Climate change denial is becoming explicitly racist and more sexist (?)

Male white nationalists are climate deniers as a tribal requirement says Michael Barnard below.  We have met Michael before.  He argues that only superior people can understand Warmism and that the rest of us should just bow down before them and believe.  He sounds a thoroughly unpleasant person so it is no surprise to find him trying to show that climate skeptics are thoroughly unpleasant people. He is just engaging in that good ol' Leftist projection.

Funnily enough, he is largely right in what he says.  He sets out findings about something that we all know -- that Warmism is almost entirely a Leftist delusion.  Most conservatives are either openly or covertly climate skeptics.  So showing that any particular conservative -- extreme or moderate --  is a climate skeptic is rather old hat.

And it is also no mystery that conservatives are dubious about illegal immigration and tend to regard feminists as unbalanced.  To Leftists like Michael, those two orientations make conservatives racist and sexist but that is just the usual unfounded abuse that one expects from Leftists.

"White supremacist" is also a term that Leftists enjoy using.  They fling it about with gay abandon, very rarely doing anything to substantiate it.  I have been called a white supremacist when I am in fact a Northeast Asian supremacist.  I believe that the 21st century will be the century of the N.E. Asians -- China, Japan and Korea.

And Barnard's opening salvo about "conspiracy theorists" is amusing.  He appears to include most or all of conservatives in that. Many of the examples of climate skepticism that he gives seem simply to be conservatives. There are some conservative conspiracy theorists but to equate conservatism generally with conspiracy theory is egregious. But I can return the compliment.  I think all American Leftists are Communists!  How's that for over-simplification?

And his claim that conservatives are "maladjusted" is also amusing.  He produces not a skerrrick of evidence for the claim -- except perhaps in that he again plays fast and loose with categories.  Perhaps he is claiming that all Right or Center views are maladjusted.

The claim that conservatives are maladjusted goes back at least to 1950 and has a huge literature in support of it.  I spent 1970 to 1990 looking closely at that "evidence". And in the main part of my 200+ published academic journal articles I showed that not a single one of the studies held water.  They were parodies of science -- not quite as fast and loose with the facts and categories as Barnard but close.

So Barnard below makes large psychological claims but is not a psychologist -- and it shows


Over the past few years, it’s become clear that maladjusted conspiracy theorists were very likely to be climate change deniers. Just when those who thought they were normal people but merely skeptical were beginning to think that maybe that was just a blip, strong evidence has emerged from multiple peer-reviewed and published studies that if you scratch a white, male, far-right nationalist, you’ll find a denier of climate science as well.

That conservative white males in the USA are more likely to deny anthropogenic global warming is well documented, as is the increase in that denial over the past decade. A study published in the journal Global Environmental Change found:

conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well.

The US study was replicated in Norway and found that in that country there was evidence that climate change denial was merging with right-wing nationalism and become a focal point of agreement in those groups.

63 per cent of conservative males in Norway do not believe in anthropogenic climate change, as opposed to 36 per cent among the rest of the population who deny climate change and global warming. […] Interpreting xenoscepticism as a rough proxy for right leaning views, climate change denial in Norway seems to merge with broader patterns of right-wing nationalism.

A German study found solid evidence of climate change skepticism being prevalent in far-right communication and that it often overrode values related to preservation of nature.

We thus contribute to the growing body of knowledge on climate-change communication and, more specifically, on the link between ideology and climate-change skepticism.

Results courtesy Pew Research

Pew Research has done extensive polling on opinions related to climate change in the USA and documented the clear split between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of global warming.

While the Republicans have not in the past been readily described as a right-wing nationalist party, the most recent administration has certainly pandered to that subset of populace and Trump’s remarks after the Charlottesville white supremacist march of 2017 and the death of Heather Heyer were widely interpreted as supporting the white nationalists.

Similarly, Pew has documented the gender split in climate change skepticism, with men in multiple countries much less likely to accept the science.

It’s also worth looking at the gender split in voting for radical right-wing parties. Research has shown time and again that most right-wing nationalists are men.

One of the most consistent findings in the research on radical right voting has been the gender-specific profile of the radical right electorate. […] women tend to be significantly underrepresented among radical right voters compared with men

So we have multiple lines of evidence which support the idea that white, right-wing, nationalist males are likely to not accept the incredibly well-supported science of anthropogenic global warming and climate change. As with conspiracy ideation, white racism’s lack of rational and empirical support is a strong indicator of other failings.

With this data and evidence of climate-change denial policies explicit in nationalist parties, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden is establishing a research project to assess this.

in Denmark and Norway, in Britain with UKIP, and Front National in France. But also, in Sweden, with the Sweden Democrats’ suspicion towards SMHI (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute), their dismissal of the Paris Agreement and of climate laws, and in their appraisal of climate change denier Václav Klaus as a freedom-fighting hero. […] a unique international collaborative platform for research into climate change denial,Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism (CEFORCED), will be established, which will connect around 40 of the world’s foremost scientific experts

There will be more and more published data on this in the coming years. For lay people, it’s sufficient to know that one of the groups where global warming denial is strongest is male white supremacists. That should give pause to others considering skepticism to be a reasonable position.

That is in some ways a positive, as a limited study found 17% of former climate change deniers had changed to acceptance of the science in part due to the credibility of the people around them. When your fellow ‘skeptics’ are tiki-torch Nazis, it’s probably hard to accept that they are rational about everything else except that.

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Life after climate change: lessons from Cape Town

What complete BS this is!  The FT should know better.  The Capetown water shortage had NOTHING to do with climate change.  It came about because the population doubled while the "Rainbow" government did nothing to expand the water infrastructure.  They are still running on the dams etc left behind by the Apartheid government

In the flat where I stayed in Cape Town last month, the bathtub felt like a relic of a lost civilisation. It may never be used again. Beside it was a shower containing an egg timer. The two-minute wash has been standard here since the recent three-year drought. In the city’s public bathrooms, a dribble comes out of the tap. Posters everywhere warn against wasting water.

This is what adapting to climate change looks like. Last year, Cape Town nearly became the first big city on earth to run dry. Daily water rations dropped to 50 litres per person per day, with the spectre of 25 litres if supplies ran out on “ Day Zero”.

The drought broke just in time, but the city’s planners now expect permanent water scarcity. Rationing, which initially felt like wartime austerity, has become normal.

We have collectively decided not to stop climate change — carbon dioxide emissions hit a record in 2018 — so the future will be about mitigating its effects. Every region faces its own threat, whether from heat, flooding, drought or hurricanes. Whatever the problem, Cape Town’s glimpse of the future offers lessons for everyone:

* An existential climate crisis creates almost instant consensus on action. I didn’t hear anyone in Cape Town dismiss climate change as an elite hobby, or argue against rationing. On the contrary, water was an almost automatic topic of conversation with people of all classes, well ahead of May’s South African elections. The only arguments were about how to access (and ration) water.

* Climate change is a class issue. For people who live in shanty towns outside Cape Town without running water, it’s always Day Zero. Yet a crisis was proclaimed only when rich Capetonians and companies were affected too.

The city’s new scarcity has caused some accidental redistribution: the rich pay rising water tariffs, and their swimming pools and baths have become less useful. But they can also afford to install storage tanks and private boreholes (which, essentially, means privatising ground-water). Meanwhile, the higher costs of living in an adapting city may push out the middle classes.

* Climate change reorders the economy. The Cape’s poor farmworkers will be hurt by reduced irrigation, writes the FT’s Southern Africa correspondent, Joseph Cotterill. (The great majority of global water use goes on agriculture.)

But adaptation also creates jobs — for technicians who can fix leaky taps and water pipes, and for the medieval-style water-carriers who have emerged around Newlands Spring in Cape Town. There’ll be corporate contracts galore as South Africa renovates its water infrastructure.

* Regional and national governments will clash over who should pay for climate change. All the proposed fixes — desalination plants, dams, plugging leaks — cost money. No national government wants to finance one city’s special needs, even leaving aside the complication that the ANC rules South Africa while its rival, the Democratic Alliance, rules Cape Town.

Such stand-offs will mushroom worldwide. Picture Miami asking Washington DC for money after the next hurricane. What almost ­certainly won’t be on offer is international help, given rising nationalism.

SOURCE




Federal Judge Strikes Down Trump’s Deal To Build a Life-Saving Road

A federal judge on Friday vacated a land swap agreement between an Alaskan village and the Interior Department because the federal government violated procedural law when making the deal.

U.S. District Court of Alaska Judge Sharon Gleason nullified a January 2018 deal that traded roughly 500 acres of federally protected wilderness to the community of King Cove, Alaska, in exchange for one acre to the Department of the Interior. At the time, Alaskan lawmakers and King Cove residents celebrated the agreement as the end of a four-decade battle.

“This is a disappointing case and a disappointing ruling,” GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said in a statement.

Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed off on the agreement, trading away some the 315,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in order for King Cove to finish construction on a road between the community and Cold Bay, roughly 30 miles away by land.

Gleason sided with several environmental groups that sued the federal government over the deal, alleging that Zinke “not only failed to provide the required level of detailed justification for reversing decades of prior findings, he provided no justification at all,” according to the judge’s decision, reported by the Anchorage Daily News. Gleason agreed with the environmentalists, ruling that Zinke had violated the Administrative Procedures Act when signing the deal with King Cove.

A community of fewer than 1,000 people, King Cove is situated on a remote peninsula in southern Alaska. Residents have limited access to medical care — a small clinic covers the most basic medical needs — and must travel more than 600 miles by air to Anchorage to see a physician for surgeries and other operations.

Alaska officials have been arguing for decades that a land route between King Cove and Cold Bay, where the area’s only all-weather airport is located, is a medical necessity. Air taxis between Cold Bay and King Cove’s gravel airstrip and fishing boats can usually transport residents, but in medical emergencies, those options are only reliable about two-thirds of the year.

The rest of the time, the area’s weather is too severe for small planes and boats to safely navigate. At least 18 people have died in King Cove waiting for medevac by the Coast Guard or in crashes trying to travel to Cold Bay because no reliable land route connects the two communities.

“There have been nearly 100 medevacs in King Cove — many carried out by the Coast Guard — since 2014 alone. There is no question that the people who live there need a single-lane, gravel, non-commercial road to protect their health and safety,” Murkowski said. “I will never stop until this road is a reality and the nearly 1,000 residents of this isolated community have a lifeline for emergency medical care.”

SOURCE





Indignant Climate Alarmists Terrified Of ANY Scientific Debate

Before even thinking about squandering one hundred trillion dollars on an insane economy-collapsing Green New Deal premised upon an end-of-world climate catastrophe, let’s take a very hard look at the so-called “settled science” nonsense.

The Trump White House plans to convene a National Security Council review panel headed by Princeton emeritus professor of physics Dr. Will Happer to do exactly that.

One of the loudest, shrillest, most unsettled voices of protest against science scrutiny is emanating from Dr. Michael Mann, the author of a cobbled-together and thoroughly debunked “hockey stick” graph first used by the IPCC and Al Gore to gin up the climate Armageddon alarm.

A March 20 article co-authored by Mann and Bob Ward in The Guardian equated the planned NSC panel to Stalinist repression.

Accordingly, a great place to begin this investigation is to revisit scandalous Climategate email exchanges between members of Mann’s hockey team along with readily available public records I have previously written about in numerous Forbes and Newsmax articles.

Tom Crowley, a close Mann colleague, wrote, “I am not convinced that the ‘truth’ is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.”

Yet friendship aside, Mann’s hockey ‘schtick’ graph co-author Raymond Bradley clearly drew the line regarding another research paper jointly published by Mann and colleague Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia.

Bradley wrote, “I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL [Geophysical Research Letters] paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year [climate] reconstruction.”

Nevertheless, Michael Mann sanctimoniously attacked Will Happer’s scientific credentials to chair the NSC’s panel because “[he] has not published any research on climate change in a reputable science journal.”

By “reputable,” Mann is obviously referring to publishers that exclusively post research papers endorsed by the Climate Crisis Cartel and its IPCC sponsors.

An email from Jones to Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports, said, “Kevin, Seems that this potential Nature [journal] paper may be worth citing, if it does say that GW [global warming] is having an effect on TC [tropical cyclone] activity.”

Jones wanted to make sure that people who supported this connection be represented in IPCC reviews, “Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.”

Top cyclone expert Christopher Landsea demanded that the IPCC refute Trenberth’s scientifically unsupportable but highly publicized claim of a global warming-hurricane link following a deadly 2004 Florida storm season. Receiving no response, Landsea resigned as an invited 2007 IPCC report author.

A July 2004 communication from Phil Jones to Michael Mann marked “Highly Confidential” discussed keeping two papers published in Climate Research from being in that next IPCC report.

Jones wrote: Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is.”

Jonathan Overpeck, a coordinating lead IPCC report author, suggested, “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.”

Trenberth’s associate Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research warned in another email to Mann, “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive . . . there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC . . . ”

Wigley and Trenberth suggested in another email to Mann, “If you think that [Yale professor James] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted [as editor-in-chief of the Geophysical Research Letters journal].”

Writing to Phil Jones, Peter Thorne of the U.K. Met Office advised caution, saying, “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”

Thorne prudently observed in a separate email, “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

Another scientist worries, ” . . . clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.”

Still, another observed, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”

One researcher foresaw some very troubling consequences, “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably . . . ”

Oh, Mann!

I understand your angst about where your rebounding hockey puck may wind up.

SOURCE






Al Gore to head Climate Change Week in Australia in June

What a nauseous prospect!  Why does anyone need "training" in global warming?  It is obviously not a scientific conference where evidence is discussed.  It seems to be a propaganda course.  That does need training because it is an education in falsehoods

An Inconvenient Truth presenter and former US vice-president Al Gore will run a three-day climate change training session in Brisbane during Queensland's first Climate Change Week.

Governments from around the Asia-Pacific region will travel to Brisbane for the week starting June 2 for discussion on climate change. World Environment Day is marked on June 5.

Political, business and community groups will also meet to debate issues to develop a strategy to minimise the effects of a changing climate.

After he left politics, Mr Gore developed an international reputation when his grassroots campaign to educate people about climate change became a 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

He was a joint-winner of a Nobel prize the following year.

An Inconvenient Sequel came in 2017, while Mr Gore runs and lectures at The Climate Reality Project.

In Brisbane, Mr Gore and The Climate Reality will host climate-change training for between 800-1000 business and community leaders.

Professor Don Henry, chair of The Climate Reality in Australia and the Pacific, said this was the first time Mr Gore would train others on climate issues in Queensland.

“It is a good opportunity for people from all walks of life to be better informed and act on the solutions needed to tackle climate change,” Professor Henry said.

“With the Great Barrier Reef threatened by climate change and action needed across the Asia Pacific region, the training will be of global significance.”

The Queensland government is developing a green paper on climate-change strategies, which it planned to release in either June or July, the state's new chief scientist Professor Paul Bertsch told Brisbane Times in February.

The Queensland government has set an ambitious target of meeting 50 per cent of its energy needs from renewable energy by 2030 and have zero net emissions by 2050.

“Climate change is the greatest challenge facing our planet today and it is critical that we unite to take urgent action,” Queensland Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch said.

Ms Enoch in February said Queensland "was on track" to provide 20 per cent of its electricity needs by renewable energy by 2020, in response to criticism by Queensland Climate Advisory Council senior scientist, Professor Ian Lowe.

The Queensland government is one of 220 members of The Climate Group's Under2 Coalition, a  group of "smaller than national governments" committed to keep the change in the world's temperature to below 2 degrees.

Ms Enoch said the Great Barrier Reef was still threatened by the warming climate.

“During Climate Week Queensland, we will bring together sub-national governments from across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

“In addition, we will host a First Nations Summit to ensure that these communities, many of which are also experiencing the impacts of climate change, are part of these important discussions.”

Climate Week Queensland will include business forums and a public program of arts, music, and panel discussions involving students.

Ms Enoch said that as part of the Minister’s Climate Challenge, students would be invited to identify a local climate problem and brainstorm an idea to solve it.

“The students who put forward the most innovative ideas will have the opportunity to be mentored by and have their solutions judged by world-class business leaders during Climate Week Queensland.”

SOURCE 

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