If All You See…

By William Teach January 7, 2016 – 1:00 pm

…is carbon pollution hanging in the sky, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Doug Ross @ Journal, with a post on tears for fears.

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Bummer: Only 27% Say Climate Change Is Mostly Caused By Humanity

By William Teach January 7, 2016 – 10:15 am

For over 25 years, the Cult Of Climastrology has been spreading awareness, hyping doom and gloom, and the years have seen their prognostications become more and more unhinged. They have the news media, the Democratic Party, and the entertainment industry behind them. After all that, this is the best they can do

(NCSE) According (PDF) to the latest Monmouth University Poll, “a large majority of Americans acknowledge climate change is happening, although they are divided on whether human activity is mostly responsible for it.” Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute Director Tony MacDonald commented, “The data exposes the extent to which this has become a partisan political issue in the U.S. rather than a scientific issue,” yet added, “The polling shows that Americans believe we are all very much in this together.”

Asked “Do you think that the world’s climate is undergoing a change that is causing more extreme weather patterns and the rise of sea levels, or is this not happening,” 70% of respondents said yes, 22% said no, and 8% volunteered that they didn’t know. Yes answers were more prevalent among Democrats (85%) than Independents (74%) and Republicans (49%), those 18-34 (76%) than those 35-53 (70%) and those 55 or older (63%), and college graduates (77%) than those with only some college (73%) and those with a high school education or less (63%).

Personally, I’d have to answer “no” because of the extreme weather qualifier. Climate change has always happened, and the world is currently within a lower level warm period. Yes, the seas are rising. Not as much as one would expect during a typical Holocene warm period, but, they are rising. Here’s where it gets dicey for Warmists

Asked “Is climate change caused more by human activity, more by natural changes in the environment, or by both equally,” 27% of respondents said more by human activity, 8% said more by natural changes in the environment, 34% said both equally, 1% volunteered that they didn’t know, 22% already said that climate change is not happening and 8% already said that they were unsure whether climate climate change is happening. The same patterns of responses differing by political affiliation, age, and education were present.

27%. That’s it. All those years, all that money spent on studies and propaganda. Having control over most of the data. Changing the data. TV shows. Movies. News stories. Politicians making dire pronouncements. Governments and institutions smacking us in the face with the issue. Yearly meetings around the world. And, yet, 27%. That’s it. It’s no wonder that solving climate change typically comes in last or next to last on lists of issues that people are concerned about.

Read: Bummer: Only 27% Say Climate Change Is Mostly Caused By Humanity »

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Washington Post: We Should Regulate Ammunition

By William Teach January 7, 2016 – 7:48 am

The Washington Post prints an op-ed by Ann Brown, who was the “chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission from 1994 to 2002.” Hey, isn’t referring to her as “Chairman” sexist? Anyhow, she thinks she has the common sense solution

America should regulate bullets

When I chaired the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, I was grateful that we had authority to regulate lead in household paint. Banning the use of lead-based paint in homes has prevented brain damage in countless children over the years.

So why wouldn’t Congress allow us authority over another dangerous consumer product often made with lead?

Specifically, why not bullets?

On Tuesday, President Obama unveiled a package of executive actions that he hopes will reduce gun deaths in the United States. I urge him to put one more proposal on the table: regulating ammunition. The idea is workable, and Americans could support it.

This idea isn’t new. In 1974, the CPSC’s first chairman made clear his belief that the agency could probably regulate ammunition, and a court agreed — whereupon a frightened Congress passed laws making it impossible even to try. Now is the time for the president to begin pushing to correct that mistake.

Perhaps she missed that it would require Congress to pass a new law. Anyhow, Ms. Brown positions ammunition control in a way that seems oh-so-reasonable, noting that 80% of citizens agreed with regulating ammunition in a 2013 Fox News poll. She ends the op-ed with “It’s time to start exploring sensible ways to stop gun violence and save lives by regulating ammunition.” How would she do this? Note this paragraph

Do I say this swayed by all the horrific mass shootings we have seen in the past few years? Only in part. These are the tragic, visible tip of an iceberg. While mass shootings attract headlines and our grief, bigger problems with guns often go unnoticed: the hundreds killed annually in intimate-partner violence; those killed by kids too young to know what pulling a trigger can do; the 21,000 Americans who commit suicide with a firearm each year.

This very much sounds like she means to create a ban on ammunition purchases, despite later “common sense” restrictions. And this all means an increase in federal government authority, in her mind. She notes that the Consumer Product Safety Commission worked with manufacturers and “It didn’t ban cribs, walkers, toasters — or paint. It worked out ways to address what made them dangerous — and saved children in the process.” How do you do that with ammunition? Bueller? Bueller?

The same flexible approach can work with ammunition. When someone who may be dangerous is prevented from buying ammunition, any gun he has hidden becomes like a car without gas: a useless hunk of metal.

Who decides they’re dangerous? What are the standards? She wants to ban on-line purchases, mandate background checks, license ammo purchases. While these seem common sense…hey, I have no problem with a background check or a license for myself: I know I’m not dangerous, no criminal issues, I rarely even carry the weapon outside the house…who decides the standards? Might there be mission creep? Once that genie is out of the box, how big and intrusive does it get?

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Germany Deals With Lots Of Sexual Assault Attacks By “Migrants” Over New Years

By William Teach January 7, 2016 – 7:25 am

Don’t ask Leftists to be outraged over all the attacks by migrants from Islamic nations: even though they make a massive deal out of protecting women from rape and sexual assault (especially on college campuses that are run by Liberals), yammer about women’s rights, and so forth, all those things are lower on the rung of Liberal Concerns than multiculturalism, which means protecting the people streaming out of Islamic countries into 1st World nations

(Breitbart) German capital city Berlin has joined the sad parade of cities touched by migrant sex violence on New Year’s Eve, with hundreds of assaults now reported to police in Cologne and other cities.

Although on a smaller scale to the unrestrained and un-policed sex attacks in Cologne, the Berliner Morgenpost has now reported on assaults taking place on the street “in front of the Brandenburg gate”.

The revelation may prove difficult for the German media, which until now has stressed in most reports on the new year’s rapes that Berlin was not caught up in the scandal.

The paper reports four separate incidents around the cite, including a tourist being sexually assaulted by a group of “three to five men”, and two women being “sexually harassed” by men from Pakistan and Iraq.

Another woman came forward to police on Tuesday following national press coverage of the migrant rape scandal to report being “touched” at a music event by “several immoral men”.

There have been 53 complaints of attacks Germany, 39 of them for sexual harassment (the article doesn’t make it clear whether this was just Berlin, or Germany as a whole). This follows on the heels of many more sexual assaults throughout Europe. Norway decided that it was a good idea to hold classes for these migrants on How Not To Rape. The UK Telegraph reports

Some of those involved in a series of sexual assaults against women in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve claimed to be Syrian refugees, according to a leaked police report.

The outbreak of violence was also far more serious than previously thought, and at one point senior police officers feared “there could have been fatalities”. (snip)

Ministers have said there is no evidence asylum seekers were involved in the violence.

But the leaked police report, published in Bild newspaper and Spiegel, a news magazine, claims that one of those involved told officers: “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.”

Another tore up his residence permit before the eyes of police, and told them: “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow.”

More than 150 women have filed criminal complaints, three-quarters of them for sexual assault. Two cases of rape have been reported.

That seems to be just in Cologne.

Three Syrians have been arrested for gang-rape of two teenage girls in southern Germany. These are the types of people Mr. Obama and Democrats want to let into the United States. People who have no respect for the laws of 1st World nations, including the U.S. None of this should really be new to anyone. The migrant camps were, and are, hotbeds of criminality and sexual assault. Migrants from the Middle East and Northern Africa have long caused problems in Europe. All those riots in France from “youths”? Young Islamic men, rioting, torching cars. But, the diversity and multiculturalism push by Leftists has made it “Islamophobic” if one dares discuss and/or report these incidents. Why do Leftists hate women?

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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What Say To Artificial Trees To Solve Hotcoldwetdry?

By William Teach January 6, 2016 – 4:37 pm

Yup. As Steven Milloy notes, this is the latest in CO2 insanity. I’d just call it bat guano insane

(Washington Post) In the fight against climate change, trees are an ally. They suck in carbon dioxide, reducing the harmful greenhouses gases in our air. But there’s a problem — we’re asking them to work overtime.

Trees can’t absorb enough of the carbon dioxide humanity is throwing at them, unless we turn every inch of available land into a dense forest, according to Christophe Jospe, the chief strategist at Arizona State’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions.

But what if trees — or machines modeled after them — had superpowers? Artificial trees with otherworldly abilities are a great hope against climate change, as environmental experts say it’s not realistic to expect humanity to release significantly less carbon into the atmosphere. Our best bet may be to capture the excess carbon and store it or convert it into something useful such as fuel.

So, these resourceful folks came up with the idea to create artificial trees. Sadly, no one is ponying up research money for these yet

Capturing and storing carbon isn’t yet the type of expense that local governments and organizations can slide into their budgets. The cost of the technology is dropping, but not to a point where it’s affordable to install “forests” of these systems. Poliquin estimates an upfront cost of $350,000 for an artificial tree, but she expects prices to come down considerably. She hopes to develop a prototype of such a tree in one or two years.

Strangely, these things never really seem to come down in price, except where government is providing direct subsidies.

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If All You See…

By William Teach January 6, 2016 – 1:00 pm

…is a world being turned to desert from too much carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Cold Fury, with a post on digging ditches.

Is everyone getting their post-holidays exercise?

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Good Grief: Trump Chimes In On Cruz Birtherism

By William Teach January 6, 2016 – 10:17 am

There’s a reason it’s called the Silly Season

(Washington Post) Donald Trump said in an interview that rival Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace was a “very precarious” issue that could make the senator from Texas vulnerable if he became the Republican presidential nominee.

“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump said when asked about the topic. “It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.”

Trump added: “I’d hate to see something like that get in his way. But a lot of people are talking about it and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

To be perfectly clear, the facepalm is for Trump. And for those who will bring up Trump being an Obama Birther, let’s not forget that it was started by Team Hillary supporters.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz has released a video that has horrified the Credentialed Media

Wisely, this frames the debate in economic and legal terms. He’s said it before: what if illegals were coming across the border and taking the jobs of non-low wage citizens? Think there would be an outcry? What if they were taking the jobs of politicians?

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Say, Can Hollywood Save Us From “Climate Catastrophe”?

By William Teach January 6, 2016 – 8:16 am

In other words, are we set for more preachy movies about Hotcoldwetdry?

Can Hollywood save us from climate catastrophe?

By taking on the link between football and brain injuries, the recently released movie“Concussion” reminds us of the potential for Hollywood to shape attitudes and beliefs about controversial topics through entertainment.

The film has put America’s most popular sport under a microscope and sparked a dialogue about children participating in contact sports and the role of the National Football League in preventing injuries to its players.

Would this be the movie that bombed? And made even less money this past weekend. And isn’t even being mentioned at major sports sites like Fox Sports, CBS Sports, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN, among others. While an important issue, no one is talking about it. So, I’m not sure if this is the best example.

Certainly, there is the potential for a similar movie to be made about climate change — one that builds on “An Inconvenient Truth” and speaks to a new generation.

Let’s hope so, because it’s amusing when Hollywood makes a preachy movie and it tanks. People do not want preachy at the movies: they want to be entertained.

Some from the scientific community argue that interjecting Hollywood into the climate debate may be a bad thing, as it could further blur the lines between fact and fiction, especially with a public that remains skeptical of science.

But, with a public that holds views on climate change that largely align with political affiliation, Hollywood might offer a rare opportunity to cut across these lines with a message that is both entertaining and eye-opening. Indeed, there is already evidence that movies such as “The Day After Tomorrow” can change consumer attitudes and beliefs about climate change.

Funny part is, The Day After Tomorrow is more about a coming ice age than “global warming”.

As scientists learn more about the potential impacts of climate change, more stories are emerging that easily could be spun to read like nightmarish sci-fi movies. Here are a few examples:

  • Ancient bacteria brought back to life as glacier ice melts cause pandemic
  • Global food stocks collapse from widespread drought, ocean acidification that dissolves shellfish and the spread of neurotoxins in fish, unraveling social order and leading to war, or worse, nuclear confrontation
  • Rising temperatures shut down photosynthesis by phytoplankton, the source of most breathable oxygen on earth, suffocating all life

They would bomb. And bomb badly. The old 50’s monster movies did well because there was concern, legitimate, real concern, over a real issue: nuclear weapons. They were new, and scary, and movie makers used them to great effect to create monsters, such as Godzilla and giant tarantulas, to entertain without preaching.

Hey, I have a great idea: perhaps the Cult of Climastrology could produce rock solid evidence, based on the Scientific Model, that proves that mankind’s release of CO2 is mostly/solely responsible for climatic changes.

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Semi-Retired President Gets Weepy Over Mostly-Ineffectual Gun Rules

By William Teach January 6, 2016 – 7:51 am

I noted yesterday that Obama’s new “gun control” regime would pretty much have a statistically insignificant effect on “gun violence”. Ed Morrissey called them a “restatement of existing law”, and that they “aren’t exercises in executive power; they’re admissions of incompetent governance.” Allahpundit notes they are empty gestures, and points to Charles W. Cooke, who writes

1) In order to make his actions appear meaningful, Obama is going to have to pretend that they represent serious change. If he does that, though, he’ll permit his opponents to say, “look, we just did big gun control by executive order, we have other things to do, and we’re not doing it again.” That matters. The Left makes great hay out of the “we never do anything” line, and its more effective advocates use our present inertia to justify the need for experimentation. Insofar as there is any, Obama has slowed the momentum for further gun-control. This is not how you win the argument.

For the most part, that’s all these actions are: appearances. And, we get this

President Barack Obama grew emotional Tuesday as he made a passionate call for a national “sense of urgency” to limit gun violence.

He was introduced by Mark Barden, whose son Daniel was killed in the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Obama circled back to that shooting in the final moments of his speech.

“Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad,” Obama said, pausing to wipe away tears.

He added: “And by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago every day,” referring to his hometown where he began his political career.

Yes, it does happen on the streets of Chicago every day (he should talk to his buddy Rahm Emanuel). And in Baltimore. Detroit. Newark. And many other mostly Democratic Party run cities. And these empty gestures will have zero effect on these events. Does anyone think that criminals will say “oh, goodness, I have to have a background check for online purchases, where I’m not purchasing guns anyhow?” They don’t care about laws regarding murder, attempted murder, theft, assault, dealing drugs, etc.

And all those Democratic cities have draconian gun control. California is a liberal gun grabbers wet dream.

But, really, this is what Obama gets weepy about? What about other things

Does anyone remember Obama getting weepy when he made his brief statement, from the golf course, over the beheading of James Foley, then went right back to the golf course?

How about when Baltimore was breaking records for murder in 2015? He didn’t get weepy over San Bernardino, when Islamists killed Americans. Nor Fort Hood. Sarah Palin wonders

America is forced to weep over Obama’s release of violent criminals into our communities – like the 121 illegal aliens who committed murders after they were released from custody by the Obama administration instead of being deported. And that doesn’t take into account the others we don’t know about.

The whole world weeps waiting for American leadership in these troubled times as Islamic savages commit genocide against the Christians of the Middle East and terrorize innocent people in cities across the globe.

Heck, how about some weeping for the record number of people who have dropped out of the work force in despair

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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Special Snowflake Warmist Isn’t Impressed With Old Gray Hair Warmists

By William Teach January 5, 2016 – 2:39 pm

Thankfully, we now have the opinion of Clara Nevins, a “high school activist, dancer, and writer” (strange, she doesn’t want to be a STEM major?), who isn’t impressed with all those old fogey Warmists when she took a long fossil fueled trip to the Paris Hotcoldwetdry conference

A Millennial’s Take on Climate Activism

….

Paris was abuzz. At the Chamber of Commerce, 200 adults in business suits, wearied by two hours of oil companies’ execu-speak, slammed coffee at the 11 am break. There I was, a 5-foot-3 15 year old in a ponytail in a room full of blue suits and gray hair. I felt so out of place.

The next speakers were equally ancient-looking oil industry CEOs again throwing around terms like API, KBD, and NGL. I tried my best to follow but I could not comprehend all the acronyms, and I certainly couldn’t imagine seeing my friends in the audience trying to understand.

The next day I hoped I might feel more at home at the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network conference. My mom and I arrived at a tired conference hall filled to the brim with women my mom’s age. One woman was standing up, swaying to the bongos played by two indigenous women while another woman tried to get everyone’s attention.

“Ladies, before we start the day off, I want to welcome the oceans and the rivers into this room,” the woman at the podium began. At that moment, I felt like I was in the 70s Coke commercial, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” This way of rallying felt so antiquated. Again, I felt so out of place.

Rather ageist, wouldn’t you say? Even sneering. And she totally wasn’t inspired, and wants to find a way to get all the other Special Snowflakes involved. Heck, they might as well, because, thanks to the economic and other policies from the people and political parties they support, the jobs market stinks.

When older people with flowy hair or business suits speak about climate change, it doesn’t have an urgency that seems like ours when in fact, this issue is more ours than any single cause.

So, obviously, she has Big Ideas to solve this who issue of a minor 0.8C increase in global temperatures over 166 years, right? A plan to stop the prognosticated doom of a 1.2C rise by 2100?

I realized I shouldn’t dismiss or have disdain for the people who created the movement and have led us to this point, but now, we must take it from here, make it our own, and transition it with language and stakes that will have meaning for my millennial peers. So my fellow millennials, rise up, show up and make noise to send a message. Buy conscientiously and sustainably and forcefully encourage your parents and friends to do the same. This issue needs fresh and innovative ideas so use your vote, use your wallet and use your force because the power is in our hands.

She may not have gray hair and be her mom’s age or ancient-looking or antiquated. She’s not banging on bongos, acting like the hippies who started all this, but, her ideas are exactly the same. Spreading awareness and a token change in consumerism. Just with more energy!

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Posted in AGW Idiocy, Global Warming | 10 Comments | Trackback URL
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