Pirate's Cove

We’re totally doomed or something

Climate pollution is "an everywhere problem…we are not just condemning future generations to suffer, but — in the case of small particulates — inflicting dementia on ourselves and cutting the brain power of our children." @dwallacewells in @nymag: https://t.co/dL1q5aenhB

— Mary Anne Hitt (@maryannehitt) October 17, 2018

Said headline has also changed for this long, long, long screed by David Wallace-Wells

Trump’s Climate Denial Isn’t Just a War on Our Coastlines. It’s a War on Our Brains.

The list of crimes Donald Trump has committed against the planet, in just two years, is already so impeachably long that his slippery-fish climate denial registers as hardly more than a footnote. “I have a natural instinct for science,” the president bragged to the Associated Press Tuesday, a week after the U.N.’s IPCC raised the alarm on global warming that is much faster, and more horrifying, than it had acknowledged before. “And I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture,” said Trump. On Sunday, Lesley Stahl pressed the president on his contention that there were scientists saying that extreme weather had been worse in the past: “Who says that? ‘They say’?” Trump responded, defensively, “People say. People say.”

It was an especially grotesque demonstration of bad faith, given that just weeks ago, his administration had announced that, as a matter of climate policy, it was now assuming a worst-case global warming scenario — four degrees Celsius this century, an assumption suggesting that any effort to regulate American emissions would be effectively pointless. In the blink of an eye, the Republican Party seemed to pass directly from insisting that global warming isn’t happening to taking for granted a climate hellscape so inevitable that there’s nothing we can, or should, do about it.

It’s so umpeachably long that those offenses weren’t included. But, lots of doomy prognostications were included

This is very bad. The term “small-particulate” suggests a trivial form of pollution, but while the particles are small, the effects are actually enormous. About 9 million people die each year, globally, from small-particulate pollution — that is one out of every six deaths everywhere on the planet. This year, scientists estimated that the death toll from particulate pollution in a world two degrees warmer would be 150 million higher than at 1.5 degrees. In the U.S., the numbers are smaller, but not that much smaller: a 2013 study found 200,000 preventable deaths each year, in the U.S., from air pollution. And “lesser” effects are pervasive, too, and horrifying: small-particulate pollution causes dramatic drops in cognition, significant increases in the prevalence of mental illness, and is “strongly correlated” with dementia.

Well, yes, it does cause artificial dementia, well, let’s just call it insanity, in the membership of the Cult of Climastrology. We witness this daily. Of course, in this case, what they’re trying to do is link actual pollutants with trace amounts of carbon dioxide, a trace gas necessary for life on Earth. Wallace-Wells goes down the rabbit hole in mentioning that brain functions went up in China as they attempted to reduce pollution, which is certainly true. But, it was actually real pollutants that are “small particulate”. The same has occurred when lead particulates are reduced. But that isn’t CO2, and the doomsaying has been out of control for a long, long time.

If CO2 is so bad, then why

Green Climate Fund: Distributing CO2 scam money involves a tremendous number of fossil-fueled junkets to exotic locations #GCFund https://t.co/y5req8QRTx pic.twitter.com/B7tHbuC7rq

— Tom Nelson (@TomANelson) October 18, 2018