Jordan Peterson in Sydney on global warming

Go here to see the relevant section of a panel show in which he was challenged on whether his values and methods would cure climate change

He basically says that to arrive at a useful opinion about such issues, you first have to grow up and solve your personal problems.  He is basically saying that concern about climate change is immature and puerile attention-seeking

His best answer of the evening was simply "No"





Stop scaring kids stiff about climate change

Adults should dispel children’s worst fears, not encourage them

Last week, thousands of children in the UK went on ‘strike’, bunking off school to call on the government to declare a ‘climate emergency’. The inspiration for the strike was 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg, who refused to attend school and protested for weeks outside the Swedish parliament over climate change.

Thunberg has since been feted by the great and the good. At a recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Katowice, Poland, she admonished the politicians in attendance: ‘You are not mature enough to tell it like it is… You say you love your children above all else. And yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.’

This view was echoed last week by the British strikers’ self-appointed spokesperson, Lottie Tellyn. ‘If we don’t strike now, then we are getting educated for a future that we don’t know is going to exist’, she told the BBC. ‘Our core message is that we want politicians to start listening to what we need as a generation… we’re going to be left with the problems they’ve created.’

In 1992, when I was still at school, 13-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki read almost the same script to the UN’s Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. She claimed to be fighting for future generations. Twenty-seven years on, Cullis-Suzuki and I are now part of the generation of grown-ups who are said to have failed the young.

But have we really failed them? Nine per cent of children born in 1992 did not reach their fifth birthday. By 2015, that number had halved: approximately 10,000 fewer infants die per day than in the 1990s. The average child born in the world in 1992 had a life expectancy of 64.5. Children born in 2015 have a life expectancy of 71.43. The world is improving for future generations on almost every conceivable measure. And this is largely thanks to the very economic development that is held responsible for climate change and therefore for endangering these children’s futures.

Then there is the charge that politicians are ‘doing nothing’ in the face of crisis. One striker, 12-year-old Theo, told Sky News that, ‘There are people in that building [parliament] going week in, week out, ignoring the fact that our world is dying out’.

But politicians are doing a lot in response to climate change. Thunberg, for instance, delivered her famous address to the UNFCCC’s 24th annual Committee of Parties (COP) meeting, where the UK and EU have long sought ‘ambitious’ global reductions in CO2 emissions. For all of the school strikers’ lives, the UK parliament has been dominated by a cross-party consensus on climate change, which has led to the creation of the Climate Change Act. The Act is likely the most expensive piece of legislation in British history – it is estimated to cost us a total of £319 billion.

And what about the strikers’ fears of a climate apocalypse? The truth is that science has yet to detect any statistical increase in the kinds of floods, wildfires, droughts and storms that these kids believe will rip civilisation from its foundations. Extreme weather today kills barely two per cent of the number of people it claimed in the early 1900s, despite the global population increasing from 1.65 billion to 7.7 billion. And thanks to economic development, even if natural disasters were to multiply in the way that certain doomsayers predict, far fewer people would be exposed to them. It is therefore highly unlikely that any of the strikers, their children or even their great-great-great-grandchildren will ever experience climate-change-related devastation.

It would be moving to see children organising themselves spontaneously for a political goal. But children do not rise to global prominence under the steam of movements of their own creation. Last week’s day of protest was trailed all over the news media before the event. And it was NGOs, not children, who organised the spectacle and its PR, booking children of green activists for media appearances and interviews. Even government ministers tweeted their support and ‘solidarity’.

Children’s perception of the world should, of course, be taken seriously by the adults in their lives (if not necessarily by the wider public). But it is not science that has put this apocalyptic understanding of climate change into these children’s heads. Adults should challenge children’s fears about the future in the same way they would their fears of ghosts and monsters. Instead, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, academics, politicians and even scientists have told them that they are going to die horribly and that they have no future. At the same time, they have abolished any semblance of perspective or debate on climate change from the airwaves, textbooks and the public sphere.

These children aren’t ‘engaged’ – they are scared stiff.

SOURCE 





Scientists: CO2 the 'miracle molecule' key to feeding, saving the world

By Paul Bedard

If you like to eat, then you should be cheering global warming.

That's the claim in a new scientific report that counters global warming fanatics like former Vice President Al Gore and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and offers proof that CO2 added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels is nature's Miracle-Gro.

In what some are calling the counter to the liberals' "Green New Deal," the new report provided to Secrets said that instead of fighting over the stalemated global warming debate, the world should take advantage of increased CO2 levels by growing plants and food that thrive on it.

"Fortunately, carbon dioxide, a non-polluting gas that is created when fossil fuels are converted into energy, has proved to be a powerful plant food," said the report from the CO2 Coalition of scientists who reject claims it will end the world in 12 years.

That group has produced President Trump's new leader of an advisory committee looking into climate change, William Happer, an NSC senior director and a physicist who headed the CO2 Coalition.

The benefits are easy to explain, said the white paper's principal researcher, Craig D. Idso, chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and a member of the CO2 Coalition.
He said plants thrive when there is more CO2, which is why growers pump it into greenhouses.

"The modern rise in atmospheric CO2 is proving to be a powerful ally in staving off regional food shortages that are projected to occur just a few decades from now. The unique characteristics of this miracle molecule are helping to raise crop yields per unit of land area, per unit of nutrients applied, and per unit of water used," said the report titled, What Rising CO2 Means for Global Food Security.

Its release this week comes as the White House is trying to shift the climate change debate to one that looks at how to take advantage of the slightly warming temperatures.

Idso's report tackled the apocalyptic warnings of global warming computer models, noting, for example, that despite a slight rise in temperatures over the past century, cities have not flooded.
His report has a de facto bottom line which his that CO2 is here to stay so deal with it and use it to the advantage of mankind.

And he challenged other reports that suggested CO2 will hurt the nutrition in plants.

"The researchers themselves acknowledge that plant breeding, fertilizers, and new growing methods can reverse any nutritional decline. However, they unrealistically decided to freeze wealth, diets, and agricultural methods at today's levels in their computer model's predictions of the future. That is what generated these dramatic but unfounded claims about 'millions being harmed,'" said Idso.

His is certainly a contrarian view to the climate change alarmism in the Democrats' "Green New Deal," but Idso warned that their calls to rid fossil fuels will end up starving the world.

"A continuation of the current upward trend in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration is essential for securing future food security. Any efforts to slow it because of the risks of predicted climate changes must also consider the risks of limiting its benefits to agricultural, nature and humanity," said the report.

SOURCE 





The Uninhabited Mind of David Wallace-Wells

David Wallace-Wells shook up a lot of people with a “horrifying 2017 essay in New York magazine about climate change. It was an attempt to paint a very real picture of our not-too-distant future, a future filled with famines, political chaos, economic collapse, fierce resource competition, and a sun that ‘cooks us.’”

Now he’s got a book out that builds on that article, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, which Vox describes as “a brutal read,” “more terrifying” than the “terrifying essay.”

What makes it terrifying is that Wallace-Wells insists that the most likely scenario is that human-driven global warming will raise global average temperature by about 4.3C by the end of the century, and all his predictions about knock-on effects assume that.

But 4.3C is toward the upper end of the range the United Nations Intergovernmental on Panel Change (IPCC) offers based on its computer models: 1.5–4.5C. Furthermore, this is predicted to happen not by the end of this century but after all climate feedbacks have responded to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration from pre-industrial times, i.e., rising from 280 to 560 parts per million. That process, termed “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS), is expected to take about 200 years, not just to the end of this century.

More important yet, the IPCC’s computer models consistently predict 2 to 3 times the warming actually observed over the relevant period, and since the global temperature has risen and fallen cyclically throughout geologic history, there’s no way to know how much of that to blame on anthropogenic CO2 versus how much to blame on natural causes.

That’s why empirical studies — as opposed to modeling studies, which are just hypotheses that must be tested against observations — point toward ECS of around 1.7C, which is near the bottom end of the IPCC’s 1.5–4.5C range. Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer discussed the paper behind that figure in a blog post last year.

Wallace-Wells’s article and book are filled with claims drawn from the upper extremes even of the scenarios of the IPCC, let alone the estimates of more empirically driven studies. It’s also filled with factual claims that just don’t stand up to the data. Take this paragraph quoting him in Vox’s article:


"Last year in the summer of 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere you had this unprecedented heat wave that killed people all around the world. You had the crazy hurricane season. In California, wildfires burned more than a million acres. And we’re really only just beginning to see these sorts of effects. We’ll take those claims one at a time".


First, a heat wave is weather, not climate, and the 2018 heat wave didn’t even match the 2003 heat wave that killed 35,000 people in Europe alone. But it’s also significant that, on average, cold snaps kill 10 times as many people per day as heat waves. So if global warming does raise the frequency and intensity of heat waves, since it will also reduce the frequency and intensity of cold snaps, we should see a net reduction in temperature-related deaths.

Second, the “crazy hurricane season” was actually pretty normal by historical standards.

Let me start with some hard numbers for the Atlantic basin, the most familiar to Americans. In 2018, there were 15 tropical storms and 7 hurricanes — 2 of them Category 3 or above — resulting in 144 deaths. In 2005, there were 28 tropical storms (almost twice as many) and 15 hurricanes (more than twice as many) — 7 of them Category 3 or above (more than 3 times as many) — resulting in 2,280 or more deaths (almost 16 times as many). So 2018 doesn’t even beat 2005, and there have been lots of other years worse than 2018 as well. One doesn’t have to be a hurricane expert to get this information — Wikipedia has the numbers.

As Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow and University of Alabama climate scientist Roy W. Spencer, whose Ph.D. focused on hurricanes, explains in his recent books Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People and An Inconvenient Deception: How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy, both available from our online store, there has been no significant upward trend, when accounting for the magnitude of annual variation, in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones in any part of the world through the modern warm period. Spencer says,


"In the U.S., there is evidence from Gulf of Mexico coastal lake bottom sediments of super-hurricane storm surges 1,000 to 3,800 years ago that have not been rivaled in the modern historical record. The strongest hurricane to strike New England occurred on August 25, 1635, only fifteen years after the Mayflower arrived and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established, with 14 to 22 feet of storm surge".


Paul Homewood summarizes the data in a paper released by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Raw data without much discussion are at hurricane specialist Ryan N. Maue’s “Global Tropical Cyclone Activity” page.

As for wildfires, the annual number of wildfires in the U.S. fell drastically in the early 1980s in response to widespread campaigns against carelessness with campfires, cigarettes, etc. It hasn’t changed much since then. Total area burned by wildfires fall drastically from the 1920s through the 1980s and began rising in the late 1990s, not because of warmer or drier weather but because of changed forest management of two kinds. First, by diminishing the number of fires, we allowed forests and their underbrush to grow more dense. Second, we stopped a lot of the logging that previously thinned forests and removed underbrush. Both of these meant leaving lots more fuel to burn. The result are fires that are hotter and grow faster than before. The increased average size of fires doesn’t correlate positively with global average temperature.

If you’re looking for standard sci-fi thriller like those in the 1950s that conjured giant tarantulas as a result of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, The Uninhabitable Earth might be just the ticket. If you’re looking for credible science — well, go elsewhere, say, to climatologist Dr. Tim Ball's Human Caused Global Warming: The Biggest Deception in History — The Why, What, Where, When, and How It Was Achieved.

SOURCE 





Ocasio-Cortez: People Maybe Shouldn’t Reproduce Due To Climate Change

For once I heartily agree with AOC.  May she convince all Warmists not to have children.  The benefit to the gene pool would be enormous

Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested on Sunday night that people should consider not having children due to climate change because there is a "scientific consensus" that life will be hard for kids.

"Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don't turn this ship around and so it's basically like, there's a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult," Ocasio-Cortez said while chopping up food in her kitchen during an Instagram live video. "And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, 'Is it okay to still have children?'"

Ocasio-Cortez then took a shot at Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) over an incident that happened in Feinstein's office on Friday when a far-left fringe group tried to pressure Feinstein into supporting the Green New Deal.

"You know what’s interesting about this group?" Feinstein told the group on Friday, in response to the group storming into her office. "I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing."

"You come in here, and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don’t respond to that," Feinstein continued. "I’ve gotten elected, I just ran. I was elected by almost a million-vote plurality. And I know what I’m doing. So you know, maybe people should listen a little bit."

Ocasio-Cortez said Feinstein's response was "like not good enough" because the legislation that the Democrats support is "frankly going to kill us."

"This idea that 'I've been working on this for x-amount of years,' um, it's like not good enough," Ocasio-Cortez said. "Like, we need a universal sense of urgency, and people are like trying to introduce watered-down proposals that are frankly going to kill us. A lack of urgency is going to kill us."

"The issue has gotten worse," Ocasio-Cortez continued. "So I don't think that working on an issue for 30 years alone is what qualifies as, as what someone qualified to solve an issue."

"That said, there are a lot of people that have been doing this work for decades that have proposed ambitious solutions for years and have not been listened to," Ocasio-Cortez added. "So it's not just, 'I've been doing this for 30 years,' so we need to listen to them because frankly people have been failing at the same things for 30 or 40 years. What we need to do is say, 'What solutions have not been tried yet? And what ambitious scale have we not shot at yet.' And let's do it."

Ocasio-Cortez has often used alarmist language when discussing climate change, repeatedly comparing fighting climate change to fighting Nazi Germany. Ocasio-Cortez has gone as far as to claim that the world is going to end in 12 years if her far-left policies are not implemented.

"I think the part of it that is generational is that millennials and people, in Gen Z, and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we’re like, the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change," Ocasio-Cortez said during a Martin Luther King forum in New York City in January. "And your biggest issue, your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it? — and like this is the war, this is our World War II."

SOURCE 

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