ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 13, 2019 at 9:15 pm

Paul Plante says :

I just heard this young “climate activist” Greta Thunberg, who was across from our White House in Washington. D.C. as she gets ready to do something we common American citizens don’t have an opportunity to do, which is to address our Congress, on the news telling us American people that we have a moral responsibility to her, a scared 16-year old girl from Sweden, who wants us all to feel panic, because she feels fear every day, to go back to a cave-man type of existence so we don’t steal her future from her, so this spoiled little rich girl from Sweden who doesn’t have a clue as to what she is talking about obviously has a lot of clout in this country, as we can see from a Washington Examiner entitled “Democrats invite teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg to testify before Congress” by Josh Siegel on September 12, 2019, where we have as follows:

Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, 16, is testifying before Congress next week at the invitation of House Democrats.

Thunberg will appear Sept. 18 before a joint hearing of a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

She is among a group of young climate activists Democrats invited to testify at the hearing, entitled “Voices Leading the Next Generation on the Global Climate Crisis.”

end quotes

Being clueless themselves, and devoid of knowledge and ideas, and being political opportunists wishing to milk this “climate change crisis” for all it is worth, even if it means exploiting and manipulating children which they shamelessly do, the Democrats are going to stage another of their media extravaganzas where they will have scared children like Greta Thunberg come before the cameras to tell lies to other children to scare them too, all to score cheap political points for the Democrats.

Getting back to that Washington Examiner article, we have more on young Ms. Thunberg as follows:

Thunberg is best known for founding an international movement called Fridays for Future, in which students skip school on Fridays to participate in demonstrations demanding action to combat climate change.

Last month she traveled across the Atlantic Ocean in an emissions-free solar-powered boat, instead of flying, to New York City ahead of her speech on Sept. 23 at the United Nations Climate Action Summit.

end quotes

Young Greta, who has been nominated for a Nobel Prize, was herself the subject of an article in the NEW YORKER entitled “The Fifteen-Year-Old Climate Activist Who Is Demanding a New Kind of Politics” by Masha Gessen on October 2, 2018, where we learned about her, as follows:

Sometimes the world makes so little sense that the only thing to do is engage in civil disobedience — even in a country as attached to its rules and regulations as Sweden is.

Fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg has been protesting for more than a month.

Before the country’s parliamentary election on September 9th, she went on strike and sat on the steps of the parliament building, in Stockholm, every day during school hours for three weeks.

Since the election, she has returned to school for four days a week; she now spends her Fridays on the steps of parliament.

She is demanding that the government undertake a radical response to climate change.

Thunberg’s parents are Svante Thunberg, an actor, and Malena Ernman, a very well-known opera singer.

Ernman has published a book in which she described her family’s struggle with her two daughters’ special needs: both Greta and her younger sister, Beata, have been diagnosed with autism, A.D.H.D., and other conditions.

end quotes

This is the little girl the Democrats have invited to appear before our Congress to tell our Congress what it is we American people have to do to please this troubled little girl with some serious issues, and I for one, am refusing to dance to the tune she wishes to call, which takes us back to the NEW YORKER, as follows, as to how Greta Thunberg became the leading voice in the world for climate change, to wit:

In part because of her mother’s fame and the publicity that surrounded the publication of her book, Greta’s protest serves a dual purpose.

It not only calls attention to climate policy, as she intended, but it also showcases the political potential of neurological difference.

“I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she explained to me, in English.

“I have a special interest.”

“It’s very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest.”

Thunberg developed her special interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in the third grade.

“They were always talking about how we should turn off lights, save water, not throw out food,” she told me.

“I asked why and they explained about climate change.”

“And I thought this was very strange.”

“If humans could really change the climate, everyone would be talking about it and people wouldn’t be talking about anything else.”

“But this wasn’t happening.”

end quote

That’s it, people – when she was nine years old, Greta Thunberg heard people saying the sky could fall, which she took to mean it was really falling, and since nobody but her seemed concerned that the sky was falling, she appointed herself as our savior, and now, she is going to appear before the Democrats in Congress as an expert on the subject, which takes us back to the Washington Examiner article, to wit:

“We’re at the point where an entire generation has grown up in the climate crisis,” said Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, chairwoman of the Select Climate Crisis Committee.

“They know the science, they know the stakes and they know how to rise to the challenge.”

“We need to rise with them.”

end quotes

Except that is not at all true that they know the science, because they don’t.

Greta Thunberg no more knows the “science” than she does a day without living in irrational fear.

Being hysterical about something as Greta Thunberg is precludes her from being “scientific,” plain and simple.

And for those who don’t know the Congresswoman making those ridiculous claims about these scared children knowing the “science, Katherine Anne Castor, born August 20, 1966, is a Democrat serving as the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 14th congressional district, who holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Emory University (1988) and a J.D. from Florida State University College of Law (1991).

And as to this asinine statement by Democrat Katherine Anne Castor that “We’re at the point where an entire generation has grown up in the climate crisis,” that is pure balderdash as we can clearly see if we aren’t hysterical like her and Greta Thunberg by doing a bit of research into technical articles like “History of the greenhouse effect and global warming” by S.M. Enzler MSc where we learn as follows with respect to carbon dioxide, to wit:

Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) was a Swedish scientist that was the first to claim in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion may eventually result in enhanced global warming.

end quotes

Ah, 1896, yes, that would be one hundred twenty-three (123) years ago now, so it is hardly recent, and all of us alive today have been living with this “greenhouse gas” theory of Arrhenius all our lives without it troubling us, because it is merely a theory which in the intervening 123 years has been shown to be seriously flawed, although Greta Thunberg and Democrat Katherine Anne Castor are totally unaware of that, being scared out of their minds as they are by chimeras.

What Arrhenius actually found was that the average surface temperature of the earth is about 15C because of the infrared absorption capacity of water vapor and carbon dioxide, which is called the natural greenhouse effect.

In other words, carbon dioxide exists in the earth’s atmosphere because nature itself put it there for its own reasons.

And notice water vapor included there as a greenhouse gas.

The real science, as opposed to the bogus science Greta Thunberg and the Democrats are peddling, has water vapor as a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

So why is that science being excluded by the Democrats and Greta Thunberg?

And as to these scare tactics Greta Thunberg and the Democrats are employing here with respect to the sky is falling and the world is going to come to an end and deprive Greta Thunberg of her future, I have been living with that crap all my life and after 60+ years of hearing about the world is going to end, I’m sick of it, which takes us back once again to that technical article for some necessary background history on this hysteria mongering by the Democrats, as follows:

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s Charles Keeling used the most modern technologies available to produce concentration curves for atmospheric CO2 in Antarctica and Mauna Loa.

These curves have become one of the major icons of global warming.

The curves showed a downward trend of global annual temperature from the 1940’s to the 1970’s.

At the same time ocean sediment research showed that there had been no less than 32 cold-warm cycles in the last 2.5 million years, rather than only 4.

Therefore, fear began to develop that a new ice age might be near.

The media and many scientists ignored scientific data of the 1950’s and 1960’s in favor of global cooling.

In the 1980’s, finally, the global annual mean temperature curve started to rise.

People began to question the theory of an upcoming new ice age.

end quotes

It is not science we are being sold here by Greta Thunberg and the Democrats, people.

So ask yourself if you have children or grandchildren – why should you tolerate the Democrats lying to them and scaring them to score some cheap political points at their expense?

http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-176974
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 14, 2019 at 10:07 pm

Paul Plante says:

Sorin, one of the reasons I generally stay out of these discussions is because they are usually stupid, with hysteria on one side, and total denial of all reality on the other.

Yours above would run towards the hysterical, no offense intended, of course.

As to the topic at hand, it is not my argument that dumping all that co2 and/or methane in the atmosphere is not causing climate change.

The real “science,” not the “science” of Greta Thunberg is what says CO2 is not causing climate change, and given that I am an engineer, I go with the real science, not the science of hysteria.

And real science is not the possession of one person like Greta Thunberg – real science is available to everyone, so the science I rely on is as accessible to you as it is to me.

So that you might understand what an engineer is, versus a scientist, the practice of the profession of engineering is defined as performing professional services wherein the safeguarding of life, health and property is concerned, when such service or work requires the application of engineering principles and data.

Since engineers like myself are supposed to safeguard life, health and property, Sorin, we are not supposed to be running around like chickens with our heads cut off yelling the sky is falling, nor are we supposed to be gulled by the ravings of a frightened 16-year old Swedish girl who wants us all to panic because she feels fear every day.

So no, Sorin, I don’t “have a hatred for the Democrats”, whatever that means, although I would agree with you based on evidence and long years of experience that whatever the Democrats are saying or doing is wrong, but that is another subject for a different thread.

And engineering principles, Sorin, are not theories like this greenhouse gas model, which has many flaws due to the fact that there are too many variables for it to handle.

Engineering principles are based on natural laws and are fundamental truths that serve as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.

So when applying engineering principle here, one looks at the fact that on earth, as opposed to Venus, our air, the general name for the mixture of gases that makes up the Earth’s atmosphere, is primarily nitrogen (78 percent), with oxygen (21 percent), water vapor (variable), argon (0.9 percent), carbon dioxide (0.04 percent), and many trace gases, as well as dust, pollen, and spores.

Notice how small a percentage of our air carbon dioxide really is.

And another engineering principle or natural law is that at standard temperature and pressure, the density of carbon dioxide is around 1.98 kg/m3, or about 1.67 times that of air, so that it is a dense gas, which means it does not rise and form a greenhouse layer in our upper air as the greenhouse gas model being pushed by Greta Thunberg and the Democrats, who are in the game for POWER, Sorin, and domination over us, if you didn’t already know that, requires it to.

So the thing with me, which may be different from you, is that I don’t like getting lied to and I don’t like seeing children being scared by lies.

And since I am an engineer, Sorin, who worked in the field of air pollution control yes, I am aware that the combustion products of burning gas are carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, while the combustion products of burning coal include carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and sulfur trioxide, while the combustion products of diesel are carbon dioxide and water vapor.

I am also aware that burning wood, or turf, or buffalo chips or any other organic matter also releases carbon dioxide into the air.

So if we want to be totally carbon free, then nothing can be burned to give us heat, which means it has to come from somewhere else, doesn’t it?

And how is that heat then supposed to get to us who now live out in the countryside?

As for me, Sorin, I’m not sitting around waiting for all you people out there running around like chickens with your heads cut off waiting for somebody to do something.

My personal carbon footprint is now very low, and very little do I have to rely on your grid to keep me alive, because your grid is becoming more and more unreliable.

As to nuclear, Sorin, let me leave you with this:

“Drought could force nuke-plant shutdowns”

By MITCH WEISS, Associated Press

Last updated: 12:52 p.m., Wednesday, January 23, 2008

LAKE NORMAN, N.C. — Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

“Water is the nuclear industry’s Achilles’ heel,” said Jim Warren, executive director of N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, an environmental group critical of nuclear power.

“You need a lot of water to operate nuclear plants.”

He added: “This is becoming a crisis.”

All but two are built on the shores of lakes and rivers and rely on submerged intake pipes to draw billions of gallons of water for use in cooling and condensing steam after it has turned the plants’ turbines.

At some plants — those with tall, Three Mile Island-style cooling towers — a lot of the water travels up the tower and is lost to evaporation.

Progress spokeswoman Julie Hahn said the Harris reactor, for example, sucks up 33 million gallons a day, with 17 million gallons lost to evaporation via its big cooling towers.

end quotes

When you have solved that cooling problem, Sorin, get back to me and we’ll talk further about nuclear.

In the meantime, have yourself a wonderful day, and Sorin, keep in mind that the average human like yourself or Greta Thunberg or AOC exhales about 2.3 pounds of carbon dioxide on an average day, and the exact quantity depends on a person’s activity level, so that a hysterical person chanting “hey, hey, ho, ho, climate change has got to go” over and over like Greta Thunberg the other day with all her friends can put out up to eight times as much CO2 as a calm person like myself, and that carbon dioxide is as much a “greenhouse gas” as is the carbon dioxide produces by burning wood or gas or diesel.

Thus, all of these politicians running their mouths at high speed telling us the untruth that the world is going to come to an end in ten years if we don’t enact the Green New Deal right now are themselves contributing greatly to climate change, assuming their model is correct that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which shows some of the ignorance and hypocrisy and scientific voodoo at play here from those who want us to be scared so we are easier to manipulate, which takes us to Greta’s carbon fiber sailboat.

Carbon fiber is manufactured by refining oil to obtain acrylonitrile and then spinning this acrylonitrile and baking the spun yarn.

Due to the high baking temperature of 1000℃ or more, 20 tons of CO2 are emitted to manufacture 1 ton of carbon fiber.

So Greta’s crossing of the Atlantic in a high-tech, carbon fiber sailboat was hardly emission-free as we are being told by the media.

Why do you think they lie to us, Sorin?

Any guesses?

http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-177191
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 15, 2019 at 12:48 pm

Paul Plante says :

And I would note that what I really said was that the latter part of Sorin’s post above ran towards the hysterical when he posted as follows:

“What do you propose we do when we can’t find any more shit to burn?”

“How are your grandchildren going to get around?”

“Horses?”

“To clarify my position. I think we should put massive resources into refining solar, wind, wave energy production, battery storage, electric vehicles, advanced nuclear reactors, hopefully fusion.”

end quotes

For the record, my grandchildren get around by using the two feet they were born with to propel them around, which is how I got along for many years of my own life when I didn’t own the extra burden of a car.

But now that school is back in session up this way, anyway, each morning, you see a seemingly endless convoy of Lincoln and Cadillac and GMC and Mercedes-Benz and BMW SUV’s and assorted sedans and coupes with a mommy or daddy in them ferrying little Johnny or little Suzy to school, creeping along in the traffic jam spewing out the deadly carbon dioxide that those same little children are so upset by as they walk out of school to stand and holler over and over along with Greta and AOC, “hey, hey, ho, ho, climate change has got to go,” which is the epitome of hypocrisy.

If those children really cared about the “environment” and carbon dioxide, they would tell mommy to leave the Lexus home, and they would walk to school, or take the bus.

As to how people will get along come the day there is no more **** to burn, who knows, because to date, it hasn’t happened yet, and I suspect that outside of a few places here in America, for many people, they won ‘t even know the difference, not being addicted in the first place to burning fossil fuel to keep them alive.

I was in Viet Nam in 1969, and where I was, there were no motorized vehicles, at all, nor was there electricity, and yet those people were getting along fine, by their standards, living as they had for centuries, given that the history of Viet Nam goes back to 2879 B.C.

And Rome, one of the truly great civilizations on earth began its history on April 21, 753 BC, long before internal combustion engines and V-8 powered trucks to haul your boat around with, and they built many engineering wonders without the aid of motorized equipment.

Julius Caesar in Gaul and in his other campaigns was moving his legions around quite rapidly on foot over 2,000 years ago.

And that is just a snapshot.

Then we have the Seima-Turbino phenomenon which dates from 2100 BCE to 1900 BCE, the homeland of is considered to be the Altai Mountains.

What makes that unique is that these people were in possession of advanced metal working technology, and two-wheeled chariots.

So by bothering to come out of our comfort zone to study a bit of history, we can plainly see that humans have gotten along just fine without the things we think are absolutely necessary today to sustain life, like the V-8 powered truck, and the big boat, etc. etc. etc.

When I was young, the old woman at the farm up the road where I worked was born after the civil war and had lived a good portion of her life without anything we consider essential to life today, and she was in her nineties when I knew her.

So, life without a BMW and a big boat with twin V-8 power used to be possible, even if it isn’t, anymore.

As to nuclear power, the first plant commissioned was on June 26, 1954, at Obninsk, Russia, when nuclear power plant APS-1 with a net electrical output of 5 MW was connected to the power grid, the world’s first nuclear power plant that generated electricity for commercial use, which is sixty-five (65) years ago now.

So, nuclear power is hardly a new concept, and by this time, there are no mysteries about nuclear power left, so what exactly is it that we are going to pour these massive resources into, outside of graft and corruption?

What is it about nuclear that we do not understand today, besides exactly nothing?

And it is not only a matter of electrical generation, it is also a matter of distribution, and what is known as Joule Heating, or “I squared R” losses.

Joule heating, also known as Ohmic heating and resistive heating, is the process by which the passage of an electric current through a conductor produces heat, and Joule heating affects the whole electric conductor, which means the farther away the source is, the greater the losses, and that heat produced goes into the atmosphere, because heat is energy.

And this has all been known now for several centuries, which is an indication of just how tedious these discussions have become today, where people are acting like we are just discovering what people have known for a long time already.

James Prescott Joule first published in December 1840, an abstract in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, suggesting that heat could be generated by an electrical current.

That was 179 years ago now.

Joule immersed a length of wire in a fixed mass of water and measured the temperature rise due to a known current flowing through the wire for a 30 minute period.

By varying the current and the length of the wire he deduced that the heat produced was proportional to the square of the current multiplied by the electrical resistance of the immersed wire, which is high school physics today, or even grade school physics, which raises the existential question of how people in this country today have become so pitifully stupid and ignorant.

http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-177191
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 15, 2019 at 5:48 pm

Paul Plante says :

And thank you to the Cape Charles Mirror once again for hosting this discussion, which lets an old disabled, certified poor person like myself have as equal access as do the well-to-do yacht owners who proliferate in the balmy clime of Cape Charles, Virginia (yes, I drove through one time with my windows down just to experience it first-hand, and I thought it was lovely, far better in fact than even San Diego or Burbank, California, or Marseilles, France, for that matter), and to Mr. Otton for bringing us back to the reality that a small group of people, at best 32% of the American people, called the Democrats are unilaterally attempting to enact an insane policy known as the “GREEN NEW DEAL (see, Cape Charles Mirror 7 April 2019 http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/g ... ent-138950 ) that will cause chaos in this country that will greatly impact the lives of the 68% of us who are not Democrats and who will be harmed by this while being denied a voice at the table, which brings us American citizens who care about due process of law, which is to say, citizenship as opposed to being a cud-chewing consumer as so many Americans have become, to this issue of the Democrats in Congress, and here we are talking directly about this AOC, inviting this young Swedish girl who is spouting nonsense to appear before something called the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, a select committee established in the 116th United States Congress in 2019 when Democrats regained the majority of the United States House of Representatives chaired by Congresswoman Kathy Castor of Florida, without someone standing there right beside her to question her “science” and to then rebut it, as it should be, given that it is nothing more than ignorant rubbish, and I say that as an American citizen who openly resents this spoiled and willful rich and manipulative Swedish teen-ager coming over here to tell me, “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is, even that burden, you leave to us children,” which is ignorant horse****, although not to the Democrats who are exploiting this girl to push their “green new deal” agenda in this upcoming presidential race, by having poor little Greta Thunberg come on camera to chide us all for being so morally irresponsible, which will have the Democrats on the panel openly weeping and possibly tearing at their clothes while flagellating themselves with chains to expiate their sins, which they will then project onto the rest of us, as well, while telling us to our faces as she did at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this year, when she told government and business leaders:

“I want you to panic.”

“I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”

end quotes

As to the existence of that particular committee, in November and December of 2018, youth climate activists with the Sunrise Movement pushed House Democrats to form a select committee with the mandate to draft “Green New Deal” legislation, working with incoming freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who proposed language for the committee’s authorization.

As can be seen, that was entirely one-sided, with no input from those of us who are not in favor of the Green New Deal for legitimate reasons the Democrats are keeping out of the record.

As to keeping us out of the discussion, which is very un-democratic, a hallmark of the Democrats, it is only necessary to go to their website https://climatecrisis.house.gov/ where they make it incandescently clear (The science is in. We know the cause. Burning fossil fuels and destroying tropical forests are driving the climate crisis.) that thank you very much, the discussion is over, we have all the facts and we have all of what we need to know, so go back home and STFU if you don’t agree with the green new deal, which makes you an obstructionist trying to steal the future of people like Greta Thunberg.

Which raises the existential question of why are the Democrats bringing this girl over from Sweden to try and turn our children and grandchildren against us by accusing us of stealing their futures because we are all a bunch of self-centered gluttons and wastrels, a characterization I frankly resent and find extremely insulting as an American citizen, which has me standing up in here to protest this Swedish trouble-maker appearing before our Congress without equal time for rebuttal being offered on behalf of the American people themselves, who are quite obviously being left out of the discussion by the Democrats.

http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-177191
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 15, 2019 at 9:20 pm

Paul Plante says :

I do not support either the Democrats nor the Republicans, and Sorin, you cannot expect us to support a government policy being put forth by the Democrats that is based on fraud, lies and deception as is the case with this “Green New Deal” which is the underlying basis of all these plans being put forth by Lizzie Warren and barmy Bernie Sanders, etc.

Where that all is now is captured in a New York Times story entitled “Climate Town Hall: Several Democratic Candidates Embrace a Carbon Tax” by Coral Davenport and Trip Gabriel on 5 September 2019, as follows:

WASHINGTON — Democratic candidates promised unprecedented new action on climate change on Wednesday night in the first prime-time televised forum devoted to the issue in a presidential campaign, vowing to undo the Trump administration’s environmental policies, spend trillions of dollars to promote renewable energy and force companies to pay new taxes or fees.

In perhaps the most significant development of the night, more than half of the 10 candidates at the forum openly embraced the controversial idea of putting a tax or fee on carbon dioxide pollution, the one policy that most environmental economists agree is the most effective way to cut emissions — but also one that has drawn intense political opposition.

While the candidates appeared in back-to-back interviews, it was a former presidential hopeful, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who dominated the event in an unusual way.

He made climate change the singular focus of his campaign before dropping out of the race last month, only to see several of the current candidates echo his ambitious proposals in their climate plans and at Wednesday’s forum on CNN.

“You may remember Gov. Jay Inslee said, ‘Let’s get tough on this,’” said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as she laid out a new plan that she said had been influenced by her former rival.

In addition to proposing $3 trillion in spending on environmental initiatives, Ms. Warren also responded “Yes!” when asked by a moderator, Chris Cuomo, if she would support a carbon tax — a measure she had not spelled out in her official policy proposal.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has not explicitly taken up Mr. Inslee’s ideas, said, “We are proposing the largest, most comprehensive program ever presented by any candidate in the history of the United States.”

Mr. Sanders has sought to win over the liberal wing of the Democratic Party with a plan that takes its name from the Green New Deal and has the biggest price tag of all the candidates’ proposals — $16.3 trillion over 15 years.

end quotes

All of that, Sorin, is based on a lie.

Why are you so accepting about that?

In support of my position, I present you with a technical paper from NASA entitled “Water Vapor Confirmed as Major Player in Climate Change” on 11.17.08, wherein is stated as follows:

Water vapor is known to be Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated.

Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.

Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

With new observations, the scientists confirmed experimentally what existing climate models had anticipated theoretically.

end quotes

Now, again, we are talking about things we have known about for many years now, the role water vapor plays as a greenhouse gas, but water vapor does not sound so scary as carbon dioxide, which green plants need to live, and so we don’t have that part of the conversation, because it does not support the efforts of the Democrats to impose on us their Green New Deal, which is a power grab, plain and simple.

Getting back to the NASA paper:

The research team used novel data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite to measure precisely the humidity throughout the lowest 10 miles of the atmosphere.

That information was combined with global observations of shifts in temperature, allowing researchers to build a comprehensive picture of the interplay between water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other atmosphere-warming gases.

The NASA-funded research was published recently in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters.

“Everyone agrees that if you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, then warming will result,” Dessler said.

“So the real question is, how much warming?”

The answer can be found by estimating the magnitude of water vapor feedback.

Increasing water vapor leads to warmer temperatures, which causes more water vapor to be absorbed into the air.

Warming and water absorption increase in a spiraling cycle.

Water vapor feedback can also amplify the warming effect of other greenhouse gases, such that the warming brought about by increased carbon dioxide allows more water vapor to enter the atmosphere.

“The difference in an atmosphere with a strong water vapor feedback and one with a weak feedback is enormous,” Dessler said.

Climate models have estimated the strength of water vapor feedback, but until now the record of water vapor data was not sophisticated enough to provide a comprehensive view of at how water vapor responds to changes in Earth’s surface temperature.

That’s because instruments on the ground and previous space-based could not measure water vapor at all altitudes in Earth’s troposphere — the layer of the atmosphere that extends from Earth’s surface to about 10 miles in altitude.

AIRS is the first instrument to distinguish differences in the amount of water vapor at all altitudes within the troposphere.

Using data from AIRS, the team observed how atmospheric water vapor reacted to shifts in surface temperatures between 2003 and 2008.

By determining how humidity changed with surface temperature, the team could compute the average global strength of the water vapor feedback.

“This new data set shows that as surface temperature increases, so does atmospheric humidity,” Dessler said.

“Dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere makes the atmosphere more humid.”

“And since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, the increase in humidity amplifies the warming from carbon dioxide.”

end quotes

Focus your attention on that last sentence, people, and really contemplate what it means in terms of what we are being told by the Democrats concerning the role carbon dioxide itself plays, which is a secondary role, not a primary role as the Democrats would have us believe, which takes us back to that paper, as follows:

“We now think the water vapor feedback is extraordinarily strong, capable of doubling the warming due to carbon dioxide alone.”

“This study confirms that what was predicted by the models is really happening in the atmosphere,” said Eric Fetzer, an atmospheric scientist who works with AIRS data at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“Water vapor is the big player in the atmosphere as far as climate is concerned.”

end quotes

And for the record, in 1975, which is 44 years ago now, I had all the records of research I was doing into the amount of water vapor being put into the atmosphere by nuclear generating facility cooling towers confiscated and destroyed because the New York State Power Pool as it was then known did not want that research published, so they had it covered up, instead.

So to answer the question of whether or not “science” is political, of course it is.

And I am not going to endorse a federal government program that is based on fraud, deception and outright lies.

http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-177382
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 16, 2019 at 6:25 pm

Paul Plante says :

It is absurd, Sorin Varzaru, at least from an engineering point of view employing thermodynamics and heat and mass transfer, if you have any of your own experts in those areas you want to bring into the conversation, to say that the heat energy produced by human activity has no impact whatsoever on the weather, and hence, the climate.

It is, however, far more absurd, and dangerously so, to insist, as these Democrats are doing, that humans can actually stop climate change, when climate change is a function of what the earth wants it to be, not the whims of 16-year old Greta Thunberg, who incidentally in my estimation as a grandfather and American citizen is the biggest fraud to be perpetrated on the public at large in the name of “science,” since the famous Piltdown Man hoax back in 1912, or AOC, for that matter, who is helping to perpetrate this fraud that is Greta Thunberg on us, in her own bid for considerable political power over our lives without our having a voice in the matter, which is tyranny.

As to the Piltdown Man, it was a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human.

The inauthenticity of the hoax was described in 1953.

An extensive scientific review in 2016 established that amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson was its likely perpetrator.

In 1912, Charles Dawson claimed that he had discovered the “missing link” between ape and man.

In February 1912, Dawson contacted Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, stating he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex.

That summer, Dawson and Smith Woodward purportedly discovered more bones and artifacts at the site, which they connected to the same individual.

These finds included a jawbone, more skull fragments, a set of teeth, and primitive tools.

Smith Woodward reconstructed the skull fragments and hypothesised that they belonged to a human ancestor from 500,000 years ago.

The discovery was announced at a Geological Society meeting and was given the Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni (“Dawson’s dawn-man”).

The questionable significance of the assemblage remained the subject of considerable controversy until it was conclusively exposed in 1953 as a forgery.

It was found to have consisted of the altered mandible and some teeth of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed, though small-brained, modern human.

The Piltdown hoax is prominent for two reasons: the attention it generated around the subject of human evolution, and the length of time, 41 years, that elapsed from its alleged initial discovery to its definitive exposure as a composite forgery.

end quotes

And here we are once again, being confronted with an elaborate fraud, this one named Greta Thunberg, which fraud is being stage-managed by her father and PR dude, the famous Swedish actor Svante Thunberg, who is listed as a co-author of a book she wrote about herself entitled “Scenes from the Heart,” where we are informed that Greta has a “condition” that makes her far more intelligent than any of us churls or serfs out here spewing gobs of carbon dioxide into the air each day with our profligate lifestyle that Greta knows every American has, so that we should submit to her superior intelligence and do whatever it is she tells us to do.

Svante Thunberg, born 10 June 1969, the year I was in Viet Nam, father of Greta and manipulator of us, is a Swedish author, arts manager and producer, and actor, and he is the son of actors Olof Thunberg and Mona Andersson, so acting runs deep in that family as we can see in this YouTube video of Svante Thunberg smoothly spinning his web of lies to capture the minds of America’s youth, to twist them to his cause, which is promoting Greta as a serious financial asset:

Greta & Svante Thunberg – Straight Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiD04TRwebQ

Personally, I think every parent and grandparent in America should watch that video with their children and grandchildren to see exactly what kind of mind poison they are being fed here in the name of “science,” which this is a mockery of.

http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-177783
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

gtm

"NASA Releases New CO2 Data, Refutes Conventional Wisdom - Analyses of a set of NASA data shows that water vapor greatly amplifies global warming, and carbon dioxide doesn’t mix in the atmosphere as quickly as assumed."


Ucilia Wang

December 15, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO -- NASA has released the first-ever set of carbon dioxide data based only on daily observations by a satellite instrument, a new tool that will help researchers study climate change and improve weather predictions.

The data came from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) that NASA launched aboard its Aqua spacecraft in 2002.

Since then, AIRS has amassed information about carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water vapor, methane and temperatures in the mid-troposphere (see multimedia presentations).

The mid-troposphere is about three to seven miles above the Earth's surface.

For carbon dioxide, AIRS measures and tracks its concentration and movement as it moves across the globe.

Observation data is critical for scientists to validate their models or adjust them to better predict the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the weather and climate.

The data have already refuted a long-held belief that carbon dioxide is evenly distributed and do so fairly quickly in the atmosphere once it rises from the ground, said Moustafa Chahine, the science team leader of the AIRS project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco Tuesday.


"Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the mid-troposphere," Chahine said.

"You can see the jet stream splitting the carbon dioxide clump."

AIRS data shows instead that carbon dioxide, which has seen its rate of increase accelerating from 1 part per million in 1955 to 2 parts per million today, would require about two to three years before it blends in, he said.

The atmosphere currently has about 400 parts per million.

How well and how quickly carbon dioxide blends in is important for understanding how much and how long carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere and affects the climate before some of it is scooped up by Earth's natural scrubbers, such as the ocean.

And by extension, that knowledge would be crucial in determining what humans must do to minimize their emissions or use technologies to capture and sequester their carbon dioxide pollution before it escapes into the atmosphere.

Chahine said several climate models have assumed an even distribution because researchers didn't have adequate data to show how the carbon dioxide is vertically transported through the atmosphere.

"The data we have now will help researchers improve their models' vertical transport," Chahine said.


Data from AIRS also has yielded another key finding: the southern Hemisphere is actually home to a large concentration of carbon dioxide, a phenomenon that some researchers had speculated about but never had the data to prove it.

Most of the man-made carbon dioxide tends to come from the northern hemisphere, where key polluters such as the United States, China and India are located.

In fact, the north produces about three to four times more carbon dioxide than the south, Chahine said.

Although scientists knew that carbon dioxide doesn't stay in one location – winds blow pollution from Asia across the Pacific to reach the United States – their models largely showed a smaller amount of the emission move from the north to the south than what data from AIRS have demonstrated.

"The southern hemisphere is a net sink."

"Some people say it's the garbage dump for the northern hemisphere," Chahine said, adding that carbon dioxide has the lifespan of 100 years.

Information gathered by AIRS also has pointed to the important role water vapor plays in global warming.

Water vapor is the evaporation of water from the ocean, thunderstorms or other sources.

Its presence is closely tied to the temperature of the Earth's surface.

As humans emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the world gets warmer and more humid.

That boosts the amount of water vapor, which, because it's a greenhouse gas itself, would in turn amplify the warming trend.


"AIRS has provided an unprecedented view of water vapor distribution," said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at the Texas A&M University, at the AGU meeting.

"Warming over the next century is essentially guaranteed to happen few degrees Celsius unless" other, previously undiscovered factors show up.

In fact, water vapor can more than double the warming effect of carbon dioxide, Dessler said.

He said the data from AIRS corroborated predictions by climate models on the impact of water vapor on global warming.


AIRS is set to end its mission in 2017, when the fuel for Aqua is expected to run out.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles ... #gs.4djthh
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE GUARDIAN

"When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope is contagious' - One is America’s youngest-ever congresswoman, the other a Swedish schoolgirl. Two of the most powerful voices on the climate speak for the first time"


by Emma Brockes

Sat 29 Jun 2019 03.00 EDT

Last modified on Sat 29 Jun 2019 05.34 EDT

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez enters a boardroom at her constituency office in Queens, New York, after a short delay which, a political aide hopes, hasn’t been caused by a constituent waylaying her in the corridor.

(“They can get really excited to meet her.”)

Greta Thunberg is in her home in Sweden, her father testing the technology for the video link while the teenager waits in the background.

The activists have never met nor spoken but, as two of the most visible climate campaigners in the world, they are keenly aware of each other.

Thunberg, now 16, catapulted to fame last year for skipping school every Friday to stand outside the Swedish parliament, protesting against political inaction over the climate crisis and sparking an international movement, the school strike for climate, in which millions of other children followed suit.

Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district is, at 29, the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress, whose election over a well-funded incumbent in 2018 was a huge upset to politics-as-usual.

She has been in office for less than a year, which seems extraordinary given the amount of coverage she has generated.

In February, Ocasio-Cortez submitted the Green New Deal to the US House of Representatives, calling for, among other things, the achievement of “net-zero” greenhouse gases within a decade and “a full transition off fossil fuels”, as well as retrofitting all buildings in the US to meet new energy efficient standards.

The Green New Deal, while garnering support from Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, was mocked by speaker Nancy Pelosi (“the green dream or whatever they call it”), and defeated in the Senate by Republicans.

Like Thunberg, however, Ocasio-Cortez gives every appearance of being galvanised by opposition, and has the kind of energy that has won her 4.41 million Twitter followers and makes establishment politicians in her path very nervous.

In the course of their conversation, Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg discuss what it is like to be dismissed for their age, how depressed we should be about the future, and what tactics, as an activist, really work.


Ocasio-Cortez speaks with her customary snap and brilliance that, held up against the general waffle of political discourse, seems startlingly direct.

Thunberg, meanwhile, is phenomenally articulate, well-informed and self-assured, holding her own in conversation with an elected official nearly twice her age and speaking in deliberate, thoughtful English.

They are, in some ways, as different as two campaigners can get – the politician working the system with Washington polish, and the teenager in her socks and leggings, working from her bedroom to reach the rest of the world.

There is something very moving about the conversation between these young women, a sense of generational rise that, as we know from every precedent from the Renaissance onwards, has the power to ignite movements and change history.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez It’s such an honour to meet you!

Greta Thunberg You, too!

AOC Thank you.

I’m so excited to be having this conversation.

I remember first hearing your speech a few months ago – I was hanging out with a friend in Harlem, who said, “Have you listened to this young woman?”

And I heard your speech and was thrilled, because here in the United States, even when I was running, people were saying there’s no need to convey this kind of urgency [about the climate], and it’s radical, and it’s unnecessary.

To hear you articulate the belief that I’ve had as well is so exciting and validating.

So I wanted to thank you for your work and your advocacy.

GT Thank you so much for standing up and offering hope to so many people, even here in Sweden.

AOC One of the things I’m interested in hearing from you is that often people say, “Don’t politicise young people.”

It’s almost a taboo.


That to have someone as young as you coming out in favour of political positions is manipulative or wrong.

I find it very condescending, as though, especially in this day and age with the access to information we have, you can’t form your own opinions and advocate for yourself.

I’m interested in how you approach that – if anyone brings that up with you?

GT That happens all the time.

That’s basically all I hear.

The most common criticism I get is that I’m being manipulated and you shouldn’t use children in political ways, because that is abuse, and I can’t think for myself and so on.

And I think that is so annoying!


I’m also allowed to have a say – why shouldn’t I be able to form my own opinion and try to change people’s minds?

But I’m sure you hear that a lot, too; that you’re too young and too inexperienced.

When I see all the hate you receive for that, I honestly can’t believe how you manage to stay so strong.

AOC I think the thing that people sometimes don’t realise is that here in the United States, because of the gap between the rich and the poor, people really identify Wall Street as a very potent political force.

With our rules, politicians are allowed to accept campaign contributions on a level that is probably beyond what happens in other parts of the world.

But what people don’t recognise is how strong the fossil fuel lobby is.

The Koch brothers in the US have essentially purchased the entire Republican party, but people forget they made their money off oil and gas.

That is where their fortune comes from.

And I think that’s what we’re up against.

So the severity of the pushback indicates the power that we are challenging.

You can look at that with despair, or you can look at it with hope.

That’s how strong we are: we’re so strong that we’re able to take this on credibly and actually build a movement against it.

GT Yes, I mean, the oil lobby is huge in the US, and we also have that kind of lobby in Sweden.

Not as much, but...

AOC What is the most effective tactic in gaining attention for the environmental movement?

What have you done, or what have been the practices that have been most galvanising?


GT I think this whole movement in which I just sat down in front of the parliament, alone – I think that had a huge impact, because people saw it and were moved, and became emotional.

Millions of children around the world, striking and saying, “Why should we study for a future that may not exist any more?”

This is not only me, but everyone in the movement.


AOC Another question I have for you is that a lot of people talk about Sweden and other Nordic countries as an inspiration.

People say that [advanced thinking around the climate crisis] could never happen in the US, because we’re a multiracial democracy – the fact that Sweden and other places are more homogenous means they’re able to get along better.

That because of the racial diversity here, and issues with immigration and so on, there’s no way we can come together in order to combat this.

I’m interested in what you say in response to that.

GT Many people, especially in the US, see countries like Sweden or Norway or Finland as role models – we have such a clean energy sector, and so on.

That may be true, but we are not role models.

Sweden is one of the top 10 countries in the world when it comes to the highest ecological footprints, according to the WWF – if you count the consumer index, then we are among the worst per capita.

In Sweden, the most common argument that we shouldn’t act is that we are such a small country with only 10 million inhabitants – we should focus more on helping other countries.

That is so incredibly frustrating, because why should we argue about who or what needs to change first?

Why not take the leading role?

AOC We hear the same exact argument here.

And this is the United States of America!

People say, “Well, we should wait for China to do something.”

There’s this political culture of people trying to say America First – that the US is the best nation in the world, yet at the same time they’re saying, “Well, China’s not doing it, why should we?”

And I think it’s the same argument: are we going to choose to lead, or are we going to sit on our hands?

It seems as if they take pride in leading on fracking, on being the number one in oil, in consumption, in single-use plastics.

But they don’t seem to want to take pride in leading on the environment and leading for our children.

GT Yes.

I mean, countries like Sweden or the US, since we are rich countries, need to go first.

Because people in poor countries need to be able to raise their standard of living.

We have a duty to lead when we already have, basically, everything.

AOC Yes.

People think of leadership as this glamorous, powerful thing.

To be a leader is to come first, to set the agenda.

But what people don’t realise is that leadership is also enormously difficult.

Leadership is a responsibility.

Leadership is not fun.

Leadership is about doing things before anybody else does them.

Leadership is about taking risks.

Leadership is about taking decisions when you don’t know 100% what the outcome is going to be.


It’s enormously easy to follow – it’s the easiest thing in the world.

And there are detriments to following.

You are too late.

You do not control your destiny.

You are not in control, period.

You are often under the thumb of someone else.

But it is enormously easy because you don’t have to determine the future.

It seems as if, really, it’s a decision on whether we’re going to lead or not.

I wonder what, to you, is encouraging, and what keeps you going?

There’s a school of thought – I personally disagree with it – that says if you educate people too much [about the climate] they’re going to think it’s too late and they’re going to wallow in despair and not act at all.

So I’m curious, given how daunting the issue is, why aren’t you so filled with despair that you’re staying on your couch every day, and just waiting for the apocalypse?


[Laughs]

GT Before I started school striking, I was like that.

I was so depressed and I didn’t want to do anything, basically.

But what I find encouraging is having all these people who are fighting on different sides in different ways, to create a better future and to make us avoid catastrophic climate breakdown.

The school-striking children, when I see them – that is very hopeful.

And also the fact that people are very unaware of the climate crisis.

I mean, people aren’t continuing like this and not doing anything because they are evil, or because they don’t want to.

We aren’t destroying the biosphere because we are selfish.

We are doing it simply because we are unaware.

I think that is very hopeful, because once we know, once we realise, then we change, then we act.


AOC I had a similar tipping point, although it had more to do with income inequality.

Many people know that several years ago I was working in a restaurant, and I had gone to college, and I had worked on so many things, but my family had fallen in to a lot of misfortune – my father had gotten sick and so on.

And I was working in this restaurant and I would go, day in and day out, and I was so depressed.

I felt so powerless, and as though there was nothing I could do that could effectively counter the enormous number of societal structures that are designed in the US to keep the working class poor, and to keep the rich, richer.

I was really wallowing in despair for a while: what do I do?

Is this my life?

Just showing up, working, knowing that things are so difficult, then going home and doing it again.

And I think what was profoundly liberating was engaging in my first action – when I went to Standing Rock, in the Dakotas, to fight against a fracking pipeline.

It seemed impossible at the time.

It was just normal people, showing up, just standing on the land to prevent this pipeline from going through.

And it made me feel extremely powerful, even though we had nothing, materially – just the act of standing up to some of the most powerful corporations in the world.

From there I learned that hope is not something that you have.

Hope is something that you create, with your actions.

Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious.

Other people start acting in a way that has more hope.


GT Yeah.

I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, “What should I do?”

And I say: “Act."

"Do something.”

Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression.

I remember the first day I was school-striking outside the Swedish parliament, I felt so alone, because everyone went straight past, no one even looked at me.

But at the same time I was hopeful.

AOC It’s true that people don’t know when those small actions can manifest into something.

I’ve seen it even in office.

There’s so much cynicism about, how powerful can this be?

Just me showing up?

I think sometimes we’re so obsessed with measurement.

What does me standing outside of parliament with a sign do?

It doesn’t lower any carbon emissions immediately.

It doesn’t change any laws directly.

But what it does is make powerful people feel something, and people underestimate the power of that.

It is becoming harder and harder for elected officials to look people in the eye.

Just this morning I was sent a picture of an older gentleman from the midwest, which has just seen some catastrophic flooding – we’re starting to see flooding in the US where there was never flooding before.

In the midwest there’s a disaster package that’s not getting passed, and he was just there with a sign saying, “Do you care about me?”

He stood outside the congressional building, knowing that members are going to have to pass him by, and it’s very much inspired, I would say, by the actions that you’ve taken.

The biggest weapon people have is to try to make you think that you don’t matter.

It is to say, “This doesn’t change anything.”

Because if you can convince people that it doesn’t matter, then they won’t do it and people can go on as though it’s business as usual.

We are no longer at the point of preventing [climate disaster] from happening entirely – we are now at the point of minimising the damage.

And as these floods and storms are here, I think more and more people are going to be willing to stand up for themselves.


GT I have a question.

I have heard about how bad the situation is in the US with climate denialism, but I find it very hard to believe.

It’s bad here in Sweden – but I have seen reports of how little the US media mentions the climate crisis and how it is treated.

How bad is it really?

AOC I would say that it has historically been very, very bad.

But it’s actually getting much better.

In the 1970s, ExxonMobil had internal science that not only definitively proved that climate change was real, but they themselves, the oil company, invested in modelling to see how bad it was going to be.

Some of their models were so sophisticated that, back in the 70s, they were predicting our weather patterns as far out as 2012 – and many of them were accurate.

They knew exactly what was happening.

So what they did, starting the year I was born, around 1989, was to start funding a lot of media and lobbying campaigns.

They knew they couldn’t fund campaigns outright saying climate change is not real.

But they could fund campaigns sowing confusion.

So they would run campaigns saying we need to see more science, to sow doubt around the consensus.

For a very long time it worked, and it got very bad.

We came very close to acting on the climate in 1989, but the lobbying was so powerful that they effectively prevented action – we had almost 40% of Republican voters not believing that climate change was settled fact.

But I think because of our advocacy and our movement, those numbers have been dropping precipitously in just the last few years.

And in the last year especially, with our push for a Green New Deal, connecting everything that is happening to climate change.

People who cover increasingly worse hurricanes as though they are accidents, or just things that happen – now, every time a storm comes, we talk about climate change.

The other piece of it is not just acknowledging that it’s real, but prioritising it as a top issue.

We just received some very encouraging numbers yesterday – a year or two years ago, only 20% of Democratic voters, the more liberal voters in the country, saw climate change as a top issue.

With our action, and the youth organising that’s going on now, it has surged.

We’ve seen in very early voting states, something like 70% of Democratic voters think that a Green New Deal should be a top issue, and that they would support candidates who support it, and not supporting it is a red flag for many voters.

I think we’re moving, but it takes this radical action to move it.


We have historically had an issue with media coverage of the climate crisis – I think they don’t realise that not covering it is just as bad as denying it.

We have issues because much of our media is profit-driven, and if it doesn’t drive ratings they will not cover it as much.

But we simply don’t have a choice.

We have to do this.

GT I saw very recent numbers, I think it was yesterday, that suggested about 2% of Sweden’s population don’t believe in the climate crisis.

Here it’s not as acceptable to not believe in it.

Everyone accepts that it’s a fact.

But still we aren’t talking about it, and it’s not a priority.

We are just treating it like any other issue.

AOC Why do you think young people have been more powerful and persuasive on this issue, in particular?

GT Many reasons, but I think the main one is that it is our future that is at risk.

Most of us know that this is going to affect us in our lifetimes – it’s not just something that might happen in the future.

It’s already here and it’s going to get worse, and many of us understand that this is going to make our lives much worse.

And also that as young people, we aren’t as used to the system.

We don’t say, “It’s always been like this, we can’t change anything.”

AOC I’ve always said to people that youth is a mindset.

And young people, we tend to come in and almost take that mindset for granted because as you said, we haven’t seen the world before, this is our first path, and so we have a tendency to question all of the nonsensical things that have just gone on for reasons of outdated logic.

I have three- and four-year-old nieces and nephews, and they’re always asking, “Why, why, why, why?”

For a lot of people it can be somewhat irritating.

But I think sometimes it’s irritating because they don’t have the answers.

You can be much older and still part of a youth movement, if you refuse to do things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done.

I believe that young people just have a natural distillation of the world that is so pure.

I’ve always felt that social movements, and youth movements in particular, should continue to be the moral compass that guides our vision.

GT Yes, it always reminds me a lot of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Everyone believes in this lie, that only a child dares to question.

AOC Right.

When I was first running [for office], people often mocked me as a child.

I’m much older than you!

But I was still very young for someone who was running for such a powerful seat.

People would say, “But don’t you know this is how it’s always been done?"

"He has so much money, and power."

"There’s no reason you should challenge someone in your own party – we should challenge people in other parties.”

And so on and so forth.

And they were all veiled ways of saying I was too inexperienced, too naive, too young, and too powerless.

I think the mere refusal to accept that can change our world.

That’s exactly what you’ve done.

GT I think we’ve both done that.

Thunberg says that she is planning to travel to the US in August, so she can attend the UN Climate Action summit on 23 September.

GT I don’t fly for climate reasons so it’s not 100% yet, but we are figuring it out.

It’s very hard, but I think it should be possible.

AOC That’s incredible.

I’m so excited to follow that.

Let us know how we can help from over here.

I think one of the things that we need to start communicating is that this a global struggle, and it’s not about what is Sweden doing, and what is the US doing – it’s about what are all of us doing, as one movement?

I think the power of that is very real.

I wish you well, and I know many members of Congress who would be thrilled to meet you.

GT Thank you so much.

AOC Thank you so much, Greta.

Be sure to let us know when you have an arrival date.

If you land in New York, we will give you a Queens’ welcome!

• This conversation appears in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine and has been abridged for length.

If you would like a comment on this piece to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... us-climate
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE GUARDIAN

"When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope is contagious' - One is America’s youngest-ever congresswoman, the other a Swedish schoolgirl. Two of the most powerful voices on the climate speak for the first time"

by Emma Brockes

Sat 29 Jun 2019 03.00 EDT

Last modified on Sat 29 Jun 2019 05.34 EDT

GT I have a question.

I have heard about how bad the situation is in the US with climate denialism, but I find it very hard to believe.

It’s bad here in Sweden – but I have seen reports of how little the US media mentions the climate crisis and how it is treated.

How bad is it really?

AOC I would say that it has historically been very, very bad.

But it’s actually getting much better.

In the 1970s, ExxonMobil had internal science that not only definitively proved that climate change was real, but they themselves, the oil company, invested in modelling to see how bad it was going to be.

Some of their models were so sophisticated that, back in the 70s, they were predicting our weather patterns as far out as 2012 – and many of them were accurate.

They knew exactly what was happening.

So what they did, starting the year I was born, around 1989, was to start funding a lot of media and lobbying campaigns.

They knew they couldn’t fund campaigns outright saying climate change is not real.

But they could fund campaigns sowing confusion.

So they would run campaigns saying we need to see more science, to sow doubt around the consensus.

For a very long time it worked, and it got very bad.

We came very close to acting on the climate in 1989, but the lobbying was so powerful that they effectively prevented action – we had almost 40% of Republican voters not believing that climate change was settled fact.

But I think because of our advocacy and our movement, those numbers have been dropping precipitously in just the last few years.

And in the last year especially, with our push for a Green New Deal, connecting everything that is happening to climate change.

People who cover increasingly worse hurricanes as though they are accidents, or just things that happen – now, every time a storm comes, we talk about climate change.

The other piece of it is not just acknowledging that it’s real, but prioritising it as a top issue.

We just received some very encouraging numbers yesterday – a year or two years ago, only 20% of Democratic voters, the more liberal voters in the country, saw climate change as a top issue.

With our action, and the youth organising that’s going on now, it has surged.

We’ve seen in very early voting states, something like 70% of Democratic voters think that a Green New Deal should be a top issue, and that they would support candidates who support it, and not supporting it is a red flag for many voters.

I think we’re moving, but it takes this radical action to move it.

We have historically had an issue with media coverage of the climate crisis – I think they don’t realise that not covering it is just as bad as denying it.

We have issues because much of our media is profit-driven, and if it doesn’t drive ratings they will not cover it as much.

But we simply don’t have a choice.

We have to do this.


https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... us-climate
Svante Arrhenius

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist.

Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry.

He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate.

In 1905, he became director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.

Arrhenius was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are responsible for the Earth's increasing surface temperature.

In the 1960s, David Keeling demonstrated that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are large enough to cause global warming.

Greenhouse effect

In developing a theory to explain the ice ages, Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth's surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

These calculations led him to conclude that human-caused CO2 emissions, from fossil-fuel burning and other combustion processes, are large enough to cause global warming.

This conclusion has been extensively tested, winning a place at the core of modern climate science.

Arrhenius, in this work, built upon the prior work of other famous scientists, including Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall and Claude Pouillet.

Arrhenius wanted to determine whether greenhouse gases could contribute to the explanation of the temperature variation between glacial and inter-glacial periods.

Arrhenius used infrared observations of the moon – by Frank Washington Very and Samuel Pierpont Langley at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh — to calculate how much of infrared (heat) radiation is captured by CO2 and water (H2O) vapour in Earth's atmosphere.

Using 'Stefan's law' (better known as the Stefan–Boltzmann law), he formulated what he referred to as a 'rule'.

In its original form, Arrhenius's rule reads as follows:

if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.

Here, Arrhenius refers to CO2 as carbonic acid (which refers only to the aqueous form H2CO3 in modern usage).

The following formulation of Arrhenius's rule is still in use today:

Δ F = α ln(C/C subscript 0)

where C subscript 0 is the concentration of CO2 at the beginning (time-zero) of the period being studied (if the same concentration unit is used for both C and C subscript 0, then it doesn't matter which concentration unit is used); C is the CO2 concentration at end of the period being studied; ln is the natural logarithm (= log base e (log subscript e)); and Δ F is the augmentation of the temperature, in other words the change in the rate of heating Earth's surface (radiative forcing), which is measured in joules of heat energy per second, per square meter — a joule per second is one watt.

Derivations from atmospheric radiative transfer models have found that α (alpha) for CO2 is 5.35 (+/- 10%) for Earth's atmosphere.

Based on information from his colleague Arvid Högbom, Arrhenius was the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes were large enough to cause global warming.

In his calculation Arrhenius included the feedback from changes in water vapor as well as latitudinal effects, but he omitted clouds, convection of heat upward in the atmosphere, and other essential factors.

His work is currently seen less as an accurate quantification of global warming than as the first demonstration that increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause global warming, everything else being equal.

Arrhenius's absorption values for CO2 and his conclusions met criticism by Knut Ångström in 1900, who published the first modern infrared absorption spectrum of CO2 with two absorption bands, and published experimental results that seemed to show that absorption of infrared radiation by the gas in the atmosphere was already "saturated" so that adding more could make no difference.

Arrhenius replied strongly in 1901 (Annalen der Physik), dismissing the critique altogether.

He touched on the subject briefly in a technical book titled Lehrbuch der kosmischen Physik (1903).

He later wrote Världarnas utveckling (1906) (German: Das Werden der Welten [1907], English: Worlds in the Making [1908]) directed at a general audience, where he suggested that the human emission of CO2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population:

"To a certain extent the temperature of the earth's surface, as we shall presently see, is conditioned by the properties of the atmosphere surrounding it, and particularly by the permeability of the latter for the rays of heat." (p46)

"That the atmospheric envelopes limit the heat losses from the planets had been suggested about 1800 by the great French physicist Fourier."

"His ideas were further developed afterwards by Pouillet and Tyndall."

"Their theory has been styled the hot-house theory, because they thought that the atmosphere acted after the manner of the glass panes of hot-houses." (p51)

"If the quantity of carbonic acid [ CO2 + H2O → H2CO3 (carbonic acid) ] in the air should sink to one-half its present percentage, the temperature would fall by about 4°; a diminution to one-quarter would reduce the temperature by 8°."

"On the other hand, any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth's surface by 4°; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8°." (p53)

"Although the sea, by absorbing carbonic acid, acts as a regulator of huge capacity, which takes up about five-sixths of the produced carbonic acid, we yet recognize that the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries." (p54)

"Since, now, warm ages have alternated with glacial periods, even after man appeared on the earth, we have to ask ourselves: Is it probable that we shall in the coming geological ages be visited by a new ice period that will drive us from our temperate countries into the hotter climates of Africa?"

"There does not appear to be much ground for such an apprehension."

"The enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree." (p61)

"We often hear lamentations that the coal stored up in the earth is wasted by the present generation without any thought of the future, and we are terrified by the awful destruction of life and property which has followed the volcanic eruptions of our days."

"We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil."

"By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind." (p63)

At this time, the accepted consensus explanation is that, historically, orbital forcing has set the timing for ice ages, with CO2 acting as an essential amplifying feedback.

However, CO2 releases since the industrial revolution have increased CO2 to a level not found since 10 to 15 million years ago, when the global average surface temperature was up to 11 °F (6 °C) warmer than now and almost all ice had melted, raising world sea-levels to about 100 feet higher than today's.

Arrhenius estimated based on the CO2 levels at his time, that reducing levels by 0.62 – 0.55 would decrease temperatures by 4–5 °C (Celsius) and an increase of 2.5 to 3 times of CO2 would cause a temperature rise of 8–9 °C in the Arctic.

In his book Worlds in the Making he described the "hot-house" theory of the atmosphere.


https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... years-ago/
AND HERE, WE CAN SEE THAT THIS SO-CALLED "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN' MAGAZINE IS CLEARLY MISLEADING US BECAUSE THIS THEORY ABOUT CARBON DIOXIDE IS NOT NEW AT ALL AND IT WAS NOT DISCOVERED BY EXXON MOBIL …

AND ANYONE PUBLICLY PURPORTING TO BE A SCIENTIST SHOULD KNOW THIS HISTORY COLD …

SO WHY DOESN'T THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN?

WHAT DOES THAT LACK OF KNOWLEDGE ON THEIR PART ABOUT THIS SCIENTIFIC HISTORY GOING BACK TO ARRHENIUS SAY ABOUT THEM?

THAT THEY AREN'T SCIENTIFIC AT ALL?

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

"Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago - A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation"


By Shannon Hall on October 26, 2015

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News.

This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation — an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking.

Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.


Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised.

“It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University.

But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it.

In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models.

Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans.

It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents.

They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic.

“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee.

A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees — a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today.

He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical."

In other words, Exxon needed to act.

But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all.

“We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American.

“The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research."

"These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”

One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial.

Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion.

By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change.

It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases.

Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty.

At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,” Oreskes says.

But experts are still piecing together Exxon’s misconception puzzle.

Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf).

“We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt,” says union president Kenneth Kimmel.

“There’s even a quote in it that says something like ‘Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.’"

"So it’s pretty stark.”

Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace.

Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kimmell says.

Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988.

“I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon’s deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry.

“I think there are a lot of parallels,” Kimmell says.

Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy.

He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done.

Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet’s health.

“It’s a harm that is global in its reach,” Kimmel says.

To prove this, Bob Ward — who on behalf of the U.K.’s Royal Academy sent a letter to Exxon in 2006 claiming its science was “inaccurate and misleading” — thinks a thorough investigation is necessary.

“Because frankly the episode with tobacco was probably the most disgraceful episode one could ever imagine,” Ward says.

Kimmell agrees.

These reasons “really highlight the responsibility that these companies have to come clean, acknowledge this, and work with everyone else to cut out emissions and pay for some of the cost we're going to bear as soon as possible,” Kimmell says.

It doesn’t appear, however, that Kimmell will get his retribution.

Jeffers claims the investigation’s finds are “just patently untrue, misleading, and we reject them completely” — words that match Ward’s claims against them nearly a decade ago.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Shannon Hall is an award-winning freelance science journalist based in the Rocky Mountains. She specializes in writing about astronomy, geology and the environment.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... years-ago/
thelivyjr
Site Admin
Posts: 73429
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:40 p

Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING

Post by thelivyjr »

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 17, 2019 at 6:43 pm

Paul Plante says :

It is not just our energy sector, Mr. Otton – these fools, who spin out pie-in-the-sky “solutions” to something they have no control over, that being the continual change of climates that are a feature of life on earth, as opposed to the moon, Mars, or Venus, are talking about turning our very lives upside down if their cock-a-mamie plans were somehow to be imposed upon us by AOC and Elizabeth Warren and barmy Bernie Sanders, none of whom really have a clue as to what the ramifications are of what they are proposing, nor do they care, because they will have power, which is what it is all about for them – control.

I lived through the northeast blackout of 1965, which was a significant disruption in the supply of electricity on Tuesday, November 9, 1965, affecting parts of Ontario in Canada and Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Vermont in the United States, and as far as we could tell from inside the affected zone, the world had come to an end.

Everything stopped.

Where there was formerly the light of cities and suburbs, there was now darkness.

I was going to get gas that evening, and was just about out when the power went out, so that was it for me.

Unless you are on top of a hill, and where you want to go is down, a car without gas is worthless.

Luckily, a friend lived near-by, so I was able to find a place to wait out whatever was happening, and since everything was off, nobody knew.

That is what these fools are proposing, except on a national scale, not just the northeast.

Getting back to the blackout of 1965, over 30 million people and 80,000 square miles (207,000 km2) were left without electricity for up to 13 hours.

And everything came to a halt, just like that.

So, what do AOC and Lizzie Warren and barmy Bernie Sanders propose to do when that happens again as a result of their Green New Deal or OFF Act?

Has anyone heard?

If so, could you please share it with us?

Thank you.

http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-178283
Post Reply