Everyone forgot about Earth Hour
Editor’s Note: Earth Hour is the creation of the World Wildlife Fund. It is an event during which companies and individuals symbolically turn off their lights for an hour to virtue-signal their commitment to the environment, effectively wasting energy rather than conserving it, due to the nature of power production. This year, it was held on March 25, but you probably missed it…
We should spend Earth Hour in a salute to coal, oil, gas, and uranium.
It was coal that produced clean electric power which cleared the smog produced by dirty combustion and open fires in big cities like London and Pittsburgh. Much of the third world still suffers choking fumes and smog because they do not have clean electric power and burn green fuels like wood, cardboard, and cow dung for cooking and home heating.
It was coal that saved the forests being felled to fuel the steam engines for electricity generation and to produce charcoal for the first iron smelters.
It was coal that powered the light bulbs and saved the whales being slaughtered for whale oil lamps.
It was coal that produced the steel that replaced shingles on the roof, timber props in the mines, wooden fence posts on the farms, and the bark on the old bark hut.
And it is diesel and petrol that powers our farms, mines, and road transport.
In Australia today, coal still provides our most reliable electricity for lighting, cooking, heating, refrigeration, rail transport, and steel.
Without coal, oil, and gas much of the world would be back in the dark days of candles, wood stoves, chip heaters, open fires, smoky cities, hills bare of trees, and streets knee-deep in horse manure.
Coal is fossil sunshine as clean as the green plants it came from, and often less damaging to the environment than its green energy alternatives.
Earth Hour candles are green tokenism for rich status-seekers and nostalgic dreamers.
We should spend Earth Hour saluting the real heroes who, despite the abuse, still produce the coal, oil, gas, and uranium on which most people on Earth depend.
The Real Agenda of Earth Hour below:
‘We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to the wilderness millions and tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.’
– Dave Foreman, ‘Earth First’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/everyone-forgot-about-earth-hour/
*********************************************Weird Weather
When someone tells me, “Boy, the weather sure has been weird in recent years,” I am pretty confident of two things: one, they have bought into the climate change hoax, and two, they know absolutely nothing about history. Upon hearing the “weather is weird lately” comment, I immediately ask two questions: “Compared to what?” and “How do you know what the weather was like 200 years ago?” To the first question, they might mumble something like, “well, it’s weirder than it was a few years ago” and to the second question, they have no answer. Because they don’t know. Except in general, I don’t, either.
So, the weather is weirder than it was 5 years ago, but maybe not as weird as it was 205 years ago. Brilliant. Let’s destroy the world’s economy on that.
Lots of tornados in America so far this spring? Weird weather! Climate change! Global warming! Snow in the northern plains in late April? Uhh...has to be climate change. Somehow. “It’s been a long winter,” I heard the nice lady on The Weather Channel say a few days ago. She probably will never be heard from again. You people in Montana have fun sweeping that “global warming” off your sidewalks.
As an historian, I have frequently, in various writings, bemoaned the abysmal ignorance of history evident among most Americans today. To use history effectively, we must broaden our viewpoint beyond what we had for dinner last night, and especially put events into their historical circumstances. The last point is critical and what most people almost never do, simply because they don’t know enough history to accomplish it. This is true with the “climate change” discussion.
One conundrum is that thinking is an exercise which requires a little bit of training and labor, more than most folks want to accede to. People don’t think, and they often don’t think because they have little knowledge to think about. You must “know” something before you can “think” rationally about it, and Americans know virtually nothing about history. This is obviously true regarding climate history. And Al Gore has made millions off that ignorance while Joe Biden has destroyed American energy independence via the same method.
So, back to the southern tornadoes for a moment. Yes, terrible. Can anybody tell me the weather in Mississippi on March 20, 1701? How about in central Utah on June 13, 1666? Mr. “Weird Weather Genius,” please enlighten me about the weather in western Arizona on October 3, 1312. Florida panhandle on April 15, 1512. Manhattan Island from February 5, 772 B.C. to March 25, 756 B.C. Don’t know? Then how do you know our current weather is “weird”? How many tornadoes did Oklahoma have in 1412? 1639? 1845? You have no clue, have you. All you know is the “weather is weird '' and “global warming/climate change is true” because CNN and Greta Thunberg tell you so.
“But the weather records show warming...” Yes, that is true—over the last few decades. How far do accurate instrument-measured weather records go back? Maybe 140 years, tops. So how do we know about specific weather events, on specific days or even months, before those records started being kept? We don’t. Climate scientists can tell us weather trends over decades and centuries, but they cannot tell you how many tornadoes Mississippi had in any month, for thousands of years, prior to recent record-keeping. It is folly to say our weather is “weird” because we don’t know what “normal” was like in the past. It may have been even weirder. Thirty years is nothing historically, and the planet shouldn’t be revolutionized based on information over such a small sample period.
On top of that, satellite data (the most accurate current weather instrumentation) demonstrates that there has been no true “global warming” since 2013 (check Marc Morano’s “Climate Depot” website for more information about this). There is a reason the switch was made from “global warming” to “climate change”—there ain’t been no warming recently. Climate scientists also know, through various methods, that the earth was warmer in the year 100 A.D. than in 2000 A.D. The 2000-year trend, except for the “Medieval Warming Period”, has been towards colder weather. Since about 1900, there has been gradual, but inconsistent, warming. We can see the developments of weather, but no specific places or dates (Mississippi, April 3, 1102). Thus, there is absolutely no way of knowing if, historically, this spring’s tornados are “weird” or “normal.” It may have been worse 1,000 years ago.
Climate scientists also speak of the “Medieval Warming Period” (appx. 1000-1300 A.D.), followed by nearly 500 years of a “Little Ice Age.” The earth only began to recover from that last century, though predictions of another “ice age” were widespread in the 1950s-70s. Now the trend is back to greater warmth. Except for the long winter this year. But, of course, the hotter temperatures, especially over the past 30 years, are the evidence “global warmists” use for their theory. And it is man’s fault.
But how did humans cause temperatures to rise 2000 years ago in the Roman period? What industries did medieval men invent that created the Medieval Warming Period? Peasant farming, I guess.
Thomas Jefferson, in 1799, noted there was generally less snow then than 60 years earlier (there was indeed a warming trend in the 1700s). Did mankind cause that, too?
A little history can work wonders in debunking hoaxes and myths. That is why Karl Marx so accurately said, “Keep people from their history and they are easily controlled.” People are being 'controlled’ now by Leftist, “climate change” lies, and one of the major reasons for it is an abysmal ignorance of history. Marano (“Climate Depot”) and others are trying. But they are being swamped and overwhelmed. As long as the Left controls the global narrative and the American education system, our climb is decidedly uphill.
https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2023/04/24/weird-weather-n2622307 ?
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Your Taxes at Work: ‘Eco-Anxiety’ Counseling
US Fish and Wildlife Service employees are struggling to cope with feelings of trauma and loss over the world’s changing climates and imperiled environments. Their work repeatedly confronts them with ecological changes, but even a sense of “anticipated loss” perhaps decades from now requires compassionate help. Or so the FWS and American Psychological Association tell us.
The FWS is thus offering paid leave to employees who attend “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief” training. When the House Natural Resources Committee called the sessions a colossal waste of money, the agency downplayed their cost and scope. But naturally the “woke” programs don’t end there.
FWS Director Martha Williams is also pushing diversity-equity-inclusion-LBGTQ programs as the agency’s “number one priority” (or perhaps number two, after climate change). Employees can take as much paid time off as needed for DEI and “gay pride” programs and eco-anguish counseling.
There’s no word about programs to help employees deal with widespread habitat and wildlife destruction that will result from millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, due to “net zero” policies implemented in the name of averting the “climate crisis.” Apparently no programs offer paid leave to participate in “conservative pride” campaigns or study Earth’s historic ice ages, warm periods, little ice ages and decades-long droughts.
That’s hardly surprising. The FWS and Interior Department were getting eco-centric and anti-fossil-fuel when I worked there 35 years ago. Like American and Western society in general, their culture has simply gotten more noticeably and intolerantly devoted to extreme environmentalist agendas since then.
Movies, television and news stories, constant instruction in what to think, rather than how to think, an absence of religion and ethics in many schools and homes, and incessant themes of inequality, victimhood and global doom foster widespread tension, anxiety and depression. They leave too many children, teens and adults unable to cope with life and setbacks, less respectful of authority and human life, inured to violence, and aggressively intolerant of opinions that differ from their own ideologies and agendas.
Even before they were forced to endure Covid-induced lockdowns, nearly 20% of Americans were taking antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, some linked to precipitating acts of violence; a third of high school students experienced prolonged anxiety, depression and hopelessness; and almost one in five teenagers had contemplated suicide.
Social isolation, minimal physical and outdoor activity, video games and reading self-selected online media have amplified depression and “chronic incapacitating mental illness” in America and many Western countries. Also hardly surprising, the problems are increasingly blamed on climate change.
“Climate grief is real,” self-proclaimed experts insist, and it’s spreading rapidly among young people. “The future is frightening,” 77% of 10,000 young people ages 16-25 from the USA and other countries told “climate anxiety” and “climate depression” investigators. Many children have climate nightmares.
“The climate mental health crisis” already affects people who have “lost everything in worsening climate infernos,” claims a NASA scientist and climate activist who’s certain we face “the end of life on Earth as we know it.” He’s not alone in being convinced that every extreme weather event and ecological calamity today is due to or made worse by fossil fuel and agricultural emissions.
“I don’t want to be alive anymore,” wailed a four-year-old who’s clearly been indoctrinated already. “The animals are all going to die, and I don’t want to be here when all the animals are dead.”
Parents fantasize about killing their children, over fears of a “climate-ravaged future.” Parents, teens and even children increasingly consider suicide.
At least one psychologist has based his entire practice on addressing climate psychoses. The Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of “climate-aware therapists,” and a “peer support network” offers grief therapy modeled on twelve-step drug addiction programs.
There’s only one real solution to this epidemic, other “experts” insist: Governments must “take action now” to “end the climate crisis,” to eliminate “the death knell of climate chaos” that threatens us. Otherwise the epidemic of anxiety, depression, pills, climate grief and suicide will steadily worsen.
This is nonsense, insanity. We don’t have a climate crisis. We have a climate fear-mongering crisis.
We don’t need to “fix” exaggerated and over-hyped climate problems. We need to end the junk science, the indoctrination dominating news stories and classroom discussions about energy and climate change, the censorship that prevents alternative, reality-based facts and voices from being heard, the massive government funding of one side of this crucial debate.
Claims of “unprecedented” temperatures and extreme weather, floods and droughts have no basis in real-world evidence. The “climate crisis” exists in greenhouse-gas-focused computer models, headlines and hype, not in reality. There is no unprecedented upward trend in the frequency of violent US tornados, or US landfalling hurricanes, for example – though the 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes hitting the United States between Wilma (October 2005) and Harvey (August 2017) is an all-time record.
Unfortunately, viewpoints, evidence and experts challenging climate crisis claims are too often banished from school curricula, news and social media, and government policy discussions.
President Biden’s “national climate advisor” worked closely with Big Tech and news organizations, to suppress facts about climate change, fossil fuels, and the acreage, raw materials and mining required for wind, solar and battery power. Meta (Facebook), YouTube, pre-Musk Twitter and other companies routinely help to deplatform, demonetize and censor anyone contesting crisis-promoting claims.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “summaries for policy makers” often misrepresent scientific findings and advance frightening but unsupported scenarios about Earth’s future climate. The IPCC also ignores studies that demonstrate how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide improves plant growth and wildlife habitats, how climate has changed repeatedly throughout Earth’s history, and that eliminating fossil fuels would result in extensive ecological damage from wind, solar, battery and transmission line mining and installations.
China, India and other countries are rapidly expanding their oil, gas and coal use, to improve their economies and lift billions out of poverty. China dominates raw material and “green tech” supply chains, making the West increasingly reliant on China for energy, economy and national defense needs – via Chinese mines, processing plants and factories that operate under minimal standards for pollution control, habitat destruction, and slave and child labor. As a result:
* Nothing the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia do will have any effect on global fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions.
* Western foreign and domestic policy options will be restricted by reliance on adversarial nations for pseudo-renewable energy materials and technologies.
* Prices for energy, goods and services will skyrocket, because every megawatt of wind and solar must be duplicated with backup batteries or generators.
* Politicians and bureaucrats – egged on by loud, often violent mobs – will increasingly dictate our energy consumption, living standards, home sizes, vacations, and what we can eat, drink, drive and buy.
These are the real existential threats to democracy, society, humanity and planet. Parents, voters, legislators and judges concerned about our future must take action now to stop this insanity.
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‘Environmental Justice’ From Climate Saint Joe
Putting an adjective before the word “justice” usually means you’re no longer getting justice. Such is the case with Joe Biden’s Earth Day Eve executive order that will further weaponize every federal agency, this time to save the planet by making it their “mission” to ensure “environmental justice for all.”
Never underestimate what the climate cultist will do to worship Gaia.
“Under this order,” Biden explained during the signing ceremony Friday, “environmental justice will become the responsibility of every single federal agency — I mean every single federal agency.” It even comes complete with “the first-ever Environmental Justice Scorecard.” And we all saw how well mobilizing government for the global emergency of COVID worked for everyone.
“This is about people’s health,” Biden declared in a similar vein. “It’s about the health of our communities. It’s only about the future of our planet.”
We’re killing the planet, Team Biden says, and it’s because we’re racist.
“For far too long, communities across our country have faced persistent environmental injustice through toxic pollution, underinvestment in infrastructure and critical services, and other disproportionate environmental harms often due to a legacy of racial discrimination including redlining,” read a White House statement. “These communities with environmental justice concerns face even greater burdens due to climate change.”
The statement adds that Biden “is working to ensure that all people” have access to “cleaner air and water, reduced risk for asthma, cancer, and other health burdens, and better access to green space, safe and affordable housing, and clean transportation.”
On the surface, that sounds pretty good. We all want clean air and water and to eradicate cancer and other health problems. We all want the American Dream.
In practice, however, Biden’s order means top-down government control over an ever-increasing portion of our lives, and that will often hamper the stated goals. Central planning never works. “Affordable housing,” for example, means penalizing people with good credit in order to subsidize those with bad credit. That’s on top of rampant inflation thanks to Biden’s spending spree, the response to which is increasing interest rates that make houses even more unaffordable.
“Clean transportation” means subsidizing and mandating Team Biden’s favored electric vehicles while waging war on gas-powered cars.
Speaking of energy, Americans get 60% of our electricity from coal and gas-fired power plants. The EPA is set to announce strict carbon limits on those power plants, and you better believe the objective is not to make that energy more affordable for American families of every color who are already struggling to keep up after two years of declining wages and rising prices.
Indeed, we all pay more for everything from homes to vehicles to energy as a result of this grossly distorted and patently unconstitutional “whole-of-government commitment to environmental justice.”
This isn’t Biden’s first executive order related to “environmental justice,” either. In his first days after taking office, he carpet-bombed America with EOs on everything from banning the term “China virus” to mandating masks in various places to regulating the supply chain to directing government agencies to pursue “environmental justice.”
Nevertheless, Biden is renewing the push now as the White House drums up anticipation over his looming reelection announcement, perhaps this week. We need to reelect the demented octogenarian, the argument will be, because the planet itself is at stake.
Biden alluded to this by fearmongering about GOP opposition to his schemes. “The MAGA Republicans in Congress want to repeal climate protections in the Inflation Reduction Act,” the president warned. Indeed, the House GOP did pass the Lower Energy Costs Act (HR 1) last month to reduce regulations on American energy production so as to reduce the cost of filling up our cars and heating our homes.
Biden called it “a thinly veiled license to pollute” and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pronounced it “dead on arrival.”
Elections have consequences and, unfortunately, Americans put Biden in the White House and Democrats in control of the Senate. A lot of folks might feel good about saving the planet, but others of us know just how economic damaging and constitutionally contemptuous the resulting bid for “environmental justice” really is.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96743-environmental-justice-from-climate-saint-joe-2023-04-24 ?
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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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