A diseased progressive dream

by Adam Guillette on April 29, 2020

Progressive ideas and global pandemics go together like a strain of COVID-19 and a mucous membrane.

The media tries to look the other way, but one progressive policy after another has been found to be a major cause of the spread of the coronavirus.

For decades, left-wing city planning experts have told us that sprawl is a bad thing. It’d be better for society, they insisted, if we all lived in high-density cities. Then the virus hit. Which area suffered more? Manhattan, New York, or Manhattan, Kansas?

One of the main reasons dense cities have suffered so much is their reliance on public transportation. Is there a pet project that gets liberal local politicians more excited than public transportation? Rail systems let politicians literally choose where you can travel. The politically connected get train stations right by their stores. The businessmen who donate to opposition candidates get screwed. Meanwhile, public transit systems increase public sector employment and fill union coffers, all in the name of saving the environment.

But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “New York City’s multi-tentacled subway system was a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection.” In fact, 79 transit workers thus far have reportedly died of COVID-19.

MTA President Pat Foye summed it up this way: “Most people should stay off mass transit.”

After the study was released, progressive city planners tried to find new methods to keep public transportation safe. No — just kidding! They actually denied science, wrote articles panning the study, and patted themselves on the back for being so wise about smart growth and dense city centers.

Another progressive idea that has fallen apart amid the pandemic is the obsession with banning single-use plastic bags and embracing reusable bags at the grocery store. Reusable bags are the hipsters of COVID-19; they were carrying disease before it was cool. Study after study shows that E. coli, salmonella, and coliform bacteria are frequently spread by these virtue-signaling totes.

Now some cities that previously banned safe, single-use bags have actually reversed course and banned the reusable bags. Many stores that once encouraged reuse now forbid it.

The same progressives responsible for these disease-ridden failures mocked my town of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, for having a limited reopening of beaches last weekend. The reopening occurred because runners, walkers, and bicyclists have been packed into the two streets closest to the beach ever since we were blocked from setting foot on the sand. By allowing us back on the beaches, the local government made it easier to socially distance over a wider area.

The Northeastern know-it-alls were certain chaos would ensue. It didn’t. I was there most of the weekend and saw no beach chairs and no towels. The beaches were full of smiley people walking, running, exercising, and fishing, with appropriate distance between them. In the absence of evidence that our beaches were a chaotic mess, some news outlets literally shared old photos of the beach from when it was packed during an air show.

The notion that central planning experts know how to run cities is a symptom of the most dangerous disease spread by urban liberals — narcissism. Their so-called “progressive” proposals actually embrace century-old technology — densely-packed cities, trains, burlap sacks, and trolleys. This is a large part of what got New York City into this mess.

Conservatives and libertarians are mocked for glamorizing 1776, but is it any better to glamorize life in 1876?

 

This article was originally published by the Washington Examiner.

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Adam Guillette

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COVID19 models – a lesson for those who trust climate scientists

The models used to estimate U.S. deaths from COVID19 had projections that ranged from over 2 million a few weeks back to 100,000-240,000 a week ago down to 60,000 this week. Hopefully the projections and reality will converge on an even lower number.

The media seemed perplexed about the large changes in the models and questioned their concept and value. Welcome to the world of modeling (see this comparison).

We in the weather business use models as a tool and they present special challenges. We have a plethora of models to choose from which run 2 to 4 times a day or even on a smaller scale hourly. Operational model forecasts go out to as far 16 days into the future. The models are subject to large errors especially in the latter periods when storms are coming inland from data sparse regions like the Pacific. We have a favorite phrase – garbage in, garbage out.

The climate model story is even worse. The climate models overstate the warming from greenhouse gases by a factor of two or more.

Climate model forecasts versus the satellite and balloon observations

The models projected the greatest warming in the tropical high atmosphere (called the Tropical Hot Spot) where air in the mean rises due to convergence of air from both hemispheres. But the models warming results mostly from the release of heat from condensation of water vapor (95% of the greenhouse effect). CO2 is a trace gas, just 0.04% of the atmosphere by volume.

See no warming trend in the upper atmosphere since 1979 where models predict it.

The lack of warming also holds for the tropical Pacific ocean down to 300 meters depth from 160E to 80W.

HOW THEY DEAL WITH LACK OF REAL DATA AT GROUND LEVEL’/

The climate cabal portray the output from their models as gospel, and the believers confuse the model projections with measured data. The data centers make unsubstantiated claims that a given month or year is the warmest back to the beginning of the record (1880 or even 1850) often by the tiniest of margins (0.05C for example).

But the data is just not there to make those claims.

71% of the earth is oceans, and data before the satellite data became available 40 years ago, ocean data was reliant on ships which travelled along specific routes mainly in the northern hemisphere near the land.

A large percentage of land surface was erratically covered with observing sites and the data too often spare and intermittent.

To create an apparent agreement with their sacred models, the data centers manipulated real data or even generated with their models data for 95% of the planet that had poor coverage before the satellite era.

MIT’s climate scientist Dr. Mototaka here exposed the phoney claims that most years are the warmest ever since the 1850s of 1880s.

“The supposed measuring of global average temperatures from 1890 has been based on thermometer readouts barely covering 5 per cent of the globe until the satellite era began 40-50 years ago. We do not know how global climate has changed in the past century, all we know is some limited regional climate changes, such as in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.”

The world’s greatest scientists in the 1970s knew that and created the first view of global trends by using land temperatures where available in the Northern Hemisphere. It showed a 2F warming from 1880s to around 1940 and then a cooling that by around 1970s cut that by more than half. Further cooling until the late 19870s virtually eliminated the rest.

These early measurements were erased when models and global land (and ocean) data was ‘created’ in the following decades. The models cooled the early data and enhanced the warming to create an apparent steady warming during the eras when fossil fuel use increased. Our conclusion is that there is man made global warming but the men are in NOAA, NASA and Hadley.

By the way, the ocean data coverage and accuracy did not really become reliable until the implementation of the ARGO buoys in 2000 designed to accurately measure temperatures and ocean heat content. Like the satellite used to measure sea level changes (which showed no changes – until artificial adjustments were made), the early results were disappointing – showing no warming. The ARGO data supported the inconvenient near two decade pause in the warming that started in the late 1990s.

 

Eventually in desperation ahead of the Paris Accord, they made this go away by adjusting the buoy data to match to inferior ship data.

The models are tuned to manipulated (fraudulent) data. In addition to what we have shown above, this can be seen when you examine all the extremes of weather that these models and the theories predict. See here how each of the claims have failed.

SUMMARY

COVID19 has shown how major the impact on the global population a pandemic can bring. A Green New Deal wasn’t developed in a lab, but is as bat shit crazy and would have a major impact on life as we know it. The effect on our economy would not be as sudden but just as serious. The government would not be sending you checks in the mail to help but driving up the cost of energy, and the cost of living and the choices you make (cars you drive, where you can live, how much you can make and keep). Because it is based on junk science, we need to dispatch it as quickly as we can the COVID19.

See much more on this issue in this presentation in front of New Hampshire Taxpayers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVWcdcORdes&t=122s

(See this comparison of climate models to COVID19 models).
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Equal Warming, 1900 to 1950 versus 1950 to 2018: Why the UN Knows the First Half was Natural

• NEWS, STUDIES AND RESOURCES
• 9 APR, 2020

Mathematics and Statistics Professor Caleb Stewart Rossiter Helps You “Do the Math” of Logarithms

CO₂ has a logarithmic effect on temperature. Using log math, CO₂ levels from 1950 to 2018 have 5.23 times the impact of levels from 1900 to 1950. That means there was no measurable warming from industrial CO₂ emissions in the earlier period. Recorded temperature rose the same amount in both periods, and rates of extreme weather and sea-level rise were also the same in both. Hence the data to date do not support claims of a CO₂-caused “climate crisis.” 

The public often hears about a “consensus” of scientists on climate change. Studies making that claim all concern not the existence of a current or future “climate crisis,” but rather the cause of the half-degree Celsius rise in the average measured global surface temperature since 1950. Here is the key claim in the executive summary of the latest UN IPCC report: “It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.” (GHG stands for greenhouse gases, of which CO₂ is by far the most important human source.)

The IPCC is a political body of UN member governments. It bases its confidence on there being at least a quarter (its half of a half) degree of warming since 1950 on the expert opinion of the government-appointed scientists who draft IPCC reports. Interestingly, the IPCC maintains a deafening silence in its reports about the cause of the equal half degree of observed warming from 1900 to 1950. Why? Probably because that warming was almost entirely natural. UN member governments who promote a “climate crisis” narrative appear to be embarrassed by the UN data that show warming and rates of extreme weather and sea-level rise are the same in both periods, the all-natural earlier one and the latter one it claims was mostly man-made.

The reason the earlier period is almost entirely natural is that there was only a 15.6 parts per million increase in the share of the atmosphere that is CO₂ from 1900 to 1950, compared to a six-times greater 96.1 ppm increase since 1950, as the world industrialized after World War II.

If the impact of CO₂ on temperature were “linear,” meaning the same impact on temperature for every additional molecule, that would cause the latter period to have 6.16 times more warming than the earlier one. Since the IPCC is confident of only a quarter of a degree from industrial CO₂ for the latter period, it could only attribute a four one-hundredths degree increase in the former period to CO₂, an amount far too small to be measured within the error bands of its estimates.

But specialists agree that the CO₂-temperature relationship is not linear. Like many physical relationships it is logarithmic, meaning that each added CO₂ molecule causes a little less warming than the previous one.

Therefore, doubling CO₂ concentrations from 200 ppm to 400 ppm produces the same surface-temperature increase as doubling again from 400 ppm to 800 ppm, even though the second doubling requires twice as much CO₂ as the first. This is because CO₂ molecules absorb and emit thermal radiation when the frequency with which they vibrate matches the frequency of infrared waves leaving the earth. These frequency bands become “saturated” because previous molecules have already produced close to the maximum possible change. The logarithmic relationship is non-controversial and well-documented with spectroscopy and measurements of radiative flux.

The table on page 3 shows why the warming impact of CO₂ levels was 5.23 times greater from 1950 to 2018 than from 1900 to 1950. Here’s how:

Moving from the left-hand side, the table first finds the relative percentages of CO₂ increase in the two periods and places those percentages on a doubling scale. Then it applies logarithms to these increases and takes the ratio of the logs for the two periods, finding 5.23. The table includes a simpler, more elegant form of this relationship: log (latter increase/earlier increase), which of course provides the same 5.23 result.

Finally, on the far right, the table illustrates the diminishing logarithmic return to the increase by tenths of the amount of CO₂ during a doubling. For example, the first tenth of the way accounts for 13.8 percent of warming impact, and the last tenth only 7.4 percent, illustrating the logarithmic relationship.

The policy implication of this mathematical reality is that, indeed, the IPCC is right not to attribute to CO₂ emissions any of the half degree of warming from 1900 to 1950, as the world came out of the Little Ice Age that ended in the 19^th century. That warming was entirely natural. As I have testified before Congress, IPCC and U.S. Government data show no increase in rates of sea-level rise, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods from the period of natural warming (1900 to 1950) to the period the IPCC claims is one of largely human-caused warming (1950 to 2018). This calls into question not just claims of current CO₂-driven “climate crisis” but projections of future damage.

A PDF version of this article can be downloaded at CO2 Coalition Science & Policy Brief_EqualWarming

How the Despair of Humanism Leads to Climate Doom

By Edwin Benson

Those who sincerely believe in “anthropogenic” (formerly manmade) climate change are a hard bunch to understand. This excludes those who cynically use environmentalism to promote an overall leftist agenda or to sell books and turn a profit.

Millions of people really await an apocalypse that they see as imminent. They have a deep emotional connection to the movement as a defining part of themselves.

Enter Jem Bendell, climate change advocate extraordinaire. He argues that the end is near, very near. He is the author of Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. According to BBC, it has been downloaded over half a million times.

Deep Adaptation argues that “climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term.” The culprit is a gradually warming climate. Dr. Bendell cites the claim that “Seventeen of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001, and global temperatures have increased by 0.9°C since 1880.” He sees that extra degree in temperature as catastrophic because “we need to stay beneath 2 degrees warming of global ambient temperatures, to avoid dangerous and uncontrollable levels of climate change, with impacts such as mass starvation, disease, flooding, storm destruction, forced migration and war.” The only cure would be to expand current efforts, “by a factor of 2 million within two years.”

Since the paper is dated July 27, 2018, his two-year window has nearly expired.

The Academic Doomsayer

Dr. Bendell has some serious academic credentials. He graduated from Cambridge and is currently the Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria (UK).

Unlike the alarmism of Deep Adaptation, his more recent writing is melancholic. Consider the first paragraph of the article “A Pandemic of Love – Deeply Adapting to Corona,” posted to his website on March 18, 2020:

“I’ve not been breathing so deeply recently… I’ve been wondering how best to protect myself, loved ones, and participate in wider efforts at change. I’ve felt anger as I witness slow and ethically dubious responses from people with the power to make decisions that matter… But rather than get stuck with blame, I am also hearing of heart-warming action from people all around the world.… we can become part of an exponential pandemic of love.”

These words appear to be the work of a man battling his anger and resignation. Dr. Bendell is not alone. He claims that his “Deep Adaptation Forum” has fifty volunteers and an audience of over 15,000 people around the world.

He sums up his strategy in three words, resilience, relinquishment, and restoration. Resilience refers to clinging to positive attitudes that might survive the collapse. Relinquishment is letting go of those aspects of life that only make the meltdown worse. Restoration is looking to the past to recover aspects of life that will assist us in creating a new society. Among other things, he mentions restoring landscapes to their wild state and changing diets to reflect the seasons of the year.

The Followers

The BBC refers to Dr. Bendell and his followers as “climate doomers.” It quotes one of his excursions into wishful thinking. “People are rising up in love in response to their despair and fear, [Deep Adaptation] seems to have reached people in all walks of life, at least in the West – heads of banks, UN agencies, European Commission divisions, political parties, religious leaders…”

The same article profiles two of Dr. Bendell’s British followers.

One is “Rachel,” who cultivates foodstuffs in the small yard behind her home. “I find the more I do it, the less anxious I am. It’s better than just sitting in the living room looking at the news and thinking, ‘Climate change is happening, what do we do?’” Every six weeks, she takes a 450-mile round trip with two of her daughters to an organic farm in Wales, where the children learn to forage. “I don’t say to them that in five years we won’t be here, but they do accept that food will be difficult to find.”

Another follower is Lionel Kirbyshire, who left his career as a chemical engineer and settled with his wife in a small town in Fife. Like Rachel, he cultivates small amounts of food in growing boxes. “We’re not stockpiling food but as the years go on, I can’t see us having much left.” Mr. Kirbyshire draws much of his emotional support from online forums like “Near-Term Human Extinction Group,” where he can share his thoughts with the like-minded. “Sometimes I say that I’m feeling quite low and someone will say they’re feeling the same, so you know you’re not in it alone.”

The Extinction Group’s Facebook cover page states its purpose. “The Near Term Human Extinction Support Group is for people who have accepted that HUMAN EXTINCTION IS INEVITABLE IN THE NEAR TERM due to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and the consequences, based on trends determined by scientific research… This is a forum for friendly and non-threatening discussion… Discuss, laugh, cry, hold hands, share ideas, and know you are not alone.”

The Despair of Humanism

The Catholic Encyclopedia defines despair as “the voluntary and complete abandonment of all hope of saving one’s soul and of having the means required for that end. It is not a passive state of mind: on the contrary, it involves a positive act of the will by which a person deliberately gives over any expectation of ever reaching eternal life.”

The climate doomers seem to participate in this despair since they exclude any possibility of a Providential God who watches over humanity and guides them to eternal life.

These people are trapped in naturalistic humanism. Their science has no room for God. They only believe in what they see, and that view is bleak. They talk of love without knowing its source. Their naturalistic manner of understanding the universe excludes the Creator and therefore makes no sense. Despair is almost a logical consequence of their limited vision of the universe.

Escaping the Trap

These doomers entrap themselves by allowing the environmentalist cause to define their lives. Even if it leads to despair, they still see this skewed vision as preferable to a life without any meaning. Embracing true Christianity is a psychological risk that they are unwilling to take.

In Matthew 16:24, Our Lord said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” That denial of self is precisely the step that activists will not risk. Thus, everything takes on a sense of doom.