In Religion News today, we learn that there’s nothing we can do – except perhaps getting naked and dancing around an Oak tree worshipping Gaia – to save the planet from rapacious capitalists, gas hungry gear heads, electrical power gluttons, and lawnmower fanatics.
Basically, we’re toast:
The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.
Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.
This is fantastic news – for those who consider industrialized civilization just a crazy interlude in human evolution and that our true calling is to root around with the pigs digging up truffles while at the same time, breaking our backs plowing the back forty with a horse drawn prairie sodbuster.
No, really, 19th century farming can be fun. And for those of you in industries that would be hard hit by this return to yesteryear – which includes just about everybody – have no fear. There will be work enough for all once we get into the spirit of the adventure.
Are you pretty good with animals and don’t mind getting scorched every once and a while? Blacksmithing is your trade then, my man.
I’ve got just two words for you: Wheel Wright. The future is yours. Grab it.
Do you like working with your hands and can lift several hundred pounds all day long? I’m sure there will be plenty of calls for Wagoneers.
Attention pizza delivery drivers. Take a correspondence course in how to drive a stagecoach.
Parents, enroll your child immediately in the Steamfitters Guild.
With trains about ready to make a comeback, lineman and gandy dancers will be in tremendous demand. Maybe we can even bring back the Non Partisan Anti-Chinese League.
Chim-Chiminey, Chim-Chiminey, Chim-Chim-Cheroo - If you need a good job, cleaning chimney’s for you.
I wonder if burning whale oil gives off CO2? Probably a better alternative than burning wood. If I were a young, unattached man, I’d move to Nantucket a go a-whalin’. I’d even have a white whale to pursue.
Of course I’m being facetious. But what I was trying to do was show that there is indeed a sizable, vocal minority of climate change alarmists who are only using the issue of global warming to advance another agenda – political, economic, and social – that is inimical to the free market, injurious of human liberty, and desirous of controlling our lives in minute ways. And what they wish to accomplish is nothing less than the destruction of western industrialized civilization.
The study, which may or may not indicate that there is little we can do to stop from warming the planet, will be seized upon by those who wish to impose draconian “solutions” that would have the effect of severely curtailing industrial activity thus causing massive disruptions in our society. These are people who talk of “sustainable development” in a world with fewer people, fewer, opportunities, and fewer dreams.
They are not a majority of climate change advocates. But not acknowledging that they are present and working to achieve their goals is ignorant.
I don’t know the motives or the history of the scientists who completed the studies mentioned in the post article but I would think that, as with anything else, more study as well as careful peer review of these studies will be necessary before any action should be taken. That might be especially appropriate since one of the authors mentioned in the article – Andreas Schmittner – wrote a paper back in 1997 predicting rising CO2 levels would lead to global cooling in Europe.)
9:57 pm
This may be typical sensational scare reporting. The authors neglected a few of the niceties of accurate portrayal of scientific results, and they used a scare image to make a point that was unrelated to the actual studies. We do not know the main assumptions used, the basic data sets used, the sensitivity of the results to variations of input quantities, all of the physical factors accounted for, and the factors not accounted for in these “sophisticated” models, nor any estimate of the accuracy of the results. I am reminded of the Club of Rome efforts of some years ago that fell flat.
For me, the big question is simply who do we trust in the scientific world to get to the truth about climate change? Far too many so-called reputable scientists and scientific organizations have signed up to some of these rather shoddy studies, and the subsequent sensationalism, not to mention the increased flow of research funds their support garners.
Isn’t it convenient that these study reports come out just as the convention of deniers is wrapping up?
11:05 pm
You are missing the point.
You are not going to have any blacksmiths. They have fires to work the metal. You are not going to have carbon-fed fires, even to heat your grass hut in the snowdrifts.
It is arguable that you are not going to be able to exhale.
“Voluntary” Human Extinction.
Our Noble Elites last
1:31 am
Rick, after blowing off all that CO2 you suggest more study, and more peer review of existing studies. Have anybody in mind? Propose any funding? And by which bodies of experts? Exxon seems to be flush these days, perhaps they can pony up, just like they have been. Surely there are enough prostitute scientists to give you the results you crave. Where the hell are they? Who has been paying for this ‘bad’ research? Where is the free market response to science? Is there not more money to be made pimping oneself to the status quo than to alternatives? What the hell has gone wrong? We need to get the scientists back where they belong: our hip pocket. At the beck and call of the current Decider.
And of course you don’t have an agenda, Rick. You merely want unfettered business as usual. That is not at agenda, right? You just want more peer review. That should be enough to stall any changes until your last breath. Meanwhile the price of dithering may be visited on others, not us, so who gives a rat’s ass anyway?
You moan about cats, what about polar bears? How about harp seals clubbed by Canadians? What kind of moral swamp do you call home? How about an american horsemeat hamburger? Venison? Dolphins sacrificed for your tuna sandwich? Huckabee’s polecat pie? Those with firing synapses demand consistency. Feel free to demonstrate such.
And you think 2 studies that conclude we must apply the most draconian measures in order to save ourselves is sufficient? Two? What a laughably ignorant tool you are to believe that when there is no proof whatsoever that reducing our emissions will lower the temperature in the first place. There are many climate change scientists who dispute the idea that lowering our emissions will change anything. What do you say to them? People who agree with you that man is causing the earth to warm but that there’s nothing we can do about it? Are they industry tools also?
And, like any unthinking global warming bot, you assume that because I want to see more than 2 studies before we destroy western industrialized civilization that I am some kind of industry hack. I oppose the kind of massive change that would be required to meet a “zero emission” goal by 2050 because anyone with a third grade education knows that 2 studies do not mean that anything is proven. And anyone who has taken a high school science course knows that those studies – published last week – HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN EXAMINED BY PEERS TO TEST THEIR HYPOTHESIS YET.
You are an anti-science Luddite. There are steps we can take to reduce our emissions over the next 20 years – 60% reduction according to AEI - that would accomplish the goal of reducing CO2 emissions substantially while not destroying our economy. I am for that kind of action, dickhead, so get off your climate change high horse and join the rest of the realists.
Ed.
2:46 am
The irony here is that much of the first wave of “scientifically inspired” Bigthink Disasters were around the collapse of cities due to excessive numbers of horses in the mid 19th century. Streetcars and then subways worked past these problems, followed by cars.
Ever since, we’ve had all manner of bigthink disaster forecasts, from big-thinkers of both the Left and Right. Maybe one day one of them will be right; after all, if you predict an earthquake every day, eventually it’ll happen. But until then, I avoid peak-oilers, global-warmers, overpopulationists, “big germ” types, and other unpleasant folk of that sort. One often gets the impression that they want their pet disaster to happen so they’ll be “right”...
6:12 am
Tuesday Links…
Not your father’s Ukrainian Army (photo)Greenies want us back to the Stone Age. After you, friends. Rick Moran has some job ideas for when the Greenies take over. Related: Have you checked in with Junk Science recently? Related: What do warming reli…
7:22 am
Now that Corporations are Going Green won’t the anti-Globalist be rioting against the mean, big Green machine?
In any case, who would have ever thought that climates never change?
6:45 pm
Mel Brooks beat you to it with his 2000-year-old man. “Hitting a tree with a stick. Hey, don’t knock it! That was a good job! You couldn’t get that job.”
9:39 pm
thanks rick for the response, although I am not an ‘anti-science dickhead’as you presume.What are the 2 studies I never mentioned? Are you on some kind of reflex?
Honestly I feel that there are technical fixes to reduce our CO2 emissions that are invisible to our american way of life. I mentioned such fixes in another post. It could or could not be true that man has or has not influenced global warming to an extent where he can mitigate or not such effects. How’s that for nonsensical nuance? Yet both of us can totally agree with that.
I am totally opening up the US to oil and gas exploration. Let us lose no more american lives in the pursuit of what? remind me? No more american blood for foreign oil. Screw the Middle east, let them kill each other for all I care. Sell your Haliburton stock and come home. Paying a gas-guzzler tax becomes patriotic.
6:06 am
You can pry my supercharged V8 from my cold, dead hands.
I laugh maniacally as I roar past hybrids or other inferior smaller displacement cars on the way to work.
My gas mileage is “not applicable”, and I probably emit more CO2 than several other cars put together.
Do I care? No. I’m going to enjoy this for as long as we have oil.