“Climate Change” Is A Hoax

Kurt Schlichter

I hate science, evidently, because I’m woke to the manifest truth about what the leftist elite currently calls “climate change." It is the second most staggering fraud ever perpetrated upon the American people after the media’s promotion of the unstoppable candidacy of Beto (who is a furry). Like some suckers still do, I once believed that “science” was a rigorous process where you tested theories and revised those theories in response to objective evidence. But in today’s shabby practice, “science” is just a package of self-serving lies buttressing the transnational liberal elite’s preferred narrative. Our alleged betters hope that labeling their propaganda “science” will science-shame you into silence about what everyone knows is a scam.

Nah. “Climate change” is a hoax. Come arrest me for felony denial.

Understand that the term “climate change” does not refer to actual meteorological phenomena but, rather, to the sordid rat-king of lies, scams and power grabs that we are commanded to accept as pagan gospel lest we burn to a crisp or drown or suffer...whatever the Armageddon du jour is. When you say “climate change is a grift,” and you should as often as possible, you are pointing out that this green-on-the-outside/red-on-the-inside fake frenzy is really just a set of intertwined grifts transparently designed to separate you from your freedom and your property in the name of somehow adjusting the weather.

Observing that “climate change” is steaming garbage served in a dirty ashtray is not disputing that the climate changes. That the climate is not static, and never could be static, is one of the myriad reasons that this whole idea is ridiculous. The planet gets hotter, it gets colder, sometimes quickly, sometimes over eons, and there are a bunch of reasons why, like the sun and volcanos. Human-produced carbon might be one of the factors, but there’s simply no evidence that it is a significant one. Of course, if they really cared about carbon, they would be up in arms about China and India, which are upping their output while we are slashing ours. Yet the object of their ire is your New York strip. Gosh, does that seem consistent with 1) someone truly concerned about atmospheric carbon, or 2) someone who trembles with joy at the notion of bossing around you rubes out in gun/Jesusland?

The underlying premise of their claims seems to be that there is a “right” temperature for the earth; watch them sputter when you enquire about that perfect setting for Earth’s thermostat. Remember, if you ask questions you hate “science.” If they did stop telling you how you hate “science” long enough to respond, they might explain that of course there’s no perfect temperature – it’s not like LA, where it’s always 72 degrees.

But then, what are they comparing the present climate to in order to declare that our climate is “getting worse?” If you establish a climate baseline, then you can compare what’s actually happening to the baseline and that might demonstrate that the whole thing is baloney. That would be awkward. It happened after Katrina. Oh, Katrina’s proof positive that Gaia is really ticked off and…and…and…then we had a bunch of years without much hurricane action at all. You might think that this would be evidence that maybe the climate wasn’t in chaos, and that they would be happy to be proven wrong, but no, it doesn’t work that way. Every time the weather fits the narrative, you see, it’s proof that the climate kooks are right, and every time the weather fails to fit the narrative, well, weather’s not climate. At least until the next heat wave or storm; then weather will totally be climate again.

Heads, you must give us all your freedom and money, and also tails, you must give us all your freedom and money.

Now, we’re being told that we’re all going to die in…I guess we’re down to what? About 11.5 years this go ‘round? Of course, we’ve been told many times that we’re doomed and the deadlines have come and gone with the doomsdayers not missing a beat. They’re like old timey Elmer Gantrys promising the apocalypse over and over again, with their hardcore true believers regularly showing up for the rapture over and over again no matter how many times the Four Horseman fail to turn up.

We haven’t even seen one horseman.

Back in the 70s, I remember we were promised an ice age if we didn’t give liberals our money and freedom. Then in the 80s, we were promised death by ozone hole if we didn’t give liberals our money and freedom, and then doom by acid rain if we didn’t give liberals our money and freedom. By the time they started promising that we were all gonna die from global warming if we didn’t give liberals our money and freedom, I was still wanting my ice age. It would be nice to have a white Christmas in LA.

So, where’s my damn ice age?

Oh right, only a climate denier – Climate, I deny thee! – might wonder why we should hand over one, ten, a hundred trillion bucks to people who have never once been right about their predictions. You evidently hate “science” if you expect the “science” people to be correct at least one time in a half-century.

And they’re not even good at short-term prognostication. Heck, for several days Hurricane Dorian was supposed to slam head on into Florida and then…it didn’t. The Obamas just bought a $15 million pad on the beach – what’s that say about their faith in “science?” But don’t worry, the guys batting .000 so far will definitely get the temperature in 2119 right if we only just write them a huge check and transform ourselves from citizens to serfs.

That’s another big red flag – have you noticed how “science” always tells us that the only possible response to the climate hullabaloo is to give liberals exactly what they always wanted anyway? How lucky are the leftists to have had an existential problem drop in their laps where the only solution is to give them everything they could not otherwise convince us to give them? What a remarkable coincidence!

And what’s also weird is how nothing that we must do right now no time to debate it’s a crisis think o’ the children in any way inconveniences or calls for sacrifices from our climate crisis-pushing elite. Boy, they really scored with climate change – if they were going to manufacture a crisis in order to get the power and money they craved, how would they do it any differently?

Now, they might claim that they too will have to sacrifice to the Angry Weather Demon, but it’s unclear how. I suppose they might stop flying across the globe to climate finger-wagging festivals in private jets, but call me jaded for thinking that if it’s such a crisis today and they have not stopped doing it yet, they won’t stop jetting about down the road. Oh, but you will. You most definitely will stop flying and driving the vehicles you choose and eating cheeseburgers and using straws that don’t disintegrate into gummy sludge in your Dr. Pepper. But them? Pete Buttigieg explained away his zipping around in Gulfstreams as necessary because it is important for him to be pestering people in Des Moines. Bet you that pretty much everything our betters want to do will turn out to be “important.” And I’ll bet that nothing what you peasants want to do will.

One might think that if stopping carbon was important, you might want to explore nuclear power. But you would think wrong. After all, if there’s plenty of electrical power, the elite loses the political power that comes from divvying up a scarce resource. If they control the power, they control you. Cheap, plentiful power makes you freer, which is a bug, not a feature.

Oh, and those many millions of people in Middle America who directly or indirectly rely on fracking and the rest of the fossil fuel industry? Even bloody-eyed, Gaffe-atronic Joe 3000 wants to shaft you. Better learn to code or something, because your good job is history. Weird how all the sacrifice once again falls on those out in the hinterlands and not on the blue coastal city swells, huh? But you’ll be able to rest easy knowing that our moral superiors in Brooklyn and Alexandria and Santa Monica enjoyed showing you sweaty rubes who’s really the boss by impoverishing you. Because that, and not the weather in a century, is and always has been what the “climate change” hoax is really all about.

If you want to read a vivid account of what happens if the Democrats succeed and manage to enslave us through weather inquisitions or disarming those of us who don’t commit crimes or however, check out my action-packed yet hilarious novels, People's Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire. People you despise for being cruise-shilling grifter dweebs called these tomes “appalling.” Can there be a greater endorsement?

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Democrats Once Again Embrace Population Control to Save the Planet
 
Is the left once again embracing Malthusian population control in order to save the planet?

Of all the preposterous proposals put forward by the Democratic presidential candidates during the CNN climate change town hall meeting last week, the dumbest wasn’t outlawing plastic straws, incandescent light bulbs or air travel. It wasn’t the contention that climate change is the globe’s greatest threat since World War II. It wasn’t even the fantastical hypothesis that hurricanes are racist because they target “communities of color” more than white areas.

No, the dumbest (and most dangerous) idea was a rehash of the widely discredited authoritarian idea from the 1960s and ‘70s: population control. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked by a schoolteacher whether it would even be possible to fight global warming given that “the world’s population has doubled over the last 50 years.” Would the senator be “courageous enough to discuss curbing population growth” as part of his climate plan? Sanders obediently blurted out “absolutely, yes” and then meandered into a discussion about a woman’s right to choose and better access to birth control.

Here we go again. In the 1960s, biologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford became the patron saint of the modern population control movement with his mega-bestseller “The Population Bomb.” That book — which argued that the world was overpopulated by more than 1 billion people and the only way to save the planet from environmental doomsday was to force people to have fewer children — became the rallying cry for Stalinistic population control measures around the world. This led to tens of millions of forced abortions, involuntary sterilization programs, forced contraception and even homicidal infanticide — all in the name of saving the planet.

China took the population control crusade to a whole new level when it instituted its notorious one-child policy. To this day, there are tens of millions of females demographically missing in China. The homicidal environmental policy was cheered on by the United Nations and many of the same left-wing activists and organizations that preach “reproductive freedom” and women’s rights. Similarly brutish population control programs were implemented in Africa, India, Egypt and many South American nations. To save the planet, babies had to be prevented.

Fortunately, scholars like the late Julian Simon of the University of Illinois proved that human beings do not deplete the world’s resources but help discover and create them. A larger number of human beings — especially when combined with freedom and free enterprise — leave the planet materially and environmentally better off, not worse off.

Simon also showed that freedom and prosperity are the best forms of contraception. Population growth happened because we found ways to conquer early death — with infant mortality rates falling by 70% and 80% — and eradicate killer diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis.

The Malthusians were not just immoral; they were dead wrong on their population projections.

All of those population forecasting models that predicted standing room only on the planet over the next 25 to 50 years were lies. In the 1970s, the left predicted today’s population would be more than 10 billion people. The number is closer to 7.5 billion. These doomsday demographic models of the future were about as accurate as the climate change models predicting catastrophic temperature changes.

What the population control crowd didn’t see happening was that population growth has radically slowed down — and not because of government edicts. As people get richer and freer, couples have chosen to have fewer — but healthier — children. Today, in most countries, including China, the tragedy is not too many children but too few.

But at its core, the radical greens really do believe that the fundamental problem with the human race is that there are too many of us. People are the pollution. Celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Prince Harry are urging people to have fewer or no kids. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wondered earlier this year whether young women should feel ethically bound not to have children so as to help prevent climate change. At the end of the day, she rejected that lunacy, but the very idea that liberals had to ask the question shows how anti-human the left has become.

This is a fundamentally anti-Judeo-Christian ideology that disrespects human life and — as history proves all too well — can lead to dastardly consequences for basic human rights and economic progress. In regard to environmental problems and the constantly changing climate of our planet, human ingenuity is the solution, not the cause.

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Don’t Overhype the Link between Climate Change and Hurricanes

By JUDITH CURRY

Doing so erodes scientific credibility — and distracts from the urgent need to shore up our vulnerability to storms’ impacts.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian’s catastrophic impacts on the Bahamas, we have been reminded of the inevitability that some aspect of any damaging hurricane will be blamed on man-made climate change.

We first saw this after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with the publication of two papers linking an increase in the strongest hurricanes to increasing sea-surface temperatures. As co-author of one these papers, I was astonished to see the outsize media and public attention that they garnered. Katrina was the first time people realized that a small amount of warming could have substantial adverse impacts. Since then, each hurricane has been viewed as an opportunity by activists to emphasize the urgent need to reduce fossil-fuel emissions.

Katrina also touched off an intense and publicly acrimonious debate among hurricane scientists about the quality of hurricane-intensity data and the effect of man-made climate change. “We anticipate that it may take another decade for observations to clarify the situation,” I wrote of the controversy in 2006. Since then, research on the climate dynamics of hurricanes has grown in leaps and bounds. But there remains substantial scientific debate surrounding the issue of hurricanes and climate change.

In 2013, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that:

Globally, there is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence. This is due to insufficient observational evidence, lack of physical understanding of the links between anthropogenic drivers of climate and tropical cyclone activity, and the low level of agreement between studies as to the relative importance of [natural variability and man-made forcing].

Last month, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Task Force, consisting of eleven international experts on hurricanes and climate change, published two assessment reports. Unlike the IPCC’s, which focus on consensus statements, the WMO reports discussed disagreement among the authors, distinguishing the issues on which there was substantial agreement among the authors from those on which there was substantial disagreement owing in part to limited evidence.

Any convincing claim that man-made climate change has altered hurricane activity requires identifying a change in hurricane characteristics that can’t be explained by natural climate variability. The only conclusion on which there was high agreement among the WMO Task Team members was that there is low-to-medium confidence that the location of typhoons in the North Pacific has changed as a result of climate change. The team members disagreed as to whether any other observed alterations in hurricane activity could be said to have been discernibly influenced by man-made climate change.

The WMO reports discussed a number of more speculative statements about the relationship between hurricane behavior and climate change, which could very well be false and overstate the influence of man-made climate change. There is some evidence suggesting contributions from man-made climate change to: an increase in the average intensity of the strongest hurricanes since the early 1980s; an increase in the proportion of hurricanes reaching Category 4 or 5 in recent decades; and the increased frequency of Hurricane Harvey–like extreme precipitation events in the Texas region. There is also evidence suggesting a decrease in how fast hurricanes move, but that has not been attributed to man-made climate change with any confidence. The WMO Report states that there is disagreement among the authors about whether these trends reflect the influence of man-made climate change.

Why, then, is there so much hype about man-made climate change in the news media after every catastrophic hurricane? Rather than referencing these assessment reports, sensationalized news coverage of the issue tends to lean on activist climate scientists with little or no expertise in hurricanes, implying that their speculative perspective represents the “consensus.”

Insofar as there is any such “consensus,” it is a weak one. Climate and hurricane scientists continue to have a range of perspectives on the impact of man-made climate change on hurricanes. The frequent disagreements among them help move the debate forward, adding to our collective scientific knowledge of the issues involved for everyone’s benefit.

My own perspective is described in a comprehensive Special Report on Hurricanes and Climate Change that was prepared for the clients of my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN). My report is broadly consistent with the WMO’s assessment reports, but maintains a greater focus on aspects of hurricanes that contribute to landfall impacts and on the role of natural climate variability in explaining the observed variability of hurricanes and their impacts.

All measures of Atlantic hurricane activity have increased since 1970, although comparably high levels of activity occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, and higher levels of activity were seen in the first decades of the 20th century. Of the 13 strongest recorded hurricanes to hit the U.S. mainland, only three have occurred since 1970: Andrew (1992), Charley (2004), and Michael (2018). Four of these 13 hurricanes — including the strongest, the Labor Day hurricane that hit Florida in 1935 — occurred between 1926 and 1935, when sea-surface temperatures were substantially cooler than they’ve been in recent decades. Hence it is difficult to support an argument that man-made climate change, which has been significant only since 1970, is making hurricanes worse.

Predictions of future hurricane activity are even more uncertain. Possible scenarios in which hurricanes could incrementally worsen over the course of the 21st century are described in the WMO Report. But they don’t change the fundamental fact that hurricanes become catastrophes through a combination of large populations, land-use practices and coastal-ecosystem degradation.

My recent testimony to the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee described ways that we can reduce vulnerability to hurricanes. Rapidly escalating hurricane damage in recent decades owes much to government policies that subsidize risk. The most politically important hurricane that you have probably never heard of is the Category 3 Hurricane Frederic, which struck Alabama and Mississippi in 1979. Its landfall occurred shortly after FEMA was established, and prompted almost $250 million in federal aid for recovery. In 1992, following Hurricane Andrew, Robert Sheets, the then-director of the National Hurricane Center, testified to Congress that the aid for Frederic’s recovery had spurred development in the hurricane-prone regions of the Gulf Coast. Federal disaster policies provide humanitarian benefits, but also encourage the growth of regions vulnerable to hurricanes, which can make the damage from future storms worse. The political pressure on state insurance regulators that often holds down insurance premiums in risky coastal areas contributes to the problem, as well.

It does no one any good to proceed on the assumption that reducing fossil-fuel emissions will mitigate damage from future hurricanes in a meaningful way. The hype that links today’s hurricanes to man-made climate change is diverting our attention from implementing policies that can reduce our vulnerability to hurricanes, which by some measures were worse prior to 1970. These policies include fixing our federal disaster policies and state insurance policies, making better land-use decisions, improving building codes and coastal engineering, hardening infrastructure, and protecting coastal wetlands.

Overselling the possible effect of man-made climate change on hurricane impacts not only risks eroding scientific credibility, but also distracts from addressing our vulnerability to the storms themselves.

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The Electoral College is affirmative action for rural areas?  I wish

The  big cities are imposing their values on rural areas with very little restraint

Purposefully, I have lived my adult life in rural Oregon because of the beautiful mountains, forests, and quiet deserts, where along with family and friends I have hiked and boated in remote areas and enjoyed the peace and beauty of rural life.

When Representative Ocasio-Cortez tweets that the Electoral College is “affirmative action” for rural Americans, I take great umbrage. To the contrary, because of the concentration of the voting power vested in big cities and states, the federal government and (in my case) the State of Oregon have dominating and disproportional powers and control over the lives and conditions of rural Americans.

Just one example: In Oregon, the federal government controls over 54 percent of the land. The management of the federal forests (there are many) is deplorable and dangerous. Subject to the political pressures by environmental organizations and their demand for old-growth forests, the forests for many years have not been properly thinned and cleared of debris and dead trees, which has resulted in deadly fires throughout the American West.

Equally devastating, the environmental movement has severely reduced logging on federal land; since 1989 the timber harvest on federal lands has been reduced by 90 percent. Besides convincing Congress and the federal bureaucrats to restrict logging, the environmental organizations have consistently and repeatedly stopped good management and harvesting by perpetual litigation in federal and state courts. Again, the voting power in big cities and states has enormously reduced the jobs and economies of rural America.

Most rural governments depend on property taxes to fund schools and local government. However, the federal government by law cannot be taxed on their lands. When the federal government owns over 59 percent of land in my county, it obviously hurts local government and especially schools. But the federal government has a solution – Payment in Lieu of Taxes. That sounds nice and sometimes it is. However, it is only a law and has been threatened to be withheld if the rural counties do not support desired legislation, as occurred when the Republicans’ leadership threatened rural county commissioners with reducing Payment in Lieu of Taxes unless the Commissioners supported the corrupt Export-Import Bank legislation of 2015.

Thus, when Representative Ocasio-Cortez, tweeted that the Electoral College is “affirmative action” for rural Americans, she went beyond the repulsive but common political obfuscation to purposeful deceit.

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Cheap US energy leads Australian company to OK mill expansion in Ohio, not Australia

US energy prices just one-third of those in Australia, along with a robust manufacturing sector stoked by President Donald Trump's policies, have prompted a $1 billion expansion of an Ohio steel mill by BlueScope.

BlueScope chief executive Mr Vassella said the $1 billion expansion of the North Star mill, to be fully up and running by 2023, was the largest capital investment the steelmaker would likely ever make, and would deliver annual returns of 15 per cent-plus.

He said the company had intimate knowledge of the mill because it helped build it in the first place in the mid-1990s in a joint venture with North American group Cargill, and had moved to full ownership in 2015.

Mr Vassella lamented the state of Australian manufacturing as the sector battled high energy prices and said one of the main drivers of the North Star expansion, which will increase capacity by 40 per cent, was that energy costs in the United States were substantially lower.

"That's a tragedy quite frankly for Australian manufacturing,'' Mr Vassella said.

BlueScope also operates the Port Kembla steelworks in New South Wales, which underwent major cost-cutting and restructuring in 2015. Mr Vassella said he worried a lot about manufacturers in Australia who were BlueScope's customers and were facing ''demand destruction'' because their energy costs were too high.

Mr Vassella is also making a bet on the economic policies of Mr Trump,  which had been a positive for domestic US industry. North Star's main customers are in the automotive and construction industries and 95 per cent of them are within a 350km radius of the North Star mill. "The mood in the US is pretty good,'' Mr Vassella said.

He emphasised there had been a year of detailed planning and number-crunching prior to the board giving the go-ahead for the expansion. "We're not frivolous with this sort of money,'' Mr Vassella said.

"This is a 30-year investment. What I'd say about North Star is that we built this asset. We know the business really well. I think it allows us to feel very confident about the return profile.''

Mr Vassella also promised shareholders that BlueScope wouldn't end up as one of the big Australian companies which make a mess of major investments overseas.

Wesfarmers squandered billions on a flawed expansion into the United Kingdom hardware market in a big bet, rather than the steady incremental growth which BlueScope had been pursuing.

The expansion green light on Monday came as BlueScope produced a full-year net profit of $1.02 billion and a continuation of a share buyback of up to $250 million.

SOURCE 

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