Showing posts with label rural. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rural. Show all posts
15 May 2016
Paul Driessen: Ben Rhodes spins climate change
Rising ocean tides will bring “waves of climate refugees” to
America and Europe, President Obama has declared. “Environmental migrants” are
already fleeing shrinking islands in the Pacific, and it is a “dereliction of
duty” for military officers to “deny the reality” of dangerous manmade climate
change.
Even if we act in accord with the Paris climate “accords” (none
dare call it a treaty) and “can stem the increase” in global temperatures,
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell insists, “very rapid” climate changes “are
expected to force the relocation of hundreds of Alaskans from their homes.”
Manmade climate change is a “threat multiplier,” a Pentagon
report asserts. It will “exacerbate” many of the challenges the United States
faces today, including infectious diseases and terrorism, destructive extreme
weather events, disputes over who has rights to dwindling land areas and basic
resources like water and food, and intense disagreements over how to absorb
millions of climate refugees.
Echo-chamber journalists disagree only over the identity of America’s
first climate refugees: Alaskan Natives in Newtok being inundated by rising
seas and melting ice and tundra – or 25 Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw families
whose little island in the Mississippi Delta has been eroding away since 1950?
Not to be outdone, ultra-liberal radio talk show host Thom
Hartmann told me, “You’ve got five million climate change refugees fleeing into
Europe right now because of droughts in Syria.” When I called this nonsense and
said they are trying to escape war and ISIS butchers who are beheading little
children, for the tenth time in a ten-minute interview, he railed that I
“should be in jail” as a “climate denier.”
Unfortunately for Rhodes & Company, inconvenient truths
eviscerate manmade climate chaos claims.
Throughout Earth and human history, climate change has
ranged from regional to hemispheric, from beneficial to harmful to destructive.
It has included Roman and medieval warm periods, little ice ages, and five “mammoth”
glacial epochs that buried continents under mile-high walls of ice. Natural climate
change inflicted a Dust Bowl that sent millions of Americans scurrying in
search of better lives, and decades- or centuries-long droughts that brought
entire civilizations to their knees.
Roman, Mayan, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese and other cities
and cultures prospered in warm periods and collapsed in cold and drought eras,
climate historian Dennis Avery observes. This happened “over and over, in a
centuries-long rhythm of affluence followed by long success, followed by long
and utter failure.” Entire cities in the eastern Mediterranean were abandoned
for centuries.
Storm activity rose
by 85% in the second half of the 16th century, during the Maunder Sunspot
Minimum, while the incidence of severe
storms increased four-fold, writes historian Brian Fagan. British Navy logbooks
show more than twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes during the
cold decades of the 1700’s as during the warm years of 1950–2000.
Little ice ages and
extended droughts brought crop failures and mass starvation, Avery notes. Rome shrank from a million inhabitants
in its heyday to barely 30,000 a century later. The Mayan civilization plunged
from perhaps 15 million to one million, as its cities were abandoned in a
century-long drought.
Climate mood swings
in the past 50 years have been far less dramatic than in previous millennia.
Few people will have to flee the tiny portion of future climate change that
might be attributable to humans.
The Climate Crisis Consortium ignores these eons, millennia
and centuries of natural climate change. It wants us to believe Earth’s climate
was stable and benign until the Industrial Age – and humans can now control
climate and weather merely by controlling carbon dioxide levels. It’s all Hollywood
nonsense.
Oceans have risen 400 feet since the last ice age glaciers
melted. Pacific islands rose with them, as corals expanded their habitats with
every new inch of sea water. Seas are now rising at seven inches per century – and
EPA’s anti-coal Clean Power Plan would prevent barely 0.01 inches of rise over
the next 100 years.
Greenland’s icecap is shrinking because of subterranean
magmatic activity – not global warming. Arctic regions have long experienced warming
and cooling cycles, as recorded by Francis McClintock and other whalers and
explorers, dating back some 300 years. Polar bear populations are at an all-time
high: 25,000.
Antarctic ice masses continue to grow, and the continent’s average
annual temperature of minus-55 F means it would have to warm by 88 degrees
year-round for that ice to melt. Even Al Gore in his wildest rants doesn’t say
that is likely. So his beachfront home is safe from the 20-foot sea rise he has
predicted.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts concludes that the only reliable long-term surface record comes
from 400 official US rural thermometer stations that were never corrupted by
location changes, airport heat or urban growth. Those stations show no
significant warming for the past 80 years.
The “record warming” we keep hearing about comes from data that have been
“adjusted” or “homogenized” (ie, manipulated) upward to conform to computer
model projections, IPCC proclamations and White House press releases.
Other studies have concluded
there has been no increase in
the severity or frequency of thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes or winter
blizzards for decades. Indeed, no Category 3-5 hurricane has struck the
United States since October 2005 – a record lull that exceeds any hurricane
hiatus since at least 1900.
Malaria was common in the USA, Europe and even Siberia until
the 1950s, when window screens, DDT and better medical practices wiped it out.
It has nothing to do with global warming or climate change. Its continued
prevalence is due to incompetent health ministries that refuse to learn from
past successes.
The notion that a warmer world with more atmospheric CO2
will bring crop failures and famines is sheer delusion. They are already
“greening” the planet and making crops, forests and grasslands grow faster and
better. New hybrid and biotech seeds, combined with modern fertilizers and
farming practices, are yielding bigger harvests, even during droughts, as India
is proving right now.
There is no manmade climate crisis. Solar, galactic and
oceanic cycles rule – not carbon dioxide. The biggest threat to agriculture and
humans would come from another little ice age, not moderate warming.
In reality, the enormous amounts of energy packed into coal,
oil, natural gas and nuclear fuels create the wealth, and power the wondrous
technologies, that give us the greatest advantages mankind has ever enjoyed – to
survive, adapt to and deal with climate changes and weather events.
The worst thing we could do is lock up that reliable, affordable,
compact energy – and switch to expensive, heavily subsidized, wildly
unpredictable wind and solar energy … and to biofuels that require millions of
acres of land and billions of gallons of precious water.
Those who control energy control lives, livelihoods and
living standards. Allowing climate alarmists and anti-energy zealots to dictate
what energy sources we can use, and how much each of us is “permitted” to have,
would put all of us at the mercy of their unaccountable whims, ideologies and fraudulent
science.
Their callous policies are already killing millions of
people every year in impoverished nations, by depriving them of the energy and
technologies that we take for granted. Shouldn’t we be helping the world’s poor
take their rightful places among the healthy and prosperous? Do we want to be
next?
The only “evidence” the alarmists have for a looming climate
cataclysm are Al Gore movies, Mike Mann hockey sticks, garbage in-garbage out computer
“scenarios” that bear no resemblance to Real World events, and more spin and
scare stories from White House novelist Ben Rhodes.
We need a president who will send the Paris climate treaty
to the US Senate, where it can be properly vetted and rejected … overturn EPA
and other regulations that are based on manipulated data and falsified pseudo-science
… and lead the world back from the precipice of climate lunacy.
Paul
Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow
(www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green
power - Black death.
© May 2016
Charles Anderson Comments:
This posting has been made at the request of Paul Driessen.
There is one context in which the Obama administration has called the Paris Climate "Accords" a treaty. The reply of the Obama State Department to the letter in which many Republican Senators objected to the violation of law when the Obama State Department supplied funds to the U. N. affiliated organization managing the Paris Climate Treaty, as the non-Obama world knows it. The violation was because the Palestinian State has signed the treaty and the funding of U.N. organizations with Palestine as a member is specifically in violation of two laws actually passed by the Congress and signed by a President. See my post
On 22 December 2009, I posted on the results of a high school science project by a father and his son which noted that while U.S. urban area temperatures had increased since 1900, rural area temperatures had not. That post is here:
It was really simple for two conscientious people with some time available to prove this. They did so well before Anthony Watts did so. While Anthony Watts has done plenty of good work, he is also an irascible, biased man who has inhibited the understanding of why the physics of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is wrong.
01 November 2014
Wall Street Journal Says Below Average White Rural Areas Are Becoming More Republican
The Friday Wall Street Journal had a front page story in which it said that the "GOP Tightens Its Grip on White Working Class." It says that it tracks the House seats held by each party in House districts dominated by white, working-class voters. In 1993, the Democrats held 36 such districts and the Republicans held 35. By 2013, this division of such districts had changed drastically, with the Republicans holding 59 white, working-class districts and the Democrats holding only 11.
The article has the usual large number of stories about individuals and what they think and how their voting may have changed or not. Among the stories it tells are those of people from Aitkin, Minnesota in the 8th Congressional District of Minnesota. Aitkin is the county seat of rural Aitkin County, with a population of 2,597 people. It is about 50 miles west southwest of Duluth, Minnesota. The 8th Congressional District is almost 93% white. We are told by the Wall Street Journal that the median household income is $49,860, compared to the national median of $53,000. We are told that only a bit more than 22% of the people in the district have a Bachelor's degree or higher, compared to a national median of 28.5%. So, we are supposed to conclude that these people are not quite as well-educated as they ought to be and not quite as successful as the average American. So, maybe this is why they are becoming Republicans in larger numbers.
Let us consider the measure of their economic success given as their income. Democrats obsess about materialistic measures such as comparative incomes. But in fact, the people of Aitkin, Minnesota are a bit too sly for the median American. There is a pretty good reason to believe the Wall Street Journal is underestimating them, both their income and their ability to recognize a perfectly fine way of living.
The median household income of $53,000 mentioned is that earned by households with a mean cost of living index of 100. The good people of Aitkin, Minnesota have a local cost of living of 92. Do the math,
The article has the usual large number of stories about individuals and what they think and how their voting may have changed or not. Among the stories it tells are those of people from Aitkin, Minnesota in the 8th Congressional District of Minnesota. Aitkin is the county seat of rural Aitkin County, with a population of 2,597 people. It is about 50 miles west southwest of Duluth, Minnesota. The 8th Congressional District is almost 93% white. We are told by the Wall Street Journal that the median household income is $49,860, compared to the national median of $53,000. We are told that only a bit more than 22% of the people in the district have a Bachelor's degree or higher, compared to a national median of 28.5%. So, we are supposed to conclude that these people are not quite as well-educated as they ought to be and not quite as successful as the average American. So, maybe this is why they are becoming Republicans in larger numbers.
Let us consider the measure of their economic success given as their income. Democrats obsess about materialistic measures such as comparative incomes. But in fact, the people of Aitkin, Minnesota are a bit too sly for the median American. There is a pretty good reason to believe the Wall Street Journal is underestimating them, both their income and their ability to recognize a perfectly fine way of living.
The median household income of $53,000 mentioned is that earned by households with a mean cost of living index of 100. The good people of Aitkin, Minnesota have a local cost of living of 92. Do the math,
$49,860 / 0.92 = $54,196 > $53,000.
So, it may not be the case that everyone in Aitkin, Minnesota is above average, but it is the case that their median income allows them to live a bit better than the median income in America allows the average American household.
So, being such sly folks, they are coming to realize that the Republican Party is better than the Democrat Party. The story is that Millennials and Hispanics are beginning to learn the same lesson. Mostly, those who are coming awake are coming to an increasing understanding that being productive is critical and that far too many people are making welfare a way of life. The people called the white working class are learning this in larger numbers, but young people now a few years separated from the Progressive Elitist indoctrination of years of Progressive Elitist education and unable to find jobs at all or jobs anything like what they thought they would have are beginning to learn this as well. Some are actually seeing that government actions have prevented any reasonable economic recovery. More and more Hispanic Americans are at the least disgusted with the failed promises of the Democrats and in some cases are coming to resent others living off of their hard work also.
While some signs of understanding are beginning to show up, there is a long way to go. A Wall Street Journal/ NBC News poll in June found out that 53% of white people said that the government was doing too much to meet the needs of people and more should be left to businesses and individuals. Only 44% of Hispanics said the same. Still fewer Black Americans agreed with this. They were stuck at a mere 32%. We still live in a largely entitlement society.
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