It seems that the Dutch have the impression that the best place to live is the birthplace of Impressionism, the village of Oosterbeek. Known as the “Barbizon of the North,” the town was near the center of the Battle of Arnheim in World War II, whose death toll leant a touch of reality to the area’s artistic tradition of Impressionism. The devastation and death of a world war aside, Dutch leaders, in compliance with policies advocated by the World Economic Fund, currently hold a curious position: They have the impression that they can significantly contribute to a cessation of rising temperatures by shutting down the country’s agriculture. Because they believe that climate change is an existential threat, they have placed restrictions on agricultural emissions of nitrogen compounds to change the course a planet. They see an Earth that is doomed to an exponential rise in temperatures—when, as I have written elsewhere, the rise, if it occurs, would most likely be logarithmic (Details, Details, Details: A New Intelligence Quotient 7/7/2022).
These newest versions of Dutch Impressionists—aka Dutch politicians and bureaucrats—are getting a different touch of reality this year in the form of a massive agricultural movement as farmers fight back with convoys of road-blocking tractors and trucks. Without evidence that their policies would truly affect world climate to any significant degree while countries like China and India, they have adopted the opinion that their rather small—but, truthfully, important agricultural—country can by austerity save the entire planet. Dutch farmers are of a different opinion as those roadblocks reveal and are of the opinion that seems to be more aligned with the realities—not the impressions—they face. So, they are using those tractors and trucks to block traffic and trucking routes because they have no truck with new restrictions on nitrogen emissions. Yes, the Dutch government seems to have bought into the idea that shutting down farms in one of the largest exporters of agricultural products. And what about their cows?—gone under the new rules. Can’t have all that manure that fertilized the farms and that supplants shortages, such as the fertilizer shortage in 2022.
So, what do the Dutch politicians think they are accomplishing by the restrictions? They believe they will decrease nitrogen emissions by up to 75%. Why? Well, nitrogen compounds are fourth most important in the list of top greenhouse gases: Water vapor (the prime), carbon dioxide (the second), methane (the third). And nitrogen compounds are over the course of a couple centuries actually more efficient as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. But nitrogen, the dominant gas in our atmosphere (as N2) and one of the six elements shared by life (H-O-C-N-S-P), is important to agriculture—and to every Dutch human and you personally.
Let’s do some numbers to get some perspective. The yearly emissions of nitrogen compounds in the United States in “carbon dioxide equivalents” is 434.5 million metric tons of which 338.2 MMT are from agricultural soil management, and 28.4 MMT are from manure management. The rest of the NOx emissions derive from a variety of sources, such a “mobile combustion.” So, how much do the Dutch emit?
Before I mention the absolute numbers, I’ll note a statement from the Dutch themselves: The total of all greenhouse gases anthropogenically emitted by the Dutch decreased in 2018 “approximately 15.1 percent below the emissions in the base year 1990.” The Dutch want to reduce even more the amount they have already reduced. Fifteen percent means they have brought down their emissions from 221.7 Tg CO2 eq. to 188.2 Tg CO2 eq. * The Dutch want to reduce even more the amount they have already reduced. And—wait for it—nitrous oxide, the specific greenhouse gas in question here, had decreased by more than 50% in that period! To reach the projected or hoped for 75% reduction, the Dutch would have to emit no more than 47 Tg CO2 eq.
Who knows? Maybe even that kind of reduction isn’t enough for the impressionable Dutch. And that reminds me of a story one of my former students told. After he had graduated, he went to work for an environmental company that had a contract with a community to normalize the high pH of their city water. At a community meeting, representatives of the company reported that the pH had been brought from its alkaline state to near 7. One of the councilmen stood up, banged on the table, and said, “We won’t rest until it’s brought down to zero.” Sound like today’s Dutch? Anyone for a glass of vinegar right now?
But the tradeoff has consequences. The world’s second leading exporter of agricultural products has decided to shut down agriculture. Go figure. We’re not talking tulips here, gents. We’re talking AGRICULTURE THAT FEEDS PEOPLE. It appears that the bureaucrats have determined it’s better to starve and kill an economy than to await the one meter rise in sea level that is projected to occur over the next millennium with its accompanying rise of less than a degree Celsius. The Dutch bureaucrats are willing to sacrifice their people and those who depend on their farmers on the basis of models that have as yet to align temperature realities to temperature models.
Ah! Impressionism. It gave us Manet and Monet, and among the Dutch, Gerard Bilders, Paul Gabriël, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, Jacob Maris, Matthijs Maris, Willem Maris, Anton Mauve, Hendrik Mesdag, Willem Roelofs, Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, and Van Gogh (Vincent has been called a post-Impressionist, to be accurate—“What’s that,” you say, “speak into my good ear”). Evidence seems to be piling up during the past ten years that there’s been no net global warming in spite of what the models predicted, and none of the dire consequences predicted in 2001 for 2020 have yet to materialize. But what does one say about the heat wave that is roasting Europe in the summer of 2022? Come now, in the short history that humans have kept records--records that, by the way, were not initially worldwide or reliable--do you believe that there haven’t been periods of heat waves like the Chicago heat wave of 1995? What of the heat waves in Europe in 1540 and 1757? Surely, you’re not going to anecdote your way through an argument. Remember, there were no worldwide records for heat waves during most of human history. But no doubt the Dutch politicians in 2022 will point to the scorching temperatures of the moment and say, “Kijk, dat hebben we je toch gezegd” (“See, we told you so”).
Now, it’s easy to understand the panic that arises after people have been primed to look for anecdotal evidence of global warming in a heat wave. The Dutch bureaucrats will see the heat wave as confirmation of their opinion. Quick, someone put a finger in the hole in the dike to save the Netherlands from the current annual 1.3 millimeter sea level rise that will raise sea level by a meter over the next eight hundred years. Maybe the Dutch should raise the dikes now with money from exporting agricultural products rather than shutting down nitrogen emissions from farms to lose revenue. Or the Dutch might consider that while other countries like India and China produce more greenhouse emissions by orders of magnitude than the Netherlands, their small contribution to saving the planet will be in the long run insignificant.
Speaking of the Dutch, what would Desiderius Erasmus Roterdamus think if he were alive? Erasmus is the author of The Praise of Folly, * which contains the line: “Anyway, man’s mind is much more taken with appearances than with reality.” For most people, according to Erasmus, “Happiness resides in opinion.” Ah! Or should I exclaim, “Meten is weten”? ***
In Erasmus’ work, Folly is an allegorical character. Essentially, Folly says, “The happiest man is the one who is the most thoroughly deluded.” No doubt the Dutch authorities who decided to shut down a major portion of their economy didn’t see the full ramifications of their nitrogen restrictions. They did not “measure” before they enacted rules to which many of their citizen-farmers objected.
But maybe I shouldn’t criticize the Dutch. Aren’t all of us at times happy in our delusions? Folly says that no one builds a shrine to her as they built shrines to gods like Diana and Apollo or to those we worship today. She says, “Why should I desire a temple, when the whole world, if I am not mistaken, is a handsome shrine to me. Nor are priests lacking—except where men are lacking…One might say that there are as many statues to me as there are people who look foolish, even unintentionally so.”****
Are the protesting Dutch farmers worshipping Folly because they object to losing their livelihoods? Are they fools because they will suffer the effects of global warming as those bureaucrats’ descendants 800 years hence say derisively, “Kijk, dat hebben we je toch gezegd”? Or are the current bureaucrats fools because they have shut down part of their economy while other nations take practical steps to feed their people in spite of the results of scary computer models?
Or are the few billions of people who have been convinced that they are destined to suffer ever-increasing numbers of heat waves and higher temperatures on average, worshipping at the feet of Folly? According to a study at the University of Alabama, Huntsville and a report in Iowa Climate Science Education, there has been a “pause” in global warming that has as of this writing persisted for going on nigh eight years.*****
So, no global warming for eight years. But not in the minds of the Dutch bureaucrats. If the Impressionists from Oosterbeek were painting today, what color would they use to paint clouds? I guess it really doesn’t matter. It isn’t the real sky that is the point of the painting just as it isn’t the actual data that count. It’s the models that count and the impression they give even though no model has yet proved itself to be prophetic. it’s the impression one gets from seeing the sky that matters. And when many people are convinced that an impression like van Gogh’s Starry Night has more value than a Hubble or JWST image of the sky, then people are willing to throw a great deal of money at it—for Starry Night, maybe 100 million dollars. And for the warming sky in the opinion of bureaucrats almost everywhere, maybe trillions of dollars on top of giving up productive farming and a booming agricultural economy.
*National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sport. 15 April 2020. Greenhouse gas emission in the Netherlands 1990-2018: National Inventory Report.
**Or In Praise of Folly (Stultitiae Laus or Moriae Encomium), 1509.
***”Measuring brings knowledge.” Basically, “reason is better than opinion.”
****Translation by Leonard F. Dean. 1946. Hendricks House Farrar Straus.
*****Monckton, Christopher. The New Pause lengthens by a hefty three months. Online at https://iowaclimate.org/2021/12/03/the-new-pause-lengthens-by-a-hefty-three-months/
These newest versions of Dutch Impressionists—aka Dutch politicians and bureaucrats—are getting a different touch of reality this year in the form of a massive agricultural movement as farmers fight back with convoys of road-blocking tractors and trucks. Without evidence that their policies would truly affect world climate to any significant degree while countries like China and India, they have adopted the opinion that their rather small—but, truthfully, important agricultural—country can by austerity save the entire planet. Dutch farmers are of a different opinion as those roadblocks reveal and are of the opinion that seems to be more aligned with the realities—not the impressions—they face. So, they are using those tractors and trucks to block traffic and trucking routes because they have no truck with new restrictions on nitrogen emissions. Yes, the Dutch government seems to have bought into the idea that shutting down farms in one of the largest exporters of agricultural products. And what about their cows?—gone under the new rules. Can’t have all that manure that fertilized the farms and that supplants shortages, such as the fertilizer shortage in 2022.
So, what do the Dutch politicians think they are accomplishing by the restrictions? They believe they will decrease nitrogen emissions by up to 75%. Why? Well, nitrogen compounds are fourth most important in the list of top greenhouse gases: Water vapor (the prime), carbon dioxide (the second), methane (the third). And nitrogen compounds are over the course of a couple centuries actually more efficient as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. But nitrogen, the dominant gas in our atmosphere (as N2) and one of the six elements shared by life (H-O-C-N-S-P), is important to agriculture—and to every Dutch human and you personally.
Let’s do some numbers to get some perspective. The yearly emissions of nitrogen compounds in the United States in “carbon dioxide equivalents” is 434.5 million metric tons of which 338.2 MMT are from agricultural soil management, and 28.4 MMT are from manure management. The rest of the NOx emissions derive from a variety of sources, such a “mobile combustion.” So, how much do the Dutch emit?
Before I mention the absolute numbers, I’ll note a statement from the Dutch themselves: The total of all greenhouse gases anthropogenically emitted by the Dutch decreased in 2018 “approximately 15.1 percent below the emissions in the base year 1990.” The Dutch want to reduce even more the amount they have already reduced. Fifteen percent means they have brought down their emissions from 221.7 Tg CO2 eq. to 188.2 Tg CO2 eq. * The Dutch want to reduce even more the amount they have already reduced. And—wait for it—nitrous oxide, the specific greenhouse gas in question here, had decreased by more than 50% in that period! To reach the projected or hoped for 75% reduction, the Dutch would have to emit no more than 47 Tg CO2 eq.
Who knows? Maybe even that kind of reduction isn’t enough for the impressionable Dutch. And that reminds me of a story one of my former students told. After he had graduated, he went to work for an environmental company that had a contract with a community to normalize the high pH of their city water. At a community meeting, representatives of the company reported that the pH had been brought from its alkaline state to near 7. One of the councilmen stood up, banged on the table, and said, “We won’t rest until it’s brought down to zero.” Sound like today’s Dutch? Anyone for a glass of vinegar right now?
But the tradeoff has consequences. The world’s second leading exporter of agricultural products has decided to shut down agriculture. Go figure. We’re not talking tulips here, gents. We’re talking AGRICULTURE THAT FEEDS PEOPLE. It appears that the bureaucrats have determined it’s better to starve and kill an economy than to await the one meter rise in sea level that is projected to occur over the next millennium with its accompanying rise of less than a degree Celsius. The Dutch bureaucrats are willing to sacrifice their people and those who depend on their farmers on the basis of models that have as yet to align temperature realities to temperature models.
Ah! Impressionism. It gave us Manet and Monet, and among the Dutch, Gerard Bilders, Paul Gabriël, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, Jacob Maris, Matthijs Maris, Willem Maris, Anton Mauve, Hendrik Mesdag, Willem Roelofs, Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, and Van Gogh (Vincent has been called a post-Impressionist, to be accurate—“What’s that,” you say, “speak into my good ear”). Evidence seems to be piling up during the past ten years that there’s been no net global warming in spite of what the models predicted, and none of the dire consequences predicted in 2001 for 2020 have yet to materialize. But what does one say about the heat wave that is roasting Europe in the summer of 2022? Come now, in the short history that humans have kept records--records that, by the way, were not initially worldwide or reliable--do you believe that there haven’t been periods of heat waves like the Chicago heat wave of 1995? What of the heat waves in Europe in 1540 and 1757? Surely, you’re not going to anecdote your way through an argument. Remember, there were no worldwide records for heat waves during most of human history. But no doubt the Dutch politicians in 2022 will point to the scorching temperatures of the moment and say, “Kijk, dat hebben we je toch gezegd” (“See, we told you so”).
Now, it’s easy to understand the panic that arises after people have been primed to look for anecdotal evidence of global warming in a heat wave. The Dutch bureaucrats will see the heat wave as confirmation of their opinion. Quick, someone put a finger in the hole in the dike to save the Netherlands from the current annual 1.3 millimeter sea level rise that will raise sea level by a meter over the next eight hundred years. Maybe the Dutch should raise the dikes now with money from exporting agricultural products rather than shutting down nitrogen emissions from farms to lose revenue. Or the Dutch might consider that while other countries like India and China produce more greenhouse emissions by orders of magnitude than the Netherlands, their small contribution to saving the planet will be in the long run insignificant.
Speaking of the Dutch, what would Desiderius Erasmus Roterdamus think if he were alive? Erasmus is the author of The Praise of Folly, * which contains the line: “Anyway, man’s mind is much more taken with appearances than with reality.” For most people, according to Erasmus, “Happiness resides in opinion.” Ah! Or should I exclaim, “Meten is weten”? ***
In Erasmus’ work, Folly is an allegorical character. Essentially, Folly says, “The happiest man is the one who is the most thoroughly deluded.” No doubt the Dutch authorities who decided to shut down a major portion of their economy didn’t see the full ramifications of their nitrogen restrictions. They did not “measure” before they enacted rules to which many of their citizen-farmers objected.
But maybe I shouldn’t criticize the Dutch. Aren’t all of us at times happy in our delusions? Folly says that no one builds a shrine to her as they built shrines to gods like Diana and Apollo or to those we worship today. She says, “Why should I desire a temple, when the whole world, if I am not mistaken, is a handsome shrine to me. Nor are priests lacking—except where men are lacking…One might say that there are as many statues to me as there are people who look foolish, even unintentionally so.”****
Are the protesting Dutch farmers worshipping Folly because they object to losing their livelihoods? Are they fools because they will suffer the effects of global warming as those bureaucrats’ descendants 800 years hence say derisively, “Kijk, dat hebben we je toch gezegd”? Or are the current bureaucrats fools because they have shut down part of their economy while other nations take practical steps to feed their people in spite of the results of scary computer models?
Or are the few billions of people who have been convinced that they are destined to suffer ever-increasing numbers of heat waves and higher temperatures on average, worshipping at the feet of Folly? According to a study at the University of Alabama, Huntsville and a report in Iowa Climate Science Education, there has been a “pause” in global warming that has as of this writing persisted for going on nigh eight years.*****
So, no global warming for eight years. But not in the minds of the Dutch bureaucrats. If the Impressionists from Oosterbeek were painting today, what color would they use to paint clouds? I guess it really doesn’t matter. It isn’t the real sky that is the point of the painting just as it isn’t the actual data that count. It’s the models that count and the impression they give even though no model has yet proved itself to be prophetic. it’s the impression one gets from seeing the sky that matters. And when many people are convinced that an impression like van Gogh’s Starry Night has more value than a Hubble or JWST image of the sky, then people are willing to throw a great deal of money at it—for Starry Night, maybe 100 million dollars. And for the warming sky in the opinion of bureaucrats almost everywhere, maybe trillions of dollars on top of giving up productive farming and a booming agricultural economy.
*National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sport. 15 April 2020. Greenhouse gas emission in the Netherlands 1990-2018: National Inventory Report.
**Or In Praise of Folly (Stultitiae Laus or Moriae Encomium), 1509.
***”Measuring brings knowledge.” Basically, “reason is better than opinion.”
****Translation by Leonard F. Dean. 1946. Hendricks House Farrar Straus.
*****Monckton, Christopher. The New Pause lengthens by a hefty three months. Online at https://iowaclimate.org/2021/12/03/the-new-pause-lengthens-by-a-hefty-three-months/
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