We are lucky in our neighborhood to have a natural gas line serving all of our houses. Most people living in the foothills use propane, and while it too is convenient, we never have to worry about that huge hit they take when it is time to fill a 500 gallon tank. Natural gas is clean, giving off less in the way of pollutants such as carbon monoxide, SO2 and NO2. Oh, and it also gives off CO2, the much maligned but beneficial byproduct of all fossil fuels.
And, part of my retirement plan was to buy an interest in some natural gas wells. I used to hold a working interest in maybe twenty wells, but sold them all due to what I felt was overexposure to risk. These wells cost tens of thousands of dollars to plug, and things like replacement of tubing strings are expensive propositions. I was under-capitalized. So I sold the “working interest” portion of the wells, keeping much smaller (and risk free) royalty interests. Prices were depressed at that time, so I took opportunity and made a fair offer to purchase a one-third interest in two very stable wells with projected lives exceeding 70 years. That is much longer than my projected life, and a very good deal for our grandchildren.
The above video is over an hour and a half, and I do not make such claims on anyone’s time. I listened to it this morning while I was cooking and cleaning, as background. For anyone’s benefit who wants a brief synopsis of what I regarded as high points, read on. If you make your way through the whole thing, as I did, good on you.
It is good to see Jordan Peterson and Alex Epstein in touch with one another. Each have facile minds, and each, acting alone, figured out that there is no climate emergency. Epstein analyzes the nuts and bolts of the Climate Alarmist movement, while Peterson hits hard on the lack of morality behind it.
Epstein mentions that Michael Mann, the man behind the Hockey Stick hoax, has said that the ideal population of the globe is one billion people. How does he know that? He doesn’t really know anything, but it fits within the larger scheme of things, that Climate Alarmism is really just a misnamed attack on fossil fuels aimed to reduce global population. (The Georgia Guidestones had ten principles, the first of which was “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”)
An attack on fossil fuels is an attack on humanity. What people like Mann and those behind the Guidestones are advocating is mass annihilation. Hatred of humanity is at the core of it all.
The Climate Alarmists, even as they reek of evil, have seized the moral high ground. Epstein’s two books, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) and Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal and Natural Gas – Not Less (2022) makes a strong case that fossil fuels occupy an necessary and highly moral place in our world. They have helped relieve humanity of poverty, and made our world much safer, protected as we are from so many ill effects of climate. (Reading either of Alex’s books relieves the need to read the other. The 2022 book is like an updated version of 2014.)
Climate Alarmists don’t really care about climate. If they did, they would all move to Kansas City to avoid rising oceans. Theirs is a perverse agenda that relies on stealth to achieve real goals.
Climate Alarmists imagine that anything that humans do that affects the planet is a bad thing, that is, hunting, fishing, raising beef and poultry for food should all be outlawed. Building dams is an outrage! They seem to think that the planet in its natural state is preferable to a civilized one.
Fossil fuels do have side effects, but the good effects far outweigh the bad. So-called renewables, in addition to being unreliable sources of energy, have very bad side effects – rare earth mining is basically strip mining, and both solar panels and windmills require them. Cobalt, needed to manufacture lithium ion batteries (our future we re told) come from the Congo, and mining it has basically placed people there in slavery once more.
Finally, Climate Alarmists merely proclaim their objectives, and use them as virtue signals without any other investment. As Peterson mentioned, getting up to speed on this subject requires lots of work (don’t I know it). Coming to grips with the truth of it, and deceit behind it, requires time, intelligence and energy. Being a Climate Alarmist requires none of that. If it did, the movement would shrink to nothing, as the science is nonexistent, even fraudulent.
“According to the RSS satellite data, whose value for April 2014 is just in, the global warming trend in the 17 years 9 months since August 1996 is zero.” (Climate Depot, Marc Marono) (RSS = Remote Sensing Systems, a company that processes NASA satellite data.) But it gets even more interesting:
If you like graphs and understand how to interpret them, you’ll see spikes and valleys, but a flat line that interprets the variations. Data is taken from satellites and tracked by Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Those high spikes are El Niño events, oscillations in the southern Pacific Ocean, which are generally followed by La Niña, or cooling events. I call the straight blue line a “moving average”. If you can read the fine print, during the period in question here, 2015-2022, global mean temperatures have fallen by 0.07 C°/century since October of 2015.
During that time period, the media have repeatedly screamed “warmest year on record!!!”, and claimed record after new record temperatures, which is nonsense. The hottest decade on record for the lower 48 was the 1930s, and that remains unchanged. It appears we are in a bit of a cooling trend right now, which would make sense as we tiptoe out of the Holocene interglacial period and back into our Great Ice Age.
It is confusing reading about Pleistocene and Holocene, as it seems that climate scientists have ceased to refer to Holocene as an interglacial period, and now refer to it as an “epoch,” with the epoch prior to Holocene known as the Pleistocene (that lasted about 2.5 million years). That word seems to indicate that climate scientists do not expect the Holocene interglacial period to end in typical 10-15,000 year length (we are 11,700 years into this period). That befuddles me. Are they saying that human activity (anthropogenic warming) has caused an end to an ice age epoch and start of a new, much warmer one? What power we humans have! Who knew?
The article is typical of this kind of nonsense, full of qualifiers, as in “…understanding any link between planetary warming and extreme cold remains a work in progress,” and …observations of jet stream patterns have not confirmed the hypothesis.” and “there’s still a lot of mixed feelings in the scientific community, though there is some tantalizing evidence that there is some ‘there’ there.”
What is this “tantalizing evidence”? They do not say. They are vague except in explaining that there is an area of low pressure normally parked over the Arctic, surrounded by bands of fast-flowing air. When the winds are strong, the band is tight, and the cold air is kept in check. Often in winter, the vortex acts like a wobbling top, and Arctic air escapes and invades areas south, like Canada and the Northern US.
This amazing winter storm reminded me of David Viner, “climate scientist” and part of the mythical “97% consensus”, who said as follows:
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said:
This YouTube link to the movie trailer refuses to embed. It will take you to a two-minute+ video.
The trailer above is to a movie called “To The End,” a documentary featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, activist Varshini Prakash, climate policy writer Rhiana Gunn-Wright, and political strategist Alexandra Rojas. The movie opened in 120 theaters, and in the period of Friday, December 9 through Sunday, December 11, pulled in $9,667.
That means that the movie is doing crickets, showing four or five times daily to empty theaters. Typical of climate change lunacy, all of the action is in the clouds. We folks down here on the ground are barely aware of anything actually being wrong.
SENATOR BARBARA BOXER: Mr. Epstein, are you a scientist?
ALEX EPSTEIN: No, philosopher.
SENATOR BARBARA BOXER: You’re a philosopher?
ALEX EPSTEIN: Yes.
SENATOR BARBARA BOXER: Okay. Well, this is the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. I think it’s interesting we have a philosopher here talking about an issue …
The above is a Google Earth photo of a nearby Tesla charging station. I was curious about the white boxes to the right, and so went over and took a couple of photos.
There are charge[r]s in various areas in my area, there is a Tesla supercharger spot, has 5 stalls, charges .40 cents / kWh, and if [we] look 20 feet a way you can see the huge generator hidden behind some trees. I think most of these generators run on? Diesel fuel. So why not have cars that run on diesel and save the hassle of the chargers?
This post has to do with a couple of Wattsupwiththat posts, one from last week, and one more recent.
The first is by Willis Eschenbach, The Mirage of Electric Vehicles. Eschenbach is ridiculed as a non-scientist by climate zealots. He blogs at WUWT.
Climate zealots are usually dismissive of anyone without scientific credentials who criticize their work, while at the same time ignoring the fact that Al Gore and Bill McKibbon are without credentials, with Gore in fact having had trouble with both science and math in college. Here’s Wikipedia in his defense:
Gore was an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories,[21] but he did not do well in science classes and avoided taking math.[20] During his first two years, his grades placed him in the lower one-fifth of his class. During his second year, he reportedly spent much of his time watching television, shooting pool and occasionally smoking marijuana.[20][21
In order to fall in love with scientific and mathematical theories, one must first possess enough brain power to comprehend those theories, even to the point of self-realization that we can all be wrong, very wrong about what we think. Anyway, call it what it is – Gore is in the crowded field of climate zealotry, and so can be as wrong and stupid as he can be, and outfits like Wikipedia will still defend him.
Piece of Mindful 