We’ve been hearing the cries “It’s science” and “Follow the science” for decades now. But in so many instances, there’s really no rigorous science behind the shouts. We’ve heard that expression from pandemic enforcers and climate alarmists. We can acknowledge, however, with regard to the former, rapidly accumulating hospitalized and dead and confusion about cures had their emotional effect that clouded our judgement. Those mounting deaths made almost everyone a bit afraid of the Grim Reaper and eager to latch onto something that offered security—though much of what was offered was, in fact, ineffective, as the disease spread through and by means of people who were vaccinated and boosted. Though somewhat parallel, climate alarmism doesn’t pose an immediate threat like the pandemic regardless of what the alarmist say. Nevertheless, alarmists have attempted to raise the perception of threat almost to the level of that which accompanied the virus.
COP28 Revisited
A major stadium’s worth of fans. Ninety thousand people. That’s the number of registered attendees at COP28, the secular Hajj to Dubai. They went to the conference to serve at the altar of climate change. And as they feasted and talked, they pledged $700,000,000 in aid to poor countries to help them with the effects of climate change. The attendees did this under the guidance of “High-Level Champions.”
Thank foremost Razan Al Mubarak, the new High-Level Champion of COP28. She has added her talents to those of Mahmoud Mohieldin, the High-Level Champion from COP27. My! How those alarmists have gone hierarchical on us! “High-Level Champion”? Could you think of a more appropriate term? I can: Amir, Archduke, Caesar (Tsar, Kaiser), Chief, Chogyal, Doge, Gaekwar, Mogul, Hospodar, Khan, Khedive, Maharajah, Mikado, Negus, Nizam, Oba, Pasha, Pharaoh, Podesta (my favorite for fascist COP28ers), Rajah, Shah, Sheik, Shogun, Stadholder, Sultan…I think I’ve made my point.
One of the goals of COP28’s High-Level Champions is “Fast-tracking a just, orderly, and equitable energy transition.” Where’s Mussolini when you need him? We could use his great expertise in making the Italian trains run so smoothly and punctually—Not!
In the Context of the Past
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the world did pass the feared two-degree Celsius mark, that “tipping point” that will send us back into the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum with carbon dioxide so abundant that the world will turn greener than it is, a world of happy thriving plants, a Vegan’s Paradise, so to speak.
So, given this two-degree rise, let’s do the connecting. Say there’s a drought in some part of the world as has occurred so often that I can’t offer a complete list. Consider as a sampling, however, the Great Drought of the last quarter of the thirteenth century in the American Northwest, the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, or the more recent Spanish Drought of 2014. How do the ninety thousand COP28 participants determine whether or not the aridity in a specific place was the product of “global” (that means the whole world, you know) average temperature? Keep in mind that averaging just reduces extremes to the mean but says nothing about where those extremes occur.
Can one pin a specific weather event to a global trend? Seems sketchy at best. If in some year the luxury homes on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, a poor country, get hit by a hurricane, do those luxury homeowners get a piece of the $700,000,000? Poor Oprah Winfrey. What if her beach house is destroyed? Bahamas is the 45th poorest country even with those multimillion dollar homes on Paradise Island. Does that make the country eligible for the funds?
Are There Worldwide Events Associated with Specific Events?
We do know, however, that as giant volcanoes erupt, they send ash and sulfur compounds into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering world temperatures. Pinatubo did that in the 1990s. Krakatoa did it in the 1880s. Tambora did it early in the nineteenth century. It’s difficult to say, however, that a global trend in warming would be the detectable cause of a specific weather event, and arguing inductively that several coincidental weather events add up to global warming as a control is not “scientific.”
Winfrey’s Potential Windfall
Who determines when, where, and how global warming produces a disaster requiring funds from the $700 million? Just assuming the “cause” of a weather event is an amorphous worldwide “climate change” doesn’t make “climate change” the cause.
Where do we start? Consider that droughts come and go and have always come and gone. Hurricanes come and go and have always come and gone. Rain, rain, rain, drenching rain has always come and always gone.
What of cold spells? Heat waves? Coral decline or coral growth? Desertification such as what has occurred in the Sahara in 21,000-year cycles interspersed with periods of greening, such as the greening period that ended about 5,000 years ago when the landscape called Al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Kubrā became the Sahara, the Great Desert?
Seven hundred million dollars! And a pledge to spend more, billions more, all based on inductive reasoning. The COP28ers are masters and mistresses and nonbinaries who know better than you because they can point to a drought or a flood here or there and definitively ascribe it to a general trend in average temperature. (But they are High-Level Champions, and you aren’t)
They have in their minds a “Pure Science” at their disposal, after all. You have only common sense. They will save the planet one drought at a time, one storm at a time, one cold spell, or one heat wave at a time because they have the money—your money and the money of all those taxed in participating countries.
The Temperatures Aren’t Rising as Fast as the Number of COP Attendees
And if 90,000 registered to attend COP28 in an expensive-to-visit and distant city this year, just imagine the attendance at COP29. Last year’s fifty thousand has almost doubled this year. If doubling occurs every year, COP29 will have 200,000 attendees, COP30, 400,000, COP32 1.6 million attendees. See where this is going? Keep doubling the attendance and soon every person, including you, will be a conference attendee. And if expenditures increase, they will eventually take everyone’s money into a future of reversing civilization to the time when, in fact, the world was truly very warm, a period about 55 million years ago, a period without the burning of fossil fuels, but a period of naturally higher atmospheric carbon—both carbon and temperatures high without human activities
The Denier
OH! NO! Another “carbon denier.” If that’s the “scientific response,” note that “OH! NO! Another Alarmist Hajj” is an equally valid response. Another pilgrimage to the altar of climate change overseen by bishops like Kerry, Gore, Thunberg, and High-Level Champions all giving homilies asking civilization to repent its ways, to reject itself in favor of a world with a burgeoning population and inadequate or unreliable energy supplies.
In the meantime, every drying-up Lake Mead or Lake Tulare will off-and-on return to bank full capacity just as those two lakes have done recently. Every intermittent stream will do what intermittent streams do: flow when water is abundant and dry up when it isn’t. For each arid or humid event, the crowd will point to say, “See, it’s climate change.” And they will forget that cycling is a planet Earth thing, a dynamism associated with shifting continents, shifting ocean currents, shifting axial tilt, shifting orbital shape, shifting solar output, shifting cloud cover, shifting volcanic eruptions, and shifting human activities, such as redirecting streams to dry the Aral Sea, the drawing down of ground water reserves like the Ogallala Aquifer, the deforestation of Brazil, Indonesia, and Madagascar—all actions that might contribute more individually to “climate change” than the addition of carbon to the atmosphere associated with the rise of modern civilization.
And when the COP people achieve their “zero carbon footprint,” will Earth revert to what it was 12,000 years ago, a wintry place of growing ice sheets destined to cover much of the Northern Hemisphere? Will COP3000 have attendees screaming about reheating the planet? “Oh! No. What did our ancestral High-Level Champions do to us? We’re freezing.”
The Perfect World Climate
What is the perfect climate? Life has persisted through many climate changes for 3.8 billion years give or take a week. It flourished in hot times and in cold times, in ages of ice sheets and in ages of hot aridity. Do the current residents of Cairo want the climate of London? Do the current residents of Honolulu want the climate of Ottawa? Do all those retired Floridians who moved to Miami to avoid the snowbird winters of New York wish for northern winters? What is the perfect climate? Is it a world with a uniform Mall Temperature?
Hasn’t 60,000 years of human migration demonstrated that people move to both arid and humid zones, to both cold and warm zones, and to tornado and hurricane zones? And once there, hasn’t history shown that people remain there for generations? Earth offers a variety of climate zones, from tropical to boreal, and humans live in all of them, save for the severest weather zones like the Arctic and Antarctic, where only “scientists” reside for relatively short periods. Is the distribution of Earth’s climate zones perfect now? Was it perfect at another time? Will it ever be “perfect” or “stable”?
The Legacy: Parties without End
Ninety thousand people. A conference. Seven hundred million dollars pledged. Next year more people, more pledges, more expenditures at what will soon become the world’s largest party that assuages the guilt of an entire species. And when you inevitably join the party, will you say with them, “We’re saving the planet one COP at a time”?
The Conference of Parties will continue their meetings ad infinitum, it seems. And why not? It’s the adult version of college spring break. It is, after all, called a conference of parties.
COP28 Revisited
A major stadium’s worth of fans. Ninety thousand people. That’s the number of registered attendees at COP28, the secular Hajj to Dubai. They went to the conference to serve at the altar of climate change. And as they feasted and talked, they pledged $700,000,000 in aid to poor countries to help them with the effects of climate change. The attendees did this under the guidance of “High-Level Champions.”
Thank foremost Razan Al Mubarak, the new High-Level Champion of COP28. She has added her talents to those of Mahmoud Mohieldin, the High-Level Champion from COP27. My! How those alarmists have gone hierarchical on us! “High-Level Champion”? Could you think of a more appropriate term? I can: Amir, Archduke, Caesar (Tsar, Kaiser), Chief, Chogyal, Doge, Gaekwar, Mogul, Hospodar, Khan, Khedive, Maharajah, Mikado, Negus, Nizam, Oba, Pasha, Pharaoh, Podesta (my favorite for fascist COP28ers), Rajah, Shah, Sheik, Shogun, Stadholder, Sultan…I think I’ve made my point.
One of the goals of COP28’s High-Level Champions is “Fast-tracking a just, orderly, and equitable energy transition.” Where’s Mussolini when you need him? We could use his great expertise in making the Italian trains run so smoothly and punctually—Not!
In the Context of the Past
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the world did pass the feared two-degree Celsius mark, that “tipping point” that will send us back into the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum with carbon dioxide so abundant that the world will turn greener than it is, a world of happy thriving plants, a Vegan’s Paradise, so to speak.
So, given this two-degree rise, let’s do the connecting. Say there’s a drought in some part of the world as has occurred so often that I can’t offer a complete list. Consider as a sampling, however, the Great Drought of the last quarter of the thirteenth century in the American Northwest, the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, or the more recent Spanish Drought of 2014. How do the ninety thousand COP28 participants determine whether or not the aridity in a specific place was the product of “global” (that means the whole world, you know) average temperature? Keep in mind that averaging just reduces extremes to the mean but says nothing about where those extremes occur.
Can one pin a specific weather event to a global trend? Seems sketchy at best. If in some year the luxury homes on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, a poor country, get hit by a hurricane, do those luxury homeowners get a piece of the $700,000,000? Poor Oprah Winfrey. What if her beach house is destroyed? Bahamas is the 45th poorest country even with those multimillion dollar homes on Paradise Island. Does that make the country eligible for the funds?
Are There Worldwide Events Associated with Specific Events?
We do know, however, that as giant volcanoes erupt, they send ash and sulfur compounds into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering world temperatures. Pinatubo did that in the 1990s. Krakatoa did it in the 1880s. Tambora did it early in the nineteenth century. It’s difficult to say, however, that a global trend in warming would be the detectable cause of a specific weather event, and arguing inductively that several coincidental weather events add up to global warming as a control is not “scientific.”
Winfrey’s Potential Windfall
Who determines when, where, and how global warming produces a disaster requiring funds from the $700 million? Just assuming the “cause” of a weather event is an amorphous worldwide “climate change” doesn’t make “climate change” the cause.
Where do we start? Consider that droughts come and go and have always come and gone. Hurricanes come and go and have always come and gone. Rain, rain, rain, drenching rain has always come and always gone.
What of cold spells? Heat waves? Coral decline or coral growth? Desertification such as what has occurred in the Sahara in 21,000-year cycles interspersed with periods of greening, such as the greening period that ended about 5,000 years ago when the landscape called Al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Kubrā became the Sahara, the Great Desert?
Seven hundred million dollars! And a pledge to spend more, billions more, all based on inductive reasoning. The COP28ers are masters and mistresses and nonbinaries who know better than you because they can point to a drought or a flood here or there and definitively ascribe it to a general trend in average temperature. (But they are High-Level Champions, and you aren’t)
They have in their minds a “Pure Science” at their disposal, after all. You have only common sense. They will save the planet one drought at a time, one storm at a time, one cold spell, or one heat wave at a time because they have the money—your money and the money of all those taxed in participating countries.
The Temperatures Aren’t Rising as Fast as the Number of COP Attendees
And if 90,000 registered to attend COP28 in an expensive-to-visit and distant city this year, just imagine the attendance at COP29. Last year’s fifty thousand has almost doubled this year. If doubling occurs every year, COP29 will have 200,000 attendees, COP30, 400,000, COP32 1.6 million attendees. See where this is going? Keep doubling the attendance and soon every person, including you, will be a conference attendee. And if expenditures increase, they will eventually take everyone’s money into a future of reversing civilization to the time when, in fact, the world was truly very warm, a period about 55 million years ago, a period without the burning of fossil fuels, but a period of naturally higher atmospheric carbon—both carbon and temperatures high without human activities
The Denier
OH! NO! Another “carbon denier.” If that’s the “scientific response,” note that “OH! NO! Another Alarmist Hajj” is an equally valid response. Another pilgrimage to the altar of climate change overseen by bishops like Kerry, Gore, Thunberg, and High-Level Champions all giving homilies asking civilization to repent its ways, to reject itself in favor of a world with a burgeoning population and inadequate or unreliable energy supplies.
In the meantime, every drying-up Lake Mead or Lake Tulare will off-and-on return to bank full capacity just as those two lakes have done recently. Every intermittent stream will do what intermittent streams do: flow when water is abundant and dry up when it isn’t. For each arid or humid event, the crowd will point to say, “See, it’s climate change.” And they will forget that cycling is a planet Earth thing, a dynamism associated with shifting continents, shifting ocean currents, shifting axial tilt, shifting orbital shape, shifting solar output, shifting cloud cover, shifting volcanic eruptions, and shifting human activities, such as redirecting streams to dry the Aral Sea, the drawing down of ground water reserves like the Ogallala Aquifer, the deforestation of Brazil, Indonesia, and Madagascar—all actions that might contribute more individually to “climate change” than the addition of carbon to the atmosphere associated with the rise of modern civilization.
And when the COP people achieve their “zero carbon footprint,” will Earth revert to what it was 12,000 years ago, a wintry place of growing ice sheets destined to cover much of the Northern Hemisphere? Will COP3000 have attendees screaming about reheating the planet? “Oh! No. What did our ancestral High-Level Champions do to us? We’re freezing.”
The Perfect World Climate
What is the perfect climate? Life has persisted through many climate changes for 3.8 billion years give or take a week. It flourished in hot times and in cold times, in ages of ice sheets and in ages of hot aridity. Do the current residents of Cairo want the climate of London? Do the current residents of Honolulu want the climate of Ottawa? Do all those retired Floridians who moved to Miami to avoid the snowbird winters of New York wish for northern winters? What is the perfect climate? Is it a world with a uniform Mall Temperature?
Hasn’t 60,000 years of human migration demonstrated that people move to both arid and humid zones, to both cold and warm zones, and to tornado and hurricane zones? And once there, hasn’t history shown that people remain there for generations? Earth offers a variety of climate zones, from tropical to boreal, and humans live in all of them, save for the severest weather zones like the Arctic and Antarctic, where only “scientists” reside for relatively short periods. Is the distribution of Earth’s climate zones perfect now? Was it perfect at another time? Will it ever be “perfect” or “stable”?
The Legacy: Parties without End
Ninety thousand people. A conference. Seven hundred million dollars pledged. Next year more people, more pledges, more expenditures at what will soon become the world’s largest party that assuages the guilt of an entire species. And when you inevitably join the party, will you say with them, “We’re saving the planet one COP at a time”?
The Conference of Parties will continue their meetings ad infinitum, it seems. And why not? It’s the adult version of college spring break. It is, after all, called a conference of parties.
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