are disproportionately prevalent in groups that they don’t identify with, and far less prevalent in the groups with which they do identify.
Hmmm. Interesting.
When I see or read a discussion about some subject I remember 2 things I learned long ago. First, a Time Magazine observation that everyone has his hustle. Second, I was told in the Army to read, write, speak and listen with precision.
Consequently, I want to know what is being said and whether it’s accurate. At times though there can be many interpretations of the communication.
As an example, we often hear about “average income”. But what does that involve? Mean and median income can be significantly different, more so now than 60 years ago because of income inequality. Family and household income, likewise, can be quite different because of demographic factors. Hourly wages don’t necessarily translate well into weekly wages because the BLS uses ~35 hours for an average workweek. The Census Bureau uses market and aggregate income. Any comparison of today’s income and those of 70 years ago are complicated by the fact that fringe benefits were almost non existent back then. Real and nominal income can paint two different pictures when making long term comparisons.
Median income for a single, black, female household is $27,000. Mean income for a two income Asian family is $187,000. The rest of us are in between.
So, when I hear the use of the term “average income” it’s almost meaningless unless I know the precise use of the word. This is one factor in trying to know if someone is lying. What are they saying and what facts are available to back them
Bernie Sanders said during the 2016 campaign that corporations in 1953 paid 30% of total tax revenue but they currently paid only 10%. I looked it up. He was correct.
But he didn’t tell the whole story. In 1953 the Social Security tax on corporations was a fraction of what it is today. Also, up until 1986 individuals who were covered by sub chapter S had their incomes counted in the corporations tally of IRS reports. After that, they were counted in the individual income tax column. Consequently, if you make adjustments for the these 2 differences, corporations pay close to the percentage they paid in 1953. I attribute this “lie” to an inexperienced staffer who probably didn’t know they were comparing apples and oranges.
What Hillary said about income inequality during the 2016 campaign can’t be passed off to an error by a staffer. She said that when George Bush cut taxes income inequality exploded. Her words. Actually, from 1992 to 2000 incomes of millionaires went from $176 billion to $817 billion. Under Bush the increase went from $817 billion to $1.07 trillion.
That fact could easily have been looked up. That was deliberate misinformation.
If I wasn’t retired I wouldn’t have time to research what the facts are and would just accept what millions of others accept without so much as a second thought.
Joshie as usual ignores the main point and writes voluminously while believing misinformation. The media is now getting ready to throw Biden under the bus and is starting to fact check his obvious lies. Biden has always been a small petty lying venal politician. Recall that his previous presidential runs were ruined by his constant plagiarism and lying. Recall his repeating a speech from Neil Kinnock complete with lies about his past.
The main point here is that the 2020 election was really rigged by a propagandistic media that actively covered up Biden’s constant lying and corruption and lied about Trump. Recall the “fine people on both sides” lie that misrepresented what Trump said. Biden announced his run for president based on that lie. Recall the “Hunter’s laptop has all the signs of Russian disinformation” lie by over 50 former intelligence officials that was trumpeted in the media and used to censor the New York Post’s completely accurate reporting on social media?
And don’t forget that we now know that the FBI was coordinating the Hunter laptop lies. They had the laptop itself and it appears to have been placed in a black hole.
Hillary is probably wrong about tax cuts. The iron law of supply and demand is mostly to blame for income inequality in the US.
In the 1920’s Congress severely limited immigration. During the Gilded Age, when there was unrestricted immigration, real wages fell consistently and prices fell also due to the industrial revolution. From 1930 to 1970, unionization became the norm in America and real wages grew. With the return of mass immigration thanks to Kennedy and Simpson, Unions started to collapse and real wages started to decrease.
Trump’s 4 years actually saw real wages increase perhaps due to Trump’s crackdown on immigration, both legal and illegal. Under Biden (5 + million illegals), real wages are falling again. These 5 million illegals can’t be hired legally, but Biden isn’t enforcing that either. They therefore are willing to work for a pittance, often for cash. When any market is flooded with supply, prices drop rapidly.
“The iron law of supply and demand is mostly to blame for income inequality in the US.”
Nope. Social changes- particularly marriage patterns.
Middle class folks are still getting married (lower even less than before), they’re getting married later (bringing wealth to the union), they’re increasingly dual income, they’re having children later, and they’re marrying their own socio-economic status.
A blue collar single parent – and their numbers are growing – will never, ever “catch up” economically to two-parent, white collar families with dual incomes. And, let’s face it, that’s the inequality that matters. Nobody cares that Mark Zuckerberg and Brad Pitt are rich, they care about how they’re doing compared to the folks in their office.
And it’s going to get worse. Those dual-income families live in good school districts or pay for private schools. Their kids graduate high school 2-3 years academically ahead of city kids. They will graduate college, the others won’t.
The later marriage and dual incomes means two retirement savings funds, two significant social security checks.
If you think the inequality is bad now between the married lawyer with kids and her unmarried legal secretary with kids, wait til they are both in their 70s.
Josh seems to be flooding the post … but don’t let it make you miss this …
https://judithcurry.com/2022/11/07/victims-of-the-faux-climate-crisis-part-i-children/#comment-982209
Jim –
> Josh seems to be flooding the post … but don’t let it make you miss this …
Indeed – as of this comment I have one more post in this thread then you.
jim2 | November 10, 2022 at 9:17 am landed in moderation
Today, adult and young climate focused folks absorb only one-sided news. They lack a readily visible source of sensible and factual reporting on climate change. The UN IPCC is political in purpose and serves policy makers, and their reporting is not informative for the general public. With predominance of this less than transparent information source we find ourselves overwhelmed with with select climate emergency shouts and doomsday-for-the-planet shrillness.
We should create a website of Climate Manifest, with lots of plain graphs, solid references and explanations that an average person can understand and be educated from. Sort of following a ‘Climate for Dummies’ book layout. I think we must start with a spread of climate drivers. Such like Gavin Schmidt and Kiehl/Trenberth had defined, the triad of water vapor, clouds and aerosols, being 50 to 70% of all greenhouse gases. We must tell about their sparsely researched interaction and their magnitude of influencing climate . Then, on to other greenhouse gases, including the minor percentage of anthropogenic CO2 vs. total CO2. Add a graph of CO2 levels being led by temperature, not the other way around. Cover the big unknowns of solar variance, multi-decadal oscillations and volcanic eruption effects. Discuss blame of global warming on anthropogenic CO2 as primary (often as only) climate driver – show the numbers. Then give us the spreadsheet of NOAA’s worldwide averaged sea level rise prediction from tidal gages, being about 8 inches per century – 8 inches, not feet. Address the probabilities of tipping scenarios, which feed the scary stories, etc., etc.
A real life scenario could be painted under all-electric mandates of a truck delivering strawberries from, say, Fresno CA to Buffalo NY. A tractor which must lug a huge, heavy battery; stops at intervals of electrical umbilical truck stops for re-charges. How many stops needed? How many wasted waiting hours at such facilities – they need their own substation for satisfying peak power demands. I wonder – is there enough space to found where the monstrous battery would reside on a tractor? How long would the trip last – are the strawberries turning brown? What is the cost per mile, compared to a diesel powered rig? What about feasibility of deliveries under drastic cold conditions where battery range is minimal? Such inquiries and examples would give insights into the consequences of carrying out Net Zero and end-of-fossil fuel mandates.
We need a climate veritas website as a source to objectively round out the climate picture for the average citizen. And we must give the children back their innocence, not a climate alarm nightmare lullaby.
Dietrich, your truck battery and charging problem gives me the idea of perhaps having sections on the interstate that have truck lanes in which there is an electrified wire at high elevation above that lane with hangers, similar to a ski lift’s, that the electric trucks could mate with on the fly, like in-air militarily refueling. Once engaged these lines could also take control of the truck’s computer to keep it on course and spaced properly in traffic. Eventually all electric vehicles could be equipped to gain a recharge on the fly in this manner, eliminating the necessity for large, heavy, expensive batteries. I am checking patents now.
Research has found that not only does brain development of adolescents take longer than was once thought but also those in that age group are not as well equipped cognitively to dealing with stressors and complex decision making as those who mature into adulthood. They can be more vulnerable up to the mid 20s to the messaging that is pervasive today.
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/full/10.12968/bjon.2021.30.5.272
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/
The “insurance” costs way more than the problem – in all likelihood. Ridiculous.
When it comes to Europe, the cost of switching to clean energy by 2050 will be $5.3 trillion, according to a new report from low-carbon research specialist BloombergNEF (BNEF). Its European Energy Transition Outlook 2022 models two clean energy pathways out of Europe’s current energy crisis.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/bnef-european-energy-transition-2022/
Looks like it’s my day in the moderation barrel.
“ Actor who played Dwight on ‘The Office’ changes name to protest climate change”
Not only has he changed his name but perhaps this 56 year old actor is now identifying as a 16 year old adolescent. But then it’s better than throwing tomato soup on a priceless work of art.
https://katu.com/news/offbeat/actor-who-played-dwight-in-the-office-changes-name-to-protest-climate-change-schrute-rainn-wilson-rainnfall-heat-wave-extreme-winter-arctic-basecamp
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Readers will recall that the claim that one third of the country was under water immediately set off my BS detector, and I did a full analysis here, totally debunking it.
But just a couple of days after my piece, the BBC’s More or Less radio programme also looked at the claim, after some viewers had complained:
image
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001brmm
They interviewed an environmental scientist who checked out what the various satellite records indicated. His conclusion was that the true figure was that about 10% of the country had been affected by floods, and much of this was short term.
In fact, all the BBC had to do was what I did in a few minutes, and check what NASA were reporting:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/11/13/bbc-admit-their-pakistan-floods-claim-was-false/
Well spotted!
So it should be 70 districts having declared a state of emergency over 160.
That is 44% of the districts, right?
And … so what?
I thought you were interested in the truth, Jim. According to your own source, the figure reported by the media is the one I just told you. Not a lot of people know that 44% figure.
You and Paul forgot to listen up to that part, it seems.
Also, you seem to be suggesting that the districts that called for a state of emergency during a very big flood did not do so because of the flood. Do you know why they did so?
Another question you should ask yourself is – how much area can be flooded in Pakistan? If you are interested in establishing truth claims, that is. If all you intended is a silly gotcha, do continue,
“State of Emergency” Flooding
District land area
I expect better from you, Willard.
My comment symbols got eaten.
“State of Emergency” != Flooding
District != land area
You should ask yourself the same sort of questions, Willard. Smoke and Mirrors man, you are.
I already have an answer to these questions, Jim and more. For instance, I know that, according to According to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, the floods have affected more than 33 million people and destroyed or damaged more than 1 million houses. At least 1,100 persons were killed. The effect of the monsoon rains has been compounded by the continued melting of Pakistan’s 7,000 glaciers.
I believe you must also know this, for you ask readers to check what NASA was saying, and that’s where I got these facts:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150279/devastating-floods-in-pakistan
I’m not sure why you’d think that less area flooded would help minimize what happened this summer over there. Unless you only wanted to play “But The Press”?
A mistake at the BBC was found and corrected. Of course the mistake was in the hysterical direction. It was corrected after being breathlessly broadcast all over the world, but no matter. Just a matter of course these daze.
A mistaken interpretation of a figure has been corrected by a megaphone of the conservative establishment. Tracing back its provenance reveals a human tragedy. Of course contrarians cry about INTEGRITY ™, oblivious to the comedy of menace they play every day in each episode.
We are only talking about 10M children after all:
https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/devastating-floods-pakistan-2022
Meanwhile, teh Donald entertains fantasies about male prostitutes. He should be on the ground, helping the Pakistanese people in dire need of being thrown toilet paper.
Willard – yes the flooding is a tragedy. It is one that has played out about forever in Pakistan and has little or nothing to do with global warming. There have been worse floods than this one. And there has been no effective mitigation of it over the decades by Pakistan.
What solution do you suggest?
For Pakistan, I suggest the Pakistani government focus on helping the poor there. I’m sure with some imagination, they can figure it out. A birth control program might be a good way to start.
I’m sure the Pakistani government could fix the flooding problem if the fat cats there wanted to. Or do you think the Pakistanis lack some attribute that would prevent them from doing something like this …
Tell us how the Dutch approach the problem of rising sea levels. They’ve been at this for thousands of years.
…
When the country got more inhabited, and now I’m talking about two thousand years ago, these practices were still in use. About one thousand years ago the population increased to such an extent that the people felt that we had to organize things. The water boards were an early form of democracy. Our oldest water boards’ [jurisdictions] are over one thousand years old. They choose a chairman and a secretary. All the people living in a certain area had to contribute to the water board, whether in money or manual labor, or horses or cows to transport earth. And then we started to build dikes. Not the same sort of thing we consider a dike now. These were earth berms, which were extended over many kilometers to fend off possible high waters. The water boards evolved over the years. In the early days, there may have been one thousand water boards, in a country the size of Maryland. But up to sixty percent of the country is below the current mean sea level, which means most of the country is still being protected by dikes.
https://metropolismag.com/programs/qa-a-brief-history-of-dutch-dikes-and-polders/
These three things summarize it all. That population of Pakistan has grown ~1,000% since 1900 to over 200 million.
“ ….up to sixty percent of the country is below the current mean sea level, which means most of the country is still being protected by dikes.”
And that monsoonal variability over the Holocene has
brought on severe droughts and massive floods.
A deadly combination. Just one look at a topographical map should be a clue.
These three points are the solution:
1. Water boards organized by the government. Citizens provide labor to build the dikes. Those who can contribute money and/or materials. Conscription if necessary.
2. Build dikes.
3. Install pumps.
This is all within the capability of the Pakistani government that has no doubt already burned many billions of other peoples money.
I am sure contrarians can do the following:
1. Do what they preach and consult their own damn sources.
2. Take a real interest in the topics on which they epilogue and do some damn research.
3. Own when they score in their own goal instead of squire long from But Media to But Costs and But Politics.
No. They have to waste more of their own time. They need to double down.
I am sure Jim can understand that one does not simply eat cake when there is no bread left. Or perhaps not and he is gonna blame Ukraine and Joe for the ZZs. No wonder he always have Fox News on in his house, the sound of a truly independent mind.
Weak tea, Willard.
You inviting me to a party, Jim? I want to see the little dance you did for the mid terms results.
No idea why my autocorrect prefers squire long to squireling.
“International NGOs could have helped, but the government has a complicated and lengthy scrutiny process for aid organizations who wish to work in flood-affected areas, resulting in a reluctance to work in Pakistan.”
https://www.dw.com/en/pakistanis-outraged-by-inept-government-response-to-monsoon-floods/a-62959022
Better. What do you suggest, infrastructure transsubstantiation? Here is what is not suggested:
Let us hope the GOP will not do exactly that now that they control the house.
Pakistan rates 108 out of about 200 on ease of doing business per the World Bank. This makes it hard to bake that bread you speak of. Naturally, the fat cats in government still get to eat cake. So my recommendation …
1. Make it drop-dead easy to start a business. They rank 82 here so there’s a lot of room for improvement. Almost zero regulation here will allow some crooks to flourish, but do it anyway and deal with the dregs after the GDP is up substantially.
2. Make a moon shot effort to install fossil fuel plants for electricity and build the grid necessary to distribute it.
3. Lessen with circumspection other regs pertaining to construction permits, registering property, and trading across borders. Beef up the enforcement of contracts.
Frequently for poor countries the government is run by control freaks. The ability to make a living and start a business is crucial to prosperity. Prosperity will help lower the birth rate and supply money to fix problems like flooding. Until then, there are plenty of people there to supply free labor to help prevent flooding.
Thanks, Jim. That is the spirit. There is something about Pakistan geography that may inspire you other ideas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_stations_in_Pakistan
Freedom Fighter is your calling. Please leave audits to more circumspect commenters.
Cheers.
Bangladesh, brother from the same mother, has identical problems to Pakistan with the same causes.
Well, Willard, since you have all the answers, I’m sure Pakistan would love to hear from you.
I will send them your USSA News reports on the Great Reset along with Kid’s notes on their demography, Jim.
VERITAS LIBERTATI SCUTUM!
jim2 | November 15, 2022 at 11:08 am | in moderation.
And then there’s this. There may be no hope for the citizens of Pakistan what with this level of corruption.
Corruption in Pakistan is widespread,[1] and extends to every sector from government to judiciary, police, health services and education.[2]
The problems are long-standing, and despite ongoing calls for reform, and many attempts to improve the situation, there is little evidence of progress.[3][4] The former government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (Pakistan Justice Movement) , led by cricketer turned politician Imran Khan, vowed to uproot corruption from all sectors. However, there is little success in bringing accountability across the board.[5] The promise to build a welfare state on the principle of Riasat-e-Madina (state of Madina) has been enshrined by recent government but there is little success on practical grounds.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Pakistan
A new paper suggesting the use of psycho babble to conquer the ravages of global warming, even applauding the efforts of a 10 year old in spreading the word, has just been released.
Here’s a thought. If the establishment wants to convince the soon to be 8 billion inhabitants of Mother Earth of a necessity for action, how about doing some top notch science and getting the models right and learning about natural variability and making efforts to quell the hysteria in the media. Bringing realism into the picture would go a long way toward convincing the critical thinking adults around to your point of view.
Publicizing the efforts of another child won’t cut it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01490-9
I should note that the average solar flux is a mathematical abstraction.
Solar flux does not average over the planet surface in the real world.
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When we “imagine” solar flux averaging on the entire planet surface it is like having (the false equilibrium concept), it is like having the actual planet being enclosed in an imaginary sphere, which sphere is emitting towards the planet surface a constant flux of 240 W/m^2.
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But it is not what happens in the real world!
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https://www.cristos-vournas.com
In India, Energy Reality smashes the Climate Doomers.
India is discussing a plan to keep old power stations running for longer, arguing that they’re needed to meet demand until enough energy storage can be built.
The world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases currently runs most of its electricity plants on coal. While the country plans major investments in renewables, it has said reliable fossil-fueled power is necessary during the energy transition to ensure economic growth until energy storage costs fall.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-17/india-mulls-plan-to-keep-old-power-plants-running-for-longer
Funny how people think more clearly living in cold houses.
“ [Canada is] heading down this same dark cul-de-sac that we have seen the Europeans head. And we see energy and climate policy at the national level in our nation that just is not grounded in the reality of the situation that we’re facing.” – Premier Scott Moe, Saskatchewan
Scott Moe, the current premier of Saskatchewan, is a foe of climate alarmism and forced energy transformation. He is a major critic of Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, in this regard.
The biography of Moe touts his commitment
“to advancing the economic interests of Saskatchewan through strengthening Saskatchewan’s high-quality agricultural, mining, manufacturing, and energy industries that meet the needs of growing markets around the globe with world-leading efficiency and sustainability.”
Some in Canada are pushing back on the Climate Doomer’s misguided energy policies. (More on Scott Moe, h/t CKid)
Reading sections of a recent report by Pipeline News verbatim, Moe quoted the outlet saying, “‘Thou shalt not use coal for power generation post-2030,’ the federal government hath said. ‘And it is moving to do the same with natural gas by 2035.’”
“‘On November 1, the Province of Saskatchewan said, ‘To hell with that,’ but in a more sophisticated, legal manner,’” Moe added, further quoting the article’s humorous, mocking tone.
While Moe employed a joking tone while quoting the report, he continued in a serious manner to blast Trudeau’s environmental policy goals, stating that “a Fossil Fuel (Renewable Energy) phase–out by 2035″ is “going to make for an awfully cold house in Saskatoon on Jan. 1, 2036,” adding that “One needs to look no further than the European Union” to see the impacts of such policies.
“I would say for the rest of the world to observe and it is on full display for the world to observe. The energy costs in the European Union over the last number of years due to enacting these solely environmental focus policies have been skyrocketing,” stressed the politician.
https://ussanews.com/2022/11/09/to-hell-with-that-saskatchewan-premier-slams-trudeaus-radical-climate-agenda/
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