What's the difference between an evil commie douchebag Heat Nazi and an evil right-fascist heretic?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.


From the way, way back machine:

City Business Church : Hurricane Katrina is God's Punishment

citybiblewatch.blogspot.com/2005/09/hurricane-katrina-is-gods-punishment.html

You new it would happen. Pastor Don Feder is claiming Hurricane Katrina is God's judgement

on America for its sin. I tend to think the hurricane was God's judgement on America for failing

TO FORTIFY THE LEVY'S. But what do I know.

From last freaking week:

Robinson: Pay heed to what nature is telling us in Houston

They both are morons who worship false gods. Pay no attentions to fascists no matter what they call themselves.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Not only is Evgeni Robinson a commie, master race baiter/traitor,heat nazi, and liar, he's really really stupid.*

* Or, he's sleeping with Al Gore and feels he has to do this kind of crap in order to keep getting some.

Not surprisingly, this execrable cretin didn't use his latest column to condemn the left-fascist violence in Berkeley. (Watch as a Rogue's Gallery of lefty nincompoops fall over their word processing programs ignoring left-fascist violence:
This space is reserved for the flood of columns by left-fascist pundits condemning left-fascist violence in Berkeley, CA. )

Instead, he killed a few hundred trees and a few million of his "readers" brain cells by coming up with the following steaming pile of economic warfare.

From Washington's other other newspaper:

Hurricane Harvey previews our stormy future -

Pay attention to what happened to Houston. It is rare to be given such a vivid look at our collective future.

Climate change cannot be definitively blamed for Hurricane Harvey, but it likely did make the storm more powerful. Global warming did not conjure the rains that flooded the nation’s fourth-largest city, but it likely did make them more torrential. The spectacle of rescue boats plying the streets of a major metropolis is something we surely will see again. The question is how often.

The relationship between climate and weather is undeniable but never specific. Tropical cyclones do not batter Siberia’s arctic coast and heavy snowfalls do not blanket the beaches of Barbados because the climates are different. But no one blizzard or hurricane can be attributed to climate change beyond the shadow of a doubt — which opens anyone who raises the subject at a time like this to the accusation of “politicizing” a disaster.

The science explaining climate change is clear, however, no matter what deniers such as President Trump choose to believe. And it will be political decisions that determine how often we witness scenes of devastation like those in Houston.

Ok, smarty-pants, if the science is so clear, you should be able to explain it to everybody.

Look, kiddies! Not a syllable of science is to be found!

Begin with the basic fact of a warming planet, due primarily to greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico are unusually warm this summer — between two and three degrees above normal — which gave Harvey extra energy and moisture.

Unsupported shouts are not evidence, Geno.

Hurricanes usually ("Usually"? You mean your science doesn't know and can't predict? Why should anyone believe anything this moron has to say? This is nothing more than fascist fear-mongering. "Give us control and we will protect you!") weaken when they approach a coastline, but Harvey was able to gain strength, making landfall as a Category 4 storm. According to Pennsylvania State University professor Michael E. Mann, one of the world’s leading experts on climate change, Harvey’s unprecedented rainfall totals were likely boosted by global warming in at least two ways. Higher atmospheric and ocean temperatures mean more evaporation, Mann wrote in the Guardian, which means more precipitation. And the fact that the storm parked itself so stubbornly over Houston is due to a jet-stream pattern predicted in scientists’ climate-change models.

Since 2005, we’ve had Katrina, Sandy and now Harvey. The flood next time could come in Corpus Christi, Mobile, Pensacola, Tampa Bay, Naples, Miami, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston — no one knows where. But there is no doubt that it will come.

WOW! Giant hurricanes have caused massive flooding in low-lying flat coastal areas twice in the past twelve years! You've convinced me, Evgeni. I'm ready to sell my soul to totalitarians like you so they can shut down the economy, starve millions to death, and rule what's left of humanity from their air conditioned palaces.

Humankind has boosted the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a shocking 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when we started burning fossil fuels on a large scale. Even if carbon emissions were magically ended tomorrow, warming would continue for many years. But we can — if we choose — keep climate change from getting catastrophically out of hand.

The rest of the industrialized world has decided to move toward a clean-energy future — and reap the economic benefits such a shift can entail. I’m betting that Trump’s successor, whether a Democrat or a Republican, will reverse his shortsighted, self-defeating decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

But in addition to mitigating climate change, we must adapt to the warming we have made inevitable. Houston officials at least tried to learn one lesson: In 2005, as Hurricane Rita approached, officials ordered an evacuation that turned freeways into parking lots; about 100 people died in the chaos. This time, residents were initially advised to stay put — and, from what we know so far, there appears to have been much less loss of life.

But billions of dollars’ worth of private and public infrastructure is being destroyed. Because low-lying coastal cities are not likely to pick up and move inland, they are going to need new natural or artificial barriers to protect against storm surge (which might have been the big problem with Harvey, but wasn’t) and high-capacity drainage systems to alleviate flooding (which was).

But that infrastructure is evil, isn't it, Gene? It encourages stupid people who disagree with geniuses like you to use more fossil fuels. (This is known outside the Beltway as "work". Which produces tax money that you can spend on really important things, like changing confused boys into "girls".) 

Such projects are hugely expensive — but cheaper than repairing the damage from a citywide flood.

Also, the nation needs a sustainable way of providing flood insurance to those living in vulnerable areas. The current National Flood Insurance Program charges rates that do not nearly cover its outlays, and for years it relied on out-of-date maps that did not accurately show flood risks.

Buildings, meanwhile, can be made more flood-proof. President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring builders who receive federal funds for a project to account for the risk of flooding in their construction plans. Trump rescinded the measure, saying it was “job-killing.” How many people went to work in Houston today?


Also, the nation needs a sustainable way of providing flood insurance to those living in vulnerable areas. The current National Flood Insurance Program charges rates that do not nearly cover its outlays, and for years it relied on out-of-date maps that did not accurately show flood risks.

Buildings, meanwhile, can be made more flood-proof. President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring builders who receive federal funds for a project to account for the risk of flooding in their construction plans. Trump rescinded the measure, saying it was “job-killing.” How many people went to work in Houston today?

If Robinson and his freedom-hating brethren were honest, they would give glory to Gaia for her persistent attempts to exterminate the little people who refuse to listen to them.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

"An Incontinent Fascist 2: No Electricity 4U Boogaloo" - Dumbass propaganda at its worst.

First, let's hear from our special guest reviewer, Heat Miser:

Hang on to your shekels, kids. This one's a snore-fest of a Gorefest. Chicken Obese is back and he's grayer, fatter, and much, much richer than the last time he pretended to be a scientist. (Just like Bill Nye Only An Engineer Guy!) Sadly, Chicken Little (a personal friend of mine) couldn't monetize her Doomsday scenario, but then again she's not a professional fascist like The Gorehound is.

Take it from a guy who's been around a couple of million years: The weather comes and goes, but it always sucks when you want to play a round of golf.

Heat Miser out!

And now, another opinion:

An Inconvenient Sequel - National Review

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

2+2=4 is settled science. "Football causes CTE" is not.*

From Eric Adelson of Yahoo Sports (a website worthy of your patronage):


Why the latest round of daunting CTE reports should come with an asterisk ...

The story was posted early on Tuesday and the headline was alarming: “The latest brain study examined 111 former NFL players. Only one didn’t have CTE.”

That was from the Washington Post. The New York Times had special graphics, and this line: “A neuropathologist has examined the brains of 111 players – and 110 were found to have CTE, the degenerative disease linked to repeated blows to the head.”

Pretty scary, and social media chimed in:

“The beginning of the end for football…”

“When will the NFL stop burying their heads in the sand?”

“Will football as we know it be changed?”

“Duh. This is what happens to brains that get smashed 1,000s of Xs.”

Democrats in Congress offered a press release with this statement: “We know that there is a direct relationship between football and CTE, and we cannot afford to wait to take substantive action to protect players of all ages from the risks of head trauma in contact sports.”

What? Ground Chuck Schumer is a fucking moronic fascist and not a scientist? Well, I'll be hornswoggled!

It’s great that elected officials are paying close attention to player safety. But the “direct relationship between football and CTE,” while backed by strong evidence, isn’t yet universally accepted in the scientific community. And this latest study, while important, doesn’t move us a lot farther in what we know about the effects of football on later-life clinical symptoms.

“This study adds little new science,” says Jeffrey Kutcher, the national director of the Sports Neurology Clinic. “It provides a larger number of cases and a better description of their problems during life. Other than that, there isn’t much here that we didn’t already know.”

Kutcher isn’t alone in his caution. This summer, Yahoo Sports interviewed dozens of doctors, from neuropathologists to neuropsychologists to physical therapists, and the response was overwhelming: We just don’t know enough yet about CTE to make any conclusions.

That sounds like a scientist.

“With trauma and CTE, nothing has been proven,” said Lil-Naz Hazrati, a neuropathologist who studies athletes’ brains in Canada. “That link is very circumstantial. We’ve taken a bunch of people and the only thing we have out of there is blows to the head.”

Even Chris Nowinski, who helped on the new study, tweeted on Tuesday: “To my football buddies: today’s study doesn’t mean your risk of CTE is 87%. Biased sample. But if you have symptoms, see a doc – they can help.

The study itself admits “several limitations.” It explains: “public awareness of a possible link between repetitive head trauma and CTE may have motivated players and their families with symptoms and signs of brain trauma to participate in this research. Therefore, caution must be used in interpreting the high frequency of CTE in this sample, and estimates of prevalence cannot be concluded or implied from this sample.”

Does this mean the study isn’t important? Not at all. This new frontier of research is making the sport safer and making parents and athletes more aware of risks. But the “public awareness” of troubling stories far outpaces the public awareness of reassuring stories, and that creates an imbalance in conventional wisdom. Even political journalists, usually fixated on Donald Trump and Russia, tweeted about Tuesday’s study.

Now consider another study earlier this month from the exact same publication, the Journal of the American Medical Association. The title: “Association of Playing High School Football With Cognition and Mental Health Later in Life.” It studied a group of nearly 4,000 former athletes who played football in the 1950s, and it found this: “There was no statistically or clinically significant harmful association between playing football in high school and increased cognitive impairment or depression later in life, on average.”

Granted, this study also has its limitations. Football in the 1950s is far different from football now. The athletes are faster, and larger, and the hits are therefore harder. That matters. But both studies should be considered as we move closer to the understanding of football’s risks. As the latter study states: “Without population-level samples, it is difficult to estimate the base rate of long-term dysfunction among professional football players, much less among high school players.”

Dr. Mark Herceg, the Westchester County Commissioner of Mental Health and Concussion Task Force chairman, added this in an interview Tuesday: “It would be great to study the brains of all the famous musicians and actors who killed themselves and battled depression/addiction/medication. We need comparisons to the general population and others with mental illness to really tease this issue out and make better assumptions.”

The JAMA study on football players from the 1950s has 16,000 views in three weeks on the journal’s site, while it’s safe to say Tuesday’s news received far more views just from Twitter in a single day. Dr. Ann McKee, the leading author of the CTE study, was interviewed on ESPN. The other study’s authors were not.

CTE is serious and worth further attention. But for every major news story you see on CTE, there are several studies that aren’t as widely circulated.

Headlines travel fast. Science takes time.

* Not to mention Globalwarmingcoolingtemperaturechangenuclearwintericecapsmelting-acidrainoverpopulationbigfoot-socialismworks!

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Scaring the sheep with ice. Or, like Delaware, icebergs impose fewer taxes on their residents.

From the hysterical ninnies at MarketWatch comes the astounding news that our planet has climate cycles:

Iceberg the size of Delaware, among biggest ever recorded, snaps off ...

Heat Miser, not REPEAT NOT a Heat Nazi. Heat Misers know ice comes and goes.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Ack! The sky is falling!

None dare call this kind of "reporting" terrorism!

Just for a laugh, read the following while skipping the largest, bold, and italicized.


Too hot to handle: Study shows Earth's killer heat worsens - ABC News


Killer heat is getting worse, a new study shows.




Heat Miser. Much more rational and truthful than a Heat Nazi.

Deadly heat waves like the one now broiling the American West are bigger killers than previously thought and they are going to grow more frequent, according to a new comprehensive study of fatal heat conditions. Still, those stretches may be less lethal in the future, as people become accustomed to them.

A team of researchers examined 1,949 deadly heat waves from around the world since 1980 to look for trends, define when heat is so severe it kills and forecast the future. They found that nearly one in three people now experience 20 days a year when the heat reaches deadly levels. But the study predicts that up to three in four people worldwide will endure that kind of heat by the end of the century, if global warming continues unabated.

"The United States is going to be an oven," said Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii, lead author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change .

The study comes as much of the U.S. swelters through extended triple-digit heat. Temperatures hit records of 106, 105 and 103 in Santa Rosa, Livermore and San Jose, California on Sunday, as a heat wave was forecast to continue through midweek. In late May, temperatures in Turbat, Pakistan, climbed to about 128 degrees (53.5 degrees Celsius); if confirmed, that could be among the five hottest temperatures reliably measured on Earth, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of Weather Underground.

I'll bet those assholes think that is quite a clever name. (Look it up.)

Last year 22 countries or territories set or tied records for their hottest temperatures on record, said Masters, who wasn't part of the study. So far this year, seven have done so.

"This is already bad. We already know it," Mora said. "The empirical data suggest it's getting much worse."

Mora and colleagues created an interactive global map with past heat waves and computer simulations to determine how much more frequent they will become under different carbon dioxide pollution scenarios. The map shows that under the current pollution projections, the entire eastern United States will have a significant number of killer heat days. Even higher numbers are predicted for the Southeast U.S., much of Central and South America, central Africa, India, Pakistan, much of Asia and Australia.

Mora and outside climate scientists said the study and map underestimate past heat waves in many poorer hot areas where record-keeping is weak. It's more accurate when it comes to richer areas like the United States and Europe.

If pollution continues as it has, Mora said, by the end of the century the southern United States will have entire summers of what he called lethal heat conditions.

A hotter world doesn't necessarily mean more deaths in all locales, Mora said. That's because he found over time the same blistering conditions — heat and humidity — killed fewer people than in the past, mostly because of air conditioning and governments doing a better job keeping people from dying in the heat. So while heat kills and temperatures are rising, people are adapting, though mostly in countries that can afford it. And those that can't afford it are likely to get worse heat in the future.

Obviously, evolution hates poor people. If only the dinosaurs had invented credit...

"This work confirms the alarming projections of increasing hot days over coming decades — hot enough to threaten lives on a very large scale," said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a University of Washington environmental health professor who wasn't part of the study.

Golly, I'll bet old Frumkin got his share of noogies when he was a wee lad. Now it's payback time, and payback is a real bitch.

Mora documented more than 100,000 deaths since 1980, but said there are likely far more because of areas that didn't have good data. Not all of them were caused by man-made climate change.

Just one heat wave — in Europe in 2003 — killed more than 70,000 people.


TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Watch as the suckers applaud their false orange god.

It rarely even bothers to lie anymore. It tells you it is betraying you and dares you to notice.


From Slate.com:

Trump promises, sort of, to renegotiate Paris accord.



Straight from the House of Orange:

Statement by President Trump on the Paris Climate Accord ...


I'll save you some IQ points by translating from semi-god to English.

The first part of the dog and pony show went like this:



"Blah, blah, blah, I'm so impressive."

On these issues and so many more, we’re following through on our commitments.  And I don’t want anything to get in our way.  I am fighting every day for the great people of this country.  Therefore, in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord -- (applause) -- thank you, thank you -- but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris Accord or a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.  So we’re getting out.  But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair.  And if we can, that’s great.  And if we can’t, that’s fine.  (Applause.) 

Then more of the usual rhetorical masturbation:

"Blah, blah, blah, all men wish they were me."

I’m willing to immediately work with Democratic leaders to either negotiate our way back into Paris, under the terms that are fair to the United States and its workers, or to negotiate a new deal that protects our country and its taxpayers.  (Applause.) 

So if the obstructionists want to get together with me, let’s make them non-obstructionists.  We will all sit down, and we will get back into the deal.  And we’ll make it good, and we won’t be closing up our factories, and we won’t be losing our jobs.  And we’ll sit down with the Democrats and all of the people that represent either the Paris Accord or something that we can do that's much better than the Paris Accord.  And I think the people of our country will be thrilled, and I think then the people of the world will be thrilled.  But until we do that, we're out of the agreement.



And then the tiny-handed finish:

"Blah, blah, blah, all women want me."




Clumpy The Clown believes in nothing and knows nothing. Convenient for it, fatal for our freedom.

IT IS NOT IN THE LEAST OPPOSED TO ENSLAVING EVERYONE, AS LONG AS IT GETS CREDIT FOR IT.

Are you willing to play along?



TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

How Charles Krauthammer deals with the Orange Menace.

One of the few sane men in Washington, DC offers his coping process for these times of madness.

Trump: 'normalized' but still scary - The Washington Post

With near unanimity, my never-Trump friends confess a sense of relief. It could have been worse. They thought it would be worse. A deep apprehension still endures but the international order remains intact, the republic still stands, and no “enemy of the people” has (yet) been arrested.

Admittedly, this is a low bar. And this is not to deny the insanity, incoherence and sheer weirdness emanating daily from the White House, with which we’ve all come up with our own coping technique. Here’s mine: I simply view President Trump as the Wizard of Oz.

Loud and bombastic. A charlatan. Nothing behind the screen — other than the institutional chaos that defines his White House and the psychic chaos that governs his ever-changing mind. What to do? Ignore what’s behind the curtain. Deal with what comes out in front: the policy, the pronouncements, the actions.

And so far they hang together enough — Neil Gorsuch, Keystone XL, NATO reassurances, Syria strike, Cabinet appointments — that one can begin to talk plausibly about the normalization of this presidency.

Hence the relief. But there are limitations to the Wizard of Oz approach. Some things do extrude from behind the curtain that are hard to ignore. And here I am not counting the gratuitous idiocies that can, despite their entertainment value, be safely ignored — for example, Trump’s puzzlement as to why the Civil War was not avoided and how Andrew Jackson, who’d been dead 16 years, was so upset by its outbreak.

These are embarrassments, but they don’t materially affect the course of his presidency or of the country. Some weirdnesses, however, do.

Such as, Trump’s late-April pronouncements on South Korea. Being less entertaining, they were vastly underreported. Here’s the context:

Trump is orchestrating a worldwide campaign to pressure North Korea on its nukes and missiles. He dispatches (finally) the USS Carl Vinson strike group to Korean waters and raises the possibility of a “major, major conflict” with Pyongyang. Meanwhile, we are working furiously to complete a THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea to intercept North Korean rockets.

At which point, out of the blue, Trump tells Reuters that Seoul will have to pay for the THAAD system. And by the way, that five-year-old U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement is a disaster and needs to be torn up.

Now, South Korea is in the middle of a highly charged presidential campaign. The pro-American president was recently impeached and is now under indictment. The opposition party is ahead. It is wary of the U.S., accommodating to North Korea and highly negative about installing that THAAD system on its soil.

We had agreed with Seoul that they would provide the land and the infrastructure, and we would pay the $1 billion cost. Without warning, Trump reneges on the deal, saying South Korea will have to foot the bill. This stirs anti-American feeling and gives opposition candidate Moon Jae-in the perfect campaign issue.

What is it with this president insisting that other people pay for things we want? And for what? In a $4 trillion budget, $1 billion is a rounding error.

So self-defeating was the idea that within three days, national security adviser H.R. McMaster had to walk it all back, assuring the South Koreans that we would indeed honor our agreement and send no $1 billion invoice.

But the damage was done. Moon’s campaign feasted. The pro-American party was thrown on its heels. And the very future of THAAD — and a continued united front against Pyongyang under a likely Moon administration — is in doubt.

As for the trade deal, the installation of THAAD has so angered China that it has already initiated an economic squeeze on South Korea. To which Trump would add a trade rupture with the United States.

The South Korean blunder reinforces lingering fears about Trump. Especially because it was an unforced error. What happens in an externally caused crisis? Then, there is no hiding, no cushioning, no guardrail. It’s the wisdom and understanding of one man versus whatever the world has thrown up against us. However normalized this presidency may be day to day, in such a moment all bets are off.
What happens when the red phone rings at 3 in the morning?

I’d say: Let it ring. Let the wizard sleep. Forward the call to Defense Secretary Mattis.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Bret Stephens is about to be kicked to death by the Heat Nazis.

Climate of Complete Certainty - The New York Times

This is Bret Stephens’s first column.

Don't be surprised if the fascist left and Iskanka Clump make sure it is his only one.

When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.  

But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

           — An old Jew of Galicia


They aren't the Chosen People of God for nothing, kiddies. Of course, this was once called common sense by Jews and Gentiles alike. Now it is..."fake news"?

In the final stretch of last year’s presidential race, Hillary Clinton and her team thought they were, if not 100 percent right, then very close.

Right on the merits. Confident in their methods. Sure of their chances. When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.

That detail comes from “Shattered,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s compulsively readable account of Clinton’s 2016 train wreck. Mook belonged to a new breed of political technologists with little time for retail campaigning and limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future.

“Mook and his ‘Moneyball’ approach to politics rankled the old order of political operatives and consultants because it made some of their work obsolete,” Allen and Parnes write about the campaign’s final days. “The memo that one Hillary adviser had sent months earlier warning that they should add three or four points to Trump’s poll position was a distant memory.”

There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.

We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead, we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.

Lord have mercy! Where has Bret Stephens been all our lives?

With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.

Last October, the Pew Research Center published a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings: Just 36 percent of Americans care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 30 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds of Americans are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity.

Why? The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?

Well, not entirely. As Andrew Revkin wrote last year about his storied career as an environmental reporter at The Times, “I saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” The science was generally scrupulous. The boosters who claimed its authority weren’t.

Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming*, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.

*Actually Bret, real science knows that 134 years means nothing when one is talking about the time scale upon which our climate actually changes. Also, there are plenty of people who dispute that "human influence" thing who have not been silenced by the same people who still preach and screech that communism is "scientific".

But for a guy who works for the Old Gray Whore [For now, at least.] you're doing great.

By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy. As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.”

Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power. (Emphasis mine. - F.G.)

Bret Stephens For President!

I’ve taken the epigraph for this column from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who knew something about the evils of certitude. Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.

Correction: May 1, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the area that warmed by 0.85 degrees Celsius as noted in the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel report. It was the globally averaged combined land and ocean surface, not only the Northern Hemisphere.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the Orange Menace and his ignorant cow of a daughter to pull us out of the Paris climate treaty. That was a campaign lie to roil up the AWUGs.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Walter Williams whacks the Heat Nazis on Erf Day.

Seriously, kiddies, we need to start thinking for ourselves and stop allowing self-proclaimed experts to rule us.

If you really want to be free, that is. You might be surprised to realize you enjoy being an ignorant slave.



Environmentalists Are Dead Wrong, by Walter E Williams - Creators Syndicate


Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom. Let's take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today's environmentalists' predictions.

In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of "The Population Bomb," declared that the world's population would soon outstrip food supplies. In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain's Institute of Biology: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, "In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct." Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' highest award.

In International Wildlife (July 1975), Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." In Science News (1975), C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization is reported as saying, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed."

In 2000, climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that within "a few years," snowfall would become "a very rare and exciting event" in Britain. "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said. "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past." In the following years, the U.K. saw some of its largest snowfalls and lowest temperatures since records started being kept in 1914.

In 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt told a Swarthmore College audience: "The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."

Also in 1970, Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look magazine: "Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian (Institution), believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."

Scientist Harrison Brown published a chart in Scientific American that year estimating that mankind would run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver were to disappear before 1990.

Erroneous predictions didn't start with Earth Day. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last for only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey said that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is that as of 2014, we had 2.47 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, which should last about a century.

Hoodwinking Americans is part of the environmentalist agenda. Environmental activist Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine in 1989: "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. ... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." In 1988, then-Sen. Timothy Wirth, D-Colo., said: "We've got to ... try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong ... we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."

Americans have paid a steep price for buying into environmental deception and lies.


Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Golly! The left-fascists were right. The climate done gone and changed AGAIN!

#Snowzilla

#It'scalledtheweather

Who's bankrolling the US anti-natural gas movement? [Hint: It's not your friendly neighborhood treehugger.]

What do the fascist Russian government, Hollyweird arch-pansy Matt Damon, and trillionaire oil sheiks have in common?

They don't want us to be energy independent.

From The Canadian Press via Yahoo! Canada News:

The next cold war? US gas drilling boom rattles Russian markets and government policies

PITTSBURGH, Pa. - The Kremlin is watching, European nations are rebelling, and some suspect Moscow is secretly bankrolling a campaign to derail the West's strategic plans.

It's not some Cold War movie; it's about the U.S. boom in natural gas drilling, and the political implications are enormous.

Like falling dominoes, the drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is shaking up world energy markets from Washington to Moscow to Beijing. Some predict what was once unthinkable: that the U.S. won't need to import natural gas in the near future, and that Russia could be the big loser.

"This is where everything is being turned on its head," said Fiona Hill, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington. "Their days of dominating the European gas markets are gone."

Any nations that trade in energy could potentially gain or lose.

"The relative fortunes of the United States, Russia, and China — and their ability to exert influence in the world — are tied in no small measure to global gas developments," Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government concluded in a report this summer.

The story began to unfold a few years ago, as advances in drilling opened up vast reserves of gas buried in deep shale rock, such as the Marcellus formation in Pennsylvania and the Barnett, in Texas.

Experts had been predicting that the U.S. was running out of natural gas, but then shale gas began to flood the market, and prices plunged.

Russia had been exporting vast quantities to Europe and other countries for about $10 per unit, but the current price in the U.S. is now about $3 for the same quantity. That kind of math got the attention of energy companies, and politicians, around the world.

Some European governments began to envision a future with less Russian natural gas. In 2009, Russia had cut off gas shipments via Ukraine for nearly two weeks amid a price and payment dispute, and more than 15 European countries were sent scrambling to find alternative sources of energy.

The financial stakes are huge. Russia's Gazprom energy corporation, which is state-controlled, had $44 billion in profits last year. Gazprom, based in Moscow, is the world's largest producer of natural gas and exports much of it to other countries.

But last month Gazprom halted plans to develop a new arctic gas field, saying it couldn't justify the investment now, and its most recent financial report showed profits had dropped by almost 25 per cent.

The U.S. presidential campaigns have already addressed the strategic potential.
A campaign position paper for Republican Mitt Romney said he "will pursue policies that work to decrease the reliance of European nations on Russian sources of energy."

In early September, President Barack Obama said the U.S. could "develop a hundred-year supply of natural gas that's right beneath our feet," which would "cut our oil imports in half by 2020 and support more than 600,000 new jobs in natural gas alone."

Poland's Ministry of the Environment wrote in a statement to The Associated Press that "an increased production of natural gas from shale formations in Europe will limit the import via pipelines from Algeria and Russia."

The issue has reached the highest levels of the Kremlin, too.

Hill, of the Brookings think-tank , heard President Vladimir Putin speak in late 2011 at a Moscow gathering of academics and media. She said in a blog post that "the only time I thought that he became truly engaged was when he wanted to explain to us how dangerous fracking was."

But one top Gazprom executive said shale gas will actually help the country in the long run. Sergei Komlev, the head of export contracts and pricing, acknowledged the recent disruptions but predicted that the U.S. fuels wouldn't make their way to Europe on any important scale.

"Although we heard that the motive of these activities was to decrease dependence of certain countries on Gazprom gas, the end results of these efforts will be utterly favourable to us," Komlev wrote in an email to the AP. "The reason for remaining tranquil is that we do not expect the currently abnormally low prices in the USA to last for long."

In other words, if the marketplace for natural gas expands, Russia will have even more potential customers because it has tremendous reserves.

Komlev even thanked the U.S. for taking the role of "shale gas global lobbyist" and said Gazprom believes natural gas is more environmentally friendly than other fossil fuels.

"Gazprom group generally views shale gas as a great gift to the industry," he wrote. When natural gas prices rise, "it will make the U.S. plans to become a major gas exporter questionable."

Whether exports happen involves a dizzying mix of math, politics and marketplaces, along with the fact that U.S. natural gas companies — and their shareholders — want prices to rise, too.

James Diemer, an executive vice-president for Pace Global, an international consulting company based in Virginia, believes that shale gas costs more to extract than the current market price. Pace, which recently released a report called "Shale Gas: The Numbers vs. The Hype," has been studying shale gas for Gazprom and other clients.

"The capital will stop flowing" to U.S. shale gas, and the price will go up, Diemer predicted. He would not divulge the kind of work Pace is doing for Gazprom. Pace is owned by Siemens, a German company.

Pace's work for Gazprom has raised some eyebrows in Washington, and Hill noted that industry watchers in Europe already believe Russia is bankrolling environmental groups that are loudly opposing plans for fracking in Europe, which could cut down on Russia's natural gas market.

"I've heard a lot of rumours that the Russians were funding this. I have no proof whatsoever," she said, noting that many critics give the rumours credence because Gazprom owns media companies throughout Russia and Europe that have run stories examining the environmental risks of fracking.

Gazprom dismissed such conspiracy theories, saying that "nothing could be more out of touch with Gazprom's inherent interests," because the shale boom promotes gas as an abundant, affordable energy source.

Many U.S. media outlets, including the AP, have run stories about shale gas and the environment. Regulators contend that overall, water and air pollution problems are rare, but environmental groups and some scientists say there hasn't been enough research.

U.S. energy companies are eager to export natural gas products. The issue is sensitive enough that the Obama administration has delayed a decision on export permits until after the election. In April, the Sierra Club sued to block one plan for exports, saying it would drive up the cost of domestic natural gas and lead to environmental damage.

But just the potential for exports could allow others to seek lower prices from Russia, said Kenneth Medlock III of the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston.

"It changes the position at the bargaining table for everybody," Medlock said. "You stack all that up, and you start to realize, 'Wow.'"

There's one enormous unknown with the shale gas bounty in the U.S., Hill said. Unlike in Russia and some other countries, neither the government nor any one private company can really control or direct it.

"The question is, can the U.S. do what the Russians do, which is use this as a political tool?" she said.


From AFP Relax via Yahoo! Malaysia News:

Matt Damon's  first 'Promised Land' trailer

Gus Van Sant's anti-fracking movie starring Matt Damon just got its first trailer.

Damon and John Krasinski take lead roles and share scriptwriting duties for Promised Land. The movie is expected to hit North American theaters on December 28, just in time to make a run at the 2013 Oscars.

Matt Damon portrays a salesman for a natural gas company who is sent with a colleague (Frances McDormand) to convince farmers to give up their land for a type of gas extraction called fracking. Things do not go as planned, however, as Damon's character, who was raised on a farm, is faced with growing criticism from the local community, leading him to recant his greedy ways. 

Watch the trailer for Promised Land: trailers.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/promisedland/

 

From NYMag.com:

Gulf Oil Emirs Are Bankrolling Matt Damon's Anti-Fracking Film

The controversial drilling technique known as fracking is part of a natural-gas boom that many hope will bring down energy prices and limit America's reliance on foreign oil. But it's not without its vigorous critics, including many in Hollywood. The latest skirmish is over The Promised Land, in which Matt Damon and Frances McDormand portray two fracking salesmen trying convince a small town to sign over its drilling rights. The trailer, released earlier this week, shows them promising one hard-up resident a "state-of-the-art high school" and hinting to another that "you could be a millionaire." Then the cows start dying, activists start pamphleting, and Damon turns to threats. "We're a $9 billion company; do you know what we're capable of?" The message of the movie, directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Dave Eggers: Fracking comes at a price.

However, it appears that anti-fracking politics makes for strange bedfellows. Heritage Foundation blogger Lachlan Markay noticed that one of the film's backers is Image Media Abu Dhabi, owned by Abu Dhabi Media, which in turn is wholly owned by the United Arab Emirates, which, it just so happens, is the world's fourth largest oil exporter.

As Markay points out, more domestic gas production means less imported oil (including from the UAE).

All of this suggests a direct financial interest on the UAE’s part in slowing the development of America’s natural gas industry. Pop culture can be a powerful means to sway public opinion. While Promised Land, like anti-fracking documentary Gasland, appears to inflate the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, it may have an impact on the public’s view of the practice.

True, fracking is still a relatively new phenomenon [Wrong. Fracking was invented in 1947. - F.G.] whose full ramifications remain unknown, but fracking-related methane seeping into drinking water supplies in Wyoming, Colorado, and Pennsylvania suggests its dangers are real enough. [Eek! - F.G.] What's harder to understand is why Promised Land's producers went ahead with the Image Media Abu Dhabi partnership, despite the obvious damage that could do to the movie's green cred.