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The Wrong Noble Cause

The climate change activists failed dramatically in the 2014 mid-term elections. By concentrating on their noble cause, saving the world for a future generation, all those efforts were wasted on an electorate more concerned with their immediate survival than that of their grandchildren.

Climate change alarmism is based on the belief in climate models that predict huge temperature increases by the year 2100, to follow the expected increases in carbon dioxide. Starting with that expectation, many other studies identify many other consequences like animal displacements and extinction, sea level rise due to ice cap melting, and so on.

Unfortunately for these alarmists, global warming has stopped with the trend in the RSS satellite temperature data being flat for the last 18 years. That lack of warming is probably why the mantra changed from global warming to climate change.

Climate change alarmism also rests on fear mongering where any weather event that is not strictly normal, like more heat or more cold, more rain or less rain, any single strong storm, and so on, must be caused by CO2 levels affecting the world's weather systems. These claims have no basis and have been debunked by numerous scientific studies, but that does not stop the claims. This continuous series of so many wild claims is ridiculous.

A physicist at Duke, Robert G Brown, has recently posted a number of pointed comments about climate models and their use in climate change alarmism. He posted about the climate model ensembles, a debate about climate science, and about calculating the global temperature.

Bob Tisdale has posted many articles about how the oscillations in the Pacific Ocean drive the world's weather. For a good review, he posted a 5-part series on this topic.

In 2013 Murry Salby gave a one hour lecture (available on youtube; starts with about 40 seconds in German) relating increases in carbon dioxide to increases temperature, rather than the opposite as claimed by global warming activists. He also stressed the natural sources of carbon dioxide.

There are also claims about global warming and extreme weather, but those claims are also unjustified. The Atlantic Hurricane season of 2013 was the quietest in 45 years, and the 2014 season has been quiet as well. There is no linkage between tornadoes and warming in the record.

The winter of 2013-2014 was one of the coldest in the 100+ year temperature record of the United States. For example, Chicago had its coldest winter on record. The Great Lakes had the 2nd highest ice cover in the satellite record (back to 1973). A rather difficult argument is required to link extreme cold to supposed warmth from carbon dioxide.

To counter this non-warming news, we get perpetual claims about each year being the hottest ever. Unfortunately, these claims are based on manipulating the actual temperatures to generate the 'average' temperature. This manipulation includes making the older temperatures colder and making the current temperatures warmer. This manipulation has also been called homogenization. The comparison of urban to rural stations, where the urban stations get warmed by all the human activity around them while the rural stations do not, results in the rural stations being warmed - but this is warming by manipulating the temperatures not that the rural stations were actually that warm.

I suppose when someone listens to only fear mongering that person will eventually submit to that persistent bad message, and it would take some initiative to actually learn about the science of weather and to discover whether the fear mongering is justified or not. Based on the number of climate change activists, it appear many remain convinced of this pending catastrophe regardless of events (cold winters, more snows, less storms, etc.) or scientific studies that should nullify that fear.

This noble cause of stopping emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities (again, an effect much smaller than that of natural sources) ignores the cost of that effort in human misery. The poor have a higher percentage of their cost of living related to energy than do the wealthy, so increasing the cost of energy will always have a greater impact on the poor. According to the World Bank, 20% of the world's population is without power. According to the World Health Organization, about 3 billion people in the world cook and heat by burning biomass, which is wood, animal dung, and crop waste. This practice leads to misery and death, with over 4 million people dying annually from illness attributed to this indoor pollution. According to the WHO (via the CDC), 11% of the world still lacks drinking water from an improved source. 35% of the world still lacks improved sanitation, with 15% still lacking any sanitation (e.g., open defecation). With the power derived from coal, which is relatively cheap given its abundance, improvements in the infrastructure (power, water, sewer) could alleviate some of this misery.  Unfortunately for these people lacking what many in developed countries consider a minimum quality of life, global warming alarmists seek to limit any coal generated power anywhere in the world to stop carbon dioxide emissions, leaving those in poverty to rely on their severely polluting wood and dung, and on proposed less reliable, renewable energy sources (wind power (which also kills many birds and bats) or solar power) or on perhaps on more dangerous sources (radioactive nuclear power).

Instead of worrying about unjustified claims of possible warming by the end of the century, these activists could spend their time and effort confronting the more immediate problems in the world, in place of those in the distant future. The United States continues its foreign policy of destabilizing countries to maintain its world empire, such as the Ukraine (to counter Russia), Syria (to counter Iran), Haiti and Honduras (to counter social activism in Latin America); these activities bring much death and misery to those areas being targeted and yet there is no noticeable anti-war movement. Globalization continues its predatory practices, seeking the poor in under developed countries to abuse that cheap labor (to maximize their corporate profits) while taking advantage of the weak governments to avoid environmental regulations (so the pollution harms only the poor there, not the executives who live elsewhere).

I find it disappointing the level of activism focused on a danger (global warming) that has such a remote chance of happening in the next 80 years while there is so little activism about the current political dangers to humanity.

The election in 2014 of many American politicians discounting the global warming fears (many Americans have now recognized how unimportant that scare is to their daily lives; global warming activists wasted their time and effort on the issue) while also pursuing both a more belligerent foreign policy and an elitist economic policy is not good news for Americans (who can expect a further widening of the financial gap between the top and the rest) or for the world (who can expect further military adventures by American troops and special forces.


created - November 2014
last change - 11/09/2014
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