The other day I filmed a short video catalogued in my website archive (semperluxmundi.org) under A Culture of Slanders and Slurs". The library of about two dozen videos now addresses topics related to religious faith in a straightforward manner: no virtue-signaling allowed. I thought it was time in this particular series to call out the unscrupulous among us who abuse language in such a way as to sequester defenders of certain views from consideration as human beings. Of course racist" is now such a slur and I am about to dedicate another video to the word Nazi". Climate-change denier" has never really caught on thanks to being quite unwieldybut the notion behind the phrase is the same: those who deny" climate change deserve whatever mistreatment comes their way. Not only must we not give them a hearing; we should entertain giving them jail time or maybe shooting them like dogs.
I placed the word deny" in quotations above because denial isnt even whats properly at issue (any more than is climate change" per se; the mandatory article of faith is really that global climate is rapidly radically changing due to manmade influences). My talkand you can do just so much in fifteen minutes alasbegan by stressing that as a lifelong enemy of the automobile and of our congested urban environments I have left considerably lighter carbon footprints behind me than most people. I then spent several minutes emphasizing that mere measurement of relevant climatic data is an enormously complex task. Readings must be obtained at uniform geographical and chronological intervals from around the world a requirement which undermines confident conclusions at our point in history right out of the gate. Perceived changes in weather during one human lifetime qualify as evidence neither by the spatial nor the temporal standard; for none of us spends an hour per month at a hundred locations equally spaced around Earths sphere and none of us lives the many centuries necessary to uncover a meaningful pattern.
This doesnt make me a denier"; it makes me a voice of restraint before those who insist upon rushing to unjustified conclusions. I wish Id had time to handle more adequately the dubious motives of many at the movements" fore who busy themselves stirring the rush into a stampede. Peter Helmes has often offered analyses of that caliber through his site Die Deutsche Konservativen. One of his posts a couple of weeks ago noted that Greta Thunbergs father has grown rather wealthy off of two concerns dedicated to marketing his eerily wooden and humorless Green Joan of Arc" daughter; and the post concludes all in boldface Um es nochmals klar zu sagen: Dahinter stehen keine Idealisten sondern knallharte Grokapitalisten. Wo deren Interesse liegt drfte jedem normal denkenden Menschen klar sein. Translation: To say it plainly there are no idealists standing behind climate change hysteria but hard-boiled capitalist tycoons. Every competently thoughtful person should be clear about where the interests of such types lie."
When I still possessed a small soapbox in academe from which to prod freshmen I tended to proceed very cautiously into the realms of chemistry and atmospheric science. Those werent my field. Some of my students could have diagrammed complex molecules while I was still trying to figure out how carbon dioxide can poison plants. (Can it? An intrepid investigator probing a volcanic lake on the History Channel made that claim within my hearing... but the minute rise in global CO2 seems to be feeding plants handsomely in locations that arent fuming with sulfur.) Behind my rostrum then I always contented myself with making a few very basic even dummy" observations. 1) Carbon dioxide is less than one half of one hundredth of one percent of the earths atmosphere; its hard to see how fluctuations in thousandths of a percentage point spell Armageddon. 2) Of that tiny amount only about two percent arises from manmade sources. 3) Of those manmade sources India and China are by far the most prolific contributorsand neither of those nations is in the least interested in curbing its industrial growth.
If the West and the U.S. in particular were to fragment its industrial/technological foundation for the very doubtful purpose of reducing CO2 emissions by .00003 the following disastrous environmental consequence would therefore follow. The Peoples Republic" of China would have a path free and clear to dominate utterly the worlds economy and hence to determine in large measure the social and political organization of every individual society. In other words the single greatest environmental poisoner in our planets history (with the possible exception of the post-Chernobyl Soviet Union) would be calling all the tunes globally.
Is this what we want? Is this what any person sincerely concerned about life on Earth would want? For several decades we have seen (if we have eyes to see) how much the Chinese oligarchy cares about its own citizens. Ive noticed in reading the testimonies of Chinese citizens who speak out too daringly and are invited for a cup of tea" at police headquarters that practically all detainees when they know theyre not going home for several weeks worry about not having their meds. Everyone in urban China is on meds! Thats because the air is poison to breathe. (Remember a few years back when a massive effort was made to cleanse to skies temporarily over Beijing for the opening Olympic ceremony?) Were getting a refresher course right now if we need one on just how highly the PRC elite value the lives of ordinary people. To the Partys chosen few handling the Coronavirus is primarily an exercise in public-relations damage control. If the disease isnt diagnosed then ensuing death cannot be attributed to it... and only about one patient in ten was being tested for infection even in the early days of the outbreak before resources gave out.
These are the people to whom we will surrender the planets health should we throttle all fossil-fuel consumption refuse to build nuclear power plants and wait for the wind to turn blades on the high plains. This is the green" plan to save us all!
I also used to stress to my students as I stress in the video and continue to underscore that pointing all solutions in the direction of a more intrusive government smells very very fishy. It is especially so inasmuch as big government created most of the problem to begin with. After World War II our federal government favoring certain players in the transportation sector over others pumped millions into producing a national car- and airline-dependency among us while leaving our substantial railways to languish. (Trains move loads about fifteen times more cost-effectively by the way than trucks... but the Teamsters Union had a louder voice.) On a local level municipalities of the Fifties rigorously began to zone out your corner drugstore your handy barber shop your neighborhood school and pediatricianwhich of course created real estate and building booms as well as forcing Middle America to invest heavily in cars in gas and oil in insurance and so forth. Meanwhile lawyers lawsuits regulations and inspectors converged upon Plainville USA the way vultures compete for a carcass. Federal bureaucracies like OSHA hounded small-business owners even after they had duly shifted their shingle from Laurel Lane to Main Street. Many of these hard-working people surrendered dissolving their business and entering the daily rush-hour file of traffic to get to a corporations megalopolitan plant or office tower.
If we simply eradicated these zoning restrictions and micro-managing bureaucracies we would preserve immense amounts of oil reduce incalculable volumes of traffic-related stress and injury almost nullify the crime endemic to periodically emptied neighborhoods foster an environment where citizens were much happier thanks to a much more human level of contact with each other... but no. No. More government more regimentationthats worked so well for us in the past! Lets just amp it up.
Meanwhile merely for raising your hand and daring to ask a question about any aspect of the climate change agenda" you make yourself a target for doxing canceling incarcerating... youre a public spittoon. This is your reward for suggesting that if the emperors new clothes are invisible maybe its because they dont exist rather than because youre blind. This is our current level of insanity. This is how well weve been groomed for rule by the idiot-producing ideologues controlling our classrooms and by marketplace and political despots ranging from George Soros to Xi Jinping (who both turn out to be financing much of what happens in our classrooms).
Indeed my ultimate question of our social conscience" warriorsfar down the list and not an item that I would ask in a townhall meetingnags at me more than any uncertainty I have about science. How many of these self-declared moral beacons I should like to know who lead the chanting chorus of Climate-change denier!" as the mob gathers are being remunerated rather directly by Soros Xi Robert Fink or the Rothschilds Bank of England? Conspiracy theory? Why hell yes its conspiracy theory! Have you not yet awakened to the fact that all truth in these post-fact" times is suffocating under the bedsheets of conspiracy-theory quarantine?
The other day I filmed a short video catalogued in my website archive (semperluxmundi.org) under A Culture of Slanders and Slurs". The library of about two dozen videos now addresses topics related to religious faith in a straightforward manner: no virtue-signaling allowed. I thought it was time in this particular series to call out the unscrupulous among us who abuse language in such a way as to sequester defenders of certain views from consideration as human beings. Of course racist" is now such a slur and I am about to dedicate another video to the word Nazi". Climate-change denier" has never really caught on thanks to being quite unwieldybut the notion behind the phrase is the same: those who deny" climate change deserve whatever mistreatment comes their way. Not only must we not give them a hearing; we should entertain giving them jail time or maybe shooting them like dogs.
I placed the word deny" in quotations above because denial isnt even whats properly at issue (any more than is climate change" per se; the mandatory article of faith is really that global climate is rapidly radically changing due to manmade influences). My talkand you can do just so much in fifteen minutes alasbegan by stressing that as a lifelong enemy of the automobile and of our congested urban environments I have left considerably lighter carbon footprints behind me than most people. I then spent several minutes emphasizing that mere measurement of relevant climatic data is an enormously complex task. Readings must be obtained at uniform geographical and chronological intervals from around the world a requirement which undermines confident conclusions at our point in history right out of the gate. Perceived changes in weather during one human lifetime qualify as evidence neither by the spatial nor the temporal standard; for none of us spends an hour per month at a hundred locations equally spaced around Earths sphere and none of us lives the many centuries necessary to uncover a meaningful pattern.
This doesnt make me a denier"; it makes me a voice of restraint before those who insist upon rushing to unjustified conclusions. I wish Id had time to handle more adequately the dubious motives of many at the movements" fore who busy themselves stirring the rush into a stampede. Peter Helmes has often offered analyses of that caliber through his site Die Deutsche Konservativen. One of his posts a couple of weeks ago noted that Greta Thunbergs father has grown rather wealthy off of two concerns dedicated to marketing his eerily wooden and humorless Green Joan of Arc" daughter; and the post concludes all in boldface Um es nochmals klar zu sagen: Dahinter stehen keine Idealisten sondern knallharte Grokapitalisten. Wo deren Interesse liegt drfte jedem normal denkenden Menschen klar sein. Translation: To say it plainly there are no idealists standing behind climate change hysteria but hard-boiled capitalist tycoons. Every competently thoughtful person should be clear about where the interests of such types lie."
When I still possessed a small soapbox in academe from which to prod freshmen I tended to proceed very cautiously into the realms of chemistry and atmospheric science. Those werent my field. Some of my students could have diagrammed complex molecules while I was still trying to figure out how carbon dioxide can poison plants. (Can it? An intrepid investigator probing a volcanic lake on the History Channel made that claim within my hearing... but the minute rise in global CO2 seems to be feeding plants handsomely in locations that arent fuming with sulfur.) Behind my rostrum then I always contented myself with making a few very basic even dummy" observations. 1) Carbon dioxide is less than one half of one hundredth of one percent of the earths atmosphere; its hard to see how fluctuations in thousandths of a percentage point spell Armageddon. 2) Of that tiny amount only about two percent arises from manmade sources. 3) Of those manmade sources India and China are by far the most prolific contributorsand neither of those nations is in the least interested in curbing its industrial growth.
If the West and the U.S. in particular were to fragment its industrial/technological foundation for the very doubtful purpose of reducing CO2 emissions by .00003 the following disastrous environmental consequence would therefore follow. The Peoples Republic" of China would have a path free and clear to dominate utterly the worlds economy and hence to determine in large measure the social and political organization of every individual society. In other words the single greatest environmental poisoner in our planets history (with the possible exception of the post-Chernobyl Soviet Union) would be calling all the tunes globally.
Is this what we want? Is this what any person sincerely concerned about life on Earth would want? For several decades we have seen (if we have eyes to see) how much the Chinese oligarchy cares about its own citizens. Ive noticed in reading the testimonies of Chinese citizens who speak out too daringly and are invited for a cup of tea" at police headquarters that practically all detainees when they know theyre not going home for several weeks worry about not having their meds. Everyone in urban China is on meds! Thats because the air is poison to breathe. (Remember a few years back when a massive effort was made to cleanse to skies temporarily over Beijing for the opening Olympic ceremony?) Were getting a refresher course right now if we need one on just how highly the PRC elite value the lives of ordinary people. To the Partys chosen few handling the Coronavirus is primarily an exercise in public-relations damage control. If the disease isnt diagnosed then ensuing death cannot be attributed to it... and only about one patient in ten was being tested for infection even in the early days of the outbreak before resources gave out.
These are the people to whom we will surrender the planets health should we throttle all fossil-fuel consumption refuse to build nuclear power plants and wait for the wind to turn blades on the high plains. This is the green" plan to save us all!
I also used to stress to my students as I stress in the video and continue to underscore that pointing all solutions in the direction of a more intrusive government smells very very fishy. It is especially so inasmuch as big government created most of the problem to begin with. After World War II our federal government favoring certain players in the transportation sector over others pumped millions into producing a national car- and airline-dependency among us while leaving our substantial railways to languish. (Trains move loads about fifteen times more cost-effectively by the way than trucks... but the Teamsters Union had a louder voice.) On a local level municipalities of the Fifties rigorously began to zone out your corner drugstore your handy barber shop your neighborhood school and pediatricianwhich of course created real estate and building booms as well as forcing Middle America to invest heavily in cars in gas and oil in insurance and so forth. Meanwhile lawyers lawsuits regulations and inspectors converged upon Plainville USA the way vultures compete for a carcass. Federal bureaucracies like OSHA hounded small-business owners even after they had duly shifted their shingle from Laurel Lane to Main Street. Many of these hard-working people surrendered dissolving their business and entering the daily rush-hour file of traffic to get to a corporations megalopolitan plant or office tower.
If we simply eradicated these zoning restrictions and micro-managing bureaucracies we would preserve immense amounts of oil reduce incalculable volumes of traffic-related stress and injury almost nullify the crime endemic to periodically emptied neighborhoods foster an environment where citizens were much happier thanks to a much more human level of contact with each other... but no. No. More government more regimentationthats worked so well for us in the past! Lets just amp it up.
Meanwhile merely for raising your hand and daring to ask a question about any aspect of the climate change agenda" you make yourself a target for doxing canceling incarcerating... youre a public spittoon. This is your reward for suggesting that if the emperors new clothes are invisible maybe its because they dont exist rather than because youre blind. This is our current level of insanity. This is how well weve been groomed for rule by the idiot-producing ideologues controlling our classrooms and by marketplace and political despots ranging from George Soros to Xi Jinping (who both turn out to be financing much of what happens in our classrooms).
Indeed my ultimate question of our social conscience" warriorsfar down the list and not an item that I would ask in a townhall meetingnags at me more than any uncertainty I have about science. How many of these self-declared moral beacons I should like to know who lead the chanting chorus of Climate-change denier!" as the mob gathers are being remunerated rather directly by Soros Xi Robert Fink or the Rothschilds Bank of England? Conspiracy theory? Why hell yes its conspiracy theory! Have you not yet awakened to the fact that all truth in these post-fact" times is suffocating under the bedsheets of conspiracy-theory quarantine?