24 Hours of Climate Craziness

Here are some sage thoughts on challenges facing humanity and pulling people out of poverty.

"Climate is no longer a major cause of deaths, thanks in large part to fossil fuels. ... The popular climate discussion .. . looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability, one who makes the climate dangerous because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don't take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe."

Humans have long fought a war with climate, and where we've won it has been through the use of technology, most recently including the use of fossil fuels.

In 1900, a single hurricane killed more than 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas, long before there was any reason to worry about global warming. America's economy has allowed us to build weather satellites, computer models of the atmosphere and a storm warning system that is the envy of the world. Literally thousands of American lives are saved each year.

People in countries using abundant fossil fuels live longer, have fewer infant deaths, are healthier, are more educated and are much wealthier on average than people who live without coal, oil and natural gas.

This is not a mere coincidence, as wealth, health, education and other living conditions remained virtually stagnant for most of human history until our discovery of the ability to transform coal, oil and gas into fuels that powered the Industrial Revolution.

In the West, fossil fuels light homes, making work and an active home life possible after dark without the use of dung, wood and tallow, thus preventing millions of unnecessary deaths from respiratory disease.

Conversely, lack of fossil fuels condemns millions to early deaths from diseases like those that they experience in underdeveloped parts of Africa and Asia. Children die in Africa from malnutrition or starvation because they lack access to the quality and quantities of food made available to the West through fossil-fuel-dependent industrial agriculture and transportation.

Lives are saved in modern hospitals thanks to fossil fuels, from the gasoline fueling emergency vehicles to the electricity keeping the lights, computers, climate controls and refrigeration on.

There are many who have -- correctly -- noted that lower income workers have done poorly over the last eight years when the Great Recession began. Some say the problem dates back much longer. Given that, you would think advocates for the poor would be celebrating lower gas prices. Wrong. Following tweet was published yesterday afternoon:

IF -- a big if -- we had second generation nuclear or some revolutionary new, carbon-free energy source ready to be deployed, I could see an increase in taxes to pay for it. At this point, with no such technology on the horizon, my opinion is that any revenue from from a gas or carbon tax would be as wisely spent as our government spends the rest of its money -- meaning it would be mostly wasted.

It almost looks like even the catastrophic global warming advocacy groups are losing their enthusiasm.

Via Twitter; photo by Bernadette Woods, Climate Central

Above is a  photo tweeted by Climate Central from yesterday's climate communications meeting (where people are taught to how to persuade others to join the catastrophic global warming movement) in Phoenix at the American Meteorological Society's annual meeting.

At about the same time, the photos below were taken as a popular television weather program was being taped nearby. I congratulate the attendees on their priorities.

Photos from Dr. Marshall Shepherd via Twitter

The fact is that catastrophic global warming has become a quasi-religious pursuit for many as well as a giant source of academic funding -- with zero institutional incentive to disprove the hypothesis of catastrophe.

And, in the ultimate of ironies, here is the abstract for an AMS paper scheduled for this morning by Dr. Eugenia Kalnay,

Eugenia Kalnay, University of Maryland, College Park, MD; and S. Motesharrei and J. R. Rivas

Over the last two centuries, the Human System has grown from having a small impact on the Earth System to becoming dominant. Both population and per capita consumption have grown extremely fast, especially since about 1950. We argue that Earth System Models must be coupled with Human System Models through bidirectional feedbacks. In particular, population should be modeled endogenously, rather than exogenously as in most Integrated Assessment Models. The growth of the Human System threatens to overwhelm the Carrying Capacity of the Earth System, and may be leading to collapse. The Earth Sciences can, and should be, involved in the exploration of mitigation strategies including education, regulatory policies, and technological advances.

A minimal coupled Human And Nature Dynamical model (HANDY, Motesharrei et al., 2014, J. Ecological Economics) provides simple guidance on the impact of excessive depletion of nature and excessive economic inequality, and how to avoid the resulting societal collapse. [bolding mine]

Dr. Kalnay is the mother of Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google. Brin has multiple private jets. Not ordinary private jets mind you, private 767 jumbo jets! They even have their own private air terminal!

So, Dr. Kalnay is worried about "excessive economic inequality" while her son is running around on private jumbo jets -- creating a carbon footprint the size of Montana -- yet lecturing the rest of us about the dangers of climate change.

This a typical day in the never-never-land of global warming advocacy. Unbelievable, isn't it?