George Rebane
‘Settled’ is not an adjective to be used with real science.
The recently released AR6 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has injected new life into climate hysteria that seems to have been flagging over the last few years. The usual hysterics are again up in arms with another round of outlandish warnings and proposals to tank the economies of the developed countries, led, of course, by the US. More sober and knowledgeable scientists are saying ‘not so fast’.
Physicist Steven Koonin has been introduced in these pages as one of the leading sober and knowledgeable scientists who has for some years now been counseling a more measured view of climate change. His recent best seller, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021), summarizes the unsubstantiated fears and foibles that continue to be foisted on the lay public worldwide. The 11aug21 WSJ, from which the nearby figure was filched, contains his critique of AR6, and is definitely worth a read. I’ll give some highlights.
To begin for those late to this pity party, what all the fuss is about that we are ignoring a global catastrophe in process – namely, preventable manmade global warming (PMGW). Every word in that label is important, and it’s the ‘preventable’ part that promises to be most devastating to the fortunes of developed countries. You have to be convinced that we humans did it all by ourselves, and that therefore we can and must roll back global warming all by ourselves.
In ‘Climate Change Brings a Flood of Hyperbole’ Dr Koonin begins with -
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its latest report assessing the state of the climate and projecting its future. As usual, the media and politicians are exaggerating and distorting the evidence in the report. They lament an allegedly broken climate and proclaim, yet again, that we are facing the “last, best chance” to save the planet from a hellish future. In fact, things aren’t—and won’t be—anywhere near as dire.
The entire history of climate reporting has been a mire of politicized fraud. RR readers learned years ago that all the prognostications about PMGW are based on a collection of incoherent, incomplete, and essentially broken general circulation models (e.g. we don't understand earth's CO2 cycle). The have been twisted beyond recognition by true believers and fraudsters to yield the gee-whiz graphs and endlessly repeated, hysterical talking points.
It is already easy to see things in this report that you almost certainly won’t learn from the general media coverage. Most important, the model muddle continues. We are repeatedly told “the models say.” But the complicated computer models used to project future temperature, rainfall and so on remain deficient. Some models are far more sensitive to greenhouse gases than others. Many also disagree on the baseline temperature for the Earth’s surface. … The latest models also don’t reproduce the global climate of the past. The models fail to explain why rapid global warming occurred from 1910 to 1940, when human influences on the climate were less significant. The report also presents an extensive “atlas” of future regional climates based on the models. Sounds authoritative. But two experts, Tim Palmer and Bjorn Stevens, write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the lack of detail in current modeling approaches makes them “not fit” to describe regional climate. The atlas is mainly meant to scare people.
The other big bamboozle involves pointing to unusual weather as confirmation of climate change. These assessments and dire pronouncements are made daily by innumerates who have no idea what science is or how it can substantiate something.
Extreme weather events are invoked as proof of impending disaster. But the floods in Europe and China and record temperatures across regions of the U.S. are weather, not climate—singular events, not decadeslong trends. Both Europe and China have experienced equally devastating floods in past centuries, but these are forgotten or deliberately ignored. The drought and wildfires in the Western U.S. are part of a trend going back a few decades, but forest management and expanding human presence in the forests are perhaps more important than climate change in causing these events. … The report expresses low confidence in most reported hurricane trends over the next century, and it remains uncertain whether there’s any trend beyond natural variability in Atlantic hurricanes. In other words, we have no scientific proof that humans have made hurricanes worse, despite what many say.
The IPCC report reveals very little that is new. It is mostly the repackaging of past reports by a legion of contributing authors, each working within their narrow field. The almost 4,000 page tome has been read by very few, and understood by even fewer. Nevertheless, AR6 will feature prominently in the upcoming November UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. So it’s important to understand both the nature of its contents and misrepresentations about PMGW that are always prominent in the executive summary and conclusion sections of what the IPCC publishes. Here is the AR6 Headline Statements from the Summary for Policy Makers.
Refreshingly, the report deems its highest-emissions scenarios of the future unlikely, even though those are the ones you’re mostly likely to hear about in media reports. The more plausible scenarios have an average global temperature in 2100 about 2.5 degrees celsius warmer than the late 1800s. The globe has already warmed 1 degree since that time, and the parties of the Paris Accord arbitrarily agreed to limit further warming to another degree. But since humanity’s well-being has improved spectacularly, even as the globe warmed during the 20th century, it is absurd to suggest that an additional degree of warming over the next century will be catastrophic. In fact, the AR5 report from 2014 says even 1.5 degrees of additional warming by 2100 will have minimal net economic impact. … Good science is characterized by detail, data, proven models and reasoned debate. That takes time. Meanwhile, we should be wary of the torrent of hyperbole that is sweeping the globe.
Scattershots – 3dec20 (updated 8dec20)
George Rebane
SCOTUS finally ruled against Gov Cuomo on the religious freedom case. The 26nov20 NYT reported, “The Supreme Court late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had imposed to combat the coronavirus. … The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The order was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role.” (more here) Justice Barrett was the crucial vote for the 5-4 majority, with Chief Justice Roberts (the court’s new ‘swing vote’) going limp again and voting with the liberals. Justice Gorsuch wrote the excellent majority ruling (here) wherein he states, “It is time — past time — to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques,”
‘This is why Yuja Wang is Wonder Woman’. Ms Wang is unquestionably one of the greatest piano virtuosi to come along in many a year. Take a listen to a five minute sampling of what this woman can do with a piano – truly a celebration and vindication of western culture and how it has contributed to the shaping of global cultures.
‘Big Companies Urge Biden, Congress to Address Climate Change’ - Amazon, Citigroup, Ford and others support a U.S. return to the Paris accords from which Trump withdrew. Well, whouda thought? (more here) With the advent of the Biden administration we are going to see a return of corporatism on steroids. Cash rich corporatists have always been lobbyists and supporters for all kinds of new regulations and fees that can be levied on their respective industries and business sectors. We recall that a corporatist is a big corporation that can no longer effectively compete in free markets without some kind of government support. Increasing costs for their smaller competitors and raising the barriers to entry for newcomers is always best achieved by established corporatists who can pay off legislators and regulators to do their assigned duties – all for the benefit of the consumer, of course. These are the naïfs who ultimately will get it in the shorts, and pay for the whole thing. (In case we have some new readers here, please recall that corporations pay no taxes or fees; they just pass those costs on to their customers. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.)
[4dec20 update] Cutting the unemployment bonus again proved that the Left doesn’t do economics. Writing unemployed low-wage workers checks with an added $600 bonus was supposed give the economy a boost and lower unemployment according to progressive economists like the socialist sage Paul Krugman. Wrong again. Workers got paid more for not working and the economy didn’t go anywhere. When President Trump had to compromise eliminating the bonus to just lowering it to $300, then, lo and behold, unemployment plummeted and the economic growth set decades-long records. As the song says, ‘When will they ever learn?’
Marc Andreessen, web browser pioneer and venture capitalist, years ago claimed that ‘software will eat the world’ (here). AI has now achieved the ability to automatically generate code for some very structured applications, and soon will become smart enough to write programs from only verbal instructions, thereby promising to make legions of programmers redundant. Some interpret this coming state of affairs with the claim that “Software Ate the World, and Soon It Will Write Itself”, going on to conclude that “developers are in short supply, but their products may acquire the capacity to replace them.” Well no, that’s not quite true. Most non-techies still believe that ‘line programmers’ create the wondrous systems that dazzle and deliver us. But learning to code in a programming language, and learning to conceive and design a system to do what has never been done are two different skill sets – the first any smart high schooler can accomplish, the second takes a bit more education in one of any number of specific fields. Bottom line, software is no more ‘eating the world’ than did movable type in days of yore – you still had to have something more to become an acknowledged wordsmith than what was needed to learn how to smith the words into print. In the same way today, it will take more from fewer to come up with novel things the software must do, than the larger number who can learn how to make the software do it. It’s the latter who should soon tremble.
Ever hear of ‘emotional support animals’? Well, they’re a couple of steps beyond ‘service dogs’ in what they apparently provide to their owners. And there’s more to be said about the portents of such critters, the humans they emotionally support, and the crumbling culture that now puts up with such nonsense. This morning we awoke to news of a passenger bringing his peacock into the passenger compartment of an airliner. Now those of you who know peacocks can readily conceive of the pandemonium that such an aggressive animal with non-existent toilet discipline will create attempting to come down the aisle and be confined to the middle seat. Today’s laws do not allow anyone to question the legitimate and beneficial purpose that such arbitrarily selected support animals satisfy for those emotionally short-changed. On that flight the pilot was astute enough not to take off with a cabin catastrophe in the making, but we were not told how the gathered authorities adjudicated the affair. From my semanticist’s perch, it is clear that our language has not evolved at a sufficient pace to provide adequate adjectives to describe the depths of insanity that today’s progressive ideology is inflicting on our society.
[5dec20 update] Check out the report on the anti-viral Ivermectin in 'Mismanaging Covid-19 ...'.
[6dec20 update] Andrew Cuomo – talk about scumbag politicians lying to the public. This political hack is one of the few in the nation to whom hundreds of Covid deaths can be directly attributed – recall his tragically misguided care facility diktat. Now he tells the country that Trump’s Operation Warp Speed had nothing to do with the early development, testing, and approval of C19 vaccines; the big pharmas would have developed it anyway since they’re only interested in profits. He believes his audience to be appropriately ignorant of what Warp Speed did to pave the path and lower the financial risk to the pharmas for them to put a very expensive full court press on their vaccine developments. We know from decades of data how long it would have taken doing the same ol’ same ol’. But that don’t make no never mind to another Democrat Big Liar telling people another Big Lie.
"Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out", David Horowitz here aligning with Rebane Doctrine.
[8dec20 update] Cringing capitalists and the great Cocoa Collusions. The cocoa growers of Ghana and Ivory Coast (61% of world supply) decided to collude and raise the price of cocoa by almost 20%, claiming to alleviate worker poverty. Naturally candy producers like Hershey and Mars don’t want to pay more for their prime ingredient, so they are working together trying to find ways to pay less for cocoa (what a concept!). In this crazy world of progressive pandemics, virtue signaling has become a de rigueur for both corporatists and cringing capitalists. Both Hershey and Mars are denying that they are trying to circumvent the ‘virtuous’ price increase, when instead they should counter with the free and open markets’ correct argument. They should tell the cocoa growers that producers also have an obligation to keep prices low for their customers whose financial welfare is no less important than that of the cocoa workers. Virtue signaling has become a particularly contagious and corrosive form of cringing for capitalists in the face of socialism’s global advance. (more here)
A new approach to ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ In the 8dec20 Union, Mr Rob Cairns attempts to heal our divide by suggesting that, instead of attacking, we sit down with our opposites to have a “real conversation” with “them”. The conversation would launch with questions like ‘What’s important to you?’, ‘What are your concerns?’, ‘What are your fears?’, ‘What are your hopes?’, ‘What are your priorities?’. A laudable approach indeed, but one having little chance of success when considered in light of the now drastically different belief systems that today propel our polarization. RR has spent years revealing and dissecting our contending beliefs, and the record is here for all to see. When a leftist finally deigns to reveal his belief(s) and/or solutions to social problems, to rightists they range from the odious to patently unworkable. What such questions serve to divert from is an exploration of the meta-world views (i.e. ontologies) of the two discussants. Without understanding each other’s basic views of how ‘their world’ functions, the rest of the conversation quickly becomes moot since the participants cannot help but talk past each other. And the real problem, encountered in the attempt to explore ontologies, is that perhaps only a small share of people are capable of such productive pursuits. Alas.
Today's joke from Rush Limbaugh illustrates the above ontological differences. A capitalist sitting at a bar is sandwiched between Bernie Sanders and AOC while watching the news. They see a tense video of a man ready to jump from a tall building. The capitalist says, 'I have $10 that says he jumps.' Begrudgingly Sanders and AOC take him up on the bet. The man jumps to his death, and the capitalist collects his winnings. Then a moment later he says, 'I can't take your money, because I saw this report earlier on the news.' AOC responds with, 'That's OK, so did we, but we didn't think he'd do it again.'
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