Racist is just another word for “nothing left to lose”

When everything is racist, nothing will be racist.

Biden administration cites climate change as a ‘racial justice issue’

Yawn.  First of all, there’s no such thing as climate change.  There’s just climate.  And it is continuously in flux because weather systems are chaotic, just like the sun.  Remember the sun?  It drives almost all weather on this rock.  If it goes away for even short periods, temperature drops precipitately.  (Ever stood in the path of a total eclipse?  Or even a partial one?  Wind picks up and it gets chilly immediately, even in high summer.)

The so-called “science” on climate is bullshit, little more than quasi-religious pseudo-scientism ginned up by the usual suspects.  I mean, I remember being told we were going back into an ice age when I was in high school, nearly five decades ago.  So again, yawn.  The so-called science isn’t any more “settled” now than it was in 1977.  Make up your fucking minds, or even better, shut the fuck up and let the real scientists do their jobs.

I will end by noting my conviction that the emerging replacement buzzphrase for “racist” or “racism”, now that they are losing any potency they may previously have had, is “white supremacy”, applied to everything that used to be called racist — even things you wouldn’t expect it to be applied to, like blacks who either have never bought into the crazy, or are starting to back away from the crazy because it’s gotten completely out of hand. When it becomes acceptable to accuse a black (or otherwise non-Caucasian) person of “white supremacy”, you know the left has totally lost it.

But the left were always the slavers, Jim Crows, Kluxers, eugenicists, and abortionists.  The left has always done everything in its power to keep the black man down.  And blacks are finally starting to figure out that, among other people, LBJ absolutely fucked them raw and destroyed their communities with the “Great Society”.

Hell’s jingling bells, it was even too much for many Democrats of the day.  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for one.  My Dad, for another.

Time to raise the black flag, my friends.

Past time.

Fuck Al Gore, and little Greta, too.

Record cold temperatures this morning (it got down to 8° this morning in Indy, smashing a record of 11° for this date set way back in the 1950’s) probably have less to do with “global climate change” than they do with “deep solar minimum”.

At solar minimum, not only do we have a spotless or near-spotless sun, the so-called “solar constant” drops off, along with the amount of insolation (the amount of solar radiation reaching a given area) we get.

This (along with some other related factors, like an increase in the amount of cosmic rays that reach earth, which in turn leads to an increase in clouds, thus more rain and even less solar insolation) makes it colder. Surprise, the sun controls temperature and climate on Earth to a really significant extent — more than mankind can ever hope to do on its own. Even big volcanoes look at mankind’s puny pollution and laugh.

And we are currently in a really, really deep solar minimum, with predictions for the next solar maximum indicating it is not likely we’ll reach even the level of the past solar maximum.

Any surprise that it’s getting really cold and that this is predicted to be a colder than normal winter in the Midwest simply reminds me of the dippy on-location newscaster during this year’s “Great American Eclipse”, who, when the sun went behind the moon, exclaimed, “Wow, it just got really chilly, and the wind picked up.”

Yeah, that’s what happens when you turn off the sun. It gets cold really quick.

Can anyone say “Maunder Minimum”?

And then there’s this, via Instapundit: Al Gore Promotes Global Warming Workshop as Arctic Blast is Set to Bring Record Cold Temps to US 40 Days Before Winter Season Begins.  Some days, I can’t even.  And this is one of those days.

#inwx

It’s not climate change.

A friend posted something about Houston on Facebook and actually implied that Harvey proved the case for climate change.

Neglecting the fact that a major hurricane has not hit the United States since Katrina, 12 years ago.*

Neglecting the fact that hurricanes aren’t driven by climate, they’re driven by weather.  If you don’t have a deep low pressure zone over warm water, you don’t generate a hurricane.  But that is completely and totally dependent on the chaotic system known as “weather”, that the experts in the field can’t even predict accurately more than about 12 hours out, let alone your lazy ass that looks at the outdoor thermometer for the last week or so and gasps, “OMG it’s global climate change!  It’s August (or now September) and it’s still summer and it’s ONLY 70 degrees!” without bothering to look at the latest NOAA surface analysis map (as if you took the junior-level Weather and Climate class from Prof Tom many years ago and actually know what all those squiggly lines mean) to find out why that might be.**

Climate is what we expect.  Weather is what we get, and it doesn’t always track with climatic expectations.

And still nobody on the Chicken Little side of the climate debate has explained why all the “warming” they saw suddenly stopped in 1997 and hasn’t started back up since.  (Oh, sure, they keep adjusting the models and fudging the data, but the models don’t jibe with what we see and we all know the data is being fudged.)

And nobody — but nobody — wants to admit that the solar cycle has anything at all to do with that, even with us going into one of the deepest solar minimums since the Maunder or the Dalton. No, the big hydrogen fusion furnace in the sky that burns your skin if you stay out in it too long has nothing to do with temperature on earth.  Y’all just keep believing that.

And keep believing that increased atmospheric CO2 means increased atmospheric heating, when actual research shows that CO2 gets released during cooling cycles, and trapped during warming cycles.  It’s almost as if the planet has a thermostat.  Oh, wait.

The fact is that the human race has seen warmer times and colder times.  Indeed, when I was in high school, Al Gore was ranting about global cooling, with just about as much reason to pay attention to him then as there is now, i.e., none.  But let’s face it:  Around the turn of the first millennium, the Vikings named their colony in eastern Canada “Vinland”.  Because they fucking grew grapevines there and were making wine, that’s why.  And as another friend of mine who is another global warming advocate (and ought to be smart enough to know better) keeps pointing out to me, there are ancient farmsteads being uncovered by melting ice in Greenland, another Viking haunt from about the same period of history.

Is it possible that we’re just living during a period when the natural variation either way just seems like it might be catastrophic?  There are stories of winter festivals held on the iced-over Thames River in London during the “Little Ice Age” (1645-1715) coincident with the Maunder Minimum.  (The Thames, for those of you who aren’t keeping up, doesn’t freeze in the winter these days.  Neither does the Hudson or Long Island Sound in New York, but both did in 1780 — the winter of Valley Forge — and the British troops rolled cannon across them to Staten Island to defend it from American partisans who were sneaking across the river to attack them.)

The US was just getting a good start when the Dalton Minimum hit in 1790. and winters turned awful until around 1830.  Have you ever read any good stories about pioneering in the Midwest during the Northwest Territories period?  Look what they have to say about the winters.  Hint:  They were nasty.  And the New Madrid fault famously cut loose during the depths of winter right in the middle of it, 1811-1812, probably making folks in proto-Illinois and proto-Indiana even more miserable than they already were.

Conversely, the Romans at their height lived through a warm era that probably fostered the growth of their empire.  It’s called the Roman Warm Period. You or Al Gore could look it up.  And there was another warm period later called the Medieval Warm Period that might have had a lot to do with the Renaissance.  You or Al Gore could look that up, too.  That one coincides with the Vinland colonization, by the way.

But you try to make that sort of logical argument these days, and the Luddites put you in the stocks and throw rotten vegetables at your head.  Or the virtual equivalent thereof.

Won’t they all be disappointed when it all works out just fine.

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* And never mind that another one is bearing down on either Florida, or the Carolinas, or the Gulf, or somewhere (the models — remember what I said about models? — disagree fairly violently) even as we speak.  To all my friends in Florida, hang in there; we’re thinking of you.

** Your concept of that sort of map may well be along the lines of, “Weather was dominated by a large Canadian low, which is not to be compared to a Mexican high, ha ha ha.”

The big solar furnace in the sky

Sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for my appointment just about the time the moon wolf was starting to eat the sun goddess, I got to watch the full totality somewhere in Idaho courtesy of their TV which was set to ABC’s “Great American Eclipse” — and isn’t that just precious.

Anyway, the talking head chick was mentioning how chilly it had gotten all of a sudden, and I had to snicker, thinking,

“And you people who believe in globull warmerongering don’t think the sun heading for the bottom of the cycle minimum has anything to do with the fact that global temperatures aren’t rising and climate change cruises to Antarctica keep getting stuck in the ice.

“Unexpectedly!”

Turn that big H->He converter in the sky off for just a few minutes in a comparatively small area of the planet and look how chilly it gets immediately from the lack of insolation.

If there were a just God, he’d turn the damn thing off altogether and let us freeze, as stupid as the mill run of us are.

Green is about control, not about efficiency.

From an away game:

Efficiency is a wonderful thing, but eventually you reach the point of diminishing returns.

Our air today in the US is cleaner than it has been at any time in our industrial history. You simply can’t burn coal or petroleum products any cleaner without a huge investment in technologies that produce smaller and smaller returns with every new generation. Our water today is also cleaner than it has been since the Industrial Revolution, for similar reasons. (The main issue with water today is overuse, not purity. If we don’t start refilling aquifiers pretty soon, we’re going to be in trouble.)

Yet the rest of the world (particularly the developing part, and I’m looking at you, China) continues to use old technologies that pollute the air and the water at rates higher than the US did at any time in my lifetime.

If you want clean and green power, you’d better be considering nuclear, or you’re not serious about operating a high-tech civilization. Today’s nuclear power is not Three Mile Island (which accident, by the way, has always been overhyped by the green left anyway).

If you want clean and green water, stop letting the EPA do things like what it did to the Animas River last year and then get away scot free. And if you want water at all in another couple of decades, start paying more attention to how water is used by farmers and industry, rather than making me flush a “low-flow” toilet four times where I could flush one of the old ones in my home once.

Remember, all these efficiencies are being forced on us by people who think they know better than we do, primarily for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining control, not because tiny improvements costing billions of dollars in new infrastructure and damage to the economy are actually doing us any real and lasting good.

What has Paris done for you?

A wise professor of mine once pointed out that if one wishes to make a treaty that is all smoke and mirrors and “feel good” but has no actual impact on the world, the thing to do is to get as many countries as possible to sign on to it, thereby diluting its effect.*

He was speaking in reference, of course, to the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 (officially the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) which purported to outlaw offensive war.

And we all know how well that worked out.

There are 63 total signatories to the Pact, which (amazingly enough) remains in effect to this day — or perhaps we should say “in ineffect”.  This was never the intent of M. Briand, who simply wished for a friendly treaty of this sort between France and the United States.  Mr. Kellogg, in his wisdom or (more likely) lack thereof, flogged the idea of making it a general treaty, and it was then off to the races.  The League of Nations, already ineffectual (well, it was ineffectual from the day it started, but let’s be nice), had nothing to do with the treaty, sinking both the League and the treaty even farther into irrelevancy to the world at large.

And when I say “ineffect” regarding this treaty, remember that there have indeed been no offensive, declared wars waged between powers since 1945.**  But there sure have been a lot of “police actions” and “interventions” and claims of national insult leading to invasion and occupation of another’s national territory (yes, I’m looking at YOU, Russia, and your sneaky military games in South Ossetia and the Crimea).  Then there was the whole ten-year Iran-Iraq intramural back before Saddam, invaded Kuwait over the claim that Kuwait was a stolen province of Iraq, and that whole ball game in the sandbox started.  And the list goes on, but always in self-defense and/or with pious pleas of “they started it!”

In fact, the only country in the world right now that seems to be bent on an eventual offensive war is North Korea, and even it (dubiously) claims provocation.  But exporting of a revolution once it goes flat has always been a Commie specialty, so it comes as no particular surprise that the fat boy is being belligerent.

Interestingly enough, Kellogg-Briand was yet another “Pact of Paris”.  But in this case there is no reason to disavow the treaty, since nobody pays any attention to it and dives through its huge loopholes on a regular basis.  And, after all, it was properly ratified by the Senate.

Parenthetically, I imagine humanity will never stop fighting amongst itself until aliens show up and invade.  Although even then I’d be skeptical.

As far as the Paris Accord is concerned, not only was it never brought to the Senate for ratification (which so few news outlets are pointing out, because it doesn’t fit their narrative), but it was nothing more than another “feel-good” pact among 130 nations, the major intent of which was to strike the world’s largest economy a crippling blow at the knees while everyone else sat back and laughed.  The dirty secret is that there was no enforcement mechanism, no penalty for missing targets, the worst polluter and purportedly second largest economy in the world (China) did not have the same obligations as the United States, and the United States was already voluntarily reducing emissions due to fracking and the steady replacement of coal with natural gas for peak demand power generation.

And then there’s the MIT assessment that even if the Paris Accord was fully executed, it wouldn’t succeed in its stated goal of “keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius”.  MIT’s assessment is that we’d be lucky if we didn’t get 3 degrees or higher even if Paris was fully implemented.  I tend to trust MIT a lot more than I trust a bunch of diplomats who are probably diplomats because they flunked out of their science classes and couldn’t get into MIT.

Say what you will, President Trump was absolutely correct to pull the US out of this unconstitutionally-implemented, economically-damaging treaty.  As Bjørn Lomborg,*** who is not even close to being an ideological brother to the conservative right, has said for many years, the solution to any warming problem is not to cripple economies by trying ineffectively to stop the warming, but to build stronger and richer economies in order to be able to react positively to changing climate and to any possible human or agricultural migration that might need to happen as a result.  In a rich world, there is no reason for humans to suffer.  In a world made bankrupt by ill-considered attempts to modify the climate rather than to simply get along with it, billions will suffer and die.  I know which outcome I prefer.

And on top of that, if other experts are correct and we are in a blip of warming that is just a pause in the overall cooling that has been happening since things warmed up after the last Ice Age, to fight warming might actually be fighting the wrong battle.  Any ham radio operator can tell you that this has been the worst solar cycle for radio in a long time.  That means solar activity is at a deep minimum, and projections for Cycle 25 have been pretty depressing.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the big nuclear fusion furnace in the sky is the biggest controller of climate, and when it gets the sniffles, Earth catches a cold.  But nobody in the “right-thinking” climate “science” community wants to admit that; they’d rather blame the industrial revolution and the CO2 it puts into the air, like the bunch of modern Luddites they are.

Got news for you:  I remember Mount St. Helens and Mount Pinatubo.  Both of those major eruptions pumped more junk into the air than (and I’m reaching a bit here, because I’m vaguely remembering what I read 20+ years ago) the entire output of mankind since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  There were notable cooling regimes after the eruptions, and I for one remember walking out in the grass at my university not long after Pinatubo, coming back with my shoes covered with black yutz, and realizing that it was because of volcanic ash from Pinatubo traveling around the planet and falling out of the air here in the US.  Puny mankind’s got nothing on Mother Nature, the world’s biggest polluter.  (Take that, Gaia worshipers.)

But I didn’t come here to laugh at climate science.  I came here to laugh at diplomats and politicians and movie stars and rich progressives and idiots who flunked science in high school who think that an essentially non-binding treaty can trump (no pun intended) Mother Nature, and her buddy the Sun.  To them I say, stop thinking with your emotions and start thinking with that mass of grey matter in your head.

If you have one.

Oh, and go read Niven/Pournell/Flynn, Fallen Angels, and Ringo, The Last Centurion, for a different view of what we might face in the future.  You might learn something.

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* The dilution of effect comes from the idea that the more signatories to the treaty, the more vague the treaty obligations must become in order to encourage the reticent to sign on.  Thus the loopholes in Kellogg-Briand that one could drive a tank (or an armored division) through.

** And recall, WWII started in 1939 when Germany claimed Poland had violated Germany’s territorial sovereignty by sneaking across the frontier and killing German border guards — which of course was a false-flag job performed by Germans in Polish army uniforms, who’d violated Poland’s territorial sovereignty by crossing into Polish territory and then coming back to kill their own countrymen to create an excuse for an “aggrieved” Germany to invade Poland.  Declarations of war followed from France and England due to mutual defense treaty obligations with Poland.  Then Germany turned around and declared war on England and France.

*** Also, see Lomborg’s 2015 paper regarding the ineffectiveness of the Paris programme.  This is the source of the graphic in my previous post.

Thank you, Mr. Trump

for seeing the Paris Accord for what it is — that is to say, complete bullshit, and by the way irrelevant and invalid in the United States because it’s never been ratified by the US Senate.

And yes, it’s complete bullshit:

ETA:  Source.

Of course, this presumes that the climate scientists’ models are correct — and they aren’t, because they failed to predict the 18 consecutive years of stable temperatures we’ve experienced since 1998.  (Google that; it’s fun to see all the links thrown back screaming that the observations are bullshit, or cherry-picked, or fake science.  Google is not your friend.  Google, despite its motto, is evil.)

So bottom line, even if the climate frauds are correct and we really are experiencing warming, all those potential trillions of dollars would have been wasted no matter what.  And probably still will be, by the countries remaining in the accord.  But my guess is that most of them will quietly slink away from their commitments within the next few years, now that the US has said, “we’re out of this sucker game.”  And climate “science” will die a well-deserved death due to federal grant starvation.

A strange game.  The only winning move is not to play.

Trump understands that.  And the rest of the world can go to hell if they like.

Pluto’s atmosphere may be “collapsing”

Which is otherwise known as “freezing out.”

Well, the sun is past solar maximum (Cycle 24 is one of the weakest solar maxima in a century; any ham knows that) and appears to be shutting down for a very deep solar minimum, so that means less heat makes it to the planets, resulting in colder surface temperatures, and yeah, at Pluto, some gases likely freezing out and becoming solids that drop to the surface.*

But to hear the warmerongers bleat, the sun doesn’t have anything to do with climate.

(By the way — the presenter is a lovely young lady, but she has the same problem nearly all of her contemporaries have — she talks too fast, and with tonal qualities that sound like scraping fingernails across a chalkboard.  The information is good, the presentation is just annoying.)

__________________

* Doesn’t anyone read science fiction anymore?  Try Fritz Leiber, “A Pail of Air”.

Happy Groundhog Day

Personally I hope the little bastard sees his shadow.
I want six more weeks of the coldest, snowiest, iciest winter on record.
Yes, I realize this will cause considerable griping, bitching, and threats to decamp back to Florida from the distaff side of the family, whose flight back from the Land of Sunshine lands back in frozen Indy tomorrow night. But I am willing to put up with that so I can keep tweaking Al Gore until spring.
UPDATE: Dig it.
Al, if it snows again, I’m in the book, just give me a jingle and we’ll set up that snow-shoveling gig for you.