Prologue to a Blog
In the 1990s I led a team of researchers that inventoried Pennsylvania’s greenhouse gas emissions and later wrote a mitigation policy for the Commonwealth, a policy that, by the way, was “circular filed” because of a change in administrations. Mitigation, seemingly important to one governor was seemingly unimportant to the succeeding governor. Long story short: I regret my lack of foresight in conducting the research even though the US EPA sent me a letter praising it and saying the agency would use it for a model it would suggest all other states follow. Unwittingly, I had become one of the first to delve into the politically charged subject of “global warming” and green energy—which was the subject of another study I conducted for PA and the US EPA.
As I just wrote, I regret my lack of foresight. I had no idea that “global warming” would become a worldwide obsession costing billions of bucks and potentially bankrupting countries while providing others with extortion plans. As India added to the Paris Accord, “Help us achieve the goals that we will not attempt to achieve sans help” (paraphrase, of course, you can look up the footnote beneath the signatures). I regret I did not see the creeping socialism in the name of mitigation that would aim to redistribute hard earned wealth and suppress fossil fuels to the detriment of most of the developed world (note Germany’s travails of recent times because it switched off coal).
I also regret not seeing the rise in hysteria over global warming, now called “climate change” and the blatant hypocrisy of those who go to conferences to decry the actions of ordinary citizens who do not add carbon and particulates from jets to the atmosphere in travels to meetings. I further regret the folly of my government's advocacy of switching to electric vehicles and wind farms without a gradual transition period and an assessment of the byproducts of EVs and their supporting electricity networks.
I am happy that there are some alternatives that make the electrical grid more secure for individuals, companies, and even public utilities, such as solar panels, geothermal heating, and tidal bore power plants like the one on the Rance River in Brittany, France. But coal is the reason that the modern world first became so technologically modern, and its effect was enhanced by the use of natural gas and petroleum. Take petroleum out of the historical picture, and the last century would have been the horse-and-buggy century without trucks and cars. The US Department of Energy notes that some 6,000 products in common use last century and this century have been derived from petrochemicals, including the coffee maker you used this morning. If modern society eliminates those 6,000 products and the many derived from coal, life as we have known it over the past 100 years will change dramatically—and global warming alarmists won’t be able to travel to distant locales to tell people not to travel to distant locales. In fact, they won’t even have the computers they could now use to Zoom themselves into a meeting.
At the end of this blog, I will invite you to read the CNBC summary of the latest document from the IPCC that details how we can survive the existential threat of climate change. In reading it, note the anecdotal evidence given to support the IPCC's call for action everywhere and right now. Such evidence includes deaths from weather events--as though such causes of deaths are somehow new. Yes, there are people living in places where just slight changes in weather can be devastating. Recall the famine in Ethiopia that occurred decades ago when extreme drought hit the region. But as the late comic Sam Kinison remarked, "We have deserts in America, but we don't live in them. This is sand. This is sand." Of course, we do live in deserts regardless of the comic's comment, but we do so by virtue of redirecting water from the Colorado River or from extensive well systems that draw on water in aquifers like the Ogalala's 50,000 year-old water supply.
In the Midst of Hysteria, What Can One Say?
Next time you talk to a climate alarmist, ask him or her what scientific evidence backs up the claim that climate change is a threat so severe that it warrants shutting down drilling and mining fossil fuels, the very sources of energy that made the modern world modern. And don’t take anecdotes as proof.
But before I ramble, let me advise that you start any such conversation with a declarative statement: “Yes, I’m for conserving what we have, for eliminating dangerous pollutants, for clean air and water, for clean-burning coal, which means efficient-burning coal, for using natural gas as a cleaner alternative to coal, for technologies that contribute to the modernism and affluence that we all have enjoyed (at least in the developed world), for renewable energy technologies like solar panels and wind mills and geothermal pipes, and I’m all for sustainable farming practices that preserve the natural heritage our ancestors passed on to us (Thanks, Teddy, for that national park stuff).” Now for the rambling:
Anecdotes, Anecdotes All around, but None Are Irrefutably Convincing
No doubt you’ll hear claims about storms, heat waves, droughts, floods, atmospheric “rivers,” and Arctic bombs. You’ll hear anecdotal evidence about coral reefs, spreading tropical diseases, attacks of fungus, and probably crimes, migrations, wars, and deaths galore, all supposedly caused by a change in climate. And none of it will be evidence that climate change is anything other than a hyped up hypothesis with little truth about its threat to the “entire” world. You’ll hear propaganda from “scientists” whose grant money depends on the belief in an “existential threat” and from reporters too lazy or too incapable of detailed analysis and in-depth reasoning to write extensively about an individual weather or other incident without linking it to global warming.
A Warming World? What Are “They” Doing about It? And I Don’t Mean Politicians.
Is the planet warming? Maybe. There is some evidence for that conclusion, but the warming has been neither consistent nor predictable by models that rely on the rise in atmospheric carbon. And some of the data has been fudged by people with an agenda. Is the atmosphere going to warm to the extent that its temperature will be an “existential threat”? Is the warming in part natural? Those are two questions you need to pose in general. Want some other questions to pose? What is the possibility that anthropogenic warming will actually stave off the next glacial advance that has the potential to wipe out the northern cities of Eurasia and North America under sheets of ice a mile or two thick? Would Canada and New England under ice—as they were not more than 22 millennia ago—be able to support their current populations? (Who lives and thrives in the center of Greenland or Antarctica?) Is there really an actual problem with an ice-free world other than the potential threat to populations living at sea level? Isn’t living at sea level (or anywhere else) in part a choice? And finally: If you are an alarmist, what are you actually doing about climate change that will make a difference? Show me the money: Show me the sacrifices you have made and the lifestyle you have rejected.
You’ll discover variations in “alarmism” and many problems generated by It, but, in Truth, You Will Change No Minds when You Point to Them and Ask, “See?”
1) Some alarmists will be true to their convictions and go off grid, believing that they contribute nothing to anthropogenic change while changing the planet if ever so slightly.
But all changes, however slight, do add up when spread among eight billion people’s actions over a prolonged period. Even “living off grid” requires changing the environment.
Let me give an example of small changes that accumulate. At just about every gas station—if not every station—you’ll note some drops of gasoline on the pavement beneath the pump. Seemingly not a big deal, every drop is actually an anthropogenic change to the planet. If the liquid components of the gasoline evaporate, they enter the atmosphere; if the solids remain, they enter the ever-swelling quantity of soil and water pollutants. Some online conversion sites give an equivalence between a gallon of liquid and number of contained drops. A bit over 75,000 drops = one gal. There are about 1.5 billion cars spread across the planet. Let’s say the average tank holds 18 gallons. Each gets a fill-up, say, on average, maybe once every dozen days. Want to do some math? Note that in the real world, each fill-up probably means more than one drop spilled. Small stuff? Insignificant? Not when one adds the multiple fill-ups per year, including those of gas-guzzling expensive cars, such as those driven by rich alarmists.
But what if the alarmists drive an EV? Isn’t that better? Doesn’t that cut down on on anthropogenic change? Certainly, EVs don’t contribute to wasted drops of gasoline. But they do require anthropogenic change. According to the IEA’s 2021 sustainable development projections of critical minerals, by 2040 80% of battery storage would be held by light-duty EVs. This alone would require a 40-fold increase in lithium and nickel. It would also mean mining and processing 20 times more copper, graphite, and cobalt than is mined and processed today. * Such an expansion of mining and processing will be coupled with tension between nations because national boundaries frame the locations of these resources. There’s very little chance that any one country will permit another to exploit its resources without paying a high price. The price of rare earths, for example, is likely to rise. And, oh! I forgot: all those wires needed to carry electricity to charging stations will be covered by insulation made from chemicals unobtainable without petrochemicals.
2) Some alarmists will do nothing to contribute personally while dictating ineffective changes to the lifestyles of the populace. This is where the politicians enter the game of “existential threat.”
Am I being snide, condescending, and maybe foolish by referring to the “serious” matter of climate change as a game? Possibly. Maybe even stupid if the existential threat turns out to be an actual existential threat--not.
When I hear of alarmists speak of a zero carbon world, I have trouble taking them seriously. in spite of their own bodies being carbon-based and all their organic requirements for life also being carbon-based, some, it seems to me, believe that no carbon is good carbon. To arrive at zero, these alarmists will use the so-called climate crisis as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth, that is, generally to take your wealth and give it to someone else because they “know better than you.” Fulfilling “green agendas” will mean the demise of aggressive entrepreneurship, the process that led to our general affluence. In the long run, restrictions and redistribution schemes will do little to nothing for the planet save impoverishing billions and causing the progress of civilization to retreat dramatically.
Is This a Joke?
We hominids and hominins took something like a couple of million years after we separated from our common ancestor with the chimps to discover and use fire. Some archaeologists argue that our sister and ancestor species used fire as long as 1.5 million years ago, but that is still relatively late in Earth history. Homo erectus seems to have controlled fire if evidence from South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave is legitimate, and Israel’s Qesem Cave holds proof of controlled burning as early as 300,000-plus years ago when Homo sapiens sapiens was just becoming Homo sapiens sapiens. Heck, even Neandertalensis seems to have controlled fire back then.
AND NOW…drumroll please…Joe Biden heads a group of hominins that want to eliminate fire in an effort to eliminate carbon. Thus, the movement to ban gas stoves that is sweeping through green movements in New York and California. (What are all those wealthy greenies going to do in their mansions with those Fulgor Milano Sofia Pro 48-inch Gas Stoves, the Bertazzoni Professional Series stoves, and the Thermador Pro Grand?)
From 4.5 billion years ago to 1.5 million years ago (dubious) or closer to our own time at 300,000 to 400,000 years ago—all that time without controlled burning, and then after just a few hundred thousand years, the alarmists say, “No more burning. No more gas stoves. This drive toward civilization and modernism has to stop, and we’re just the ones to stop it. No more carbon. No more carbon. No more car….”
Right, no more car. No more heat in the winter. No cooking. No controlled burning of anything because the by-product is carbon dioxide. No more college Homecoming bonfires just for a fun night of drinking. Not even the bonfire of the vanities! But if the ice returns because of Milankovich cycles like precession and orbital eccentricity, well, then I guess we’ll do what hominids did before hominins came along—freeze in the absence of fire as we eat our uncooked food. “Me carnivore; me eat raw meat."
Where’s the Evidence That the Threat Is an Ineluctable Consequence?
There is no evidence that a rise in global temperature by 2, 3, or even 5 degrees will be devastating to life across the planet. It might be very disruptive for some in many localities; it might be a boon for others in many localities. It might cause some populations of humans to migrate to higher latitudes or elevations. But haven’t humans done that repeatedly over the past 200,000 years? Why are we the exception? Some areas will be warmer; some not. Coral reefs might die off where they now form and reform in higher latitudes. Imagine going snorkeling off the new coast of Pennsylvania just to see the reef. Imagine growing corn in the Northwest Territories or on Greenland.
Dynamism in an Open System
Earth is a dynamic planet with a dynamic atmosphere that distributes and redistributes energy. The energy transfer is accomplished mostly by water: Vapor in the air and liquid in the oceans. Large circulation cycles like the Hadley cells in the atmosphere and the warm currents like the Gulf Stream in the ocean transfer heat from the tropics and move it toward the poles. The planet also loses energy to space, just as it receives energy from the Sun. It is not a closed system because of that exchange of energy between star and planet.
Do They Really Know Something the Rest of Us Do Not Know?
Each year for more than two dozen years, an ever-growing number of climate “scientists” have met in exotic places to discuss topics associated with global warming and climate change. And each year they have left those conferences having done nothing more than talk or share research, some of the latter only peripherally related to Earth’s climates. However, during those past couple dozen years, politicians have adopted the cause and imposed restrictions on carbon in the belief that they are actually saving the planet. Why have politicians like Joe Biden followed the alarmist crowd? Simple. All of us, including the President, act without examining the reasons for acting or examining the consequences of our actions beyond their original intent. The alarmists have heard enough. They are convinced. They even consider themselves to be saviors.
As we all know, repeating an idea ad nauseam eventually wears down the most thick-skinned of the laity. We’re pretty much all involved in the subject of climate change because it’s inescapable. It’s become a part of the civilized world’s psyche. I just saw that the new catchphrase, spoken by Hillary Clinton and VP Harris is “climate anxiety.”
More work for counselors and psychotherapists who will never run out of work in a world that generates new psychological ailments almost yearly. And I recently saw a report on how millennials are refraining from reproducing because they don’t want to have children enter such a doomed world. Great. Mission accomplished. No people, no anthropogenic carbon dioxide. But not so great, really. Whereas those in the developed affluent nations fail to reproduce, the people in the undeveloped nations continue to be fruitful and multiply, and in doing so, they are generating more people who want to have the affluent lives of the declining populations of the developed nations.
The planet will as it has for eons undergo climate changes for various reasons from orogeny to erosion, from shifting plates to shifting ocean currents, from plants and animals photosynthesizing and respiring, and from Milankovich Cycles and solar activity. If we add some greenhouse gases, we’ll have an effect, but any one of the large scale causes can overwhelm what we do, so worrying about climate change is an exercise in futility.
Climate Anxiety? Get a Life; Get Real
I have no doubt that some people really do have “climate anxiety.” I also have no doubt that such people have lived lives shielded from the harsh realities of “the real world.” Want to compare anxieties? Given those who recently suffered loss of family and neighbors in the earthquakes in Turkey and those who also suffered such losses in various wars, including the Ukrainian invasion, I consider those suffering from “climate anxiety” to be among the weakest personalities on the planet. But then, that’s just a “kick-them-in-the-butt-and-tell-them-to-get-a-life” me talking. Think about it. They’ve been told that the planet will get warmer, so they become emotionally distraught. After years of Al Gore and others chanting their climate mantra, the emotionally weakest among us have been trained to react to any weather event as though it is a harbinger of the dreaded existential threat changing climate poses to the entire planet. (Hit me on the head with an asteroid or a nuclear bomb)
And There’s No Convincing Those Who Live in Fear
Fear is a terrible condition to suffer without respite. But it really doesn’t matter which way the weather turns when the thought of climate change as an existential threat dominates the mind. If it gets colder, it’s climate change. If it gets warmer, it’s global warming. There’s no weather phenomenon that alarmists don’t connect to their overriding perception of that “existential threat.” The burgeoning crowd of worried believers are willing to relinquish the wealth they derived from the use of cheap fossil fuel energy and to give it to a manipulative group of self-proclaimed elites. They yield to redistribution of wealth advocates who exempt themselves from the redistribution that they preach as a way to stop climates from changing.
When Will It End, All This Fear Mongering?
Sad to say, not in your lifetime. There are just too many believers to stop the global warming snowball from rolling down the hill. Thousands attended the recent COP 27. More thousands will attend COP 28. All will congratulate themselves on research and promulgation. All will plan to attend COP 29 in some exotic location to be reached only by plane trips. And the ever-compliant media will echo every warning.
In the Real World, Just as Forrest Gump’s Mother Taught Her Son, Stupid Is as Stupid Does
It’s one thing to protect local environments from anthropogenic changes that destroy ecologies; it’s another to destroy by restoring. Huh?
In my research for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Legislature on the effects of underground coal mines, I came upon this very problem. Longwall mining in panels a thousand feet wide and a mile or two long causes almost instantaneous subsidence of the overlying ground, affecting natural and artificial surface features. Streams that were free flowing sometimes have their flow interrupted by such subsidence as a “wrinkle” in the ground acts as a dam. Soon after the blockage, a small pond forms, and critters who like to live in and around small ponds create a new ecology that replaces the one associated with the previously freely flowing stream. So, the question becomes one of choosing which ecology should be preserved, the initial one of the flowing stream or the later one of the dammed stream.
And the same might be said for the land and sea ecologies affected by any temperature change. If we look at the American Southwest and the land of the Anasazi, for example, we see a semiarid to arid landscape that was not always the ecology of the area. Long-term droughts changed the previous ecology and uprooted the Hopi. Now, what is preferable, the former ecology, which was wetter, or the current ecology, which is drier? What happens to the critters and plants that love the heat and aridity? Are they not worth preserving?
So, also, we should ask about, say, North America of 22,000 years ago. Is that cold ecology not worth restoring at the expense of the current ecology? Shouldn’t we hope for ice sheets that cover Canada and northern states because it will restore the lost ecology?
Of Course, No Alarmist Will Engage You when You Speak Thus.
Sure, there are some legitimate concerns expressed by alarmists. Although sea level, which has risen at least a hundred meters since the last low stand, is rising at a very slow rate of 2 to 3 millimeters per year, it will, in fact, be a meter higher in just under a millennium, and there is a chance that the pace of inundation might pick up to more millimeters per year. So, yes, there can be concern, but such concern isn’t reflected in the continued buildup of cities and their many outlying communities (including resort communities) along coasts. Sea level rise? “It won’t affect my beach house,” say Obama, Trump, and Biden. (Obama has two, by the way)
If the threat of a rising sea is so great (a meter per millennium), why haven’t local zoning officials rejected the potential tax revenues from homeowners and businesses to shut down all current and future building? Why hasn’t every coastal location planned as Texas is now doing along the Galveston coast, a $31,000,000,000 sea wall? Hey, it’s just thirty-one billion. Surely, Delaware outside Biden’s home, Martha’s Vineyard outside Obama’s East Coast home, Hawaii outside Obama’s island home, and Palm Beach outside Trump’s home can find the funding somewhere, maybe from the U.S. Treasury. You can ask.
You’ll be dismissed as a loon if you ask.
Sorry but Happy
Sorry this ran to more than 3,500 words. Happy you stopped by to read it. Hope I stimulated your own thinking on the matter. I could say more, but you now have a compendium of ideas for your next conversation with an alarmist (or, maybe if you are an alarmist, ideas to back a new argument for your concern about “the existential threat”).
With an analytical mind, please read the CNBC summary of the latest IPCC report by Sam Meredith. It is entitled "World's top climate scientists issue 'survival guide for humanity,' call for major course correction." **
*Taylor, Tom. https://www.atlasevhub.com/weekly-digest/101-raw-materials-and-ev-supply-chains/
**https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/20/ipcc-report-on-climate-un-scientists-call-for-course-correction.html/
In the 1990s I led a team of researchers that inventoried Pennsylvania’s greenhouse gas emissions and later wrote a mitigation policy for the Commonwealth, a policy that, by the way, was “circular filed” because of a change in administrations. Mitigation, seemingly important to one governor was seemingly unimportant to the succeeding governor. Long story short: I regret my lack of foresight in conducting the research even though the US EPA sent me a letter praising it and saying the agency would use it for a model it would suggest all other states follow. Unwittingly, I had become one of the first to delve into the politically charged subject of “global warming” and green energy—which was the subject of another study I conducted for PA and the US EPA.
As I just wrote, I regret my lack of foresight. I had no idea that “global warming” would become a worldwide obsession costing billions of bucks and potentially bankrupting countries while providing others with extortion plans. As India added to the Paris Accord, “Help us achieve the goals that we will not attempt to achieve sans help” (paraphrase, of course, you can look up the footnote beneath the signatures). I regret I did not see the creeping socialism in the name of mitigation that would aim to redistribute hard earned wealth and suppress fossil fuels to the detriment of most of the developed world (note Germany’s travails of recent times because it switched off coal).
I also regret not seeing the rise in hysteria over global warming, now called “climate change” and the blatant hypocrisy of those who go to conferences to decry the actions of ordinary citizens who do not add carbon and particulates from jets to the atmosphere in travels to meetings. I further regret the folly of my government's advocacy of switching to electric vehicles and wind farms without a gradual transition period and an assessment of the byproducts of EVs and their supporting electricity networks.
I am happy that there are some alternatives that make the electrical grid more secure for individuals, companies, and even public utilities, such as solar panels, geothermal heating, and tidal bore power plants like the one on the Rance River in Brittany, France. But coal is the reason that the modern world first became so technologically modern, and its effect was enhanced by the use of natural gas and petroleum. Take petroleum out of the historical picture, and the last century would have been the horse-and-buggy century without trucks and cars. The US Department of Energy notes that some 6,000 products in common use last century and this century have been derived from petrochemicals, including the coffee maker you used this morning. If modern society eliminates those 6,000 products and the many derived from coal, life as we have known it over the past 100 years will change dramatically—and global warming alarmists won’t be able to travel to distant locales to tell people not to travel to distant locales. In fact, they won’t even have the computers they could now use to Zoom themselves into a meeting.
At the end of this blog, I will invite you to read the CNBC summary of the latest document from the IPCC that details how we can survive the existential threat of climate change. In reading it, note the anecdotal evidence given to support the IPCC's call for action everywhere and right now. Such evidence includes deaths from weather events--as though such causes of deaths are somehow new. Yes, there are people living in places where just slight changes in weather can be devastating. Recall the famine in Ethiopia that occurred decades ago when extreme drought hit the region. But as the late comic Sam Kinison remarked, "We have deserts in America, but we don't live in them. This is sand. This is sand." Of course, we do live in deserts regardless of the comic's comment, but we do so by virtue of redirecting water from the Colorado River or from extensive well systems that draw on water in aquifers like the Ogalala's 50,000 year-old water supply.
In the Midst of Hysteria, What Can One Say?
Next time you talk to a climate alarmist, ask him or her what scientific evidence backs up the claim that climate change is a threat so severe that it warrants shutting down drilling and mining fossil fuels, the very sources of energy that made the modern world modern. And don’t take anecdotes as proof.
But before I ramble, let me advise that you start any such conversation with a declarative statement: “Yes, I’m for conserving what we have, for eliminating dangerous pollutants, for clean air and water, for clean-burning coal, which means efficient-burning coal, for using natural gas as a cleaner alternative to coal, for technologies that contribute to the modernism and affluence that we all have enjoyed (at least in the developed world), for renewable energy technologies like solar panels and wind mills and geothermal pipes, and I’m all for sustainable farming practices that preserve the natural heritage our ancestors passed on to us (Thanks, Teddy, for that national park stuff).” Now for the rambling:
Anecdotes, Anecdotes All around, but None Are Irrefutably Convincing
No doubt you’ll hear claims about storms, heat waves, droughts, floods, atmospheric “rivers,” and Arctic bombs. You’ll hear anecdotal evidence about coral reefs, spreading tropical diseases, attacks of fungus, and probably crimes, migrations, wars, and deaths galore, all supposedly caused by a change in climate. And none of it will be evidence that climate change is anything other than a hyped up hypothesis with little truth about its threat to the “entire” world. You’ll hear propaganda from “scientists” whose grant money depends on the belief in an “existential threat” and from reporters too lazy or too incapable of detailed analysis and in-depth reasoning to write extensively about an individual weather or other incident without linking it to global warming.
A Warming World? What Are “They” Doing about It? And I Don’t Mean Politicians.
Is the planet warming? Maybe. There is some evidence for that conclusion, but the warming has been neither consistent nor predictable by models that rely on the rise in atmospheric carbon. And some of the data has been fudged by people with an agenda. Is the atmosphere going to warm to the extent that its temperature will be an “existential threat”? Is the warming in part natural? Those are two questions you need to pose in general. Want some other questions to pose? What is the possibility that anthropogenic warming will actually stave off the next glacial advance that has the potential to wipe out the northern cities of Eurasia and North America under sheets of ice a mile or two thick? Would Canada and New England under ice—as they were not more than 22 millennia ago—be able to support their current populations? (Who lives and thrives in the center of Greenland or Antarctica?) Is there really an actual problem with an ice-free world other than the potential threat to populations living at sea level? Isn’t living at sea level (or anywhere else) in part a choice? And finally: If you are an alarmist, what are you actually doing about climate change that will make a difference? Show me the money: Show me the sacrifices you have made and the lifestyle you have rejected.
You’ll discover variations in “alarmism” and many problems generated by It, but, in Truth, You Will Change No Minds when You Point to Them and Ask, “See?”
1) Some alarmists will be true to their convictions and go off grid, believing that they contribute nothing to anthropogenic change while changing the planet if ever so slightly.
But all changes, however slight, do add up when spread among eight billion people’s actions over a prolonged period. Even “living off grid” requires changing the environment.
Let me give an example of small changes that accumulate. At just about every gas station—if not every station—you’ll note some drops of gasoline on the pavement beneath the pump. Seemingly not a big deal, every drop is actually an anthropogenic change to the planet. If the liquid components of the gasoline evaporate, they enter the atmosphere; if the solids remain, they enter the ever-swelling quantity of soil and water pollutants. Some online conversion sites give an equivalence between a gallon of liquid and number of contained drops. A bit over 75,000 drops = one gal. There are about 1.5 billion cars spread across the planet. Let’s say the average tank holds 18 gallons. Each gets a fill-up, say, on average, maybe once every dozen days. Want to do some math? Note that in the real world, each fill-up probably means more than one drop spilled. Small stuff? Insignificant? Not when one adds the multiple fill-ups per year, including those of gas-guzzling expensive cars, such as those driven by rich alarmists.
But what if the alarmists drive an EV? Isn’t that better? Doesn’t that cut down on on anthropogenic change? Certainly, EVs don’t contribute to wasted drops of gasoline. But they do require anthropogenic change. According to the IEA’s 2021 sustainable development projections of critical minerals, by 2040 80% of battery storage would be held by light-duty EVs. This alone would require a 40-fold increase in lithium and nickel. It would also mean mining and processing 20 times more copper, graphite, and cobalt than is mined and processed today. * Such an expansion of mining and processing will be coupled with tension between nations because national boundaries frame the locations of these resources. There’s very little chance that any one country will permit another to exploit its resources without paying a high price. The price of rare earths, for example, is likely to rise. And, oh! I forgot: all those wires needed to carry electricity to charging stations will be covered by insulation made from chemicals unobtainable without petrochemicals.
2) Some alarmists will do nothing to contribute personally while dictating ineffective changes to the lifestyles of the populace. This is where the politicians enter the game of “existential threat.”
Am I being snide, condescending, and maybe foolish by referring to the “serious” matter of climate change as a game? Possibly. Maybe even stupid if the existential threat turns out to be an actual existential threat--not.
When I hear of alarmists speak of a zero carbon world, I have trouble taking them seriously. in spite of their own bodies being carbon-based and all their organic requirements for life also being carbon-based, some, it seems to me, believe that no carbon is good carbon. To arrive at zero, these alarmists will use the so-called climate crisis as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth, that is, generally to take your wealth and give it to someone else because they “know better than you.” Fulfilling “green agendas” will mean the demise of aggressive entrepreneurship, the process that led to our general affluence. In the long run, restrictions and redistribution schemes will do little to nothing for the planet save impoverishing billions and causing the progress of civilization to retreat dramatically.
Is This a Joke?
We hominids and hominins took something like a couple of million years after we separated from our common ancestor with the chimps to discover and use fire. Some archaeologists argue that our sister and ancestor species used fire as long as 1.5 million years ago, but that is still relatively late in Earth history. Homo erectus seems to have controlled fire if evidence from South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave is legitimate, and Israel’s Qesem Cave holds proof of controlled burning as early as 300,000-plus years ago when Homo sapiens sapiens was just becoming Homo sapiens sapiens. Heck, even Neandertalensis seems to have controlled fire back then.
AND NOW…drumroll please…Joe Biden heads a group of hominins that want to eliminate fire in an effort to eliminate carbon. Thus, the movement to ban gas stoves that is sweeping through green movements in New York and California. (What are all those wealthy greenies going to do in their mansions with those Fulgor Milano Sofia Pro 48-inch Gas Stoves, the Bertazzoni Professional Series stoves, and the Thermador Pro Grand?)
From 4.5 billion years ago to 1.5 million years ago (dubious) or closer to our own time at 300,000 to 400,000 years ago—all that time without controlled burning, and then after just a few hundred thousand years, the alarmists say, “No more burning. No more gas stoves. This drive toward civilization and modernism has to stop, and we’re just the ones to stop it. No more carbon. No more carbon. No more car….”
Right, no more car. No more heat in the winter. No cooking. No controlled burning of anything because the by-product is carbon dioxide. No more college Homecoming bonfires just for a fun night of drinking. Not even the bonfire of the vanities! But if the ice returns because of Milankovich cycles like precession and orbital eccentricity, well, then I guess we’ll do what hominids did before hominins came along—freeze in the absence of fire as we eat our uncooked food. “Me carnivore; me eat raw meat."
Where’s the Evidence That the Threat Is an Ineluctable Consequence?
There is no evidence that a rise in global temperature by 2, 3, or even 5 degrees will be devastating to life across the planet. It might be very disruptive for some in many localities; it might be a boon for others in many localities. It might cause some populations of humans to migrate to higher latitudes or elevations. But haven’t humans done that repeatedly over the past 200,000 years? Why are we the exception? Some areas will be warmer; some not. Coral reefs might die off where they now form and reform in higher latitudes. Imagine going snorkeling off the new coast of Pennsylvania just to see the reef. Imagine growing corn in the Northwest Territories or on Greenland.
Dynamism in an Open System
Earth is a dynamic planet with a dynamic atmosphere that distributes and redistributes energy. The energy transfer is accomplished mostly by water: Vapor in the air and liquid in the oceans. Large circulation cycles like the Hadley cells in the atmosphere and the warm currents like the Gulf Stream in the ocean transfer heat from the tropics and move it toward the poles. The planet also loses energy to space, just as it receives energy from the Sun. It is not a closed system because of that exchange of energy between star and planet.
Do They Really Know Something the Rest of Us Do Not Know?
Each year for more than two dozen years, an ever-growing number of climate “scientists” have met in exotic places to discuss topics associated with global warming and climate change. And each year they have left those conferences having done nothing more than talk or share research, some of the latter only peripherally related to Earth’s climates. However, during those past couple dozen years, politicians have adopted the cause and imposed restrictions on carbon in the belief that they are actually saving the planet. Why have politicians like Joe Biden followed the alarmist crowd? Simple. All of us, including the President, act without examining the reasons for acting or examining the consequences of our actions beyond their original intent. The alarmists have heard enough. They are convinced. They even consider themselves to be saviors.
As we all know, repeating an idea ad nauseam eventually wears down the most thick-skinned of the laity. We’re pretty much all involved in the subject of climate change because it’s inescapable. It’s become a part of the civilized world’s psyche. I just saw that the new catchphrase, spoken by Hillary Clinton and VP Harris is “climate anxiety.”
More work for counselors and psychotherapists who will never run out of work in a world that generates new psychological ailments almost yearly. And I recently saw a report on how millennials are refraining from reproducing because they don’t want to have children enter such a doomed world. Great. Mission accomplished. No people, no anthropogenic carbon dioxide. But not so great, really. Whereas those in the developed affluent nations fail to reproduce, the people in the undeveloped nations continue to be fruitful and multiply, and in doing so, they are generating more people who want to have the affluent lives of the declining populations of the developed nations.
The planet will as it has for eons undergo climate changes for various reasons from orogeny to erosion, from shifting plates to shifting ocean currents, from plants and animals photosynthesizing and respiring, and from Milankovich Cycles and solar activity. If we add some greenhouse gases, we’ll have an effect, but any one of the large scale causes can overwhelm what we do, so worrying about climate change is an exercise in futility.
Climate Anxiety? Get a Life; Get Real
I have no doubt that some people really do have “climate anxiety.” I also have no doubt that such people have lived lives shielded from the harsh realities of “the real world.” Want to compare anxieties? Given those who recently suffered loss of family and neighbors in the earthquakes in Turkey and those who also suffered such losses in various wars, including the Ukrainian invasion, I consider those suffering from “climate anxiety” to be among the weakest personalities on the planet. But then, that’s just a “kick-them-in-the-butt-and-tell-them-to-get-a-life” me talking. Think about it. They’ve been told that the planet will get warmer, so they become emotionally distraught. After years of Al Gore and others chanting their climate mantra, the emotionally weakest among us have been trained to react to any weather event as though it is a harbinger of the dreaded existential threat changing climate poses to the entire planet. (Hit me on the head with an asteroid or a nuclear bomb)
And There’s No Convincing Those Who Live in Fear
Fear is a terrible condition to suffer without respite. But it really doesn’t matter which way the weather turns when the thought of climate change as an existential threat dominates the mind. If it gets colder, it’s climate change. If it gets warmer, it’s global warming. There’s no weather phenomenon that alarmists don’t connect to their overriding perception of that “existential threat.” The burgeoning crowd of worried believers are willing to relinquish the wealth they derived from the use of cheap fossil fuel energy and to give it to a manipulative group of self-proclaimed elites. They yield to redistribution of wealth advocates who exempt themselves from the redistribution that they preach as a way to stop climates from changing.
When Will It End, All This Fear Mongering?
Sad to say, not in your lifetime. There are just too many believers to stop the global warming snowball from rolling down the hill. Thousands attended the recent COP 27. More thousands will attend COP 28. All will congratulate themselves on research and promulgation. All will plan to attend COP 29 in some exotic location to be reached only by plane trips. And the ever-compliant media will echo every warning.
In the Real World, Just as Forrest Gump’s Mother Taught Her Son, Stupid Is as Stupid Does
It’s one thing to protect local environments from anthropogenic changes that destroy ecologies; it’s another to destroy by restoring. Huh?
In my research for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Legislature on the effects of underground coal mines, I came upon this very problem. Longwall mining in panels a thousand feet wide and a mile or two long causes almost instantaneous subsidence of the overlying ground, affecting natural and artificial surface features. Streams that were free flowing sometimes have their flow interrupted by such subsidence as a “wrinkle” in the ground acts as a dam. Soon after the blockage, a small pond forms, and critters who like to live in and around small ponds create a new ecology that replaces the one associated with the previously freely flowing stream. So, the question becomes one of choosing which ecology should be preserved, the initial one of the flowing stream or the later one of the dammed stream.
And the same might be said for the land and sea ecologies affected by any temperature change. If we look at the American Southwest and the land of the Anasazi, for example, we see a semiarid to arid landscape that was not always the ecology of the area. Long-term droughts changed the previous ecology and uprooted the Hopi. Now, what is preferable, the former ecology, which was wetter, or the current ecology, which is drier? What happens to the critters and plants that love the heat and aridity? Are they not worth preserving?
So, also, we should ask about, say, North America of 22,000 years ago. Is that cold ecology not worth restoring at the expense of the current ecology? Shouldn’t we hope for ice sheets that cover Canada and northern states because it will restore the lost ecology?
Of Course, No Alarmist Will Engage You when You Speak Thus.
Sure, there are some legitimate concerns expressed by alarmists. Although sea level, which has risen at least a hundred meters since the last low stand, is rising at a very slow rate of 2 to 3 millimeters per year, it will, in fact, be a meter higher in just under a millennium, and there is a chance that the pace of inundation might pick up to more millimeters per year. So, yes, there can be concern, but such concern isn’t reflected in the continued buildup of cities and their many outlying communities (including resort communities) along coasts. Sea level rise? “It won’t affect my beach house,” say Obama, Trump, and Biden. (Obama has two, by the way)
If the threat of a rising sea is so great (a meter per millennium), why haven’t local zoning officials rejected the potential tax revenues from homeowners and businesses to shut down all current and future building? Why hasn’t every coastal location planned as Texas is now doing along the Galveston coast, a $31,000,000,000 sea wall? Hey, it’s just thirty-one billion. Surely, Delaware outside Biden’s home, Martha’s Vineyard outside Obama’s East Coast home, Hawaii outside Obama’s island home, and Palm Beach outside Trump’s home can find the funding somewhere, maybe from the U.S. Treasury. You can ask.
You’ll be dismissed as a loon if you ask.
Sorry but Happy
Sorry this ran to more than 3,500 words. Happy you stopped by to read it. Hope I stimulated your own thinking on the matter. I could say more, but you now have a compendium of ideas for your next conversation with an alarmist (or, maybe if you are an alarmist, ideas to back a new argument for your concern about “the existential threat”).
With an analytical mind, please read the CNBC summary of the latest IPCC report by Sam Meredith. It is entitled "World's top climate scientists issue 'survival guide for humanity,' call for major course correction." **
*Taylor, Tom. https://www.atlasevhub.com/weekly-digest/101-raw-materials-and-ev-supply-chains/
**https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/20/ipcc-report-on-climate-un-scientists-call-for-course-correction.html/
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