In December 2019 I asked a friend if he knew of something I could read to figure out if the climate change narrative was true, or at least how true or not it was. When I reflect back on that question, I actually don’t know why I asked the question, I’m not sure why I thought there was a question in the first place. I was entirely asleep and distracted with life, so why did I have any doubts about that narrative…I’m not sure.
Anyway, he ended asking a friend of his that was previously very senior within the Australian BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) and came back to me with this 20-page pdf:
Judith Curry – Senate testimony – Dec 2015
I didn’t just read it, I actually studied that document, and went to many of her references and read then, and BANG, I was red-pilled. It woke me up. I think that was the first time that I came to terms with global and coordinated malfeasance. It’s also fair to say that it helped me to consider global malfeasance in March 2020 and accept it as a possibility.
Her credentials are on the first page, but here it is:
I am Professor and former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. As a climate scientist, I have devoted 30 years to conducting research on a variety of topics including climate dynamics of the Arctic, climate dynamics of extreme weather events, and reasoning about climate uncertainty. As president of Climate Forecast Applications Network LLC, I have been working with decision makers on climate impact assessments, assessing and developing climate adaptation strategies, and developing subseasonal climate forecasting strategies to support adaptive management and tactical adaptation.
There is a fair bit of science in it, but Judith dumbed it down so that a politician could understand it. The bad news is that the whole climate story is built on a collection of untruths and lies, the good news is that the world is not going to be destroyed anytime soon. We have much cause for optimism.
This from Curry’s submission:
What is causing the warming?
The key conclusion of the 2013 IPCC AR5 Report is that it is extremely likely that more than half of the warming since 1950 has been caused by humans, and climate model simulations indicate that all of this warming has been caused by humans.
Global surface temperature anomalies since 1850 are shown below.
If the warming since 1950 was caused by humans, what caused the warming during the period 1910 – 1945? The period 1910-1945 comprises over 40% of the warming since 1900 but is associated with only 10% of the carbon dioxide increase since 1900. Clearly, human emissions of greenhouse gases played little role in causing this early warming. The mid-century period of slight cooling from 1945 to 1975 – referred to as the ‘grand hiatus’, also has not been satisfactorily explained.
Apart from these unexplained variations in 20th century temperatures, there is evidence that the global climate has been warming overall for the past 200 years, or even longer. While historical data becomes increasingly sparse in the 19th century, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has assembled the available temperature data over land, back to 1750:
The Berkeley Earth analysis shows a warming trend back to 1800, with considerable variability around the turn of the 19th century. Some of this variability around the turn of the 19th century can be attributed to large volcanic eruptions; this was also the time of the Dalton solar activity minimum (1791-1825). Paleoclimate reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere climate – such as from tree rings and boreholes – indicate that overall warming may have occurred for the past 300-400 years. Humans contributed little if anything to this early global warming.
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Something is clearly wrong with the current contract between climate scientists and society that is biasing the science and breeding scientists who are advocates, partisans and alarmist. And the taxpayer foots the bill. How can we press the ‘reset button’ on all this?
First, we need to recognize that the politically driven push to manufacture a premature consensus on human caused climate change is biasing climate research, and in particular is resulting in the relative neglect of research on natural climate variability. Until we have a better understanding and predictive capability of natural climate variability, we don’t have a strong basis for predicting the climate in the decades or century to come.
Second, we need to break the ‘knowledge monopoly’71 in climate science – the IPCC. As a result of this knowledge monopoly, there is insufficient intellectual and political diversity in assessments about climate change. To break this monopoly, we need to identify new frameworks for encouraging, publishing and publicizing independent ideas and assessments.
And finally, we need to find ways to fund a broader spectrum of research that challenges the politically preferred outcomes.
But Judith is not everybody’s cup of tea, and you need to roll up your sleeves and invest time to understand her work. She runs a little website where she writes about and also curates some of the best climate science analysis in the world. A good one to stay connected to over the years.
Climate Etc. (judithcurry.com)
Coming to terms with the truthiness of the climate story is very important because so much else hangs off it and is derived from it. It’s not just a bit of handy to know trivia.
I bumped into this video a couple of days ago and it reminded me of a chapter I wrote in my The Climate™. eBook (link below):
I’ve had an intuition about nuclear for years. It just didn’t make sense to me that the world would on the one hand be claiming an impending climate disaster, an extinction event no less, but then willfully chooses to NOT use and develop the one technology that could avoid that extinction event. If it’s that serious, then wouldn’t the supposed risk of nuclear be irrelevant?
If you are certain to die from cancer, but have a 20% chance of dying from a cancer treatment…wouldn’t the treatment be a no-brainer? Yes, it would.
I have realised that Nuclear is the Ivermectin of The Climate™.
Ivermectin would have solved the Covid problem, so they killed it. The problem was far more valuable.
Nuclear would have solved The Climate™ problem, so they killed it. The problem was far more valuable.
As I’ve said before, unhealth is the most profitable state, far more profitable than if you are dead or healthy.
The system always leans towards the maintenance of the problem.
Shellenberger has been consistent on nuclear being the solution for many years, and he is vocal about it, with receipts, in his wonderful book Apocalypse Never.
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All : Shellenberger, Michael
Here are just a few excerpts on key points about safety, cost, and waste:
On Safety
Similar to Fukushima, a meltdown occurred in 1979 at Unit Two of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The incident created a national panic that contributed to the halting of nuclear energy’s expansion, despite neither killing anyone nor elevating anyone’s risk of cancer.
It is difficult to find other major industrial accidents that kill nobody. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig caught fire, killed eleven people, and emptied more than 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, keeping the Gulf contaminated for months. Four months later, a Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) natural gas pipeline exploded just south of San Francisco and killed eight people.
The worst energy accident of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China. It collapsed and killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people.
It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million). By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred.
Nuclear’s worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe for the same inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel. Splitting atoms to create heat, rather than splitting chemical bonds through fire, requires tiny amounts of fuel. A single Coke can of uranium can provide enough energy for an entire high-energy life.
As a result, when the worst occurs with nuclear—and the fuel melts—the amount of particulate matter that escapes from the plant is insignificant in comparison to the particulate matter from fossil- and biomass-burning homes, cars, and power plants, which killed eight million people in 2016.
Nuclear is thus the safest way to make reliable electricity. In fact, nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.
For that reason, replacing nuclear energy with fossil fuels costs lives. A study published in late 2019 found that Germany’s nuclear phase-out is costing its citizens $12 billion per year, with more than 70 percent of the cost resulting from 1,100 excess deaths from “local air pollution emitted by the coal-fired power plants operating in place of the shutdown nuclear plants.”
On Cost
Nuclear has long been one of the cheapest ways to make electricity in the world. In most of the world, including Europe and Asia, nuclear electricity is usually cheaper than electricity from natural gas and coal.
At a global level, there has been a natural experiment since 1965. Between 1965 and 2018, the world spent about $2 trillion for nuclear, and $2.3 trillion for solar and wind. At the end of the experiment, the world received about twice as much electricity from nuclear as it did from solar and wind.
It’s true that new nuclear plants are behind schedule and above costs, but this is typical for large construction projects, and has often been the case for nuclear plants, including many highly profitable ones operating today. Because nuclear plants are relatively inexpensive to run, the importance of cost overruns declines over time. This is particularly true as the lives of nuclear plants are extended from forty to eighty years.
On Waste
As for nuclear waste, it is the best and safest kind of waste produced from electricity production. It has never hurt anyone and there is no reason to think it ever will.
When most people refer to nuclear waste, they are referring to the used nuclear fuel rods. After they cool for two to three years in spent fuel pools in nuclear plants, they are put in steel and concrete canisters and stored on land in a manner known as dry cask storage. This makes nuclear the only form of electricity that internalizes its waste product. All other forms externalize their waste onto the natural environment.
One of the best features of nuclear waste is that there is so little of it. All the used nuclear fuel ever generated in the United States can fit on a single football field stacked less than seventy feet high.
If an airplane crashed into the canisters of used fuel, the plane would explode and the cement-sealed steel canisters would likely remain intact. Even were some used fuel to escape, it would not be the end of the world. Emergency workers could easily recover it.
On The Climate™ Hypocrisy
“They can’t have it both ways,” said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel. “If they say this [climate change] is apocalyptic or it’s an unacceptable risk, and then they turn around and rule out one of the most obvious ways of avoiding it [nuclear power], they’re not only inconsistent, they’re insincere.”41
This from my section on Ivermectin in June 2021:
But read it with Nuclear in mind now:
Imagine that someone has a heart attack on an aeroplane, and there are 5 doctors on the flight, all of them as it turns out are heart specialists. They start running towards the patient to help but get crash tackled by air hostesses and onboard airline security, even the co-pilot jumps in to punch the doctors. Anyway, the patient dies and several of the doctors lose their license for trying to help. Turns out the reason is that the airline has also invested in a new heart treatment and that is the only treatment it will allow its passengers. The treatment involves heavy machinery that is at the airport, so the patient must wait until landing.
Do you think that the airline, its employees and hired help are involved in a Criminal Obstruction? I do.
If you need any evidence at all that there is structural, centralised malfeasance at play, look no further than Ivermectin and this subject generally.
In Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, she explains antisemitism, and it’s very long European history like no other book I’ve ever read. It has a history of several hundred years preceding the Nazi’s, and it’s not what I thought it was. One aspect of it that Arendt taught me was that it was used as a “supranational” organising narrative. National sovereignty has been a problem for those wanting to maximally aggregate and concentrate power, and you need “narratives” to get as many people as possible on board to help you achieve it.
Antisemitism was that sovereignty busting narrative that was no longer useable after the Nazis took it to its literal and final conclusion.
Here is Hannah explaining its supranational utility:
The second highly significant characteristic of the new antisemitic parties was that they started at once a supranational organization of all antisemitic groups in Europe, in open contrast to, and in defiance of, current nationalistic slogans. By introducing this supranational element, they clearly indicated that they aimed not only at political rule over the nation but had already planned a step further for an inter-European government "above all nations."
This second revolutionary element meant the fundamental break with the status quo; it has been frequently overlooked because the antisemites themselves, partly because of traditional habits and partly because they consciously lied, used the language of the reactionary parties in their propaganda.
The intimate relationship between the peculiar conditions of Jewish existence and the ideology of such groups is even more evident in the organization of a group beyond nations than in the creation of a party beyond parties. The Jews very clearly were the only inter-European element in a nationalized Europe. It seemed only logical that their enemies had to organize on the same principle, if they were to fight those who were supposed to be the secret manipulators of the political destiny of all nations.
While this argument was sure to be convincing as propaganda, the success of supranational antisemitism depended upon more general considerations. Even at the end of the last century, and especially since the Franco-Prussian War, more and more people felt that the national organization of Europe was antiquated because it could no longer adequately respond to new economic challenges. This feeling had been a powerful supporting argument for the international organization of socialism and had, in turn, been strengthened by it. The conviction that identical interests existed all over Europe was spreading through the masses.'' Whereas the international socialist organizations remained passive and uninterested in all foreign policy issues (that is in precisely those questions where their internationalism might have been tested), the antisemites started with problems of foreign policy and even promised solution of domestic problems on a supranational basis. To take ideologies less at their face value and to look more closely at the actual programs of the respective parties is to discover that the socialists, who were more concerned with domestic issues, fitted much better into the nation-state than the antisemites.
Climate change, or specifically The Climate™ is the new supranational, sovereignty dissolving, narrative.
Climate change is the new antisemitism.
This article is a “refurb” of a chapter in my free eBook The Climate™. It’s the type of short eBook I would have wanted to read when I was asleep but slightly curious.
Nuclear Ivermectin