Thursday, January 09, 2020


Department of Defense Predicted Climate Change Would Destroy Us by 2020

Back in 2004, the Department of Defense released a report assuring the world Climate Change would destroy all of us by the year 2020.

Well, welcome to the year 2020! And welcome to yet another fake doomsday prediction number 42 from our renowned climate experts!

Yep, our so-called “climate experts” are now 0-42 with their doomsday predictions, and this latest one is a doozy.

As summarized by the Guardian in 2004, here’s what the so-called “experts” assured us would happen by now:

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

And that’s not the worst of it. Get a load of this:

‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,‘ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’ ....

Climate change ‘should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern’, say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is ‘plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately’, they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions

This is from the actual report:

The Weather Report: 2010-2020

* Drought persists for the entire decade in critical agricultural regions and in the areas around major population centers in Europe and eastern North America.

* Average annual temperatures drop by up to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over Asia and North America and up to 6 degrees Fahrenheit in Europe.

* Temperatures increase by up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in key areas throughout Australia, South America, and southern Africa.

* Winter storms and winds intensify, amplifying the impact of the changes. Western Europe and the North Pacific face enhanced westerly winds.

None of this happened. None of it. In fact, over the last ten years, global temperatures have remained remarkably stable.

Take a look at the full report for yourself. It’s literally filled with fake alarmism and fake hysteria, and it’s also filled with one completely wrong climate doomsday prediction after another.

Nothing in this report has come true. Not a single prediction was accurate. Not one!

But even after this, even after no less than the Department of Defense get it so horribly wrong, even after a 0-42 record of failed doomsday predictions, we’re still ridiculed by the fake media as “deniers” if we don’t take these partisan idiots seriously.

SOURCE





An evolving climate vocabulary

In the growing strength and coherence of climate protests, something did change discernibly in 2019.

Extinction Rebellion, a new movement, disrupted major cities. Greta Thunberg, a teenage activist, was Time’s Person of the Year; she travelled by boat to a climate summit in New York to avoid flying (and the associated carbon emissions). Another summit, in Madrid, ended in acrimony. Policy may not have evolved much, but wider attitudes did— and with them, the language in which the issue is discussed.

Some climate-related vocabulary was already in circulation. After a boiling summer in Germany in 2018, the Society for the German Language chose Heisszeit, “Heat Age”, as its word of that year. (It rhymes nicely with Eiszeit, “ice age”.) In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the Society for Our Language plumped for laadpaalklever, or “charging-post sticker”: someone who uses the electric-car charging space for too long, treating it like a free parking place.

Van Dale, a dictionary publisher, lets the Dutch-speaking public vote on its word of the year (in separate contests in Belgium and the Netherlands). For 2019 Belgians chose winkelhieren, or “buying local”. The Dutch went with an imported word that has a good case for being the winner in English, too: “boomer”. As Chloe Swarbrick, a 25-year-old member of New Zealand’s parliament, was giving an impassioned speech on the impact of climate change on her generation, she coolly dismissed a heckling older mp with a curt “ok, boomer”. The phrase was already an internet meme; Ms Swarbrick made it the talk of the offline world as well.

Babbel, which makes a popular lan-guage-learning app, has collected a host of climate-related neologisms from European languages. Flygskam is perhaps the most likely to be permanently adopted into English: “flight-shame”, from Swedish, was popularised by Ms Thunberg’s rise. It also has a nifty corollary: tagskryt, or “train-boasting”, from those who advertise their flygskam by taking ground transport and letting the world know.

(Dutch has an equivalent: treintrots.)

The march of the climate-protest movement has led to the coining of disparaging terms by its critics. Italian, for example, has gretini: allegedly mindless followers of Ms Thunberg (-ini is a diminutive suffix, and the word echoes cretini, or “idiots” ). The Danish Language Council and Denmark’s national broadcaster jointly chose a similar term as their Word of the Year for 2019: klimatosse, or “climate fool”, used dismissively by Pia Kjaersgaard, a right-wing Danish politician, to explain her party’s poor election performance. Being Danish, she hastened to add that her party is itself concerned about the climate, but that the klimatosser who voted for other parties apparently care about nothing else.

Compared with its European cousins, English has not been creative. Oxford Dictionaries declared its word of the year to be “climate emergency”. Collins, another dictionary-publisher, nominated the slightly more imaginative “climate strike”, originally coined to denote the schooldays that climate activists such as Ms Thunberg began skipping as a protest. (Klimaatspijbelaar, “climate-school-skipper”, was number three in Van Dale’s Dutch vote.)

Words of the year are a way for lexicographical types to grab a rare slice of the spotlight, boost interest in language and have a bit of fun. All the same, the pessimistic trajectory of the outcomes suggests a darkening global mood. The American Dialect Society will vote for its word of 2019 at its annual meeting in New Orleans in January. Its previous three choices were “tender-age shelter” (a euphemism for places where America’s border forces keep children separated from their parents), “fake news” (often, these days, meaning real news that powerful people would like to dismiss) and “dumpster fire”. Whether or not it picks a climatic word as an emblem of the bygone year, it is hard to see the society choosing anything upbeat.

Perhaps Dictionary.com captured the feeling best with its word of the year for 2019. Neither new nor fancy, it was foreboding nonetheless: “existential”.

SOURCE





Climate Change? Turns Out Two Dozen Arrested for Setting Australia's Fires

Authorities in New South Wales have arrested two dozen Australians for intentionally setting fires as huge swaths of the country continue to be engulfed by flames.

In a news release issued Monday, the NSW Police Force said legal action has been taken against more than 180 people since late last year. The bushfires have killed 18 people and burned 4.9 million hectares of land, consuming thousands of structures, and millions of animals, the statement said.

In breaking down their figures, the police said “24 have been charged over deliberately-lit bushfires; 53 people have had legal actions for allegedly failing to comply with a total fire ban; and 47 people have had legal actions for allegedly discarding a lighted cigarette or match on land.”

Offenders could face a wide variety of penalties including:

- Damaging property with the intention of endangering life – up to 25 years imprisonment;

- Manslaughter – up to 25 years imprisonment;

- Starting a bushfire and being reckless as to its spread – up to 21 years imprisonment;

- Lighting a fire when a total fire ban is in place – up to 12 months imprisonment and/or a $5500 fine;

- Not putting out a fire that you have lit – up to 12 months imprisonment and/or a $5500 fine;

- Failing to comply with a bush fire hazard reduction notice – up to 12 months imprisonment and/or a $5500 fine;

- Light or use a tobacco product within 15 metres of any stack of grain, hay corn, straw or any standing crop, dry grass or stubble field – up to a $5500 fine. (NSW Police)

News of these arrests come as many on the left have claimed that climate change is to blame.

"Australia is on fire. Nearly half a billion animals have been killed with more than 14.5 million acres burned. This is climate change"

SOURCE





Why Even Liberals Should Be “Climate Change Skeptics”

When you’re several decades older than Greta Thunberg, her impassioned warning of impending doom hits you differently than it may college students or early twentysomethings. In a word, it sounded “familiar.”

I’m not just talking about the climate change movement, nor exclusively about the left side of the political spectrum. I’ve been hearing about impending doom that can only be averted by massive increases in the size and scope of government my whole life, from both the right and the left.

Fearmongering by the Right

The 1980s saw a massive increase in the so-called “War on Drugs.” Capitalizing on the tragic death of basketball player Len Bias, drug warriors succeeded in convincing the American public that only draconian drug laws and sentencing guidelines could save their children from certain death due to an imminent, nationwide epidemic of drug addiction. The legislation pushed through on the heels of this fear-mongering resulted in the mass incarceration of generations of disproportionately black and brown people, many for as little as possessing too much marijuana, which is now legal in more than half of US states.

Knowing what you know today, would you like to have those millions of destroyed lives and families back?

In 2003, with the American public still shell shocked from the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration embarked upon a fear campaign similar to the Reagan administration’s Soviet scare featuring an even less plausible boogeyman: Saddam Hussein. Hussein was a ruthless dictator and a generally bad guy, but he was never a threat to US national security. The Bush administration evoked images of massive chemical weapons attacks and even “a mushroom cloud” in a major US city. It was all baloney.

Knowing what you know today, would you like to have the Iraq War back?

Fearmongering by the Left

So, what does all this have to do with climate change? Environmentalists are using the same tactics, only for different ends. Right-wingers often revere the military and law enforcement. For all their talk about “small government,” no increase in either would be too much for many of them.Would it not have benefitted Americans, left, right or otherwise, to have been more skeptical of claims like this before the War on Drugs or the Iraq War?

They’ve generally got what they’ve wanted in those areas by employing a thus far foolproof tactic that goes something like this: Oh my God! I’ve discovered a dire threat to all our lives and civilization as we know it. And believe it or not, the only solution is for you to give me everything I’ve ever wanted politically.

Shouldn’t any thinking person be suspicious of this? Would it not have benefitted Americans, left, right or otherwise, to have been more skeptical of claims like this before the War on Drugs or the Iraq War?

I’m not trying to convince liberals there is nothing to the anthropogenic climate change theory. But I am calling attention to the fact that the very same tactic that gave us the Iraq War, the largest prison population in the history of the world, and an out-of-control national debt due largely to unnecessary military spending is now being used to achieve a political result to address climate change.

Let’s not forget that before the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s dramatic turn away from communism and towards a market economy, the hard left’s chief argument against free markets had nothing to do with the environment. For most of the 20th century, they claimed that full-on communism or socialism was a better economic system. It was only when its failure in so many places became impossible to deny that the focus shifted to the environment. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) didn’t form until 1992, the year after the Soviet Union disappeared and just after China’s market reforms got underway.

Coincidence? Maybe, but shouldn’t it at least raise an eyebrow? How can anyone be blamed for skepticism when the very same people who wanted a centrally planned economy based on its economic merits suddenly discover it’s the only way to “save the planet”? Shouldn’t that give pause to even a true believer in climate change?

This is before even asking the question of whether giving the government these sweeping new powers (not to mention trillions more of our dollars) would actually solve the stated problem. Past experience should make us skeptical of this, too. Did the War on Drugs result in fewer drugs on the street? Did the Iraq War result in less terrorism? Believing the government is suddenly going to be wildly successful based purely on its doing the bidding of the other political tribe seems more like religious faith than reason.

The Poor Will Suffer Most

One thing Greta Thunberg’s speech is honest about, at least indirectly, is that adopting the drastic environmental measures called for by the hard left will make us poorer. She derisively asks how any of us can even talk about “economic growth.” That’s easy for Thunberg and other First-Worlders to say, given what this will cost them vs. what it will cost truly poor people, of which there are very few in the United States or Sweden.

The truth is eliminating fossil fuels at the rate the hard left suggests could cost billions of poor people their lives, not merely their hamburgers. Given that grim reality and the poor track record of drastic government solutions adopted in an atmosphere of fear, a healthy skepticism toward the hard left’s claims and demands related to climate change should not only be tolerated but encouraged.

SOURCE





Australia: Hazard reduction for big burns ‘not a panacea’

It is utterly un-ambiguous that the bushfires would not have happened without fuel to burn.  The fuel consists of fallen branches and leaves and the easy way is eliminate it is to burn it off in a controlled way, mostly in winter.  Foresters have been doing that for generations. Burn all the fuel and it absolutely IS a panacea for big burns.  There can be no fire without fuel.

So why is the official below saying that it is not a panacea?  It is because he has failed to do his job.  He has failed to eliminate the fuel that is powering the current fires.  The excuse he gives is that the weather is warmer these days so opportunities to do safe burns are fewer.  But that is nonsense.  Australian national average temperatures differ by only fractions of one degree from year to year.  And since the fires are nationwide, national averages are what counts.

So why has he allowed the huge fuel buildup that we are presently suffering from?  The two main reasons are bureaucratic and he gives every sign of being a very timid bureaucrat.  It even influences him when people complain about the smoke from preventive burns.

The first limitation is that the preventive burns are "scheduled".  Bureaucrats love schedules but the weather cannot be scheduled.  So what happens when the weather would make a scheduled burn dangerous?  The burn is of course called off and the fuel remains there ready to burn.

So forestry has to be opportunistic.  Any window of suitable weather has to be grabbed when it arises and used there and then to do a burn.  But can you imagine Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons pushing through that policy?  It is to laugh.  He is just a timid bureaucrat who above all avoids making waves,  hoping that it will all work out somehow.

And the second reason is also bureaucratic.  When landowners want to burn off areas near their properties that have a dangerous fuel buildup, the authorities mostly say No.  You can't have people protecting themselves!

"That would show us up as not doing our Job!  No Siree.  We know what it is needed and we will do it, not anybody else".

And people who burn off without permission are often fined heavily.  So what's the solution to that?  A recognition that the people on the ground know best and a general deference to their wishes.

So the present fires were entirely preventible


Hazard reductions burns are being hampered by longer fire seasons and extreme weather, Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons says, warning the controversial technique is "not the panacea" some may be looking for to temper bushfires.

The Commissioner on Wednesday defended the RFS' record on hazard reduction burning, saying the agency was not comprised of "environmental bastards", indicating prescribed burns were done with the priorities of people, property and the environment in mind.

Commissioner Fitzsimmons said the agency had met its targets for hazard reduction in the lead-up to this bushfire season, but the "really awful" conditions across the drought-stricken state meant that fires had spread wildly regardless.

"Hazard reduction burning is really challenging and the single biggest impediment to completing hazard reduction burning is the weather," Commissioner Fitzsimmons told ABC Breakfast.



"It's only when the conditions back off a little bit that you actually have some prospect of slowing the fire spread.

"It's important, but not the panacea, and something we should have a very open and frank discussion about."

Commissioner Fitzsimmons said the agency "worked through a sensible regime" to conduct hazard reduction burns, with weather on the day being the largest factor in determining if a burn could happen.

"Resourcing is challenging. Don't forget, as settled Australians, as Europeans, we are now living and working and occupying areas that used to burn freely," Commissioner Fitzsimmons said.

Commissioner Fitzsimmons said the smoke generated by the hazard reduction burns before the bushfire crisis began had made the RFS and other agencies "public enemy number one" at the time.

"There is a very significant health issue with smoke, but you can't have prescribed burning, hazard reduction burning without the by-product being smoke. Whilst we try to forecast, predict and hope it doesn't impact populated areas, you can't have it both ways," he said.

As Commissioner Fitzsimmons spoke to the ABC, Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce was on Sunrise and urged more hazard reduction burns.

"Have you seen a footpath on fire? No, because there is nothing there to burn. Have you seen a massive fire that kills people on grounds [where] there is no fuel load? People get terribly hurt but you can control it," he said.

"Once a fire breaks out onto an area... with minimal fuel load [you] can control it. In a national park, there are always fires but it is the intensity of the fire because of the fuel load catching on fire. I believe, and this is my view, there are too many caveats, green caveats, that impedes people's efforts."

The Prime Minister earlier this week also called for more prescribed burns.

"You've got to deal with hazard management in national parks ... this, of course, will be one of the things that we will consider when premiers come together after they've been dealing with the fires," the Prime Minister said.

On Tuesday, Victoria's Country Fire Authority's chief officer Steve Warrington said there was a "fair amount of emotion" around hazard reduction. "The emotive argument is not supported that fuel reduction burning will fix all our problems," he said.

"Some of the hysteria that this will be the solution to all our problems is really just quite an emotional load of rubbish, to be honest."

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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