We gonna kill ourselves because of stupidity

The warming racket is the best example for dumbing down. The adherents of this New Age Religion display a mass-psychosis that we normally attribute to fanatical cultists.

“Peer reviewed” is just groupthink that stifles mental growth.

Doomsday Cults & Warming Loons

Hans Schellnhuber  reminds me of Marshall Applewhite,  another doomsday guru who encouraged 20 of his followers to commit suicide to board an imaginary spaceship to another planet.

The 1970s Heaven’s Gate cult based their belief system on a combination of Christian ideas of the apocalypse and elements of science fiction. If their ideas were to be believed, planet Earth was due to be wiped clean by supernatural forces, and the only path to salvation was to escape to the “Next Level”. According to founder Marshall Applewhite, this escape could be achieved through an ascetic existence, which meant detachment from family, friends, jobs, possessions and other trappings of modern existence. In 1997, however, Applewhite announced a fast-track route to the Next Level: boarding a spacecraft that was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp. On March 26th, when the comet was at its brightest, Applewhite and 38 of his followers committed suicide in order to abandon their terrestrial forms and gain access to the UFO.

Science Dictionary 101

By definition, a heat wave is global warming.

By definition, a cold snap is climate change.

‘cuz @geraldkutney the anti-forest eco-terrorist said so

Ottmar Edenhofer

“If we continue to burn coal and gas for decades to come, … we will not have a habitable planet and hundreds of millions of people will die.”

AND NOT ONE JOURNALIST CRIED: “THAT’S NUTS.”

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
.

It happened so fast that few people watching would know they’d just seen a shocking sign of the debasement of journalism in this country.

I say that because it actually happened at the National Press Club, in front of many of Australia’s top political journalists.

And before that audience, Australian Conservation Foundation boss Kelly O’Shanassy made this preposterous claim: “If we continue to burn coal and gas for decades to come, … we will not have a habitable planet and hundreds of millions of people will die.”

Pardon?

“Hundreds of millions of people will die”? We will “not have a habitable planet”?

But get this: not a single journalist in the room said: “Are you nuts?” Not one asked: “What’s your evidence?”

To me, it’s mad, bad and dangerous that a room of journalists can hear a shiny-eyed speaker proclaim the end of the world — at least for humans — yet react without the slightest scepticism.

Have they no eyes to see or brains to think? Just look outside.

(Read the full column here.)

An inconvenient truth for Gore

Graham Lloyd The Australian November 3, 2018

Climate champion Al Gore has given a frank assessment of the latest UN report into the dangers of global warming. Interviewed by US public broadcaster PBS, Gore said the language used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its report on limiting global warming to 1.5C had been “torqued up” a little to get the attention of policymakers.

This was appropriate, he said, because climate change was a global emergency that posed “an existential threat to human civil­isation on this planet”.

There has been plenty of “torquing up” as conflicting signals buffet what is supposed to be a milestone in implementing the Paris Agreement in Poland next month. Peak stupid in climate change politics usually is timed to coincide with key decisions that have to be made to keep together a UN process in which the annual bill for meetings alone is calculated at more than $150 million.

Internationally, the conflicting signals include the demise of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the rise of authoritarian president-elect Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Together with Donald Trump’s withdrawal of climate change funding and threats to leave the Paris Agreement altogether, the global sentiment going into Poland is vastly different from that coming out of Paris.

Analysis by the pro-action Climate Home News is that “the alliance of rich, emerging and poor economies that sealed the Paris climate deal is falling apart”. In many countries, it says, climate scepticism and economic nationalism are usurping the international green enthusiasm of 2015.

Even countries that remain committed to climate action are consumed by domestic concerns, such as Brexit in Britain and political instability in Germany.

But in Australia, “torquing up” continues to reach new heights. In a speech to the National Press Club this week, Australian Conservation Foundation chief exec­utive Kelly O’Shanassy out-torqued the IPCC. “If we continue to burn coal and gas for decades to come, we will kill the 1.5 degree target, we will not have a habitable planet and hundreds of millions of people will die,” she said.

Tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes tweeted from his recent­ly purchased $100m harbour-front mansion a modern-day equivalent of “let them eat cake”. Cannon-Brookes’s answer is a $200 prize for a new logo for “fair dinkum” power that is reliable, renewable and cheap.

However, the real torque is the way in which small deceptions, repeated often, are allowed to become fact. The results of a recent survey of company directors illustrate the point. Federal opposition climate change and energy spokesman Mark Butler says: “We’ve also seen the biannual survey of company directors for the first time place climate change, or action on climate change, at the top of the list of challenges that company directors think the federal government should be acting on.”

A full reading of the Australian Institute of Company Directors report shows otherwise. The leading economic challenges cited are rising global economic protectionism, global economic uncertainty, energy policy, taxation system, high energy prices, red tape, low productivity growth, the China economic outlook and then climate change. Climate change is considered a major long-term issue for government to solve. But what business wants the government to concentrate on now is energy policy, tax reform and infrastructure.

Likewise, it has become an article of faith among many that the Wentworth by-election was swung by climate change, which would be a dominant issue at the next election. The ACF has activated a lobbying effort in marginal seats to push the issue. “We are making this the climate election,” O’Shanassy says.

But research by Essential Media shows that pushing renewable energy is a first-order issue only among those who already vote Green. According to Essential’s October 23 report, the most important issues for the federal government to address in the next 12 months are cost of living, improving the health system and housing affordability. Promoting renewable energy was a first-order issue for only 7 per cent of respondents. Overall, the issue of renewables ranked eighth behind the major concerns and then job creation, improved wages, economic growth, national security and terrorism.

What is not in dispute is the cost of the low emissions transition so far. Nathan Vass, founder of the Australian Power Project, which is championing a continued role for coal, says renewable energy subsidies at state and federal levels to date amount to $42.5 billion.Across that same period 10 coal-fired power stations have been taken out of action and, according to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s recent report, electricity prices have increased in real terms, adjusted for inflation, by 56 per cent. For the $42.5bn spent, greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector have risen by 50 million tonnes a year or 40 per cent since 1990. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are back on the rise after slowing with the global financial crisis.

Ironically, it is the US that is bucking the global trend: its emissions fell 2.7 per cent last year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Reported emissions from large power plants declined 4.5 per cent since 2016, and 19.7 per cent since 2011 due mainly to a switch from coal to natural gas from fracking.

US EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler says the Trump administration has proven federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions. “These achievements flow largely from technological breakthroughs in the private sector, not the heavy hand of government,” he says.

1/ Al Gore at a UN climate conference in 2015.

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18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”