Posted on 04/29/2017 5:17:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
Recent science and climate marches demonstrated how misinformed, indoctrinated, politicized and anti-Trump these activists are – and how indifferent about condemning millions in industrialized nations and billions in developing countries to green energy poverty. Amid it all, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole helped illustrate how the marchers became so ignorant, insensitive and intolerant.
It’s always amazed me how frequently academics, journalists, politicians and students confuse poisonous carbon monoxide (CO) with plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide (CO2). But Professor Cole’s April 17 article in The Nation presents unfathomable ignorance from the intellectual class that is “educating” our young people, while displaying and teaching intolerance toward countervailing facts and viewpoints.
Bashar al Assad’s sarin gas attack “consumed the world’s attention,” Prof. Cole intones, but President Trump is committed to releasing hundreds of thousands of tons a day “of a far more deadly gas – carbon dioxide.” Even CO2 that is washed out of the atmosphere “typically goes straight into the oceans,” he continues, “where it turns them acidic,” threatening a “mass die-off of marine life.”
Cole’s polemical nonsense is too extensive to address in full. But these two claims require rebuttal. A deadly gas? Carbon dioxide is the Miracle Molecule that enables plants to grow and makes all life on Earth possible. Plants absorb CO2 exhaled by humans and animals, and emitted by burning wood, dung, fossil fuels and biofuels – and then release oxygen that people and wildlife need to survive.
Hundreds of studies demonstrate how slightly higher atmospheric CO2 levels (rising from 0.03% a century ago to 0.04% today) are making crop, forest and grassland plants more drought resistant, helping them grow faster and better, and “greening” vast areas that had been brown and barren. Claims that CO2 has replaced the solar and other powerful natural forces that have always controlled Earth’s climate, and is now causing “dangerous manmade climate change,” are not supported by actual planetary evidence.
Marine life thrived when CO2 levels were many times higher during past geologic eras. Far from being or becoming acidic, the oceans are mildly alkaline, and their vast volumes of water will not become acidic from human fossil fuel use: that is, to drop from their current pH of 8.1 into the acidic realm of 7.0 on this logarithmic scale. Oceans may become slightly less alkaline with another century or two of human carbon dioxide emissions, but most marine organisms will be unaffected, while others will adapt or evolve.
The science marchers forget that President Trump’s actions are in response to eight Obama years of “highly politicized so-called research on climate,” under grants that “anticipated particular scientific outcomes before funding was provided,” Princeton University physicist Dr. Will Happer told me. Real science “is not based on political agendas, belief systems or computer models. It’s based on evidence – and actual observations have found normal icecap fluctuations, seas rising a foot or less per century, drought cycles little different from the twentieth century, and a decline in major landfalling hurricanes.”
These inconvenient truths contradict the dominant narratives in college classrooms and political circles. Climate alarmists thus demand that they be vilified, banned and silenced, through vile, even violent confrontations if need be – along with other conservative speech on and beyond too many campuses.
It’s as if reality, truth, discussion and debate have become irrelevant where feelings, leftist dogma, climate science or public policies are involved. Even more troubling, it’s as if our culture, education and public forums have been taken over by jack-booted fascists, Mao’s Red Guards, Maduro thugs, and “heroes” like Pavlik Morozov, memorialized by Stalin for betraying his father to the secret police.
Some intolerant protesters may be delicate snowflakes, too easily intimidated, offended or made to feel “unsafe” by conservative or other contrarian thought. However, the near-constant intimidation and threats of expulsion or violence have become a deliberate tactic, used repeatedly to impose speech codes and political agendas – and too often ignored, acquiesced in or supported by professors, administrators and politicians who welcome the silencing of opposition voices or lack the courage to confront it. During Science March weekend in Huntsville, Alabama, shots were fired into the offices where reality-based climatologist John Christy works. “Mainstream media” and academia coverage was minimal.
They demand diversity of race, language, handicaps, sex, sexual orientation, transgender status and sexual self-identification. They cannot tolerate diversity of thought, speech or faculty and student ideology.
George Mason University economics professor Walter Williams calls it “a spreading cancer,” a re-emerging mentality that gave us loyalty oaths, which today come in the form of demands that faculty members sign “diversity statements, especially as part of hiring and promotion procedures…. The last thing diversity hustlers want is diversity of ideas.” The goal is “political conformity among the faculty indoctrinating our impressionable, intellectually immature young people,” Williams says.
As far-left protest marches, window smashing, limousine burning and physical assaults in Berkeley, Portland, Washington, DC and other cities attest, the cancer is metastasizing – particularly when movements and political groups believe their money, power, influence and control are threatened.
On the climate front, at stake are $100 billion a year in reparation funds for poor countries, for companies that want to build “sustainable low-carbon” energy systems, and boundless power for politicians and bureaucrats who want to control economic growth, livelihoods and living standards. They cannot tolerate “climate deniers,” even those who merely question the extent of human influences, the degree and impact of temperature and climate changes, whether changes will all be bad, or the supposed inability of wildlife and wealthy, technologically advanced societies to adapt to future changes.
Members of this activist, governing and corporate elite also excel at inflating trivial risks and dismissing easy solutions, to advance their agendas and self-interests. For example, as President Trump revises many Obama era environmental rules, activist groups are using other tactics to continue their war on coal.
Dry ash from coal-fired power plants can be used in wallboard and to partially replace sand in high-strength concrete for bridges, roads and buildings. However, regulations, engineering considerations and other factors limited that option and resulted in most wet and dry ash being sent to impoundments that can leak barely detectable pollutants into surface and ground water. Studies have shown that these levels of chromium and other metals pose little risk to humans, but scare campaigns are creating pressure to force utility companies to spend billions of dollars relocating the ash and closing more power plants.
The best solution is likely to leave the ash in place, shore up the coffer dams, put solid clay seals over the deposits, and let them dry out, locking the metals in place. Radical groups demand relocation and seek to bankrupt the utilities – after which they intend to intensify their attacks on natural gas-fired power plants, drilling, fracking, and the factories, petrochemical plants and other industries that use fossil fuels.
In essence, they have brilliantly established a mantra that can ensure victory in every campaign. Whatever they support is safe, sustainable, climate-friendly environmental justice; whatever they oppose is dangerous, unsustainable, ecologically destructive and unjust. End of discussion.
In the process, they are unwilling or unable to recognize two facts. One, cheap, reliable energy improves living standards, saves lives, and supports new technologies and opportunities, with poor families benefitting most. Policies that make energy less accessible and affordable harm the poorest most of all.
Two, fossil fuels have undeniable environmental impacts, but allow us to produce vast amounts of cheap energy from relatively few acres. Replacing those fuels with wind, solar and biofuel energy would require hundreds of millions of acres worldwide that are now cropland or wildlife habitats. Those “eco-friendly” alternatives are actually our least sustainable, most ecologically destructive energy options.
The stakes are too high to let intolerant ideologues continue to control energy policy decisions.
People in hoodies are bad
They have the time to complain they have the time to get a fn job and go to work
I haven’t been there recently, so I don’t know if it’s still there. A shop just across the street from FSU displayed a sign reading: “Enter the premises wearing a hoody and the police will be called.”
During freezing weather, freezing for a Floridian, I always dropped my hoody when entering a business. Once, the proprietor saw me do it and said, “Thanks.” as I passed him.
Climate Scientologists are everywhere distraught that no one seems to be buying what they’re selling. Time to prostrate themselves before their Saints Barnum, Hubbard and the Holy Lysenko.
There are paid goons (ala Soros) whipping left wing into a frenzy.
If Jeb Bush had won, we would be talking about the anti-Bushers.
Organizations such as the Sierra Club must be driven out of business. They are contemptuous to reason, science and a healthy environment. We must take up the sword against these organizations cutting them off at the root.
Environmentalism is a deceptive conceit. It is predicated on the false idea that humans are primarily destructive of the system that sustains them. It is as if God (Mother Nature, Gaia for the atheist crowd) has deliberately created the seed of its own destruction in mankind. The uniquely enlightened few who are convinced that humans are essentially boorish, dirty, and stupid, must be kept in control of all human activity to insure our continued existence. This is only slightly adulturated Marxism: conttol of the masses by a select elite (of thugs).
This cadre of thugs cannot be dealt with logically. They are closed minded ideologues prepared to kill to get their way.
OK!! Everybody pay attention!
Lesson for today:
1. The sun is 1,300,000 times as big as the earth.
2. The sun is a giant nuclear furnace that controls the climates of all its planets.
3. The earth is one of the sun’s planets.
4. The earth is a speck in comparison to the size of the sun.
5. Inhabitants of the earth are less than specks.
Study Question: How do less-than-specks in congress plan to control the sun?
By force is the only way the left can implement their bankrupt ideas. We have centuries of proof, this climate thing is a radical religion that is going to get us all killed.
The scientific fact that CO2 is what grows plants and CO2 is what humans exhale, and that Oxygen is what humans and animals need to live, which is the gas the plants and trees (exhale), pretty perfect in my book!!
Why did the Supreme Court rule that CO2 was a poison gas?
The public has a right to know who these thugs are. No one has a camera? No one can ID these thugs? The public needs names and addresses of these anarchists. We have a right to know who exactly is causing anarchy in our streets.
saw the headline and figured it was about Bill,Hillary and Chelsea
Was you disappointed that it wasn’t?
Ayn Rand predicted this in the 1960s.
Plant more trees.
...”This cadre of thugs cannot be dealt with logically. They are closed minded ideologues prepared to kill to get their way.”...
You are stating the real “inconvenient truth,” which will kill many and leave the rest to unbelievable suffering and poverty, if not dealt with logically. Yes, they must be stopped. But, how, when the major media is the core of their support?
It is the law in Germany that for every tree that is cut down in a forest two or three new trees have to be planted.
MSM is in fact the core of the problem. Byzantine ownership of the LATimes, NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, and others derive from viciously anti-American power centers. The Democrat party, Hollywood, DC Influence Peddlers and much of the University system are lapdogs to this conspiracy. Draining the Swamp and taking back our country will require the disintegration of each of these spheres of influence. The task before DJT is monumental.
When what went around comes around, they will wonder what hit them.
These are first world weaklings, in general. They aren’t riding bicycles in protest of the CO2 abuse of earth that they are alleging. They live in the lap of carbon wasting luxury while trying to choke down carbon usage by those who need it to survive.
This will eventually reap its own wild oats, and they will choke on them.
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