We’ve all recently seen an eyebrow-raising number of yard signs with semantically-overloaded slogans in rainbow font, which are more of an attempt to virtue signal condescendingly and make a public political statement than they are evidence of any actual understanding of the issues advertised.
“In this house, we believe; Black lives matter, woman’s rights are human rights, love is love, no human is illegal, water is life, science is REAL!” Most of these are ironic and cringy and some are outright ridiculous on their face. Black Lives Matter (Incorporated) is an openly Marxist organization that hasn’t helped a single black American. It fosters divisive identity politics to produce a victim mentality and learned helplessness by deliberately distorting historical grievances to peddle socialist revolutionary activism and raise money, that is spent solely on enriching the founders of the movement, and electing democrats which have had a monopoly on local political control over inner cities for 50-70 years with catastrophic results.
BLM has also facilitated millions of dollars worth of property damage in black communities and drastic rises in violent crime. All of this to produce more tension between ethnic groups, more tension between police and civilians, and ultimately more grievance. More poverty, more crime, more racism, more emotional despair, richer communists.
Woman’s rights, I suppose is a shorthand for the right to kill unborn children, which isn’t very faithful to the human rights of the child. Love is Love, which is non-sense; pedophilia and bestiality count as abuse regardless of the genuine adoration. Not all Love is created equal. No human is illegal… that doesn’t even need an explanation, that’s just stupid.
And science is REAL; well at least as long as it promotes the agenda of the Democratic party. We can dismiss the whole biology thing, right? And water is life, whatever that implies… But the implication of these signs is to imply that they are on the moral and intellectual high ground, unlike those who disagree with them politically, in which case you must be a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homo-intolerant, science denier who hates water I guess. Ok, right?
Science is real. This is mostly likely a reference to the issue of climate change, an issue that the left claims to have allied itself with the science. Which is a disingenuous. Although the right tends to acknowledge more of the limitations of our scientific understanding, and the corruption introduced by political and financial interests entangled in the science. Most prominent conservatives agree that CO2 contributes to global warming, and that rapidly increasing global temperatures present a very real problem, and thus, reducing our carbon emissions is a noble objective.
Largely the right is far less skeptical of the actual science and much more skeptical of the rhetoric and policy prescriptions proposed by the left. It has gotten more alarmist, unworkable, impractical, unsustainable, unscientific, and drastically more authoritarian with each election. The narrative of Climate change and the political ramifications thereof has become one of the most contentious issues of our cultural conversation. Few topics are so widely misunderstood, dogmatic, and yet as emotionally and even morally charged as this one (for example, even the Liberty Revolt is split on the issue, with Cole taking the stance that there actually is a climate emergency and that alarmism is justified).
Part of the reason is how rarely science permeates the actual discourse on all sides and fronts. Ask yourself or anyone around you, or certainly any politician what the 2nd law of thermodynamics is for a quick reality check. And although the Fossil fuel industry also receives massive government subsidies, and uses billions, perhaps even trillions to lobby against fossil-fuel regulations, and research that might obfuscate guilt from the further use of, and investment in fossil fuels (though all fossil-fuel companies now admit they believe in anthropogenic, or human-caused, Climate Change), the other extreme has it’s a fair share of crony manipulation.
The ignorance of physics might not impact political ability, a captivating media personality, or activist virtue signaling, but it absolutely lends itself to exploitation. Global warming is in many ways the dream issue for environmentalists, media figures, politicians, and the like. If the crisis is true, it gives them a license to commandeer the entirety of the energy sector. And since energy is the master resource enabling all other resource use, it is the beating heart of modern economies and society more generally. Seizing influence over energy is equivalent to dominating the commanding heights of the world. Even AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti admitted that “it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all … we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Climate alarmism is one of the most profitable industries ever conceived for politicians, the media, environmental activists, and researchers. More than any other issue, global warming alarmism combined with mass scientific ignorance, provides them with the things they most desire. For politicians, it’s money and power. For the media, it’s shocking headlines. For activists, it’s a tremendous fund-raising venture, and a way to feel like a virtuous defender of the earth.
Researchers exploit the ignorance of politicians for government funding. And once you look at the money trail, it becomes abundantly obvious that massive incentives exist in favor of alarmism. After all, would you expect a researcher receiving government money to report back with a recommendation to slash his own budget and relieve him of his job? But given the democratic necessity for unscientific participants to address scientific issues, both politicians and voters have to take a leap of faith and rely on narratives and over-simplification. But this faith is best in perspective, so we’ll try to address enough of the science to do just that before we dive into the arguments over policy.
The Climatic system and our ability to measure it
Our climatic system consists of two turbulent fluids interacting with each other: the ocean and the atmosphere. By turbulent, I mean perpetual irregular circulations which are influenced by endless internal variables such as currents, temperatures, pressure systems, geography, and chemistry. And the entire system is influenced by outside forces such as clouds, water vapor, volcanic activity, carbon cycles, gas emissions, the chemical exchanges made by plants and animals, solar variations, aerosols, and particulate matter passing through the water, air, and space between earth and the sun, electromagnetic fields, and even the gravitational pull of the moon, as our planet and the entire solar system move through the vastness of space.
Much of the popular literature (on both sides of the climate debate) presume that in the absence of external factors, the climate would be consistent, which is not the case. The interactions of the atmospheric system and the oceanic system circulating on independent time scales react in their own manners to steady forcing caused by interacting with each other. Given the immense nature of the denser oceans, such circulation variations can involve timescales of millennia, and these internal time variations are often too long to even be identified in our relatively short instrumental record. El Niño is a relatively short example of oceanic circulation, involving only a few years. Nature has endless examples of autonomous variability, from these atmospheric and oceanic circulations to the roughly 11-year sunspot cycle and the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field every few hundred thousand years or so.
Our current scientific models are wholly incompetent to measure the vast majority of all of the variables in any particular place and time, let alone the combination of them all on a planetary scale, and especially as we try to measure the history of the climate or predict the future of the climate system. So to say that the science is settled is a logical fallacy, for one, no science is ever settled, that’s the whole point of science. Furthermore, even the leading UN scientists of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) admit that quote, “The long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” And “These projections were not intended to be predictions, over the short time-scales for which observations are available to date.”
There however does seem to be measurable trends that imply a higher probability of climate outcomes, given certain scenarios. But all of these predictions can fall apart with the introduction of new technologies or external events such as volcanic eruptions. Which, by the way, are not massive producers of carbon emissions, and in fact, large volcanic eruptions, like that of Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Pinatubo, actually lead to short-term global cooling, as sulfur dioxide (SO2), ash and other particles in the air and stratosphere reflect some solar energy. SO2, which converts to sulfuric acid aerosol within the stratosphere, can linger there for as long as seven years and cause a cooling effect for years.
But what about the slogan we often hear that “97% of scientists believe in climate change…” which political activists often tout, implying that belief in climate change is an endorsement of their preferred policy agenda. Well, that statistic is not the honest truth, and the conflation is disingenuous as well. And once you look into the origin of that figure it becomes as convincing as the polls leading into the 2016 presidential election.
That figure came from a prominent professor from Australia named John Cook. His study purported to review the abstracts from 11,000 climate science articles. The summary of his study said quote, “We find the 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on anthropogenic global warming, 32.6% endorsed anthropogenic global warming, 0.7% rejected it, and 0.3% were uncertain. Among abstracts expressing a position on human-caused global warming, 97.1% endorsed the consensus positions that humans are causing global warming.” That is to say, 97% of one-third of scientists believe in man-made climate change. 66% made no opinion. And nowhere did the study suggest that any of these scientists endorse climate catastrophe predictions or a Green New Deal.
Initially, Cook refused to share the data for review, but eventually, it was found and was revealed that many of these “Climate science studies” had nothing or very little to do with Climate science, even including a study of the media’s depiction of climate science. And strangely of those 11,000 scientific studies, not a single one was authored by Prof. Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist of MIT, and the most prominent Climate crisis skeptic who has published more than 200+ scientific articles since 1961.
The Energy Budget of the Climate system
The energy budget of the climate system is essentially how the “Greenhouse Effect” works. The unit for describing the energy flows of the earth is watts per square meter. The energy budget of this entire global system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. A doubling of CO2 incorporates a 2% disturbance to this budget. The Earth takes in about 340 watts per square meter from the sun, about 140 watts per square meter is reflected, primarily by clouds, back to space. This leaves about 200 watts per square meter emitted from the Earth in order to achieve equilibrium. The sun radiates in the visible portion of the radiation spectrum with its temperature averaging 6000 Kelvins.
Earth’s atmosphere and oceans introduce a host of complications. Water vapor very strongly absorbs and releases radiation in the infrared spectrum. It essentially blocks infrared radiation from leaving the surface, causing the surface and (via conduction) the air adjacent to the
surface to heat, which is the greenhouse effect. The buoyant elements expand as they rise, and the density of air decreases with height.
The buoyant elements cool, and the mixing results in decreasing temperature as the air rises. The amount of water vapor that the air can hold decreases rapidly as the temperature decreases. Eventually, at some height, there is so little water vapor that radiation can escape from the atmosphere. It is at this elevated level (around 5 km) that the temperature must be about 255K in order to balance incoming radiation. However, because convection causes the temperature to decrease with height, the surface now has to actually be warmer than 255K reaching about 288K.
The problem with the “Green Energy” Policy prescriptions
Setting aside the fact the US only produces about 15% of the world’s carbon emissions, and despite a rapidly expanding economy, the US’s carbon emissions have been going down. In Fact, the U.S. leads the world in carbon emissions reductions, followed by Europe but at a slower rate. This is regardless of our dismissal of the “Paris Climate accords” which was disproportionately taxing on the U.S. to the tune of trillions while being incredibly lenient on China which is responsible for almost 1/3 of the entire world’s carbon emissions.
Furthermore, China has been building an average of two coal power plants per day, and China’s emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India’s grew by 1 billion metric tons. “As much as 95 percent of the plastic waste transported by rivers into oceans comes from just ten rivers, a study has shown. Eight of those rivers are in Asia, with the remaining two — the Nile and the Niger — in Africa.” Indeed, environmental conscientiousness tends to be a privilege of the wealthy.
This contention would imply that if the progressives were serious about the climate alarmism they shouted, their platform would demand that they declare war on China.
But in continuing the west’s long tradition of being the most self-critical societies to ever exist, our prominent climate change alarmists focus the vast majority of their wrath against the West. Afterall, the use of fossil fuels has facilitated the great expansions of wealth in the West, and to deny that opportunity towards other countries would be to perpetuate “White Supremacy,” which is worse than climate catastrophe caused by the further increasing emissions of non-western countries.
But aside from the blatant statement of such, this ire directed particularly at the U.S. by the progressive movement lends credence to the notion that for them this is less about environmentalism, and more so a will to power. The progressive movement is deeply invested in the climate catastrophe narrative. Many of the politicians and wealthy world leaders pushing this gather in international meetings where they lecture and virtue signal about our carbon footprints, of course, they themselves expend as much carbon emissions flying their private jets to these meeting as an average person does in a year and parade around on their yachts burning 300 gallons of diesel fuel an hour. And all of course all of these technologies, from the vehicles to the very microphones they speak into are made with steel and plastic.
The target of climate policy orthodoxies, is an 83% reduction in CO2 emissions worldwide, by 2050, led by the U.S. Currently, the U.S. Emits about 6 billion tons of carbon emissions per year. So about 80%, would be about 1 billion. The last time U.S. carbon emissions were that low was in 1910. In 1910, the U.S. had half as many people. emitting half as much per capita. To reach this we’d have to emit a quarter of what our ancestors did over a century ago. LOONEY-TUNES. The only countries emitting at that level are countries like Haiti and Somalia, because they are desperately poor, and because of that poverty they are eagerly plundering their resources and polluting to make economic gains.
They largely imply that we are to accomplish this by switching our electrical grid to primarily Solar and wind energy. But unfortunately these energies have tremendous flaws. Nowhere in the world has the use of Solar or Wind replaced fossil fuels, or even decreased reliance on fossil fuels. This is due to the fact that both industries are overwhelmingly dependent on Fossil fuels. Let’s start with wind.
Wind Energy
Wind energy sounds so nice, but what are the processes that go into making wind turbines, and how efficient are they? Every single windmill needs between 900 and 140 tons of steel, and 2,500 tons of concrete to anchor them into the ground. Both of these are created by burning coal. Not to mention, the fuel and oil it takes to run the machines that dig out the ground, to transport the pieces, and to assemble them. And this is to say nothing of anchoring wind turbines into the ocean. These windmills, require the massive clearing out of land to make room for wind turbines.
These turbines, like any other machine with moving parts, requires oil lubricant. These machines, require a fossil fuel-based generator idling 24/7 to regulate the energy supplied, and compensate for time when the wind is absent. They require the use of a chemical called, sulfur hexachloride to mitigate the risk of fire inherent in the transistors required to regulate the flow of electricity, a chemical that is 23,000X worse than CO2. And to top it off, these wind turbines only last 20 years, after which they all need to be removed by massive machines, and the process starts all over again. It’s an illusion that this could ever possibly lead us away from fossil fuels.
Written by: Liberty Revolt
