Croesus
Croesus of Lydia had it all, riches, empire, power. But he wanted more power. After all, what is there left for the world’s richest man to gain after wealth and rule? His rival Cyrus of Persia also had an empire. As Herodotus tells the story, bound in mutual covetousness, they were on the precipice of war when Croesus got an idea: Why not consult the Oracle at Delphi before entering battle?
He did, and the Oracle told him that he would topple an empire if he went to war.
You know where this is going, don’t you? Yes, the empire Croesus toppled was his own. The power he sought fell into the hands of his enemy.
See any modern parallel?
Power
There’s more than one kind of power. There’s that definition of it in physics, a scalar quantity that equals the transfer of energy in some unit of time, usually in watts, which are joules per second (Think of a joule as the amount of energy needed to lift a lemon one meter in one second). Then there’s that psycho-social extended definition that makes up Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. * This is the kind of power Croesus and Cyrus sought, a control over individuals or entire societies.
In the modern parallel there’s a link between these two kinds of power, and a Delphic lesson to be learned the hard way.
The Proposition: Science Is Dead and a New God Has Risen in Its Place
Science is dead, and people who killed it formed a new religion to take its place, a fundamentalist creed with only one belief with one corollary: Climate is changing; climate has control over humanity.
This new religion has its own version of the Apocalypse which contains a story of plagues similar to those in Exodus: Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes of power never before seen, tornadoes, deluges, floods, Arctic cold, vast migrations of humans and beasts, diseases bacterial, viral, and parasitic, wars, rising seas, famines, locusts, and women in bikinis sunbathing by the locks at Sault Ste. Marie in the dead of winter. (It ain’t all bad, I suppose)
This new religion has only one theology: Escatology. The faith is, in fact, steeped in eschatological fear. As much as any other religion, it focuses on “end times” and the despair and desperation engendered by a rapidly declining prospect for salvation. The ineluctable disaster is the work of the devil spewing carbon dioxide and methane into the world of the living, both noxious gases derived from the Underworld. If there is an opening to the Gates of Hell, we’re just outside. Abandon all hope…because “The Science Is Settled.” It’s the End of Times.
And No Less a Prophet than the President of the United States Warns Us
Ever wonder what it might have been like to hear the ancient soothsayers and prophets? Wonder no more. We have our biblical analog. Here’s the United States President addressing the United Nations on September 19, 2023:
“Blah, blah, blah, fires, blah, floods, blah, droughts. No one can doubt that climate change is occurring and that it is an existential threat. We need to keep warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade. Blah, blah, blah…”
Okay, I’l admit that those weren’t his exact words, but his speech to the delegates did run according to the dictates of “modern science.” If he didn’t cite the sacred text exactly, he at least paraphrased or plagiarized it (one of his skills, I’m told). If we don’t stop using fossil fuels, we’re all doomed. The world needs Green Energy, thus, Green Power. In his words, “We need to climate-proof the world.”
Excuse me? Climate-proof? Sorry for the crudity here, but what the h-e-double toothpick does that mean? Climate is a general term for a combined temperature-precipitation decades-long profile of a region in categories organized by various men, including Köppen, Geiger, Thornthwaite, and Trewartha. Their classifications include, for example, tropical-rainforest and tropical savanna, and tropical monsoon. How does one climate-proof the planet? What in the h-e-double toothpick can that possibly mean?
Like Fundamentalists Everywhere the Clergy of Climate Change Label the Inquisitive as Heretics
It doesn’t matter that reasonable people have posed reasonable questions to believers. For them “the science”—pardon me, religion—“is settled,” and alternative views are neither scientific nor warranted. Alarmists have raised a new God, and He [She, It, They, Z] is very much alive, belying Nietzsche’s famous proclamation. Contrary to Nietzsche’s thinking, it’s science, not God, that’s dead.
For the living, there’s little to do but worship at the altar of the IPCC and join with the elite priesthood of a dual papacy in Gore and Kerry and their little altar girl Thunberg. “The Climate God Is Alive, but Science Is Dead.”
As in all fundamentalist times, heretics continue to question in spite of the ridicule and threats. Numerous “climate alarmism” nonbelievers have become incarnate pagans, atheists, and wimpy fence-sitting agnostics of our time.
Some of those nonbelievers have gone to great lengths to seek an alternate truth and have actually uncovered one: There is no existential threat from changing weather patterns that differs in kind from any similar threat humans and other life-forms have faced. But the fundamentalists in the religion of climate change won’t allow them to speak their minds or offer proof for their reasoning without ridicule and ostracism. This is a “science” that disdains doubt. Even if Earth is warming, a contestable contention, is it the devil called Anthropogenic Carbon like the Book of Job’s The Satan (The Adversary) that is wreaking the supposed havoc on Earth’s living?
What Would Our Ancient Ancestors Think?
It’s a tough world because it is indifferent to comfort. But comfort isn’t the only reason for people to colonize a climatic regime. People have moved into climates severe and mild over thousands of years and have stayed or moved as survival remained easy or became more difficult. Personally, I can’t imagine living in the cold land of the Inuit, but similarly, I can’t imagine living in the hot rainforests of Amazonian tribesmen. But Inuits and Amazonians live in those environments, just as nomadic people live in the Sahara and Arabian drylands. Note that human migrations throughout the Americas during the past 16,000 years are testimony to our ability to choose where and how we wish to live. And our choices differ. Otherwise, everyone would live in the same climate zone.
Whereas a move might seem to be a good choice for the first generation of migrants, subsequent generations might find the new locale falls short of its initial promise. Yet, populations have endured through harsh environmental changes. The settlement of Greenland serves as a model. No doubt the Viking settlers Leif Erickson persuaded to accompany him across the northern Atlantic during the Medieval Warm Period would have said “No, thanks” to a similar voyage during the later Little Ice Age. Once emplaced, however, people can figure a way to survive and even thrive. Those “Erikson” Vikings’ descendants inhabited Greenland for more than four centuries. Tell me, has your family descended in place for 400 years? No?
The Inuits, Amazonians, and Bedouins are testimony to human endurance and our ability to acclimatize. Both boreal and equatorial people show that neither extreme cold as in high latitudes nor extreme heat as in low latitudes is a detriment to continued life. If life is sustainable, then everything beyond sustainability is a luxury. And apparently the presence of fresh water is more significant than either high or low temperatures: Thus, Bedouins survive because of oases; Inuit have all the fresh water they want; Amazonians live with rain. And from the time of ancient Ur till now, people have dammed water and irrigated farmland.
Science Is Dead because It Has Become Inductive
Toss a coin. How did it land? What if it landed tails up 25 times without landing heads up? Could you predict the 26th toss? Of course, you know that you could toss a coin an indefinite number of times and still have no clue to the result of the next toss. Generally, it will fall tails up about as many times as it falls heads up. There’s no way to inductively conclude future results. Similarly, there’s no way to conclude with certainty that because there have been recent floods in Pakistan, Libya, and California, that such weather phenomena are only destined to increase in number and intensity. There’s no way to use a few weather specifics to derive a tenable generalization with regard to climate patterns, this is especially true of using today’s severe weather as a foreshadowing of tomorrow’s. Take the severe winters of the 1970s in North America as examples. Anyone living through them could easily say that the 1980s would be equally as cold—but they weren’t.
Consider these monthly average temperatures in Fahrenheit for some recent Januarys in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:
January 1974: 34
January 1975: 32.6
January 1976: 23.5
January 1977: 11.4
January 1978: 22.6
January 1990: 36.8
January 1991: 29.7
January 1992: 30.5
January 1993: 35.1
January 1994: 21.1
The 30-year mean for Pittsburgh in January is 28.8. Will it change to colder or warmer temperatures? Who knows. I remember 1977’s 11.4 degree average because I lost power during part of that month, and on one morning I went outside to chop wood for the fireplace when the wind chill was close to minus 50 F. You can guess that I thought we were entering a second Younger Dryas. But the following January was warmer. Weather anomalies occur all the time, but they are not predictors of future weather anomalies. As their knowledge now stands, meteorologists are still not capable of predicting the exact effects of an El Niño, La Niña, the Aleutian Low, the North Pacific Oscillation, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
IPCC Coin Tosses
If you read through the many IPCC reports and documents associated with international agreements like the recent Paris Agreement or Accord, you’ll encounter many specifics tied to generalities, actually specifics supporting generalities. The field of climate science is filled with inductive reasoning. It’s filled with documentation of widely spread effects attributed to a single cause: climate change. And it doesn’t matter how unrelated the effects are or how accurately they are documented. Nor does it matter to climate alarmists that much of the “settled science” is derived not from reality, but rather from models of reality, many of them incapable of “predicting” past warming or cooling episodes.
The models and the inductive thinking combine in alarmists’ minds to prophesy an unquestioned existential threat from a warming world caused by increased atmospheric carbon even though the current carbon composition of the atmosphere is among the lowest levels of that gas over the past 55 million years. Strangely, none of the “scientists” or climate alarmists will accept that during the past 2.5 million years there have been inconsistent relationships between the amount of atmospheric carbon and temperatures. Nor will they willingly accept that some natural processes like Milankovitch Cycles, ocean currents, and atmospheric cycles play an undecided role individually or in conjunction with one another.
Climate is complex. We haven’t studied it for very long. We can derive some information about its past vicissitudes, but we often rely on proxy evidence for that information. Tree rings, for example, were important in the making of the “hockey stick graph,” but that graph, widely accepted, was adopted in place of another competing graph by another tree-ring researcher. And tree rings, even from the Little Ice Age might not be as good a clue about temperature as they are about moisture and disease. In other words, settled science isn’t really settled. Recall that elsewhere I and others have pointed to Naomi Orestes’s study from which Al Gore got his “97%” that the media keep repeating, a figure that was based on a small sampling of papers within a larger sampling. Can anyone say, “The Science Is Settled”? The religion of climate change has an element of numerology: Two numbers, 97% consensus and 1.5 degrees Celsius are sacred.
And in front of the United Nations, the President of the United States declared that we must make the world “climate-proof.” Think he has ever studied a climate textbook?
A Future They Would Have Loved to Live
Plopped into the twenty-first century, our ancient ancestors would probably say, “If we would have known the world would be this hospitable, we would have postponed our births.” Certainly, the people roaming with mammoths and mastodons and saber tooth tigers might have a more optimistic view of their chance of survival with a change of a degree or two or with a sea level three-feet higher than today’s ocean level. Remember that as the last large sheets of ice melted off the continents, sea level rose by more than 400 feet. Surely, that would have displaced some generations of coastal dwellers. “When I was a kid, my great grandpa had a lean-to over there, but it’s covered by water now.”
How ever will we modern people survive a couple of millimeter rise currently washing over the land? At the rate of eustatic change, the seas will be meter higher in just under a millennium.
But isn’t it all a matter of migratory choices? As the coastal urban population increases, is it not more likely that there will be more structures damaged and more people put in jeopardy by storms? Aren’t we really moving into potential danger?
I think that our ancestors who lived during the Younger Dryas would think today’s weather, storms and floods, Arctic blasts, and tropical heat waves, would be preferable to the constant chill of their times. Heat is dangerous in the absence of water, but cold kills when the water is abundant but frozen. Death Valley is “death valley” because it is dry, not because it is hot though the heat and the rain shadow of the mountains to the west are the reasons for the aridity. Think POTUS understands rain shadows, semi-permanent Highs and Lows, and cold ocean currents like the California Current?
Two Quotations from Feynman
Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said, “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” In front of the United Nations, the current President of the United States proclaimed that no one could doubt that climate change is real. His surety is indicative of a dead science. Richard is turning over in his grave.
And Feynman is famous for this statement: “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” The fundamentalism of climate ideology can’t be proven by any experiment other than time. If the climate scientists are right, we have to wait decades to centuries to discover that they are. Time is the laboratory scientist, and it’s in no hurry as human lifetimes go.
Past experiments in its laboratory have indicated a swinging climate, a carbon pendulum, and both advantages and disadvantages to humans when climates do change. No one could possibly farm in Canada when the entire country was covered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet one to two miles thick from 90,000 to 20,000 years ago. I’ll bet Canadians are happy that ice melted. Or, am I wrong? Do you think today’s Canadians wish the Laurentide climate regime had never changed, had never turned toward warmer temperatures?
But if alarmists are right, do they know something about Earth the rest of us don’t know. After a general cooling trend since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago, are we headed toward a warmer world that cannot support life? Isn’t that ancient warm period the initial time when mammals began to dominate the planet? And didn’t primates become bipedal during a droughty period in Africa?
Dead Science Is Dangerous Science
Science is dead. Climate alarmists have killed it. In its stead, they have raised a god replete with a fully developed religion. Be aware. If you don’t believe, you’ll be declared a heretic, shamed, and ostracized. But those in the clergy of this climate religion can say anything with relative impunity, even crazy ideas that involve geo-engineering.
Take the recent proposal by people in the Biden Administration and elsewhere to “seed” the upper atmosphere with sunlight blockers and reflectors. As I pointed out in a previous blog, that strategy could backfire if a few volcanoes also ejected sunlight blockers into the atmosphere as they did right before 1816, the Year without a Summer that caused famine and death by starvation in Europe and killed crops in the United States. Then what? Will the Biden Administration or whoever is in charge send big vacuum cleaners skyward to sweep away the blocking dust and molecules to allow needed sunlight in once again? Can anyone say, “The Science Is Settled”? Can anyone say that just like Croesus, the empire that falls is one’s own?
But if you point out such madness to the media or climate alarmists, you get no admission of absurdity. Among the believers the wildest statements are appropriate and beyond question or ridicule. That’s dangerous because a group in power might even try to pull off some sunlight-blocking. And yet, “The Science Is Settled.”
The religion of climate change is, unfortunately, here to stay because big money is involved. Whole industries are devoted to it as well as the academics and politicians that derive lucrative rewards for supporting it. There is no separation of religion and state in this. Climate alarmism has become the state religion.
Below the Broken Derna Dams
In his UN address POTUS cited the tragic flooding in Pakistan and Libya. In the latter country thousands died, but they died because they lived in the channel between impounded water and ocean. It was in the outlet to the sea down which the water from two collapsed dams above Derna washed away lives. The tragic loss during the storm called Daniel was probably predictable. People in the outflow channels below every dam are vulnerable to floods from water perched upstream. There are too many examples of similar incidents to cite.
In 1985 the Monongahela River valley suffered a devastating flood after some very heavy rainfall (Running an experiment at the time, I recorded 11 inches of rain in a 24-hour period). The people in the valley suffered damages to their homes and businesses. My house lies more than 300 feet above the river. No damage. If one chooses to live in a channel, then one can expect water damage at some time. The poor of Derna lived in a chaotic, terrorist infiltrated and corrupt government that failed to stop urban growth in the valley below the dams. Biden wants to blame climate.
I can think of some American analogs of the Libyan flooding. But they prove no connections between climate and catastrophic flooding, but they do prove connections between lack of foresight and disaster. The famous Johnstown Flood occurred after heavy rains could not be held in the reservoir behind a poorly kept dirt dam. Johnstown, like modern Derna, was situated in the valley far below the collapsing dam. What could one expect? Or, rather, why did the people of Johnstown not expect the inevitable?
But no modern flood can be as a specific tied to a generalization, just as no January temperature for Pittsburgh can be tied to a rebirth of the Younger Dryas.
Science is dead. You can’t convince the faithful to accept that. They believe what they believe. They have seen the specifics, so they know the generality. They have reasoned inductively and are sure that they know which side of the coin will fall face up.
Biden as Croesus
So, JRB Ware, alias Joe Biden, seeks to establish a new kind of power. To do so, he decreased energy supplies by, among other actions, closing the Keystone Pipeline. As a result of his attempt to acquire “green power” that is “carbon free,” he has decreased the power in the electrical grid. Like Croesus, he’s been to the altar of the Oracle—his located not in Greece, but rather in the IPCC headquarters. He’s been told that he will topple an empire, the empire of fossil fuels. In fact, his enemy, the giant Chinese empire’s economy that runs on fossil fuels, will acquire the power, both the actual physical power measured in watts and the socio-eco-international-political power measured in world domination.
The economic empire he is toppling is the American one.
*Greene, Robert. 1998. A Joost Elffers Book. Penguin Books.
Croesus of Lydia had it all, riches, empire, power. But he wanted more power. After all, what is there left for the world’s richest man to gain after wealth and rule? His rival Cyrus of Persia also had an empire. As Herodotus tells the story, bound in mutual covetousness, they were on the precipice of war when Croesus got an idea: Why not consult the Oracle at Delphi before entering battle?
He did, and the Oracle told him that he would topple an empire if he went to war.
You know where this is going, don’t you? Yes, the empire Croesus toppled was his own. The power he sought fell into the hands of his enemy.
See any modern parallel?
Power
There’s more than one kind of power. There’s that definition of it in physics, a scalar quantity that equals the transfer of energy in some unit of time, usually in watts, which are joules per second (Think of a joule as the amount of energy needed to lift a lemon one meter in one second). Then there’s that psycho-social extended definition that makes up Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. * This is the kind of power Croesus and Cyrus sought, a control over individuals or entire societies.
In the modern parallel there’s a link between these two kinds of power, and a Delphic lesson to be learned the hard way.
The Proposition: Science Is Dead and a New God Has Risen in Its Place
Science is dead, and people who killed it formed a new religion to take its place, a fundamentalist creed with only one belief with one corollary: Climate is changing; climate has control over humanity.
This new religion has its own version of the Apocalypse which contains a story of plagues similar to those in Exodus: Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes of power never before seen, tornadoes, deluges, floods, Arctic cold, vast migrations of humans and beasts, diseases bacterial, viral, and parasitic, wars, rising seas, famines, locusts, and women in bikinis sunbathing by the locks at Sault Ste. Marie in the dead of winter. (It ain’t all bad, I suppose)
This new religion has only one theology: Escatology. The faith is, in fact, steeped in eschatological fear. As much as any other religion, it focuses on “end times” and the despair and desperation engendered by a rapidly declining prospect for salvation. The ineluctable disaster is the work of the devil spewing carbon dioxide and methane into the world of the living, both noxious gases derived from the Underworld. If there is an opening to the Gates of Hell, we’re just outside. Abandon all hope…because “The Science Is Settled.” It’s the End of Times.
And No Less a Prophet than the President of the United States Warns Us
Ever wonder what it might have been like to hear the ancient soothsayers and prophets? Wonder no more. We have our biblical analog. Here’s the United States President addressing the United Nations on September 19, 2023:
“Blah, blah, blah, fires, blah, floods, blah, droughts. No one can doubt that climate change is occurring and that it is an existential threat. We need to keep warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade. Blah, blah, blah…”
Okay, I’l admit that those weren’t his exact words, but his speech to the delegates did run according to the dictates of “modern science.” If he didn’t cite the sacred text exactly, he at least paraphrased or plagiarized it (one of his skills, I’m told). If we don’t stop using fossil fuels, we’re all doomed. The world needs Green Energy, thus, Green Power. In his words, “We need to climate-proof the world.”
Excuse me? Climate-proof? Sorry for the crudity here, but what the h-e-double toothpick does that mean? Climate is a general term for a combined temperature-precipitation decades-long profile of a region in categories organized by various men, including Köppen, Geiger, Thornthwaite, and Trewartha. Their classifications include, for example, tropical-rainforest and tropical savanna, and tropical monsoon. How does one climate-proof the planet? What in the h-e-double toothpick can that possibly mean?
Like Fundamentalists Everywhere the Clergy of Climate Change Label the Inquisitive as Heretics
It doesn’t matter that reasonable people have posed reasonable questions to believers. For them “the science”—pardon me, religion—“is settled,” and alternative views are neither scientific nor warranted. Alarmists have raised a new God, and He [She, It, They, Z] is very much alive, belying Nietzsche’s famous proclamation. Contrary to Nietzsche’s thinking, it’s science, not God, that’s dead.
For the living, there’s little to do but worship at the altar of the IPCC and join with the elite priesthood of a dual papacy in Gore and Kerry and their little altar girl Thunberg. “The Climate God Is Alive, but Science Is Dead.”
As in all fundamentalist times, heretics continue to question in spite of the ridicule and threats. Numerous “climate alarmism” nonbelievers have become incarnate pagans, atheists, and wimpy fence-sitting agnostics of our time.
Some of those nonbelievers have gone to great lengths to seek an alternate truth and have actually uncovered one: There is no existential threat from changing weather patterns that differs in kind from any similar threat humans and other life-forms have faced. But the fundamentalists in the religion of climate change won’t allow them to speak their minds or offer proof for their reasoning without ridicule and ostracism. This is a “science” that disdains doubt. Even if Earth is warming, a contestable contention, is it the devil called Anthropogenic Carbon like the Book of Job’s The Satan (The Adversary) that is wreaking the supposed havoc on Earth’s living?
What Would Our Ancient Ancestors Think?
It’s a tough world because it is indifferent to comfort. But comfort isn’t the only reason for people to colonize a climatic regime. People have moved into climates severe and mild over thousands of years and have stayed or moved as survival remained easy or became more difficult. Personally, I can’t imagine living in the cold land of the Inuit, but similarly, I can’t imagine living in the hot rainforests of Amazonian tribesmen. But Inuits and Amazonians live in those environments, just as nomadic people live in the Sahara and Arabian drylands. Note that human migrations throughout the Americas during the past 16,000 years are testimony to our ability to choose where and how we wish to live. And our choices differ. Otherwise, everyone would live in the same climate zone.
Whereas a move might seem to be a good choice for the first generation of migrants, subsequent generations might find the new locale falls short of its initial promise. Yet, populations have endured through harsh environmental changes. The settlement of Greenland serves as a model. No doubt the Viking settlers Leif Erickson persuaded to accompany him across the northern Atlantic during the Medieval Warm Period would have said “No, thanks” to a similar voyage during the later Little Ice Age. Once emplaced, however, people can figure a way to survive and even thrive. Those “Erikson” Vikings’ descendants inhabited Greenland for more than four centuries. Tell me, has your family descended in place for 400 years? No?
The Inuits, Amazonians, and Bedouins are testimony to human endurance and our ability to acclimatize. Both boreal and equatorial people show that neither extreme cold as in high latitudes nor extreme heat as in low latitudes is a detriment to continued life. If life is sustainable, then everything beyond sustainability is a luxury. And apparently the presence of fresh water is more significant than either high or low temperatures: Thus, Bedouins survive because of oases; Inuit have all the fresh water they want; Amazonians live with rain. And from the time of ancient Ur till now, people have dammed water and irrigated farmland.
Science Is Dead because It Has Become Inductive
Toss a coin. How did it land? What if it landed tails up 25 times without landing heads up? Could you predict the 26th toss? Of course, you know that you could toss a coin an indefinite number of times and still have no clue to the result of the next toss. Generally, it will fall tails up about as many times as it falls heads up. There’s no way to inductively conclude future results. Similarly, there’s no way to conclude with certainty that because there have been recent floods in Pakistan, Libya, and California, that such weather phenomena are only destined to increase in number and intensity. There’s no way to use a few weather specifics to derive a tenable generalization with regard to climate patterns, this is especially true of using today’s severe weather as a foreshadowing of tomorrow’s. Take the severe winters of the 1970s in North America as examples. Anyone living through them could easily say that the 1980s would be equally as cold—but they weren’t.
Consider these monthly average temperatures in Fahrenheit for some recent Januarys in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:
January 1974: 34
January 1975: 32.6
January 1976: 23.5
January 1977: 11.4
January 1978: 22.6
January 1990: 36.8
January 1991: 29.7
January 1992: 30.5
January 1993: 35.1
January 1994: 21.1
The 30-year mean for Pittsburgh in January is 28.8. Will it change to colder or warmer temperatures? Who knows. I remember 1977’s 11.4 degree average because I lost power during part of that month, and on one morning I went outside to chop wood for the fireplace when the wind chill was close to minus 50 F. You can guess that I thought we were entering a second Younger Dryas. But the following January was warmer. Weather anomalies occur all the time, but they are not predictors of future weather anomalies. As their knowledge now stands, meteorologists are still not capable of predicting the exact effects of an El Niño, La Niña, the Aleutian Low, the North Pacific Oscillation, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
IPCC Coin Tosses
If you read through the many IPCC reports and documents associated with international agreements like the recent Paris Agreement or Accord, you’ll encounter many specifics tied to generalities, actually specifics supporting generalities. The field of climate science is filled with inductive reasoning. It’s filled with documentation of widely spread effects attributed to a single cause: climate change. And it doesn’t matter how unrelated the effects are or how accurately they are documented. Nor does it matter to climate alarmists that much of the “settled science” is derived not from reality, but rather from models of reality, many of them incapable of “predicting” past warming or cooling episodes.
The models and the inductive thinking combine in alarmists’ minds to prophesy an unquestioned existential threat from a warming world caused by increased atmospheric carbon even though the current carbon composition of the atmosphere is among the lowest levels of that gas over the past 55 million years. Strangely, none of the “scientists” or climate alarmists will accept that during the past 2.5 million years there have been inconsistent relationships between the amount of atmospheric carbon and temperatures. Nor will they willingly accept that some natural processes like Milankovitch Cycles, ocean currents, and atmospheric cycles play an undecided role individually or in conjunction with one another.
Climate is complex. We haven’t studied it for very long. We can derive some information about its past vicissitudes, but we often rely on proxy evidence for that information. Tree rings, for example, were important in the making of the “hockey stick graph,” but that graph, widely accepted, was adopted in place of another competing graph by another tree-ring researcher. And tree rings, even from the Little Ice Age might not be as good a clue about temperature as they are about moisture and disease. In other words, settled science isn’t really settled. Recall that elsewhere I and others have pointed to Naomi Orestes’s study from which Al Gore got his “97%” that the media keep repeating, a figure that was based on a small sampling of papers within a larger sampling. Can anyone say, “The Science Is Settled”? The religion of climate change has an element of numerology: Two numbers, 97% consensus and 1.5 degrees Celsius are sacred.
And in front of the United Nations, the President of the United States declared that we must make the world “climate-proof.” Think he has ever studied a climate textbook?
A Future They Would Have Loved to Live
Plopped into the twenty-first century, our ancient ancestors would probably say, “If we would have known the world would be this hospitable, we would have postponed our births.” Certainly, the people roaming with mammoths and mastodons and saber tooth tigers might have a more optimistic view of their chance of survival with a change of a degree or two or with a sea level three-feet higher than today’s ocean level. Remember that as the last large sheets of ice melted off the continents, sea level rose by more than 400 feet. Surely, that would have displaced some generations of coastal dwellers. “When I was a kid, my great grandpa had a lean-to over there, but it’s covered by water now.”
How ever will we modern people survive a couple of millimeter rise currently washing over the land? At the rate of eustatic change, the seas will be meter higher in just under a millennium.
But isn’t it all a matter of migratory choices? As the coastal urban population increases, is it not more likely that there will be more structures damaged and more people put in jeopardy by storms? Aren’t we really moving into potential danger?
I think that our ancestors who lived during the Younger Dryas would think today’s weather, storms and floods, Arctic blasts, and tropical heat waves, would be preferable to the constant chill of their times. Heat is dangerous in the absence of water, but cold kills when the water is abundant but frozen. Death Valley is “death valley” because it is dry, not because it is hot though the heat and the rain shadow of the mountains to the west are the reasons for the aridity. Think POTUS understands rain shadows, semi-permanent Highs and Lows, and cold ocean currents like the California Current?
Two Quotations from Feynman
Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said, “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” In front of the United Nations, the current President of the United States proclaimed that no one could doubt that climate change is real. His surety is indicative of a dead science. Richard is turning over in his grave.
And Feynman is famous for this statement: “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” The fundamentalism of climate ideology can’t be proven by any experiment other than time. If the climate scientists are right, we have to wait decades to centuries to discover that they are. Time is the laboratory scientist, and it’s in no hurry as human lifetimes go.
Past experiments in its laboratory have indicated a swinging climate, a carbon pendulum, and both advantages and disadvantages to humans when climates do change. No one could possibly farm in Canada when the entire country was covered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet one to two miles thick from 90,000 to 20,000 years ago. I’ll bet Canadians are happy that ice melted. Or, am I wrong? Do you think today’s Canadians wish the Laurentide climate regime had never changed, had never turned toward warmer temperatures?
But if alarmists are right, do they know something about Earth the rest of us don’t know. After a general cooling trend since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago, are we headed toward a warmer world that cannot support life? Isn’t that ancient warm period the initial time when mammals began to dominate the planet? And didn’t primates become bipedal during a droughty period in Africa?
Dead Science Is Dangerous Science
Science is dead. Climate alarmists have killed it. In its stead, they have raised a god replete with a fully developed religion. Be aware. If you don’t believe, you’ll be declared a heretic, shamed, and ostracized. But those in the clergy of this climate religion can say anything with relative impunity, even crazy ideas that involve geo-engineering.
Take the recent proposal by people in the Biden Administration and elsewhere to “seed” the upper atmosphere with sunlight blockers and reflectors. As I pointed out in a previous blog, that strategy could backfire if a few volcanoes also ejected sunlight blockers into the atmosphere as they did right before 1816, the Year without a Summer that caused famine and death by starvation in Europe and killed crops in the United States. Then what? Will the Biden Administration or whoever is in charge send big vacuum cleaners skyward to sweep away the blocking dust and molecules to allow needed sunlight in once again? Can anyone say, “The Science Is Settled”? Can anyone say that just like Croesus, the empire that falls is one’s own?
But if you point out such madness to the media or climate alarmists, you get no admission of absurdity. Among the believers the wildest statements are appropriate and beyond question or ridicule. That’s dangerous because a group in power might even try to pull off some sunlight-blocking. And yet, “The Science Is Settled.”
The religion of climate change is, unfortunately, here to stay because big money is involved. Whole industries are devoted to it as well as the academics and politicians that derive lucrative rewards for supporting it. There is no separation of religion and state in this. Climate alarmism has become the state religion.
Below the Broken Derna Dams
In his UN address POTUS cited the tragic flooding in Pakistan and Libya. In the latter country thousands died, but they died because they lived in the channel between impounded water and ocean. It was in the outlet to the sea down which the water from two collapsed dams above Derna washed away lives. The tragic loss during the storm called Daniel was probably predictable. People in the outflow channels below every dam are vulnerable to floods from water perched upstream. There are too many examples of similar incidents to cite.
In 1985 the Monongahela River valley suffered a devastating flood after some very heavy rainfall (Running an experiment at the time, I recorded 11 inches of rain in a 24-hour period). The people in the valley suffered damages to their homes and businesses. My house lies more than 300 feet above the river. No damage. If one chooses to live in a channel, then one can expect water damage at some time. The poor of Derna lived in a chaotic, terrorist infiltrated and corrupt government that failed to stop urban growth in the valley below the dams. Biden wants to blame climate.
I can think of some American analogs of the Libyan flooding. But they prove no connections between climate and catastrophic flooding, but they do prove connections between lack of foresight and disaster. The famous Johnstown Flood occurred after heavy rains could not be held in the reservoir behind a poorly kept dirt dam. Johnstown, like modern Derna, was situated in the valley far below the collapsing dam. What could one expect? Or, rather, why did the people of Johnstown not expect the inevitable?
But no modern flood can be as a specific tied to a generalization, just as no January temperature for Pittsburgh can be tied to a rebirth of the Younger Dryas.
Science is dead. You can’t convince the faithful to accept that. They believe what they believe. They have seen the specifics, so they know the generality. They have reasoned inductively and are sure that they know which side of the coin will fall face up.
Biden as Croesus
So, JRB Ware, alias Joe Biden, seeks to establish a new kind of power. To do so, he decreased energy supplies by, among other actions, closing the Keystone Pipeline. As a result of his attempt to acquire “green power” that is “carbon free,” he has decreased the power in the electrical grid. Like Croesus, he’s been to the altar of the Oracle—his located not in Greece, but rather in the IPCC headquarters. He’s been told that he will topple an empire, the empire of fossil fuels. In fact, his enemy, the giant Chinese empire’s economy that runs on fossil fuels, will acquire the power, both the actual physical power measured in watts and the socio-eco-international-political power measured in world domination.
The economic empire he is toppling is the American one.
*Greene, Robert. 1998. A Joost Elffers Book. Penguin Books.
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