Defining a visual metonym: A hauntological study of polar bear imagery in climate communication
A VERY intellectual story below about images of polar bears. The Green/Left for a long time claimed that the bears were dying out so the bears became a symbol of global warming. Now, however, they are mostly a symbol of climate fraud. Why? The bears are NOT dying out. They are increasing in overall numbers, if anything. Pesky!
Abstract
From television news bulletins, newspapers and magazines, documentaries and films, social media memes and cartooning, to protest and art – even to the images that spontaneously come into our minds – polar bears are now ubiquitously associated with climate change. Indeed, polar bear visuals now often mean nothing but climate change. Why do polar bear images, as a particular type of climate change imagery, continue to thrive and to circulate – and indeed, to haunt – our imaginings of climate change? This paper seeks to understand the tangled social, cultural, political, and scientific histories of polar bear visuals through defining a new concept, a ‘visual metonym’. This concept is worked through using a longitudinal analysis of visual evidence arising from political, social, scientific, and cultural domains and using a hauntological approach that is sensitive to the spectre-like nature of polar bear imagery. This reveals three periods in which the work that polar bear visuals has undertaken has changed: polar bear (1990s–mid-2000s), political bear (mid-2000s), and climate bear (mid-2000s onwards). By the time of the ‘climate bear’ period, polar bear images had become entrenched and irreducible from (i.e., they haunt) climate change. As polar bear images came to stand in for much wider debates – of climate scepticism and political (in)action – they became a visual metonym. The paper concludes by presenting the visual metonym concept as a way to explore and understand how particular image types gain power, agency, and meaning and how they come to act as signalling devices representing complex engagements with contemporary issues. The visual metonym concept can be used to understand, interrogate, and critique naturalised and pervasive issue-led imagery.
https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tran.12543
*****************************************************Funding For The Climate Scam Soars As ‘Green Transition’ Collapses
In December 2016, Donald Trump had just been elected President. He had been widely accused of calling the climate scare a “hoax”
In a post titled “The Impending Collapse Of The Global Warming Scare,” I went out on a limb predicting that the change of administration could bring about the rapid demise of the climate scare.
The post reported the then-increasing focus of the environmental movement on the climate issue, and ended with this prediction:
The environmental movement has climbed itself way out onto the global warming limb.
Now the Trump administration is about to start sawing off the limb behind them.
Well, that didn’t happen. In the event, the Trump Administration was mostly a disappointment to us climate skeptics. Yes, they did take on a few significant regulatory matters, like rescinding the so-called Clean Power Plan (which forced the closure of fossil-fuel power plants).
But they never tackled the Endangerment Finding (labeling CO2 a “danger” to human health and welfare); nor did they make any meaningful pushback against the activist bureaucracies or scientific societies; nor did they cut funding for the climate alarm movement to any significant degree. [Except here.]
So we have been left to wait for the climate scare and the energy transition to collapse under the weight of the combination of their scientific absurdity, physical impossibility, and crushing costs. It has been a long wait.
But you have likely seen over just the past few months that the supposed green energy transition — widely hyped and massively subsidized for two decades — has suddenly started to crumble on multiple fronts.
We are rapidly approaching the green energy wall. And yet at the same time, the promoters of the climate scare are not backing down. Not in the least.
To the contrary, the New York Times reports just today that the major environmental NGOs are in the process of cutting their funding for their most basic programs, like dealing with toxic chemicals to double down and focus even more on the one big issue — climate change.
More on that in a minute. But first, a small update on the approach of the green energy wall. Here are just a few of the latest data points on the supposed green energy transition not happening due to issues of cost and physical impossibility:
• From the New York Times, November 2:
“Wind Power, Key to Democrats’ Climate-Change Goals, Faces a Crisis.” The article recounts the developers backing out of four big offshore wind projects off New York a couple of months ago, followed by an overlapping group of developers backing out of two big wind projects off the coast of New Jersey just a few days ago (November 1). (See also my post of October 5 as to other cancelations of offshore wind projects off the mid-Atlantic and New England.).
For New York, where offshore wind is supposed to be the magic elixir that will enable us to close all our natural gas plants and at the same time electrify all buildings and cars, we are left with exactly one offshore project currently moving forward, with all of 12 turbines.
Excerpt from the Times piece:
“Instead of gathering momentum as the long-promised benefits of offshore wind farms are about to be realized, the industry is now mired in an existential crisis. An assortment of recent obstacles to projects in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are almost certain to delay — and possibly derail — Northeastern states’ grand ambitions to harness the winds blowing over the Atlantic Ocean.”
• The darned fossil fuels just won’t go away. From the New York Times today: “Nations That Vowed to Halt Warming Are Expanding Fossil Fuels, Report Finds.” Excerpt:
“In 2030, if current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas than at any point in its history. Russia and Saudi Arabia plan to do the same. They’re among the world’s fossil fuel giants that, together, are on course this decade to produce twice the amount of fossil fuels than a critical global warming threshold allows, according to a United Nations-backed report issued on Wednesday.”
• Values of stocks of wind and solar developers have been crashing. Jo Nova reports today that the Invesco Solar ETF is down 40 percent year-to-date. She previously produced this chart of the stock price of Siemens Energy, with two dramatic drops in the past few months tied to announcements of losses in the wind energy business:
• The Germany-focused website No Tricks Zone keeps us updated on Germany’s ongoing deindustrialization due to soaring energy costs resulting from going all-in on wind and solar. Today’s post has the headline “Green Economic Collapse: 1/3 Of Germany’s Automotive Suppliers Considering Moving Abroad.”
This brings us to the other New York Times article from today, headline: “Environmental Groups Cut Programs as Funding Shifts to Climate Change.”
Even as everyone can see that this whole green energy thing is just not going to work, the Times reports that the entire environmental movement is doubling down, cutting other programs and focusing their funding on ‘climate change’ to the exclusion of everything else:
A significant shift in donor contributions to nonprofits fighting climate change in recent years has left some of the nation’s biggest environmental organizations facing critical shortfalls in programs on toxic chemicals, radioactive contamination, and wildlife protection.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is shutting down its nuclear mission and has laid off its top lawyer in the field. …
The NRDC is not alone. The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the Environmental Working Group, which have been at the forefront of efforts to clean up wastewater, regulate pesticides and adopt tougher standards for atomic power plants, are facing similar financial problems.
All the funders and the activists care about anymore is ‘climate change’:
Meanwhile, global spending to fight climate change by environmental groups and other nonprofits reached $8 billion in 2021, most of it in the United States and Canada, according to a survey released in September by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. …
“Funders that had a nuclear program or a toxics program have left those fields entirely and have gone to climate change,” said Marylia Kelley, senior adviser and former executive director of a citizens oversight group. …
I’d be surprised if the total annual funding of all climate skeptic organizations is as much as $25 million.
Well, alarmists have religious fervor and fanaticism on their side, but we have reality.
https://principia-scientific.com/funding-for-the-climate-scam-soars-as-green-transition-collapses/
*************************************************Another Setback for Biden’s Green Dream
The only truly viable means of replacing fossil fuel-based power production is via nuclear power. Of course, the conundrum for the climate cultists is the fact that their denunciation of nuclear power is almost as pronounced as their objection to fossil fuel.
Nevertheless, Joe Biden was so determined to push his “net-zero emissions by 2050” green dream that his administration was willing to embrace nuclear power — at least behind the scenes.
Yet Biden’s green dream once again has been hit by a cold dose of reality.
It all started two weeks ago when Danish wind energy company Ørsted announced that it was pulling the plug on its massive wind farm projects off the coast of New Jersey. Dubbed Ocean Wind I and II, the wind farms were part of a massive green energy initiative for New England that was projected to produce enough electricity to power 10 million homes.
The reason given by Ørsted had everything to do with costs, as the company said the project was no longer financially feasible, even with taxpayer dollars. One wonders if it ever could have been financially feasible without massive government handouts.
Now, Biden is getting more bad news. Oregon-based nuclear power company NuScale Power, the only company in the U.S. to have a certified design for the building of small modular reactors (SMRs), has just canned its years-long project to construct six SMRs at the Idaho National Laboratory. The first-of-its-kind nuclear power plant would have provided power to more than 300,000 households.
The Biden administration had intended for NuScale Power’s SMR plant, which had been slated to come online by 2029, to replace several coal-fired plants that are scheduled for closure. The advanced nuclear power plant would have provided needed supplemental support for wind and solar operations being developed.
Before shuttering those coal-fired power plants for good, the Biden administration might want to make sure it actually has the capability to produce reliable energy to meet the nation’s growing power demands. SMR technology does offer promising and exciting electricity-producing potential, and nuclear power has long been a proven energy-producing technology.
The trouble is the amount of government red tape. The regulatory costs associated with the development and construction of nuclear reactors has been nearly cost prohibitive. But investing in nuclear technology makes a whole lot more sense for true environmental and energy stewardship than does relying on the inherently and notoriously unreliable wind and solar power sources.
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The ocean isn’t rising, your island is sinking
Studies using 40 years of satellite imagery of more than 1,100 coral atolls in the Indian and Pacific Oceans have shown that most coral atolls have been growing in area, especially large atolls such as at Tuvalu. A few were static and some smaller atolls decreased in size. Some atolls had decreased in size because of compaction, extraction of coral for roads, airports, buildings and cement manufacture and groundwater extraction. Again, these satellite measurements confirm earlier theories that coral atolls grow when there is a relative sea level rise.
There is absolutely no science whatsoever to support the view that Tuvalu, or any other island nation, will be inundated by a speculated sea level rise. Only the contrary. The past shows that a relative sea level rise results in a growth of atolls. This has been known for nearly 200 years. The cash grab by the island atoll nations’ unctuous politicians and the UN should be called out for what it is. Maybe younger folk educated on Rugby Australia scholarships and with a Christian ethical foundation could change political thinking in the Pacific island atoll nations upon return to their homelands.
Come on Australia. Break away from your woke chains. Rather than hand out shedloads of cash to Pacific island nations for some silly hypothetical future catastrophe
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/bring-back-blackbirding
***************************************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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