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I love these little clips from Davos where our governors gathers to suck each others cocks, metaphorically speaking. Their true beliefs and attitudes are revealed.
DAVOS WATCH: USA climate envoy John Kerry claims that the WEF globalists are the "select group of human beings” touched by something at some point in their lives that caused them to have a savior complex
He calls the experience “extra terrestrial” #wef23 pic.twitter.com/diZKoh6fe1
— Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) January 17, 2023
We are incomparably better off than we were in the past, and only concerted human effort can wreck it. We are richer than Rockefeller. Things have improved hugely in our lifetimes, and in the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. This point of view was well expressed in a recent interview of Warren Buffet, who spoke of the enormous increase of wealth in American society and around the world in the space of three generations. Rockefeller had no flat screen, and had to go to a football stadium to see a game, nor did he have any antibiotics that cured me only weeks ago. Calvin Coolidge’s son died of a staphylococcus infection that would have been cured by a tube of non-prescription ointment.
If you want to see how much better things have got for everyone, see a video by Hans Rosling. Our ideas of human population, health, income and family size in the world are in the main obsolete by about forty years.
And yet….
Beyond the froth of electoral politics, and at deeper levels, a movement has arisen that, since the 1970s, has proclaimed a revolution against this wealth. Its success has been spectacular. It dominates governments. It has the majority of population in its grip. Highly intelligent people believe it to be based in incontrovertible fact. Policies are devised at the most minute levels to adapt to its dictates: plastic spoons are banned, grocery bags are switched from paper to plastic and back again, on lines of reasoning adapted to this theory. More than this, energy production is curtailed, pipelines not built, even when they are proven to be safe and effective, and vast tracts of land are turned over to solar panels and wind turbines which have demonstrably less effectiveness in generating energy than machines that burn fuels.
This doctrine announced itself in the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” paper in 1972. Earth’s carrying capacity is limited; we are overstepping natural limits; catastrophe lies ahead unless we do something; the population pressures we humans place on the planet need to be reduced – by reducing the number of people. You don’t have to dig to deep to find a deep pessimism in this doctrine.
The blurb for the Club of Rome’s book starts like this:
“Published 1972 – The message of this book still holds today: The earth’s interlocking resources – the global system of nature in which we all live – probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technology.”
The ideology is a combination of warmed-over Thomas Malthus (overpopulation) with a belief in central planning of the world’s economy that would cheer the heart of Karl Marx. It dominates political assumptions. It is the principal form that leftism took when the Communist system collapsed in the Soviet Union.
We have never been so wealthy, and we have never been so pessimistic about our collective futures.
This is the central contradiction of our times. Most western governments are busy harming the economies of our countries with a view to preventing climate change. Pessimism may wreck the rising tide of wealth creation, which has been fueled by technology, energy production, and civic culture.
More than anything else, I remain a believer that things will get even better, if we only give progress a chance. The pessimists – in the form of Malthusians, limits to growthists – are now in charge. It is their day. We have federal ministers in this country who are seriously bent on wrecking the economy of the one province in Canada that pays the pensions of the rapidly aging populations of Ontario and Quebec.
For a more eloquent exposition of the optimistic view, I again recommend the recent interview with Warren Buffet by Charlie Rose. Buffett expresses the hopeful view, which I think is well justified. I don’t buy into the dark views of ecological doomists.
I used to believe the following tenets of the Club of Rome. I did so for about four years (from the age of 22 to 26) until I woke up from ecodoomism. It is apparent that millions have been sucked into this cult and have never found a way out. Yet. Indeed, ecodoomism is the world’s leading cause of depression, suicide, sexual ambiguity, non-replacement and cultural anomie. It is immediately the cause of policies designed to immiserate the population (viz. Dutch government putting farms out of business to control world atmospheric nitrogen levels).
Here are the doctrines of the Club of Rome, circa 1972. Look familiar?
• “The Limits to Growth” contains six main messages:
Firstly, that the environmental impact of human society
had become heavier between 1900 and 1972 due to
both an increase in the number of humans and the
amount of resources consumed and pollution generated
per person per year.
That our planet is physically limited, and that humanity
cannot continue to use more physical resources and
generate more emissions than nature is capable of
supplying in a sustainable manner. In addition, it will
not be possible to rely on technology alone to solve the
problem as this would only delay reaching the carrying
capacity of the planet by a few years.
Third, the authors cautioned that it is possible, and even
likely, that the human ecological footprint will overshoot
the carrying capacity of the planet, further explaining that
this would likely occur due to significant delays in global
decision making while growth continued, bringing the
human footprint into unsustainable territory.
Once humanity has entered this unsustainable territory,
we will have to move back into sustainable territory,
either through “managed decline” of activity, or we will
be forced to move back through “collapse” caused by the
brutal inherent processes of nature or the market.
The fifth message is one of hope. The authors state
that: “The challenge of overshoot from decision delay
is real, but easily solvable if human society decided to
act”, meaning that forward looking policy could prevent
humanity from overshooting the aforementioned
planetary limits.
Lastly, the authors advocated for an early start – in 1972
that was 1975 – to achieve a smooth transition to a
sustainable world without needing to pass through the
overshoot and contraction phases.
The World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab have followed as night follows day. They key assumptions are that the current population/ resource consumption mix is unsustainable, and the second is that a process of managed decline can smooth the transition to sustainability. I am about to say something at once paradoxical and true. Humans have more to fear from the managers of population reduction than we do of civilizational collapse. Because the population reduction is being planned by people who think they are doing good and the old adage of C. S. Lewis applies: that the robber barons might have their greed satiated, and stop, but the person who tortures for you own good does so with a clean conscience and will not stop. Hence Stalin. Hence Klaus Schwab, and his minions and acolytes.
Collapses are random and bring their own correctives. They are chaotic. If the Roman Empire has to fall, it is better that it occur without central planning, administered by mad tyrants. I realize this is offensive to those who believe that civilizational change can be planned, but it cannot.
The assumption that needs to be challenged the most is that collapse is somehow inevitable because we have gone beyond limits set by Gaia, that this unsustainability is somehow new, and that we can plan our way out of it.
We went beyond the limits set by Gaia since we domesticated animals, invented agriculture and mined metals. I would not wish to say there are no limits, but I would say that the collective intelligence of mankind has continually found solutions to the problems we have ourselves created. We went into the realm of the “unsustainable” tens of thousands of years ago. We are still in “unsustainablity”. There is no stable state. The Club of Rome published its manifesto in 1972. It had a tremendous negative effect over time. It resuscitated the idea of a centrally planned economy when the central conceit of Marxism had collapsed: that a planned economy could prevail over the chaotic forces of the market, or of nature.
The close relationship between the idea of sustainability and the tyranny of all-wise central planners needs to be made clear.
________________________-
Regarding solutions that appear without planning, population growth is collapsing through the very process of unsustainable wealth generation that has come from burning fossil fuels. Women reach a level of prosperity where their kids will survive until adulthood, and – bingo! – they produce at most two children. It is enough to make the most hardened ecodoomist pause and reconsider.
See
Or more brutal yet, try David Goldman (known as Spengler)
To be accurate, “belief” is distinguished from knowledge. What I know for sure does not need to be believed, because in that case belief is superfluous. I see belief and knowledge to be incompatible states of mind. When the pen is dropped from the hand in normal gravity, I know it falls towards the centre of the earth. I might believe it as well but that belief is superfluous.
I believe:
I do not believe:
Most of what I blog is a commentary on the above. And with that, I will call it a day.
Peace.
.
“Now it has become a scandal that so many people are telling lies.”
“The models are being contradicted by observations”.
“A computer model is essentially just fluid dynamics.”
Interviewer “Are you saying the whole history of global warming is based on fluid models, computer models and less on observations? FD “Yes that is true”.
And more. The warmists “live by scaring the public.” (at 7:37)
Interviewer; “Are we saving the world or missing the point?” FD “I would say missing the point”. (at 9:00}
Steven Koonin, an advisor to Obama on climate change policy, has issued a sensible position on the issue.
His soon to be published book “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters” notes that global average temperature has risen by about 1C degree since 1900. More important, it decries any notion that we are in a “climate emergency”. He expects another 1C increase in this century.
“Humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate. The results from many different climate models disagree with, or even contradict, each other and many kinds of observations,” he wrote. “In short, the science is insufficient to make useful predictions about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”
The New York Post article on Koonin’s opinions says:
“Among the most significant revelations were that human activity had no significant influence on hurricanes over the past hundred years; Greenland’s ice sheet has been shrinking at the same rate for the past 80 years; and parts of the world that have been destroyed by wildfires have declined by greater than 25% since 2003, with 2020 being one of the lowest years on record.”
This is congruent with a more extensive set of graphs produced by Willis Eschenbach in Watts Up with That.
Among the charts that interest me most in Eschenbach’s article was the one on sea level rise. It shows that between 1990 and now, sea levels have risen about 80 mm in 25 years. Let us extrapolate this to 320 mm in 100 years, without further justification. This is about 12 and one half inches in a century, which is far less than the rise expected by the physicist Lawrence Krauss, who wrote The Physics of Climate Change . He predicted a rise on sea level of about a meter (39 inches) by mid century.
Krauss situated the problem of global warming principally in rising sea levels, caused by melting glaciers and the expansion of water itself under the influence of greater heat. Krauss believes that places such as the Mekong Delta will be flooded with sea water at high tide, and rendered sterile, by 2100. This would have a disastrous effect on food production in a nation of 90 million people. Krauss is an alarmist but not a catastrophist, and his arguments are persuasive as long as you don’t look at contradictory data.
I have come to the views expressed by Koonin: that humans have had a small warming effect on the climate. and even if we stopped CO2 production right now, we would still be increasing global temperatures by a degree or two for another century at least. But in terms of the policies the elite wankers want us to adopt, I side with General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. I have smelt it for a long time.
It is apparent that CO2 madness is being replaced by COVID as the mania of choice for members of the elite. The opportunities for direct social control with COVID are so much greater and more satisfying to the control freaks, and the willingness of people to go along with the scare so much greater than is the case with CO2. Decades of panic mongering about CO2 as the master control knob for global climate change have not succeeded in making the case for turning off our oil refineries and shutting down civilization as we know it. Always go with the panic that grows government authority most readily, and that is COVID, not atmospheric carbon dioxide.
I wish I could illustrate 415 against a million, but a million is 10,000 (10 to the 4th) times greater than a hundred (10 to the second). I am not proposing that we need orders of magnitude more CO2 in the atmosphere. What I am saying is that a trace gas is vital to plant life. More of it is greening the planet.
It will be evident that any serious policy aimed at reducing carbon emissions will have to focus on more nuclear reactors, as our Liberal government now understands.
So is this truly the end of Greta Thunberg’s influence? Hardly. The damage is now institutionalized in the poilicies of governments that seek to shut down tar sands and other sources of petro-chemical energy. Fanatics like Greta are mascots for the movement. But the attention has moved on from long term abstractions like climate change to hospitalizations and actual deaths.
Meetings are being cancelled, people are working from home, supply chains are being disrupted, businesses harmed, and things are not being done because of the epidemic. High rates of illness may be the more important aspect than the actual deaths that ensue. The disruption occurs when public assembly points are shut down: schools, theatres, shopping centres. The social isolation that people use to protect themselves generates most of the disruption. The combination of infectiousness and lethality has not been seen since the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 50 million.
20% of people who are infected show no symptoms, hence they can roam freely. We have no built-up resistance to it, so the disease is new and may become endemic, meaning it will become a permanent feature of existence.
We may be experiencing something akin to the waves of plague and disease of the latter Roman Empire, when smallpox and other new diseases came out of Africa and killed large portions of the population. Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome must be read to appreciate that Rome fell under a series of blows of plague, and barbarian invasions driven by agricultural collapse caused by sudden global cooling around AD 400. It did not fall from one thing, but a combination of things. We may be at the start of a series of hammer blows that could disturb all the benign predictions ever made by Steven Pinker about the golden age we have been living in, or we may by contrast be at the start of a minor perturbation in the long run of history. Either way we are in for a tough year.
The nature of exponential increase is explained in this youtube from 3blue1brown.com. Watch it for the mathematical truths that are explained.
Aside: I am not the first to observe that, when people believe there is a real risk, they act on that belief. When people are not persuaded there is a real risk, then no matter what they actually profess to believe, they act as if there were no risk. Think of Obama buying an 15 million dollar house six or ten feet above sea level at Martha’s Vineyard. Does Obama believe glaciers are melting? With one part of his mind he does. Does he believe his house will become unlivable as a consequence? Obviously not.
2. Then there is the collapse of investment in Canadian energy projects. This is not an act if God. It is a deliberate policy pursued by Gerry Butts and the Prime Minister. I need not write more about it here, you have seen the details in the papers.
3. The Indians of Canada have been deceived into thinking that they now hold the reins on economic development of natural resources, and perhaps they are right in that opinion. This is another man-made disaster of the federal Liberal party and its feckless leader, Justin Trudeau. The Indians, aided, abetted and driven on by anti-development leftists among Canadian whites, have not been resisted at any stage by the governments of Canada from an arrogant usurpation of the rights of their fellow Indians and ordinary Canadian citizens who favour economic development.
4. Oil price collapse. Russia is feuding with Saudi Arabia over oil production. The effect on US oil production, which has become highly dependent on shale oil, may turn out to be disastrous. Lower gas prices may not mean much when your schools are closed or when factories operate at far less than capacity because of supply chain disruptions caused by coronavirus. The effect on other oil producing countries like Iran or those in Africa, whose costs of production are high, will be severe.
The breakeven price for Canadian oil sands is $70/barrel, according to the graph above. It is questionable whether the figure for shale oil is correct in terms of today’s technology. 96% of Canadian oil reserves are in the form of tar sands.
Conclusion
It has not been a good week, and it has not been a good month, and it is going to get worse.
Words can describe the same thing at various levels of politeness and social acceptability. Moreover, as soon as the euphemism becomes too clear, the word can be changed to something less vulgar. Euphemism piles on euphemism. Thus the place where we void our noxious bodily effusions goes through various evolutions. The incompatibility of shitting with the maintenance of personal dignity causes a continuous slow migration of words to describe the place where the deed is done.
Likewise climate alarmism has changed the terms of the debate whenever it suited them. “Anthropogenic global warming” is a scientific theory. “Global warming” hides the crucial term that attributes human causation to the reality that the world has been warming since 1850. “Climate change” obscures the causal relationship even further. Anything that happens in nature is assumed to be human caused, without that realization ever consciously arising in one’s mind.
The Guardian announced a few months ago that it was changing its terms from “global warming” to “global heating”. They write:
“The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world.
“Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”, although the original terms are not banned.”
Not banned you say? How civilized of them!
The Guardian continues:
“Other terms that have been updated, including the use of “wildlife” rather than “biodiversity”, “fish populations” instead of “fish stocks” and “climate science denier” rather than “climate sceptic”. In September, the BBC accepted it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.”
“Updated”? The use of the term “climate science denier” is not an update, it is a slander.
Yes the climate has changed. 11,000 years ago, where I write was under 4,000 feet of ice. I deny nothing, I merely allow for a wider range of facts to impinge on my understanding of climate.
