The ‘heroic’ climate book offering some hope for our future
The book review below is not only uncritical. It is positively laudatory. The one thing the review gets right is that the book is heroic -- heroic in ignoring the facts.
Author Gergis is one of the many on the Green/Left who see only what they want to see but Gergisis in fact an extreme case of that. Her research has in fact produced a vivid proof that there is NO long-term global warming. But she sees in it proof of warming.
Judge for yourself. She showed that the temperature was just nine hundredths of one degree warmer in the 20th century than it was in the 13th century. Some warming!
Below is the temperature graph underlying her "research". Going back centuries sure is pesky.
Gergis is the practitioner of a religion, not a scientist. Sadly, she has authored over 100 "scientific" publications on climate. She is a lead author on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on the Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, no less. That says a lot about the Warmist fantasy. Anything will do as evidence for it
The problem with climate change is the hot air. A belief, once widespread, was that rational discussion, awareness-raising and political debate were levers that could be pulled to correct an errant course. Today, heave though we might, these levers seem only to vent steam.
Here, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope by Joëlle Gergis has a special role to play. Gergis is one of hundreds of scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessment reports, the gold standard of international scientific collaboration and rigour by which we discover just how much trouble we’re in.
Part of this book describes the report’s creation, an exhaustive and exhausting process of write, review and rewrite, which takes years to compile, the latest running at nearly 3000 pages. It is then flung into the centrifuge of the modern news cycle. Little but a few headlines survive intact. Humanity’s Moment is Gergis’ opportunity to translate the science in a controlled environment, outside the clickbait and pop-ups.
She does so with precision, fidelity and restraint. Our present predicament is harrowing enough. Yet floods in Pakistan, wildfires in Europe are but a taste of the likely future despite the trumpeting of net-zero target figures.
Humanity’s Moment is in three parts: the head, the heart and the whole. The heart is needed because science is simply not enough to fully grasp the loss, both actual and potential. It must be felt. The author intercuts exposition with personal accounts, often at the edge of despair. “We are witnessing the great unravelling; the beginning of the end of things,” she writes in her journal.
Through such entries, email correspondence with other scientists and the author’s bittersweet immersion in landscapes she knows are vanishing such as the Great Barrier Reef or Gondwana rainforest, we understand the price of again spelling out the case on the page. As an act of defiance, it is heroic.
Gergis states that the IPCC’s sixth assessment report released last year will be the last chance that scientists have to make a difference. In the time it takes to produce another, we’ll be too far gone. From here on, it’s politics, and we know how that goes.
Very bravely, she resists such easy cynicism, in which the apocalypse is simply another meme. I had to limit myself to a chapter a night but felt hopelessness long afterward. It’s also not an easy book to discuss with friends, especially those with children.
But in all darkness, there is light, as the opening chapter of the third part states. Here the concept of the tipping point that runs throughout Humanity’s Moment is applied to repair. When change happens, it is unexpected and accelerating. In the whole: social movements, art, technological progress and the teal revolution could be reaching a point at which politicians and businesses with vested interests in the status quo have no option but change.
Many climate books take on this structure but few have a final “hope” section that is believable. Most smack of compromise to an anxious publisher, a counterbalance to the grim forerunners. Yet Gergis has deployed a compelling metaphor, not least of all because things are improving. Denialism has lost mainstream credibility while fossil fuel companies are increasingly resorting to greenwashing, a definite retreat from attacking the science.
The chapter Life Imitating Art, on the growing cultural dimension of the climate movement, is particularly important. It represents the outflanking of vested interests to a place they struggle to follow – culture. A fossil fuel company can create an Instagram account where a guy in a hardhat stands before a seedling but for all its PR budget, it cannot create true art.
Still the BLM and LGBTQI+ movements that Gergis points to as examples of rapid change have never been achieved against the clock or on the global scale required by climate action. The holdouts are the same authoritarian states such as China and Russia needed for success on climate. It is those that reject “Western values” and resist global action the instant it is expedient to do so. Change will require a powerful diplomatic, not just social, justice dimension.
Another issue only glanced at is social media, another blocker. Now the sole news source for almost 50 per cent of people and lacking necessary bandwidth and nuance to convey the challenge, it’s the echo chamber filtering out challenging beliefs that truly allows misinformation to fester. Traditional media has had little choice but to mirror the dynamics of their ersatz distributors. All this justifies the need for a book. Hence Humanity’s Moment.
I have been told by those in the know that books on climate change, even those with high-profile authors, simply do not sell. I’m sure Humanity’s Moment sparked intense conversations before commissioning. Credit, then, to a publisher that has opted for urgency and gravity over entertainment and, of course, to an author who refuses to mollycoddle but instead provides genuine hope.
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This is war: Renewables vs the West
Comment from Australia
The future of renewable energy is laid out before us, bound by inevitable consequences and engineering restraints. It is a failure of concept, buoyed by trillions of dollars in public money and the artificial destruction of its market competitors. The result is an energy crisis which is hastening the end of virtue-seeking energy systems that have benefited nobody except crafty investors and billionaire green playboys.
The public will pick up the bill for their hubris, as is always the case with political errors. Australians have been left sitting at the table with the scraps of the meal that was ‘renewable energy’ – bones picked clean by bankers, mining giants, bureaucrats, and diplomats.
State Premiers lie whenever they describe solar and wind as ‘cheap energy’, conveniently restricting their costings to the initial construction of the project while ignoring the required backup battery farms, re-wiring of the grid, and cyclic nightmare of the ‘rip out and replace’ reality of technology with a 20-year lifespan. Experts call this ‘re-powering’. Normal people call it madness.
This delusion is how we end up with the embarrassing antics of Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declaring Brisbane Airport will be running on ‘100 per cent’ renewable energy for the bargain deal of $4.5 billion – except for the planes, of course. And no, the airport is not going to operate on an isolated renewables-only grid to prove the point. Are you crazy? What if the wind died in the middle of the night?
The ABC are too friendly with green ideology to ask the obvious question: why are the Pacific Islands and other third-world despots asking for billions in reparations while selling their fossil fuel and rare earths assets under the table to the world’s largest polluter, China? Or the follow-up: what happens if we end up at war with China over Taiwan and they won’t sell us any solar panels? Or the follow-up to the follow-up: will Australia be able to defend the Pacific with a ‘made in China’ sticker on our power grid?
It is a contradiction that speaks to profit, not apocalypse. The insulting paternalism of Labor’s attitude toward ‘those poor people’ on ‘sinking flooded islands’ leaves Australia as a victim of politicians who are more concerned with ‘looking good’ and shaking all the right hands at the United Nations than taking care of the Australian people, whose money they throw away like confetti at the monstrous wedding of globalism and eco-fascism.
As the human population grows, civilisation requires an energy grid with a dense fuel source – something that takes up as little of our productive land as possible. Covering river deltas and prime agricultural fields with solar panels and wind turbines is the work of morons who have confused steel bird mincers with chapel steeples. These are not monuments to the Green religion, they are symbols of inexhaustible human idiocy that will be rusting long after the climate apocalypse fails to manifest.
Why must we be polite about the vandalism of Western Civilisation? Why do conservatives tolerate the gutless, mute, spineless, and soulless Liberal Party playing along because they are too embarrassed to apologise for trying to gain political traction from the same green fibs as Labor?
Climate Change has drifted into a religion of convenience – an ‘Edenism’ that ignores basic geological history and makes unkeepable promises about the fate of humanity. We have transferred our personal fear of mortality onto the Earth, terrified of a terra hellfire (or is it another Noah-style flood?) instead of the metaphoric flames of the old religions.
The planet is not a sentient being, it is a self-destructive rock that cares very little for our survival and would sooner hurl an asteroid or open a flood basalt rift than thank us for the sacrifice of university virgins.
Try telling that to a screaming activist glued to a Renoir with bits of horse and petroleum…
Instead of transferring the innards of third-world mountains to Australian landfills – or listening to scientists talk about melting wind turbines down into gummy bears for our children to eat – why not skip to the end?
The answer to our energy woes was revealed last century – a solution so simple, clean, and practical that its existence threatens the survival of all other energy sources. Nuclear. With billions of years in fuel reserves, nuclear will outlive humanity.
It doesn’t matter that the argument in favour of nuclear is unshakable, whether you believe in the apocalypse or simply want to restore light to the West, nuclear must first win the culture war that was started by jealous fossil fuels companies and is being continued by renewables barons.
We have seen conflicts like this before.
In the 19th century, a clash of profitable scientific ideas slammed into the middle of another culture war. Society was turned into a stage upon which charismatic showmen, backed by competing corporate interests, fought for the future of human civilisation. Energy was then, as it is now, the most valuable commodity.
The War of the Currents between beloved American Thomas Edison and competing energy merchant George Westinghouse changed the world, in large part due to outspoken Serbian migrant Nikola Tesla. It was a showdown between Direct Current electricity and the mysterious Alternating Current motors devised by Tesla that came with distinct advantages. Merit won out, but the battle was an expensive mess that claimed many lives. Friendships were destroyed, fortunes lost, and barbaric acts committed within the hysteria.
Edison championed Direct Current. His business interests, and those of his corporate investors, were entrenched in the technology. Alternating Current was a superior product and the obvious answer to the technical issues that plagued Direct Current systems. From a logical perspective, if America wanted to become an energy empire, it would have to rip up its old DC systems and replace them with an AC infrastructure.
Obvious solutions are often hated.
Unable to dismantle AC with sensible arguments, Edison sought ways to frighten the public over to his side – playing on the cheapest of human emotions in the hope that public fear would put political pressure on the scientific realm and cause lawmakers to act as AC’s executioner. To spread fear you need victims, so Edison Electric arranged public demonstrations in which AC current could be shown frying animals to death. Eventually, AC was used in the creation of the first electric chair, ensuring that the technology became synonymous with killing.
Edison took the culture wars too far. His antics painted him as unhinged and childish, deliberately contriving acts of cruelty for corporate interest while Westinghouse and Tesla improved the safety profile of their generators. Westinghouse secured the contract for the Niagara Falls system with Tesla’s motors, finishing the argument. The loss was so complete that the war is often forgotten.
We see a similar level of moral panic levelled at nuclear, with the combined forces of international bureaucracies and the corporate elite inciting the useful idiots on social media to arms. Propaganda and political power are the glue that holds renewables together. A bit of sensible jostling would easily snap it apart.
Anyone in love with renewable energy should be afraid of nuclear energy. It is coming to murder the solar, wind, and battery industry. As Europe is swiftly learning, nuclear is the only solution to our immediate energy crisis – the way for humanity to advance with its standard of living intact.
Those who get themselves caught up in this new war of the currents – misguided citizens who lean into fear porn, apocalyptic rhetoric, and socially destructive activism – will look as foolish as the men electrocuting small animals to scare the mob.
Yes, this is a war, but it has already been won in the eyes of history. It is only the final bill that remains to be counted.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/this-is-war-renewables-vs-the-west/ ?
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UK: Eco-loonyism is an upper-middle-class rite of passage
Greta Thunberg, the Shirley Temple of the apocalypse, let the cat out of the bag last week. She told the audience at her book launch that her environmental focus is merely part of her bigger secret plan to overthrow society. Apparently there’s a lot of ‘colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North’ that has to be stopped. Gosh. Some have framed this as millenarianism’s Bonnie Langford saying the quiet part out loud, but surely it was always obvious?
More interesting, though perhaps even less unexpected, was her revelation a few days later to comedian Russell Howard (who wore the now-familiar ‘blessed by the Infant of Stockholm’ expression) that her critics were ‘heterosexual, white, privileged, middle-aged men’. Russell Howard is, of course, like the vast majority of Greta’s followers, a heterosexual, white, privileged, middle-aged man. What does this tell us?
Some have wondered why the eco-loons of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil aren’t heading to heavily polluting countries such as China or India to make their protests. There have been some vague replies from said loons that if Britain complied with their demands it would set a shining example for the world to follow. But this is terribly tenuous, half-hearted nonsense. You can see it turning to ashes as it leaves their lips. A similar idea was put forward in the heyday of CND, and it felt like desperate stuff then.
No. The real reason is because eco-loonyism is not about saving the planet, or even overthrowing society, at all. It has no possibility of achieving its aims by protest. It is in fact a curious mix of ecstatic atonement and the loons showing that they are certainly not, Heavens to Betsy no, like those yucky Tories or their yob voters, perish the thought.
Eco-loonyism is a curious mix of ecstatic atonement and showing that one is certainly not like those yucky Tories
Like many things – Glastonbury, the gap year, dyeing one’s hair bright blue – it is an upper-middle-class rite of passage, and occasionally also a pensioners’ pastime, a modern alternative to floristry classes and good works for the parish. And, most crucially of all, it annoys people which that ‘progressive’ section of the upper-middle-class don’t like – those ‘heterosexual, white, privileged, middle-aged men’ (well at least the ones Greta isn’t gassing to at that particular moment – her parents are an actor and an opera singer, after all). That is why Just Stop Oil is harassing British motorist and chucking soup at Old Masters.
So much of public life is claiming to be aggrieved about something but is really about carving out social and class distinctions, often within the same class, and winding up ‘the right people’. Elon Musk charging for blue ticks is a good example coming from a slightly different direction; a kick right in the status.
The imminent World Cup is the most brazen example of the phenomenon. Saintly footballers, plus luminaries such as the talkative Gary Neville and the monosyllabic David Beckham, are all happily pocketing the Qatari shilling (which is worth several millions pounds sterling). This makes a mockery of their constant haranguing and posturing about social issues, and exposes their concerns about slavery, racism, and homophobia as actually nothing to do with slavery, racism, and homophobia – which are all boom industries, right now, in Qatar.
It reveals that what this is really all about is signalling at home. It is the same with ‘anti-racism’ ideology across the board. Non-whites are simply props in that play, to be wheeled on and off stage when convenient. If lower-status whites cannot be blamed for something – as in the Uighur genocide, or Qatar, or Rochdale and Rotherham – these purportedly concerned anti-racists are simply not interested. It’s embarrassing. There is nothing in it for them, no status points to be garnered. Who cares?
Away from protest, so much of politics has a self-absorbed, tribal vibe. The Tories themselves fight shy of actually doing conservative things for fear of looking nasty and common. There is still a fear of social ostracism in them, of that Suella Braverman being terribly non-U. Robert Jenrick’s recent fluster about Braverman’s talk of ‘invasion’ was pure old-fashioned class discomfort. The Tories are hypersensitive to dropping social clangers in front of their progressive social equals.
Meanwhile Labour have taken the philosophy of ‘if they don’t like it, it must be a good idea’ to ridiculous lengths with their enthusiastic embrace of genderism. But even Keir Starmer is starting to look a little green about the gills on the issue now, at least when the dreadfully déclassé Mumsnet are watching. Immigration is a similar area. The transitory thrill of goading and annoying Farage and his kind is apparently worth admitting millions of people into the country on a whim.
Annoying ‘the right people’ is a powerful pull for us all. When I went to cast my vote in the EU referendum I never thought Leave would win, but I felt I had to do my duty. I’ll never forget what happened when I got into the booth and picked up my little pencil. Out of nowhere I experienced a visceral, whole-body thrill, a totally unexpected holy joy à la Saint Teresa of Avila, a release of UP YOURS! to Caroline Lucas, Steve Coogan, Bob Geldof, Stephen Fry, etc. I’m sure Remain voters felt much the same about Gove and Boris. The last thing actually on our minds – at that moment, anyway – was the European Union.
‘This is annoying all the right people’, we often hear. And yes, that gives us a warm glow, and a kind of guide to whether something is a good idea. But is it the best guide? Being more aware of this very human heuristic, and a little more honest about it, would do us all good.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/eco-loonyism-is-an-upper-middle-class-rite-of-passage
*****************************************************Electric cars are NOT Green
Electric cars sales are up 66% this year.
President Joe Biden promotes them, saying things like, “The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified,” and, “There’s no turning back.”
To make sure we have no choice in the matter, some left-leaning states have moved to ban gas-powered cars altogether.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning them by 2035. Oregon, Massachusetts, and New York copied California. Washington state’s politicians said they’d make it happen even faster, by 2030.
Thirty countries also say they’ll phase out gas-powered cars.
But this is just dumb. It will not happen. It’s magical thinking.
In my new video, I point out some “inconvenient” facts about electric cars, simple truths that politicians and green activists just don’t seem to understand.
“Electric cars are amazing,” says physicist Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute. “But they won’t change the future in any significant way (as far as) oil use or carbon dioxide emissions.”
Inconvenient fact 1: Selling more electric cars won’t reduce oil use very much.
“The world has 15, 18 million electric vehicles now,” says Mills. “If we [somehow] get to 500 million, that would reduce world oil consumption by about 10%. That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t end the use of oil.”
Most of the world’s oil is used by things like “airplanes, buses, big trucks, and the mining equipment that gets the copper to build the electric cars.”
Even if all vehicles somehow did switch to electricity, there’s another problem: Electricity isn’t very green.
I laugh talking to friends who are all excited about their electric car, assuming it doesn’t pollute. They go silent when I ask, “Where does your car’s electricity come from?”
They don’t know. They haven’t even thought about it.
Inconvenient fact 2: Although driving an electric car puts little additional carbon into the air, producing the electricity to charge its battery adds plenty. Most of America’s electricity is produced by burning natural gas and coal. Just 12% comes from wind or solar power.
Auto companies don’t advertise that. “Electric vehicles in general are better and more sustainable for the environment,” says Ford’s Linda Zhang in a BBC interview.
“She’s a Ford engineer,” I say to Mills. “She’s not ignorant.”
“She’s not stupid,” he replies. “But ignorance speaks to what you know. You have to mine, somewhere on Earth, 500,000 pounds of minerals and rock to make one battery.”
American regulations make mining difficult, so most of it is done elsewhere, polluting those countries. Some mining is done by children. Some is done in places that use slave labor.
Even if those horrors didn’t exist, mining itself adds lots of carbon to the air.
“If you’re worried about carbon dioxide,” says Mills, “the electric vehicle has emitted 10 to 20 tons of carbon dioxide (from the mining, manufacturing, and shipping) before it even gets to your driveway.”
“Volkswagen published an honest study [in which they] point out that the first 60,000 miles or so you’re driving an electric vehicle, that electric vehicle will have emitted more carbon dioxide than if you just drove a conventional vehicle.”
You would have to drive an electric car “100,000 miles” to reduce emissions by just “20 or 30%, which is not nothing, but it’s not zero.”
No, it’s not.
If you live in New Zealand, where there’s lots of hydro and geothermal power, electric cars pollute less. But in America, your “zero-emission vehicle” adds lots of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
Politicians and electric car sellers don’t mention that. Most probably don’t even know.
In a future column, three more inconvenient facts about electric cars.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/02/inconvenient-facts/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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