Another Day, Another 'Climate' Disaster to Exploit

Nobody can say that climate change alarmists are inconsistent, at least when it comes to natural disasters. They are quicker to blame the latest bit of foul weather on global warming than an ambulance chasing lawyer is to whip out his business card when he meets someone with a back injury.

Mechanical engineer Bill Nye has been all over CNN and the internet explaining how climate change affects weather in terms of a mechanical engineer. It’s all about energy transfer for Bill, a direct, proportionally measurable phenomenon that the many and “always reliable” climate models predict with perfect accuracy! Or so he seems to believe. (Side note: if the models are SO accurate why do we have so many of them?)

Bill Nye.

Weather events are bit more complex than that. That’s why weather models are different beasts than climate models. There is another big difference between weather models and climate models: weather models tend to be right. They tend to be right because they are limited in scope, both in terms of geographical area and in terms of how far into the future they look. They also tend to be right because their accuracy is immediately demonstrable. Climate models, on the other hand, seek to define trends for the entirety of planet Earth decades into the future and beyond. They are largely unproven because the data sets used to attempt to validate them is so poor (remember “hide the decline”) and their scope so terrifically huge.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the alarmist crowd told us that the number of hurricanes and cyclones were increasing in number and intensity because of "global warming." They have largely abandoned that argument for the very good reason that it is demonstrably false. The actual record shows very little variation in the number and intensity of hurricanes between 1980 and the present. It’s difficult to comment on hurricane frequency before 1980 because global weather monitoring by satellite did not exist prior to 1980.

For a while the “proof” became the undeniable fact that the value of insurance claims associated with hurricane damage continues to rise. A-ha! The hurricanes must be getting stronger and causing more damage, and the reason they are getting stronger is because of global warming.

That’s a neat little argument, one that seems to make some sense at first. But somebody checked on the rate of new property development in hurricane-vulnerable locales. Sure enough, the increase in the value of insurance claims pretty well matched the increase in development. So it wasn’t that hurricanes are hitting harder, they are just getting more targets to hit. In terms of intensity, Ian was far below Andrew in 1992 and somewhat below Michael in 2018. Andrew made landfall with a wind speed nearly 150 mph, Michael with a wind speed of about 135 mph, while Ian topped out at around 130 mph.

The "science guy."

If it can be shown that we don’t have more hurricanes and a given hurricane’s potential to cause damage hasn’t really changed either, how can alarmists like Nye blame the devastation in Florida on "global warming"? Well, everything is possible if you just use your imagination. Nye parroted the latest party line: the rate at which today’s hurricanes are intensifying is increasing due to "climate change."

That is to say that as Ian came whipping up the Gulf of Mexico it was picking up more heat than it otherwise would have, thus transferring more energy, thus increasing the intensity of Ian beyond what nature intended.

The beauty of this argument is that it is unprovable. It’s an act of faith. If anything is a demonstrable exercise in chaos theory, it’s hurricane behavior. Yes, we can attempt to predict the track and growth of a given hurricane using some meteorological data, but the error bars surrounding those predictions are huge. Nye can no more prove that Ian would have behaved differently in a world with less greenhouse gases than he can disprove my assertion that Ian would have been much smaller in a world with fewer Bill Nyes.

Predictably, Nye chastised Republicans in Congress for not taking "climate change" seriously. Because why? Presumably because if everyone believes, really believes, hard enough in "climate change" then Tinkerbell will appear to solve the problem. What exactly does Nye expect Republicans in Congress to do? Close coal-fired power plants? We closed a bunch of them. Subsidize new wind and solar plants? Been subsidizing both for decades now. Push automakers into building more electric vehicles? We can take that one off the punch-list as well. Reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Been doing that for years.

Worldwide coal consumption is surging, with 2021 coming in just short of the record set in 2014. Any discussion of greenhouse gas reductions starts and pretty much ends with China and India. It’s silly on one level to wag a finger at Republicans in Congress for not believing that climate change is or will be a crisis. It’s beyond absurd when one considers that there is literally nothing Congress can do about the crisis if it exists.

Coming to save the day!

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been roundly criticized for solely talking about climate in terms of Florida’s infrastructure needs. Coastal erosion, whatever the cause, is a problem in Florida and DeSantis is spending money to address it. But he won’t pay due homage to the golden calf in the room: "global warming" idolatry. He won’t do penance for America's prosperity by blaming humans and their wicked ways. He won’t address the root causes of the problem! How could he address the root causes of this supposed problem? Short of ordering the Florida Air National Guard to bomb the snot out of Chinese coal-fired power plants it's unclear what he could possibly do. And presumably Xi wouldn’t take too kindly to that solution.

Ian was a disaster, as large hurricanes that make landfall always have been and always will be. We should all offer up a prayer for those Floridians who lost property and loved ones. But those who try once again to exploit the disaster to achieve their own selfish ends deserve nothing but our contempt.

Money Talks, Woke 'Batgirl' Environmentalism Walks

"Cut the crap." That's what the money men have started to say to the Leftist ninnies who have gotten used to telling them what to do. It's getting fun to watch.

The best example is the ruthless work being done by David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery. Upon taking the reins of the newly created entity -- a product of the merger of the two corporations -- Zaslav wasted no time pulling the plug on the company's $300 million CNN+ streaming service just three weeks after it had launched! Everyone could see that CNN+ was off to a rocky start, but the quick hook was clearly meant as a company-wide warning to anyone who thought he/she/it wasn't expendable.

Since then, Zaslav has made it known that he wants CNN to get back to its hard news roots, rather than indulging in the fanatical progressive bilge that has characterized its programing for many years. The other day he fired one of the faces of the network, Brian Stelter, and cancelled his show Reliable Sources, known mainly for reliably repeating the Democratic Party's every talking point.

Stelter: so long, Tater.

Zaslav also sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry when he cancelled the release of Batgirl, a multimillion dollar superhero flick (of course), because it was way overbudget and test audiences were hating it. Zaslav's options were to either write a blank check for rewrites and reshoots or else just to put the whole project down as a tax write-off, guaranteeing it would never see the light of day. He chose the latter. And that despite Hollywood's shrieking that it was a "bad look" to cancel a superhero movie with a minority woman lead. But that was the point -- for Zaslav, the race-swapping, female empowerment angle meant nothing. He only cared about whether it would make money, and the answer was no.

Similarly, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made waves recently when he spoke in defense of investing in oil and, especially, natural gas. Speaking to a gathering of journalists and investors Dimon asked rhetorically, “Why can’t we get it through our thick skulls" that American oil and gas production can help us hit emission reduction targets, and thus ultimately is good for the environment. Continued Dimon, "because of high oil and gas prices, the world is turning back on their coal plants. It is dirtier.”

Of course, environmentalist policies and anti-fossil fuel ESG investing trends are a big reason for those high prices. And, as Joan Sammon has discussed here at The Pipeline, Dimon's own company has been one the biggest proponents of the ESG fraud. Still, in this instance, he's absolutely right -- our present energy crisis, which can be blamed as much on our ruling class's fanatical devotion to so-called renewable energy as on Russia's war in Ukraine, has left countries throughout the world searching desperately for reliable alternate energy sources, and the one they've landed on is coal, the consumption of which is projected to return to 2013 levels by the end of the year. Transitioning from coal to natural gas, made possible by the fracking revolution, has led to America leading the world in emissions reductions since the turn of the century. The transition from natural gas to wind and solar has, in practice, meant the triumphant return of coal.

Look what's back.

Environmentalists quickly responded to Dimon's statement by claiming he cared more about his company's investments than the environment. But the obvious response is -- why can't it be both? Dimon knows that his company has been transitioning away from the resource sector mainly to appease the activist class, which is bad for both his bottom line and emission reduction targets. When the economy is booming, he can afford to indulge them. But in the face of an impending recession, he has to start speaking some hard truths, even if it pisses off some culture warriors.

Keep it up boys, its good for the crybabies to be told "no" every once in awhile.

Against the Great Reset: 'The Great Regression'

Continuing today, and for the next 16 weeks, The Pipeline will present excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, to be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now for pre-order at the links. 

 

PART I: THE PROBLEM

Excerpt from "The Great Regression," by Victor Davis Hanson

The Great Reset was first concocted at the World Economic Forum in Davos by its founder Klaus Schwab as a way to assemble together global success stories like himself. His idea apparently was that grandees who have done well for themselves could do even better for the rest of us—if these anointed could just be unbound and given enough power and authority to craft rules for nearly eight billion of the planet’s ignorant.

A word of caution is needed about the pretentious and supposedly benign signature title of the Great Reset project. Assume the worst when the adjective “great” appears in connection with envisioned fundamental, government-driven, or global political changes. What was similar between Lyndon Johnson’s massively expensive but failed “Great Society” and Mao’s genocidal “Great Leap Forward” was the idea of a top-down, centrally planned schema, cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor. So often, the adjective “great” is a code word of supposed enlightened planners for radical attempts at reconstruction of a society that must be either misled or forced to accept a complete overhaul.

When “great” is applied to a proposed transnational comprehensive revolution, we should also equate it with near religious zealotry. “The Great Reset,” after all, in all its green and “woke” glory, with all of its credentialed and “expert” devotees, is still a faith-based rather than scientific effort. Its spiritual predecessor was perhaps the eighteenth-century “Great Awakening” of Protestant evangelicalism that swept the eastern seaboard of colonial America in reaction to the secularism of the Enlightenment. But this time around the frenzy is fueled more by agnostics who worship secular progressive totems such as Al Gore or Greta Thunberg.

Given the Davos elite’s cosmic ambitions, “great” also conjures up a messianic reference to God’s “Great Plan” that should from on high reorder earthly life under a few trusted religious authorities. It recalls the notion of Alexander the “Great” of a brotherhood of man, which supposedly was to fuse conquered peoples into one vast and enlightened east-west, Persian-Hellenistic empire—albeit after, rather than before, eastern tribes were conquered, and sometimes slaughtered, in efforts to achieve a common, centrally planned purpose.

To reassure a shared brighter post-Covid-19 path ahead, Schwab drops most of the familiar globalist names that resonate power, money, seriousness, and wisdom. And the Great Resetters are now quite familiar: the world’s third or fourth richest man, Bill Gates, coming off his denials of palling around with the late Jeffrey Epstein; Jack Ma, the Chinese multibillionaire and Alibaba CEO apparently now “forcibly disappeared” by the Chinese communist government for too many candid speeches; the septuagenarian Prince Charles whose long anticipated monumental accomplishments apparently must still await his ascension to the British throne; the polymath Dr. Anthony Fauci who has laced his 2020 “noble lie” assessments of wearing and not wearing masks or achieving and not achieving herd immunity in terms of climate change, race, Chinese cooperation, and global progressive expertise; John Kerry, one of the multilateralist architects of the Paris Climate Accord and Iran Deal; and the usual rotating leaders of the U.N., IMF, World Bank, and the European Central Bank.

In its post-Covid-19 global comprehensiveness, the Great Reset has ambitions to be our greatest “woke” project yet. On examination, it is a kitchen-sink mishmash of agendas that incorporate the U.N.’s long stale “Sustainable Development” plan (“Agenda 21”), the Green New Deal, tidbits of Black Lives Matter sloganeering, critical race theory, “stakeholder” capitalism that often champions ESG, or forced corporate embrace of “environmental and social governance” over shareholder profitability, open-borders rhetoric, and boutique redistributionism dumbed down from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Reset offers us a global Fabian socialist future, repackaged as a European Union-like top-down diktat. But above all, the agenda incorporates the pop insights of various half-educated corporate billionaires. All now find themselves in a secure enough position to dabble with Trotskyite ideas—to be foisted upon others not so fortunate and lacking their own exemptions from the toxicity of the elite’s theories.

On sale Oct. 18: pre-order now at the links above.

The same linguistic suspicions hold true of the use of the noun “Reset.” It assumes a year-zero arrogance that all that came before was flawed. And all that will follow, we are assured, will not be so defective. Such absolutism is reminiscent of former President Barack Obama’s grandiose promise on the very eve of the 2008 election: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America”—a transformation that birthed the Tea Party revolt just two years later, during the 2010 midterm elections, one of the greatest conservative political pushbacks of the past seventy years.

We remember that just four months after Obama’s promises of transformation, the romance of fundamental change went international with the idea of a foreign policy “reset” that focused on a new détente with Vladimir Putin. The idea was inaugurated in 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the assumption that Putin’s past territorial aggressions had arisen from an absence of dialogue and ecumenical outreach from the prior “unilateralist” George W. Bush administration. Bush supposedly had wrongly sanctioned Putin for his 2008 miniature war with Georgia that resulted in the Russian absorption of South Ossetia. And the go-it-alone “cowboy” Bush apparently had also unduly polarized Putin and thus wet the ex-KGB operative’s beak for additional irredentist acquisition.

The reactive makeover that followed from the Obama-Clinton “reset” was unfortunately an utter failure. Its pompous declarations and talk of “listening” and “outreach” ended in fresh Russian aggressiveness, most notably in the 2014 Russian invasions of both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Such appeasement created the original seeds for Putin’s eventual spring 2022 catastrophic Russian invasion of most of Ukraine and attack on Kyiv. In addition, Russia earlier in 2013 had reentered the Middle East, on Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2011 invitation, after a three-decade hiatus. Then followed Russia’s informal partnerships with both Iran and China, and Moscow’s much greater and more comprehensive crackdowns on internal dissidents. In all talks of the Great Reset, we should then recall that Vladimir Putin apparently interpreted “reset” as American laxity to be leveraged rather than as magnanimity to be reciprocated. In cruder terms, Americans speaking loudly while carrying a twig was no way to “reset” Putin.

The telltale noun “Revolution,” of course, also makes its appearance frequently in Great Reset rhetoric, specifically in connection to Klaus Schwab’s 2017 bestselling book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution. In it, Schwab makes the now familiar argument that the internet, computers, electronic communications, artificial intelligence, and the new global interconnectedness of the prior “Third Revolution” have at last synchronized into wonderful harmony.

The supposedly never-before-seen, never-imagined fusion of the paradigms of economic, social, cultural, and political life offers us a once-in-a-lifetime—or, rather, last—chance to exploit them—even if most of us are not sufficiently equipped to appreciate the opportunity. Yet Schwab makes the fundamental error that these new technologies act as independent drivers of the way people behave and think, rather than as accelerants that nonetheless have not changed ancient fixed and predictable human behavior.

In Schwab’s way of thinking, imagine that a modern computerized high-tech pump sends forth two thousand gallons of water a minute, and therefore its essence, “water,” is now likewise “new” and different from what emerged for millennia at a rate of a gallon a minute from preindustrial hand pumps. Again, we fools outside the Davos agenda would apparently mistakenly believe that greater volume had not much altered from antiquity water’s molecular structure, chemical properties, and use in the natural world.

A glimpse of the idea that Davos-like elites can gather to discuss reset planning in an age of paradigm-changing technology is popular at the national level. A good example is the invitation-only conference on entertainment, technology, finance, and communications held each summer in Idaho at the Sun Valley Resort, hosted by the investment bank of Allen & Company. In 2021, the usual corporate and media globalist suspects showed up, among them Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings, ViacomCBS (now Paramount) chairwoman Shari Redstone, Disney chairman Robert Iger, New York City’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg, GM CEO Mary Barra, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, Discovery CEO David Zaslav, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, and film and television producer Brian Grazer. The premise was Platonic. A meritocracy—chosen by the metrics of either acquired or inherited wealth, influence, celebrity, or a corporation’s ability to influence millions—immune from private bias and guided by reason, should be given latitude to override the dangerous emotions of the masses.

So there are plenty of linguistic reasons alone to be suspicious of the grandiose notion of a top-down, international, and fundamental transformation of the way the world is supposed to work...

Next week: an excerpt from "China, Covid, Realpolitik, and the Great Reset," by Douglas Murray.

Great Moments in Schadenfreude

At CNN, Cherry-Picking Hurricanes

You know a story is probably 100 percent baloney when its apocalyptic lede -- hailing a "new study," of course -- is written in the passive voice and published by CNN:

It is becoming increasingly evident that hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones worldwide are becoming stronger and potentially more deadly as the globe warms due to the climate crisis, according to a new study. The study, released on Monday by researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), looked at nearly 40 years of satellite data of global storms.

Let's unpack this pompous bit of journalistic water-carrying, The words in bold above expose not only the study's biases, but also those of the reporters -- Judson Jones and Brandon Miller, who both appear to still be in knee pants -- blathering on about the "climate crisis" while hedging their bets with the weasel word, "potentially." Further, a study that uses "nearly 40 years of data" to make projections about the future is by definition pure propagandistic bunkum, leaving out (among other things) the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the great Miami hurricane of 1926, the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, and a series of blistering storms in 1955. So a time span of "nearly" forty years is worthless.

The new research builds upon previous studies that showed a likely increase in stronger storms as global oceans had warmed, but the data did not go back far enough to confidently asses the increase was due to man-made global warming and not natural cycles that can span decades. The latest findings add another 11 years to the data set, which allows for statistically significant trends to become clear.
Yeah, right. This is what cherry-picking looks like.
While human-caused warming is likely fueling the increase, there are also natural cycles at play as well, which can increase or decrease storm frequency and intensity varying from basin to basin and from year to year, such as we see with El Niño and La Niña. "Like all aspects of climate, there is an element of natural variability at play," Kossin said. "Our study does not formally disentangle the natural causes from the human-activity causes, and the trends we found are most likely due to a combination of both."
Come back when you're serious, CNN.

CNN Blames 'Climate Change' for Evolutionary Extinction Events

Worried that your favorite plants and animals might be going extinct, right before your very eyes? Gonna miss those little buggers when they're gone? Blame climate change!

Take a moment to cherish your plants and appreciate the animals you see around you. In 50 years, a third of them may no longer exist. Using data from surveys that studied 538 animals, insects and plants from 581 sites across the globe, researchers John J. Wiens and Cristian Román-Palacios from the University of Arizona found that approximately one in three plant, insect and animal species could face extinction by 2070. However, things could be even worse if emissions continue to rise as rapidly as they have in recent decades. In a worst-case scenario, that number could rise to over 55%.

Wow, that sounds pretty bad, right? Every time a human being exhales, another snail darter bites the dust, or whatever snail darters bite. Wait -- it gets worse!

"Of the 538 species studied, 44% of them have already experienced an extinction in a particular local area. The researchers found that local extinction sites had larger and faster changes in the hottest yearly temperatures than those that did not... researchers found that the key to predicting whether a population will go extinct is the maximum annual temperature, as opposed to the average yearly temperature. This is notable because average temperatures are typically used as markers in measuring climate change.

In other words, a heat wave can polish off legions of weak-sister species. Who knew? But everything will be just peachy keen if we only... live up to the Paris climate agreement and keep that darn "global warming" below 2 degrees Celsius above "pre-industrial" levels. "Based on our sample of 538 species, we projected a loss of 30% of the species under a more extreme warming scenario, but only about 16% if we stick to the Paris Agreement," Wiens told CNN. "So, think in 1 in 6 species, not 1 in 3."

Pretty scary, huh? But hang on... what's this?

Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 percent are now extinct. Many of them perished in five cataclysmic events.

We may be in the middle of another mass extinction event, but biologists aren't pinning it on "climate change." During a PBS round-table on the subject, Peter Ward, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, noted:

Geologists, I think, see this in terms of time scales that most of us probably don't think of. We think of the next 100 years or the next 300 years as the overall time scale over which much biotic impoverishment may take place. But I've spent my life looking at the past mass extinctions. Certainly the fastest we have on record was the end of the dinosaurs, the so-called K/T extinction, but over the last five years we've looked in great detail at what happened at the end of the Permian and what happened at the end of the Triassic, and neither of these were events that took place in, let's say, a 100-year time scale or a 300-year time scale. I think in the past, if we use the past as a record, 100,000 year intervals of mass extinction are certainly what has taken place.

My view of the current mass extinction is that it has been going on for 15,000 years. The loss of the mega-mammals, to me, was really the opening shot of what's going on, and it is now filtering down to ever-smaller animals. The current mass extinction has been unfolding for millennia, and unlike the greenhouse effect, global warming, or the hole in the ozone, it is visible without sophisticated imagery or complex computer modeling. It is real, and it is happening to a greater or lesser degree all over the globe; it is most apparent, however, in the tropics. It will not eliminate life from the Earth; no mass extinction does that. But enough species will die that the nature of life on the Earth will be forever changed.

In other words, species' extinction is not an anomaly brought on by cow farts and SUVs but part of the natural cycle of life on earth, stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. Darwin even wrote a book about it! (On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.) Climate hysterics like CNN's Allen Kim, who wrote the piece cited above, aren't arguing science at all, but merely cherry-picking data that serves to prove their utterly falsifiable thesis and, as an important byproduct, are simultaneously reaching into your pants pockets and stealing you blind. And all the while, they're out to terrify you with their predictions of Apocalypse Now.

"In a way, it's a 'choose your own adventure,'" Wiens said. "If we stick to the Paris Agreement to combat climate change, we may lose fewer than two out of every 10 plant and animal species on Earth by 2070. But if humans cause larger temperature increases, we could lose more than a third or even half of all animal and plant species, based on our results."

Note the hedge: "we may, we could." The fallacy of this kind of thinking should be obvious, but as long as it convinces suckers to diminish their own lifestyles and transfer money to the global-governance crowd, propagandists will keep pushing it. in the meantime, who misses the 99.9% of species that have gone extinct? We don't even know today how many species of anything there actually are, or were, or will be. Let's give the last word to ecologist Ariel Lugo, director of the USDA Forest Service International Institute of Tropical Forestry in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico:

I think certainly we are grossly underestimating the number of species on Earth, and the more we look, obviously, we're going to find a lot more than we think we have. And the destruction of habitat is why we are so scared about the potential for huge extinctions. The problem is that we also need to rely on models to relate the extinction rate to the destruction of habitat, and we don't have, I don't think, sufficient information to define the relationship between habitat loss and species loss, mostly because the complexity of nature is just absolutely huge, and our understanding is very primitive.

And most of the controversy, I think, comes because we're naturally cautious -- it's obviously better to err on the side of caution -- but nevertheless, we don't seem to give credit to nature's resilience and to the ability of organisms to cope with change. And to the degree that the models do not incorporate resilience mechanisms -- I'm referring to the trick of relating, for example, rate of deforestation to rate of species loss -- to the degree that those models don't take into consideration the possibility that species recover from changes in the habitat, to that same degree, our estimates of the numbers of extinctions may be too high. So I would assume that we're grossly underestimating the diversity of the world, but we're probably overestimating the rates of extinction.

In other words, the science is not settled. Don't let them tell you otherwise.  And keep your wallet in a safe place.