The Green New Deal and the left’s grand plan [Part I]
[NOTE: This is such a huge topic that I’m splitting it into parts.]
There’s a lot of derision on the right about the Green New Deal. It goes something like this: it’s so stupid, and so against what the American people want, that it exposes the left to ridicule and will ultimately facilitate the re-election of Donald Trump.
Well, maybe. Maybe that will happen. But I have grave doubts, and I don’t think the GND is stupid. Yes, it may be stupid in the sense of violating our current knowledge about energy generation, or what is practical, as well as financial reality, and the like. But it’s not meant to make sense in that way; it’s meant to make political sense.
But how can that be, if most people can see through it? My answer is that I don’t think most people can see through it, and certainly not enough to make it a losing proposition for most Democratic candidates to hop on board.
But how can I say that? Isn’t it very very extreme, so extreme it will alienate people? For the answer, just do what I did: spend a few hours reading MSM sites and seeing reactions from Democrats. It’s an education in how the GND is being responded to, and why the Democratic candidates have all hopped aboard the extremist green social justice jobs for everyone train.
Last night I watched a clip of some liberal spokesperson or other being quizzed by a conservative as to what she agreed with in the details of the GND. “Its spirit” was all she could come up with, but for her it was enough. She seemed embarrassed when asked about particulars and couldn’t endorse any, but she pooh-poohed—almost ridiculed—the need for details.
I doubt there are many Democratic politicians able to defend many (if any) of the GND manifesto’s specific provisions. And yet many have endorsed it. Why is that? For example, Kamala Harris is all in; she is the proposal’s co-sponsor, and tweeted this after its release:
California senator Kamala Harris (D.) has signed on as a cosponsor of Green New Deal legislation unveiled on Thursday morning, writing in an email to supporters that climate change is an “existential threat to our country, our planet, and our future.”
Harris announced her support for the plan shortly after she launched her presidential run last month, but the details of the proposed federal government-led economic overhaul of the country were not released until Friday…
“Bold action takes bold leadership,” said the 2020 presidential contender, “and I’m grateful to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D., N.Y.] and Senator Ed Markey [D., Mass.] for leading the charge on this critical resolution.”
Nancy Pelosi is no dummmy; she seemed on the one hand to look down on the GND, but on the other hand she apparently set the tone for the spokesperson I saw on the show (liking the spirit). Pelosi had stated this:
“Frankly, I haven’t seen it, but I do know it’s enthusiastic, and I welcome all the enthusiasm,” Pelosi told reporters, just hours before Green New Deal sponsors Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) held their own press conference…
It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi told Politico. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”
See? She is playing both ends here, and AOC played her own part of the game quite well in response:
…I think it is a green dream. I don’t consider to be that a dismissive term,” she said. “Nancy Pelosi is a leader on climate, has always been a leader on climate, and I will not allow our caucus to be divided up by silly notions of whatever narrative. We are in this together.”
The article makes it clear that Pelosi wants some climate change legislation. My guess is that it’s just as I wrote yesterday—hers will seem mild compared to AOC’s. They are indeed in this together.
Since virtually all the Democratic candidates are on board with the GND, this should be used in 2020 by Republicans in the campaign against them. That’s obvious. So why are so many Democratic candidates doing it (and read this article for a refresher on how awful the GND is)?
They know their base will love it—especially young people, but more about that later. And Democrats are counting on the notion that most of the rest of the public will not be paying much attention to the details of the GND, or at least will like the “enthusiasm.”
I was very curious how on earth the MSM would spin this to make it sound plausible. I had little doubt that they would, however, because their goal has been to support the Democrats. I decided to read this New Yorker piece as an example, and I learned exactly what I wanted to know.
If you had read it without reading the Green New Deal text, you’d think the GND to be a rather moderate, ho-hum, slight extension of things that had gone before (ABC took a similar approach). You would have no idea of its lunacy, its extreme radicalism and sweep, and its utter impossibility of implementation without beggaring the country. And of course, most people will almost certainly not read the text of the Green New Deal; they will rely on the MSM to tell them what it really is, and the MSM will keep the focus soft and fuzzy and friendly.
From that article:
It is an even clearer sign than growing Democratic support for single-payer health care that the era of Clintonian triangulation is over—that the question leading Democrats are asking is not whether the Party should move left but how far left it should go.
The resolution is also in keeping with the Democratic Party’s longstanding strategy on climate—the Party has long assumed, probably correctly, that major climate action is unlikely unless addressing the crisis is woven securely into the Party’s economic agenda. A job guarantee, as radical as it seems, is an extension of the same logic that led the Obama Administration to tout the creation of green jobs.
The job guarantee is not some thing that was arbitrarily tacked on; it is integral and a way to sweeten the attraction to the average voter. Another big clue is here:
Of course, no bill they propose will be taken up unless Democrats win the White House in 2020, unseating a President who has claimed repeatedly that climate change is a hoax.
Got it? This GND initiative is a counter to Trump, that troglodyte non-believer in AGW. The GND is not meant to be serious legislation for now, but to burnish the Democrats’ reputation as caring about climate change and the Republicans’ reputation for not caring. And the Democrats are counting on just about no one—except the right, and the far left—to read what’s actually in the GND.
Meanwhile, think about this: the Democratic Party wins these days by appealing to blocs of voters who will vote nearly monolithically for Democrats. Just as one example, black voters. “Young people” are also a bloc that puts Democrats over the top in many races. And many many of today’s young people are terrified of AGW. They have been taught in school from early grades on that it is a dire problem staring us in the face, and that—as AOC has helpfully pointed out prior to releasing the GND—the planet is at risk in the next decade and something drastic must be done or the world is in dire peril. If a person believes that, and believes that science supports it, that person will almost certainly vote for people advocating extreme measures—particularly if that person is unaware of the science and math and history that make those measures very very dangerous as well as unlikely to succeed. The idea is that desperate measures require desperate defenses, and the Democrats are at least willing to take measures that the GOP will not.
Do not estimate the powerful appeal of this to many many people. The Democrats have no intention of passing anything like these proposals for now. The plan for now is to use it all for a cudgel in 2020 and gain more power, and then they can do just about anything they want.
It may not work, but it’s not stupid—not if your goal is power and control.
The problem here is that producing electricity is so conservative technology that it hardly had witnessed any significant changes for almost a century. This is partly due to engineering genius of Nikola Tesla who invented all the main components of it, and partly due immutable laws of physics governing it. Except for nuclear plants, it is virtually impossible to propose any realistic improvement, and so-called renewable sources do not fit well with the grid, so replacement of the traditional sources by them is a pipe dream.
People into increasing power in this regard always seem to put the most insane radical ideas out first so that when they move on the less radical they can say, “Well, at least its not as crazy as the first load of bumpf.” Its a rachet move.
Neo, I think you are exactly right about this. It almost saddens me to read the sane and practical commentary about this GND, which seems to me to be merely rising to take the bait. Of course it depends on the stupidity of the American voter, a resource that is increasing. It worked to get us the ACA.
Neo, I think you are exactly right about this. It almost saddens me to read the sane and practical commentary about this GND, which seems to me to be merely rising to take the bait. Of course it depends on the stupidity of the American voter, which the commentariat seems to be underestimating. Politically, this will work.
Neo: “And many many of today’s young people are terrified of AGW. They have been taught in school from early grades on that it is a dire problem staring us in the face, and that—as AOC has helpfully pointed out prior to releasing the GND—the planet is at risk in the next decade and something drastic must be done or the world is in dire peril. If a person believes that, and believes that science supports it, that person will almost certainly vote for people advocating extreme measures—particularly if that person is unaware of the science and math and history that make those measures very very dangerous as well as unlikely to succeed.”
The obvious answer is that somehow we must show the general public how the theory of CAGW is only an unproven theory and that the connection between CO2 and warming is questionable. How to do that? Only an all out effort by the “climate deniers” will work. The zone must be flooded with climate scientists who know the truth and can explain it in terms laymen will understand. When I say the zone, I mean all media outlets, newspaper editorials, books, well publicized public interest lectures, and documentary movies. The truth must be gotten out to the general public.
A start would be to point out that James Hansen, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt and other “warmers” will admit under pressure that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (400 parts per million) is too small to have any appreciable effect on global warming. To get the warming they have been predicting, they invented the concept of “forcings.” Forcings are water vapor, methane, aerosols, surface albedo changes, solar irradiance, and other such hard to measure factors. Using educated guesses to quantify those forcings, they have constructed climate models, which they hold out as accurate predictors of future warming. The biggest problem is that the models constructed in the 1990s have not been very predictive. They have predicted much more warming than what has been observed. That has not motivated them to go back to the drawing board and reexamine their theory. Instead, they have continued to predict an end to the world due to global warming and accused anyone who challenges their theory of being a “Denier” – a buzz word that is intended to vilify anyone who disagrees with them. The basic concept that all warming is due to CO2 is questionable, but they can’t openly admit that. It would threaten their funding.
The second front that must be engaged is that CO2 is a “pollutant.” CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere that is absolutely necessary for life. There is not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to be harmful to anyone’s health. By calling it a “pollutant” they establish that it is BAD. and SCARY. Fear is a main ingredient of what they are selling. That lie must be demolished.
Another avenue of attack on the GND is to point out that destroying our economy will benefit our competitors and adversaries who will continue to use fossil fuels and delight in seeing the U.S. descend into a 19th Century standard of living. Movies or novels about a dystopic U.S. that is desperately trying to make reliable electric power out of solar panels and windmills while the society crumbles might also inform the general public about the horrors of the GND proposal.
Well, that’s my solution. Anyone got better ideas? We’ll need them.
A few postings back, people were talking about the idea that in bargaining, one asks for more than one can get so as to make a lesser, but worthwhile, offer seem more palatable.
So: This gambit is an example of The Art of the Deal, in the hands of those who get off on ruining things.
What a rush!
(And the sense of P-o-w-e-r don’t hurt none, either. Look, Ma, I can nudge the pieces around like this and actually topple the King!)
. . .
–She said, venting at the immense spraying of ridiculous but deadly venom by the Enemy.
A common and not-unhealthy human reaction.
But having vented, how to counter with winning moves against the enemy’s? That is the real question.
I’m sorry but in my opinion the camp demanding immediate and urgent action on climate change have yet to address the simple questions first raised by Lomborg in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, namely, what would the costs and benefits be?
It helps to start at the bottom of the argument: what, if anything, can we do about climate change even if the alarmists are right in claiming climate change is a grave threat to civilization? It turns out, very little, no matter how much we are prepared to do or how much it might cost, even to the point of dismantling our industrial civilization. Most of the change is already baked in. Even IPCC data supports this conclusion.
The second question from the bottom is whether global warming caused by increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere is really a bad thing. Let us grant that ecosystems will shift northwards and that many plant and animal species will have to adapt. But what about the positive side of the equation? More CO2 in the air has already increased agricultural yields by roughly 15% and has led to a greening of the planet, with shrinking deserts. (Look it up.)
Then there is the fact, according to the climate models at least, that most of the warming is expected to occur near the poles, at night, during the winter. Could you ask for anything better than that? The world’s temperate zone will grow larger as a brief glance and the globe will show, which means that the planet will be more habitable, not less. To say nothing of the fact that more people die from cold every year than from heat.
And George W. wasn’t completely off the mark when he said the answer to global warming was air conditioning, which is but another way of saying that we are a uniquely adaptable species.
Then, coming up to the beginning of the argument, there is the question of how severe the warming will be. The IPCC publishes estimates (based not on hard science but upon the consensus of models and climatologists best guesses) that indicates it might be quite moderate. The idea of a tipping point (aka positive feedback loops) seems inherently unlikely as it would imply that earth’s climate is highly unstable, which it doesn’t appear to be. Certainly the warming caused by CO2 alone — and on this I think the scientists agree — is on the order of one or two degrees centigrade. This is the so-called climate sensitivity. We can certainly live with that.
Which comes back to the first question I raised above: we better hope there are no big positive feedbacks — that increased water vapor will be counteracted by increased cloud cover in particular — because otherwise we are doomed no matter what we do.
I get most of this by reading Lubos Motl, the IPCC reports, and of course Lomborg himself.
Note how they frame everything in terms that are instantly relatable…”global warming” becomes “climate change”, socialism/marxism becomes “social justice”…they really are quite good at this.
Today several people on WUWT have suggested a new formatting for us: change “renewables” to “weather dependent energy”. It get rids of the fuzzy soft, nice “renewables” and states what those sources actually are in easy to understand terms. I suggest everyone start using the term especially with people on the left and in the middle. It’s a small thing, but look how they have controlled the language and thus the culture.
@Luke Lea:Let us grant that ecosystems will shift northwards and that many plant and animal species will have to adapt.
I don’t think it’s wise to just hand-wave “of course warmer is better”. People are living in and accommodated to the world as it is now, and a large change in that has winners and losers and expenses, even if in the end we might look back on it as having been for the best.
For an example the USDA zone have shifted northward since the 90s, and how quickly can Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and redwoods shift northward? It takes a short time for a tall tree to die, and a long time for it to grow. So the conifer forest can shift north, but not as quickly as blackberries and broom can. And so for many decades you’re going to see transition zones of really crappy vegetation where once were conifers, because the slow-growing desirable trees have to compete with the weeds that got in and established themselves first.
The kinds of plants and animals that adapt best to changing conditions tend to be what humans consider “weeds” and “vermin”, respectively. Yes, “weeds” and “vermin” are somewhat in the eye of the beholder. I may make my fortune in rat ranching perhaps.
As for the benefits, yes it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, somebody benefits from any change, even if in aggregate the change is bad. But a fairly large disturbance in how things are now, will have extra costs in adapting to it, even if in aggregate the change is good–and some folks are definitely going to be worse off.
Of course. You have to pass the bill before you can find out what is in it.
Look. the unemployment rate for blacks is at an all time low. For Hispanics the same.
Manufacturing is showing some recovery and the general unemployment rate is at its lowest since 1969. In any normal universe the entire nation would be celebrating.
But they are not. Because these figures and these results mean nothing to a sizable portion of the American population who have burrowed into institutional niches and have made it their life project to avoid risk and insulate themselves from personal responsibility.
They simply do not care about these matters.
There’s a lot of derision on the right about the Green New Deal. It goes something like this: it’s so stupid, and so against what the American people want, that it exposes the left to ridicule and will ultimately facilitate the re-election of Donald Trump.
Well, maybe. Maybe that will happen. But I have grave doubts, and I don’t think the GND is stupid. Yes, it may be stupid in the sense of violating our current knowledge about energy generation, or what is practical, as well as financial reality, and the like. But it’s not meant to make sense in that way; it’s meant to make political sense.
But how can that be, if most people can see through it?
neo: I take your general point. Nonetheless, the Green New Deal FAQ page got taken down within hours.
https://www.chicksonright.com/blog/2019/02/07/aaaaand-the-green-new-deal-faq-page-got-taken-down/
Slate, which is not even center-left, is already putting out, “Whoa, big fella” posts:
“The Green New Deal Will Never Work”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/green-new-deal-unrealistic-impossible-experts.amp
“Why the Green New Deal Rollout Was Kind of a Mess”
https://slate.com/business/2019/02/green-new-deal-faq-ocasio-cortez-rollout-confusion.amp
I don’t believe Democrats can pull off another “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” promise by smiling, waving their hands and tripling down.
Though, to be sure, many will drink the kool-aid.
huxley:
I don’t think you actually do get my point, although you get part of it.
Of course the page was pulled. That’s because they realized that the details were playing poorly. They didn’t want many people to pay attention to the details, just the warm fuzzies the MSM was putting out to cover up all those pesky little things like no more airplanes. The drumbeat of the MSM and Democrat message about enthusiasm and “at least we’re doing something and we care” will overtake the knowledge of those few people who remember those details later on.
I’ve said the Democrats’ approach might not work. But they’re smart enough to fine-tune it by removing those details in a very very timely fashion, and they assume (perhaps rightly) that they can recover any lost ground, with the help of the MSM and the rest. They are very good at propaganda. And any time anyone asks about those details, they will change the subject and talk about enthusiasm and good intentions and how they are for the people, just as that pundit did on the show I was watching, and just as Pelosi did.
As for rollouts, in the end it didn’t matter with Obamacare.
neo: And I said, “I take your general point.”
I often think you don’t get actually get my points. So there!
As I said in a previous thread — stuff works until it doesn’t.
Of course, the Dem/leftists will keep pushing their strategy, which paid off like four aces in the good old days, but I think we’re past the inflection point. Their hand is only worth two pair and the rest is bluff.
I read desperation in the Green New Deal, not a wily strategy which will move the Overton Window to compromises that we will only give up half of our oil, coal and nukes, etc.
huxley:
Oh, and that Slate piece you linked explains (although it does not espouse) the view that I’ve already discussed, which is that the extreme suggestions of the GND make other less extreme solutions very possible (as well as desirable, in this case):
The author does then go on to criticize the plan as written as unworkable (he also calls it “Trumpian” by the way—as in “the perfect distillation of the Trumpian, big swing, mega-MAGA hashtag, nonconstrained by literalism, post–reality-to-accuracy politics age”—see, it’s Trump’s fault!). But then, after mentioning that experts don’t think we can get to 100% in ten years (a fairly minor quibble, considering certain other things the GND actually proposes), he writes:
His main quibble, and perhaps his only quibble, as far as I can see, with the GND is that it promises too much too fast. It’s a question of pace: what the experts think can be accomplished would have a somewhat slower pace. Otherwise, it all seems fine with him, as far as I can tell. He again blames it on recent Republican presidents, here:
huxley:
I had written that you get part of my point.
Maybe just maybe, when the long view and big picture is considered… having the GND pass into law is a necessary evil.
As, America following Venezuela into the “Democratic Socialist” ABYSS is guaranteed to wake up a LOT of our young ‘socialists’. As there’s nothing like brutal reality to remove entrenched illusions. Protests would follow with one difference; unlike Venezuela’s poor, we are armed to the teeth…
“Some men need killing…” etched on the tombstone of Gunslinger Clay Allison
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better.” Abraham Lincoln
Gerard Vanderleun at 4:32 pm said:
“It’s a ratchet move.”
That’s what I was thinking, but in different words. The left is into the long game. They’ve got plenty of time to achieve their utopia. What this Green New Deal does is to lurch the Overton Window sharply leftward. That’s very bad for us righties.
Interesting piece at Vox from January 28 — “Americans are worried about climate change — but don’t want to pay much to fix it”; some excerpts:
I think we need to coordinate a series of comments or questions that will play to voters’ cognitive dissonance. 1) Ask AOC whether she tried to get her bar owner boss to stop selling drinks that had to be transported by trucks across the country.
2) Since employers are now looking for trained workers, where will you find all the people needed to refurbish every building in the country? 3) Will you hire Jerry Brown to oversee the building of all the high-speed train lines in the country? 4) How many riders will use those trains between two towns of 10,000 in Wyoming and Montana? 5) If you are trying to renovate your house to have an extra bedroom for your new baby, will you be willing to double your mortgage to pay for installing a new heating system when yours is only a few years old?
Such a list could go on for a long time, but individual items have to be put out so that loads of people hear them.
Frederick,
You make some good, if obvious points. It would be more correct to say “more CO2 might be better” than “of course, warmer is better.” For example, crop yields are considerably higher now. That is a very large benefit.
Yes, some people might be much more adversely affected, especially compared to others. But that is the entire point of Lomborg’s body of work. According to him, the economist, it is vastly more cost effective to spend capital on those adverse problems as they occur, rather than spend 50 or 100 trillion globally, and disrupting everyone, in an effort to return the atmosphere to the year 1900.
Note, as the science of climate computer models has gotten better, the hysterical claims of 5 to 7 deg. C temp. increases has given way to claims 1.5 to 2.5 deg. C. Those earlier claims were called “peer-reviewed consensus” too. Possibly the current numbers will continue to come down.
Neo said,
“Of course the page was pulled. That’s because they realized that the details were playing poorly.”
Here’s a gaffe from those pages,
“Build on FDR’s second bill of rights by guaranteeing: Economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.”
As comic Dennis Miller used to say repeatedly. “”I want to help the helpless, but I don’t want to help the clueless.” Or the unwilling.
_____
huxley said,
“I read desperation in the Green New Deal, …”
There is the point that around 2012 give or take, there was a panic that the global warming may have actually stopped. The horrors! Check out Dr. Roy Spencer and his charts of the satellite data on troposphere temps. Temps had been dropping for a couple years in 2012, while they’ve bounced back and forth since then, they not higher now than in late 2010.
_______
Ann says,
“… 23 percent said they’d pay at least $40 per month, and 16 percent were willing to pay at least $100 per month. [to fix climate change]”
Germans were promised years ago that “fixes” to their energy infrastructure would only add the cost of two scoops of ice cream to their monthly energy bill. A few years ago, after these were implemented, some wag stated that the actual cost increase could purchase scoops of all 31 flavors. Is that about $100 or more?
I r a physicist and even played one in real life. I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at the basic physics and my conclusion is that carbon dioxide has exactly zero effect on warming the climate regardless of its concentration. The mechanism they promote for making it a “greenhouse gas” violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That’s a worthless argument because only a tiny slice of the population can understand what that means. But this debate has nothing to do with science and everything to do with power and money, so I suggest a different tack.
First stop calling them progressives, the correct name is totalitarian left. Neo, you have good connections to people like glen reynolds and elsewhere. Get them on the band wagon to start calling the Democrats that. As Confucious said, the reification of names is the first step in understanding the truth.
Next, insist that DC be the test bed right now. No AC in summer, it wastes lots of energy for no reason at all. Insist that DC completely switch to windmills and solar electricity within two years, no exceptions. Let’s see how that goes over. That should be the reply everytime they start up on the Green New Deal. Learn to chant “Green DC now.”
“The Energy 202: No ‘unanimity’ on Green New Deal, says key House Democrat”:
Grijalva is a drunk and an abuser,.
I have worked for an electric company for over 25 years. The executives that have come in over the last 5-7 years are very much on board with the “green” tech. Most of them are finance and MBA types. Some of it is because they are getting tax breaks and direct price incentives for “green” generation, but I have begun to see that many are also Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming believers.
I am on the back office side and not an engineer but while discussing the problems with intermittent generation like wind and solar with my boss, he actually said “What if costs and profit wasn’t an issue. Why does that always have to matter? If we didn’t think about that maybe we could come up with a better way.” This man is 50 years old and a Director level exec at a power company and he doesn’t seem to understand that economics is not just a conservative trick to stop us from doing “good things”.
If the non-engineers working for an electric company can’t see why ideas like these won’t work, what chance do other people, most of whom see electricity as basically magic, have.
I will not be using my normal name on this since would not this to get back to him.
FWIW, for some reason, despite all the press, this isn’t playing at all (yet) on my ultra liberal Facebook feed, that otherwise (inexplicably) adores the ground AOC walks on. But, even an acquaintance, who last week posted “it’s time to eat insects to save the planet!” hasn’t mentioned this.
Someone,
Thanks for the comment. I laughed instead of crying. You may want to be doubly or triply careful in posting though. Email addresses and MAC addresses are likely exposed to masters of the universe like Google/Alphabet.
@Paul in Boston: The mechanism they promote for making it a “greenhouse gas” violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
That’s not true… love to see you lay out why you think that is, I’ve heard incompatible versions of that.
American Institute of Physics has a good explanation of how the physics works; as you might expect, if you belonged that professional society.
Fredrick:
“Fresh analysis of government scientific records reveals the idea of ‘long-settled’ science in the greenhouse gas theory is a myth.”
https://principia-scientific.org/r-i-p-greenhouse-gas-theory-1980-2018/
And the APA thinks masculinity is a pathological condition.
Consensus is not science or didn’t they teach you that?
Luke Lea: “The IPCC publishes estimates (based not on hard science but upon the consensus of models and climatologists best guesses) that indicates it might be quite moderate.”
Yep. Here’s what the most recent estimate was:
From the IPCC AR5 WGII:
“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21st century is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”
The MSM and the Warmers ignore this. No one asked AOC if she had read the IPCC AR5 (WGII Table 12.4) when she predicted that we only have ten years before we all perish.
I have lived 86 years and I can tell you that the weather, on average, does not seem perceptively warmer than it was when I was a young person. The only thing that caught my attention in those 86 years was the Arab oil embargoes of the 70s. That focused my attention on the need for us to be more efficient in our use of energy. Even though we are now self sufficient in oil, I don’t believe in wasting energy. We should always work to become more efficient, but abandoning fossil fuels for weather dependent energy is just not technically feasible at this time.
I agree with Lomborg that adaptation is a better strategy than mitigation. Especially since we aren’t dead certain that CO2 is the cause of the warming we have seen. Additionally, adaptation is much easier if you have abundant energy to help with the process of adapting to a changing climate.
Taking my cue from Paul, above, I would recommend calling them the Thieving Left.
What I want to know is, if the world doesn’t end in 12 years, will they all sit down and shut up?
Thank you Ann!
It’s gratifying to learn that a mere 16%-23% of Americans are willing to put their own money where their mouth is… that’s also an accurate snapshot of the percentage of Americans actually committed to personally doing something about the chimera of “global warming”.
The degree to which someone is willing to, if need be, sacrifice their own “blood and treasure” demonstrates the degree of commitment.
It’s heartening to have confirmed that “Sturm und Drang” is all they’ve really got.
‘It’s gratifying to learn that a mere 16%…’
This.
Some great comments and suggestions here, I’m totally on board with ‘weather dependent energy’ and ‘Green DC Now!’
A lot of physics talk, too. So even though I’m putting my trust in the Lord to save the US from this iteration of human vanity and foolishness, failing that, there’s always Newton’s Third Law.
Coming late, as usual, and as an aside…..
I don’t think we need be too wary of “Young People”. “Young People” are something of a “Boomer” preoccupation; they were the original “Young People” after all, and so the assumption is that “Young People” will forever be as the “Boomers” were: Radical etc. Not so, when you talk to some. No doubt they were taught about AGW at school, but they were also taught about spelling and arithmetic and those lessons don’t appear to have had much impact.
Paris 68, Chicago 68 and Woodstock were 50 years ago. 50 years before I was born King Edward VII was on the throne. Kids I talk to regard the 1980s as Ancient History, and if I was inclined to tell then that unless we mend our ways the seas will start boiling in 12 years, I don’t suppose they’d be too worried because they can’t conceive that far ahead.
So if we corner them with graphs and charts and argue about AGW all we’ll accomplish is to convince them that we are indeed cranks.
a more appropriate name for their proposal would be the “Green Leap Forward”
Or, “Flying Green Leap”.
Off the cliff.
My take, in text and 2/4 time:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/ritchie-the-riveter/dim-bulbs/140514325995655/
King Edward VII was on the throne.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLTJ8hrxlM0
If the non-engineers working for an electric company can’t see why ideas like these won’t work, what chance do other people, most of whom see electricity as basically magic, have.
Excellent point. We have a poorly educated (maybe on purpose-See Antonio Gramsci) generation or two that will learn or crash the system. In the 1970s and early 80s I was a bit of a survivalist. I had a 40 foot sailboat and freeze dried food, etc. At the time I had kids that were in school and worried about the wild inflation and oil shocks.
I’m old now so I figure they can drive the country to ruin and it won’t affect me.
Bill Cosby had a very funny routine about electricity that probably represents what most people think.
It’s all about moving the Overton Window. The left will keep pushing it until the sheeple buy it.
That’s why I think we must destroy the concepts and ideologies expressed within it to anyone and everyone.
I have to say, I’m extremely encouraged by all of you that have posted a reply! Great analysis and I can’t tell you how happy I am to see so many people standing up to these dangerous ideologies.
And many thanks to Neo being Neo.
Hey Ritchie… that’s awesome! Very catchy.
Check out Ritchie’s links if you haven’t yet.
@Om:Consensus is not science or didn’t they teach you that?
I never suggested it was, or used the word, or appealed to consensus in any way.
A specific claim about the physics of carbon dioxide was made, referring to a specific law of physics. That claim I know to be false. I asked for an explanation of J. J.’s claim, and he didn’t give one.
Since the AIP has an explanation of how the Second Law applies to the physics of carbon dioxide and global warming, and they are the professional society that the bulk of the world’s physicists belong to, I was hoping he would read and see that his fellow physicists can give him what he needs to see that his claim is false.
What’s on their web page is I thought a good explanation of how the science of global warming developed and specifically the physics behind it. You don’t have to accept that increasing carbon dioxide results in higher global temperatures to benefit from the explanations there.
Because you can use those explanations to attack the warmists with VALID arguments, instead of fallacious arguments.
If a man says he’s a physicist and says something wrong about physics, he might not listen to me, but he might listen to his peers who also say he’s wrong, because he and they are both experts and they can say it in a way he understands and might accept, as opposed to a random stranger on the Web.
I should probably hasten to add that like Neo, I think that the science of global warming is being seized on as an excuse for power and control. Because I see people assuming that I must be on the warmist side, because I’m offering mild disagreement to some anti-warmist statements.
The proof that the science is being used as an excuse, to me, is anyone who claims to be worried about it but opposes nuclear and hydro generation. Those are the most obvious ways to cut carbon dioxide emissions in a big hurry, and they would work (though be quite expensive). Obvioulsy such a person has not bothered to learn the science but is using as an excuse to justify what they already wanted anyway.
That said, I don’t think you should fight lies and falsehoods with other falsehoods. That the science of global warming violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics is one of those falsehoods.
I always like to point out the NASA earth’s energy budget poster.
https://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/energy_budget/
The total radiant energy entering the top of the atmosphere is obviously 100%. NASA then shows this energy incident upon the Earth’s surface at a rate of 7% reflected solar insolation plus 48% absorbed solar insolation plus 100% back radiation from the atmosphere for a total of 155%. They have the atmosphere making energy. The Conservation of Energy in a system in equilibrium does not allow the flow of energy into the Earth’s surface to exceed the rate at which energy enters the system.
@Ray:They have the atmosphere making energy.
I’m afraid you are reading that poster wrong.
The solar input is 340.4. Total reflected solar is 99.9. Total outgoing infrared is 239.9. Net absorbed is 0.6. 0.6+ 99.9 + 239.9 = 340.4.
The energy balance they show, into and out of the Earth-atmosphere system, is checking out.
If the poster had been wrong, that would only mean NASA got the poster wrong, which would reflect on NASA only.
Frederick at 11:09 and 11:20.
The AIP article you linked to was a history, not science. They leave out the criticism of Sir George Simpson, the founder of the UK Meteorological Society, of Callendar who reintroduced the claim that CO2 warmed the atmosphere.
Sir George Simpson, reply to Callendar, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, vol. 64, issue 275, pp. 223-240, 1938
“In the first place he thought it was not sufficiently realized by non-meteorologists who came for the first time to help the Society in its study, that it was impossible to solve the problem of the temperature distribution in the atmosphere by working out the radiation. The atmosphere was not in a state of radiative equilibrium, and it also received heat by transfer from one part to another. In the second place, one had to remember that the temperature distribution in the atmosphere was determined almost entirely by the movement of the air up and down. This forced the atmosphere into a temperature distribution which was quite out of balance with the radiation. One could not, therefore, calculate the effect of changing any one factor in the atmosphere, and he felt that the actual numerical results which Mr. Callendar had obtained could not be used to give a definite indication of the order of magnitude of the effect.”
Modelers treat the radiation emitted by CO2 as coming from isolated shells in the atmosphere that only interact with each other via infrared radiation. If that were true, yes, the CO2 would warm the surface. However, the inconvenient truth is that the atmosphere is made up of air that is not broken up into shells and the air can transfer energy around via conduction and convection, in very messy ways. A real world example is the Thermos flask. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_flask
“A vacuum flask (also known as a Dewar flask, Dewar bottle or thermos) is an insulating storage vessel that greatly lengthens the time over which its contents remain hotter or cooler than the flask’s surroundings. Invented by Sir James Dewar in 1892, the vacuum flask consists of two flasks, placed one within the other and joined at the neck. The gap between the two flasks is partially evacuated of air, creating a near-vacuum which significantly reduces heat transfer by conduction or convection.”
If the vacuum is broken, the thermos no longer insulates its contents from room temperature. Your coffee gets cools quickly. The second law of thermodynamics applies and the warmunists get it wrong. They also manipulate the data and ignore the scientific method among other sins which I won’t get into here.
By the way, about a decade ago the American Physical Society, the professional society for physicists, put out one of those “The science is settled, it is incontrovertible, CO2 is going to doom us” statements. It created an uproar that provoked a massive pushback by the membership including a fair number of resignations by prominent members of the society. The most famous resignation was by Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1973 who said, “Is climate change pseudoscience? If I’m going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely.”
https://www.mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/videos/34729/ivar-giaever-global-warming-revisited/laureate-giaever
Frederick: “A specific claim about the physics of carbon dioxide was made, referring to a specific law of physics. That claim I know to be false. I asked for an explanation of J. J.’s claim, and he didn’t give one.”
I made no such claim. My claim is that the amount of O2 in the atmosphere is too small to have an outsize effect on warming. That comes directly from the blog, Real Climate, which I began reading in the early 1990s. It is hosted by Gavin Schmidt and other well known advocates of CAGW. It was there that I learned that they admit that the amount of CO2 (400 parts per million) could not account for the warming they were measuring. They then came up with the idea of “forcings” that amplify the effect of CO2. The forcings are difficult to measure on a global basis so they made educated guesses to feed into their computer models. Those models have consistently predicted more warming than has occurred. So, maybe the science is wrong. At least it’s certainly not accurate enough to recommend abandoning fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro-electric (As you mentioned the Greenies are against all of these.) for energy sources that are unable to replace them at this time.
I highly recommend the link om posted. It is a pretty good discussion of the history of claims/counter claims about CO2 as a greenhouse gas. If nothing else it shows that the science is far from settled.
@Paul:The AIP article you linked to was a history, not science.
Yes, it was the history of the science. It is not a journal paper or a textbook. And in that article and its links you will find an explanation of the physics of how carbon dioxide influences warming, which J. J. falsely says violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
“What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. (To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule may radiate the energy back out again in a random direction. Or it may transfer the energy into velocity in collisions with other air molecules, so that the layer of air where it sits gets warmer.) The layer of air radiates some of the energy it has absorbed back toward the ground, and some upwards to higher layers. As you go higher, the atmosphere gets thinner and colder. Eventually the energy reaches a layer so thin that radiation can escape into space.
What happens if we add more carbon dioxide? In the layers so high and thin that much of the heat radiation from lower down slips through, adding more greenhouse gas means the layer will absorb more of the rays. So the place from which part of the heat energy finally leaves the Earth will shift to higher layers. Those are thinner and colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well.(11a*) The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates (which is in fact our current situation). As the upper levels radiate some of the excess downwards, all the lower levels down to the surface warm up. The imbalance must continue until the upper levels get warmer and radiate out more energy. As in Tyndall’s analogy of a dam on a river, the barrier thrown across the outgoing radiation forces the level of temperature everywhere beneath it to rise until there is enough radiation pushing out to balance what the Sun sends in.
While that may sound fairly simple once it is explained, the process is not obvious if you have started by thinking of the atmosphere from below as a single slab. The correct way of thinking eluded neary all scientists for more than a century after Fourier. Physicists learned only gradually how to describe the greenhouse effect. To do so, they had to make detailed calculations of a variety of processes in each layer of the atmosphere. (For more on absorption of infrared by gas molecules, see this discussion in the essay on Basic Radiation Calculations.)”
@J.J.I made no such claim.
No, you didn’t, it was Paul in Boston. My mistake.
They then came up with the idea of “forcings” that amplify the effect of CO2. The forcings are difficult to measure on a global basis so they made educated guesses to feed into their computer models. Those models have consistently predicted more warming than has occurred. So, maybe the science is wrong.
Certainly. If the atmosphere was totally carbon dioxide it would be much more straightforward to make predictions.
But if carbon dioxide leads to a small increase in temperature, that might result in more water vapor, which would lead to even higher temperatures. Unless that lead to more clouds and snow and ice, which would offset those higher temperatures. But is it enough to cancel out the original warming, or more than that, or less than that?
So that’s why they tried to understand by building complicated models. It IS complicated.
Which is why I don’t think it makes sense to trash our energy infrastructure oer it just yet.
I was pretty much leaning toward the positive of AGW until the EAU emails and comments were leaked. I wasn’t terribly involved in the science of it all. I was once an engineer and later an MD. But, when I saw the evidence of chicanery at EAU, I knew that nothing they said after that could be trusted. I gradually drifted to Watts up with that.
Correction: “It was there that I learned that they admit that the amount of CO2 (400 parts per million) could NOT account for the warming they were measuring.”
The GND will only work, in a power and control sense for the democrats, if there is no legitimate candidate on the GOP side to rebut it and make its radicalism plain as day. If we had Jeb! or McCain, or either Bush, it would work grandly.
But we have Trump, who isn’t afraid of taking off the gloves and calling it for what it is. How the MSM treats it is irrelevant. 2016 proved that in spades.
It worries me not at all and I am very happy they are espousing such a clear distinctive choice.
Fredrick;
Assumptions built upon assumptions that are not backed up by reality (models that don’t work), acknowledging that the societies and associations that buttress your argument are a consensus, and then to accuse JJ of “falsity.”
Question. What is the surface area of the oceans where diatoms live and consume CO2? Is there more surface area of water or land on the Earth? Would additional CO2 favor the increase of said plants? Do dead diatoms and such give up the CO2 when they die (to the atmosphere) or does some of it get deposited on the bottom of the deep old briny abyss? And then of course when just CO2 doesn’t explain it all there are all the other “Greenhouse gasses.” A house of cards built on sand indeed, but backed by models (which use maths!).
But we shouldn’t worry. your explanation from Physics (the only science) has the answer, others are ignorant or falsifiers.
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@om:But we shouldn’t worry. your explanation from Physics (the only science) has the answer, others are ignorant or falsifiers.
A terrible slaughter of straw men: I was responding to one and only one obectively false statement, made by Paul in Boston, not J. J. (I was mistaken and acknowledged that). None of the things you criticize me for are things that I actually said.
The GND isn’t even about defeating Trump. It’s part of the long game by the Bolsheviks. One hundred years ago the cry in Russia was “A job for every peasant!” and “Land reform!” and “No more bosses! The people will own the factories!”. The Bolsheviks didn’t mean it then. It was about getting the power.
Today, here in the USA, the cry to the ignorant masses is “Free Health Care!” and “Free University Education!” and “We Only Have Twelve Years To Save The Planet!”. The Bolsheviks don’t mean it now. It’s about getting the power.
I think it’s Sun Tzu who wrote, “The battle is decided before the troops ever join in the fight.” We conservatives lose all the battles because we want to join in a battle of ideas – a debate if you will. The Bolsheviks don’t care about the ideas. They care about winning. Winning the argument is not the prize. Being right is not the prize. Absolute Power and Control is the prize.
The Bolsheviks are on a one hundred year tear because they capture the critical ground first (National Media Establishment, Education System, The FEC and state election boards, The Courts, The Government Bureaucracy – IRS, DOJ, State, Defense, EPA, etc.) then shore up their supply lines (Tom Steyr, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, George Soros) so they can sustain the long siege of battle. And then they work with patience, knowing their time will come.
Their army of ignorant peasants (The Millenials through Generation Z plus Third World Immigrants) can’t find Canada on a map but have been taught the Canadian health care system is better than America’s – and are not told how Canadians with serious health issues come to the US for treatment. They can’t find France on a globe but have heard the French universities are free. They can’t show ONE place on earth where sustainable energy and infrastructure is an economic or net carbon benefit. When the ignorant peasant get what they asked for, they don’t like it so much and revolt.
By then it’s too late for everyone.
I agree that the Green New Deal will gin up the Democrat far left base, but beyond that I don’t see the coalition that put Trump in office doing anything other than rejecting it outright. I don’t think young people are terrified of global warming, I think they’re terrified of holding beliefs that don’t pass muster in the Church of Secular Socialism in which mandatory membership is required for social acceptance by their peers. (Take a look at Tim Pool’s insightful analyses of Gen Z’s trend away from far leftism for more on this.) Meanwhile, the working class Democrats and independents who put Trump in office actually are terrified of the globalist/socialist policies that brought such economic disaster upon them and their communities. No way do those voters abandon Trump just when things are getting so much better for them only to lurch far deeper into the globalist/socialist tyranny that caused them to cross party lines and vote for Trump in the first place. They don’t need to read the Green New Deal or anything else, they just need to see AOC and her hate-filled, tyrannical messaging (not to mention just seeing Nancy Pelosi’s face, period) to run ever faster into Trump’s arms. And see it they will because AOC is all over the news every day all day. When they see her and hear her they’ll see Obama and think, “Fool me once…”
I just thought of another point to make to the young: If we give up cows, we give up cheese, and Mac and Cheese is no longer available.
I see commenters, here and there, renaming AOC’s “Green New Deal” ** the “Green Leap Forward,” comparing it to Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward,” and I think this an apt comparison.
AOC’s Green Leap Forward which, through a “ten year national mobilization” on the scale of our government’s total mobilization of our citizenry during WWII—to quote AOC—“This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation ”—proposes to rehab or rebuild every structure in the U.S. to fight “global warming”—oops, sorry, “climate change”—to make it more energy efficient, and to eliminate the vast majority of all current forms of “green house gas generating” electricity production in favor of total reliance on wind and solar power by 2030.
To quote the non-binding Congressional Resolution Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her cosponsor Senator Ed Marky introduced, along the way, her Green Leap Forward will also “provide justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous communities, communities, of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth, referred in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities.””
Such frontline and vulnerable communities to play a key, pivotal role in this national crusade, and the decision making involved.
AOC’s Green Leap Forward to also provide guaranteed (union only, apparently) jobs with a family sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security for all, as well as apparently free health care, and adequate, safe housing and clean water to every person in America. If you don’t want to work, no worries, you’ll apparently get an adequate payment from the government anyway.
AOC’s plan also apparently proposes to eliminate all travel by aircraft and to replace it with travel by train or boat, to eliminate the atmospheric pollution caused by cows, etc, etc.
How all this would be paid for seems to be solved with a lot of “hand wavium”.
I think that name change perfectly captures AOC’s Green New Deal’s resemblance to the collectivist fanaticism—completely divorced from practicality and reality—of Chinese Communist Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward.”
I could not produce a better summary of what happened in China than this summary of the contents of a lecture series presented by Professor Richard Baum, Ph.D. that is part of the Great Courses Series: see https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/great-leap-forward-mao-zedong/
First, in 1956-57, came Mao’s “Hundred Flowers Campaign,” in which he encouraged all sorts of thinkers and critics of the Chinese Communist regime to express their suggestions and criticisms. When they naively came out into the open, a reported 500,000 such “deviationists” were killed in the purges that followed their exposure.
You can bet this object lesson stilled any further criticism.
This purge of potential nay sayers opened the way for Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” campaign of 1958-9 to begin.
To quote one of the propaganda slogans of the day, “Hard work for a few years was then to be followed by a thousand years of happiness.”
This was to be an all-hands, maximum effort—sort of like the “national WWII type mobilization” that AOC is proposing—involving everyone in China, aimed at suddenly vaulting them ahead, into the ranks of prosperous industrialized countries and, to accomplish this, most people were to be gathered together and to live in gigantic communes, and to live, eat, and work communally—economies of scale, don’t ya know.
They were not only to produce enough food to feed themselves, they were to become a food exporter (the Great Leap campaign to eliminate the birds that ate a significant portion of the produce in the fields resulted in a later ecological disaster, when the insect population the birds used to prey on and, thus, control exploded).
It was reported that, due to the Great Leap Forward, gigantic pumpkins of 132 pounds had been produced and pigs, it was said, had been successfully crossbred with cows, to produce a new revolutionary source of food.
Machinists were to sleep next to their machines, peasants to sleep in the fields, so that all workers could start to work at the earliest possible moment.
A predominantly peasant-based, mostly rural, agricultural country was to quickly industrialize, by doing things like having millions of technologically illiterate and unskilled Chinese melt their pots and pans in the crude backyard furnaces they built to produce steel (steel of such inferior quality that it was useless).
Hard work—it was promised—would make people so healthy that doctors would no longer be needed.
So much would be produced that everything—food, clothes—would be free, there would be no inequality, and all would be equal—and everyone would be living in skyscrapers and travel by airplane.
“Hard work and fanatical self-sacrifice” would be the key—the results were sure to be fantastic.
And so rationality fled, and fanaticism and insanity seized a great nation.
The resulting famine reportedly killed 40,000,000 Chinese, cannibalism was reported in the countryside, and pictures show the landscape barren and devoid of animals.
By 1960-61 the Great Leap was abandoned, but the communes it created remained.
This set the stage for the even more intense fanaticism, destruction, slaughter, and chaos of Mao’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
Simply put, AOC’s Green New Deal is, among many other things, the blueprint for a “Command economy,” a Communist, collectivist’s wet dream.
** See it’s outline here at https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=5729033-Green-New-Deal-FINAL
The history of Russia, after the Bolshevik Revolution is not quite as bad as that of China but Russia was far more advanced toward modernity than China. There is a myth that Russia was backward and contained only peasants.
In fact, Russia had been growing rapidly since 1880.
Under a succession of Tsarist ministers (Bunge, Witte and Stolypin) railways were built, foreign investment attracted and landholdings reformed.
Economic growth rates averaged 9 per cent from 1894–1900 and 5 per cent from 1900–1914. These were huge rates of change.
Industrial growth was centred on armaments because Tsar Nicholas II wanted to protect Russia’s position as a great power. However, oil, textiles, minerals and iron and steel were the industries most affected by economic growth.
Subsistence farming means that they produced what they needed, took little to market, did not use much money and could not easily be taxed.
By 1914 the Russian economy had grown more slowly than those of Germany, the USA, France and Britain. However, Russia put a huge army of 3 million troops on to the front against Germany and Austria. This meant that Russia was unable to equip her troops as well as her enemies. The strain of supplying them would be immense.
It was a fatal error by the Tsar to enter the war in 1914. He should have learned by the 1905 war with Japan.
After the Revolution, there was a catastrophe.
In the two years following the Revolution, there was an economic catastrophe. By 1919, average incomes in Soviet Russia had fallen to less than 600 international dollars at 1990 prices. Less than half that of 1913, this level is experienced today only in the very poorest countries of the world, and had not been seen in Eastern Europe since the 17th century (Maddison 2001). Worse was to come. After a run of disastrous harvests, famine conditions began to appear in the summer of 1920 (in some regions perhaps as early as 1919). In Petrograd in the spring of 1919, an average worker’s daily intake was below 1,600 calories, about half the level before the war. Spreading hunger coincided with a wave of deaths from typhus, typhoid, dysentery and cholera. In 1921, the grain harvest collapsed further, particularly in the southern and eastern grain-farming regions. More than five million people may have died prematurely at this time from hunger and disease.
Because we have shown that the level of the Russian economy in 1917 was higher than previously thought, we find that the subsequent collapse was correspondingly deeper. What explains this collapse? It is natural to think of the Russian Civil War, which is usually dated from 1918 to 1920. However, we doubt that this is a sufficient explanation.
First, although economically damaging, armed conflict between the two sides was geographically and temporally sporadic. The economic decline was most rapid in 1918; fighting was widespread only in 1919.
Second, there are signs that Bolshevik policies of economic mobilisation and class warfare acted independently to spread chaos and decline. These policies were continued and intensified as the civil war drew to a close during 1920, and clearly contributed to the famine of 1921.
That sort of thing is what the idiots like AOC want to try again. Sorry for the wall of text.
@Frederick,
“The energy balance they show, into and out of the Earth-atmosphere system, is checking out.”
True, but I didn’t say into and out of the atmosphere. I said incident on the earth’s surface.
Fredrick burns assumptions to keep a warm atmosphere. He didn’t say that.
Delightfully snarky comment seen on YouTube:
You may be right in that it’s not “very very extreme”, only “very extreme”. So when they come up with their Real Plan that’s only Moderately Extreme. we can breathe a sigh of relief and think we got off easy.
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Vox said (quoted by Ann way up thread), “Are people genuinely worried, or is it just fashionable to say that climate change is a problem? …”
csmats on February 9, 2019 at 2:35 pm at 2:35 pm said:
“… I don’t think young people are terrified of global warming, I think they’re terrified of holding beliefs that don’t pass muster in the Church of Secular Socialism in which mandatory membership is required for social acceptance by their peers.”
Frederick on February 9, 2019 at 11:21 am at 11:21 am said:
“I think that the science of global warming is being seized on as an excuse for power and control.…I don’t think you should fight lies and falsehoods with other falsehoods.”
John Henry on February 9, 2019 at 2:10 pm at 2:10 pm said:
“…We conservatives lose all the battles because we want to join in a battle of ideas – a debate if you will. The Bolsheviks don’t care about the ideas. They care about winning. Winning the argument is not the prize. Being right is not the prize. Absolute Power and Control is the prize.”
* * *
Notice that “winning the argument” — which they (the AGW cum “Climate Change” cum “We’re All Gonna Die unless you give us money” crowd) can’t, because they are wrong — is not the same as “winning the war” — which they can, because they are willing to use methods which the anti-AGW side eschews, for moral as well as ideological reasons.
That is the crucial dilemma for the Right.
Oh, and what Molly said:
Molly Brown on February 9, 2019 at 2:35 am at 2:35 am said:
I’m totally on board with ‘weather dependent energy’ and ‘Green DC Now!’
“…is not the same…”
No, it’s most certainly not….
And indeed, who DID put the “war” in “Global Warming”??
Cf.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXmsLe8t_gg
Kevin D. Williamson has what might very well be the answer…though, it may not—as indicated by the quote above—solve the problem.
Still, it may open a few eyes (or at least tear ducts….):
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal/