Against 'Climate Change,' Week Three.
As mentioned in the last edition, our two week Against “Climate Change” project ended up with so much extra material, that we decided to keep running with it for the rest of the month. What follows are the contributions from week three.
First, our editor Michael Walsh:
Tent, Meet Camel
A little phrase I wrote some years back about the Left, in the guise of my character, "David Kahane," has managed to hang on across the time and space of the internet and has now become common wisdom on the Right: They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Which is to say, in their relentless quest to destabilize every society with which they come into contact, "progressives" move seamlessly from one provocation to the next, camels sticking their noses under every tent, mindless of the human and institutional debris they leave behind and eager to get on with attacking the next potential pile of rubble. This animating principle, by the way, is what is known as Critical Theory.
In my 2015 literary hand grenade, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, I explained the true meaning of neo-Marxist doctrine:
Critical Theory, which essentially holds that there is no received tenet of civilization that should not either be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School) or attacked. Our cultural totems, shibboleths, and taboos are declared either completely arbitrary or the result of a long-ago “conspiracy,” steadfastly maintained down through the ages—as degenerate modern feminism blames male “privilege” and other forms of imaginary oppression. If the feminists have an argument, it is with God, not men; but since few of them believe in God, it is upon men that they turn their harpy ire. In its purest form, which is to say its most malevolent form, Critical Theory is the very essence of satanism: rebellion for the sake of rebellion against an established order that has obtained for eons, and with no greater promise for the future than destruction.
In other words, this is war, but on the basis of all current evidence, only one side is waging it in earnest, and with "pride." If there's one thing history tells us, it's that all things must pass. Times change, cities fall, empires crumble. As Shelley famously wrote: "Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away."
Peter Smith:
What the World Needs Now: More CO2, Not Less
Time on my hands, I watched a somewhat dated video of Patrick Moore, ex-president of Greenpeace, turned enlightened. He explained that it would be better if we had more CO2 in the atmosphere not less. That the current level was low by standards of the distant past. More CO2 means more plant growth; better for plants, which makes it better for us. In burning oil and gas, he said, we were simply putting back into the atmosphere what organisms with calcium carbonate shells have taken out and stored over many millions of years. He didn’t go on to describe the same picture with coal but it applies pari passu. Burning coal puts back CO2 taken out by growing trees over many millions of years. The circle of life, as it were.
I like Moore’s way of putting things. It strikes at the heart of the scary pseudo-religious prophecy that we’re all gonna perish if we put back into the atmosphere some of the CO2 that nature has previously taken out. How so? Is something you might ask climate cultists; if they were sensible, that is. They’re not. So better not your time waste.
I also find interesting Moore’s implicit acceptance that the recent rise in CO2 in the atmosphere, from a pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million to a touch over 400 ppm now, is ascribable to man. That’s not universally conceded on our side of the fence, if I can put it like that. Therein lies a tale of uncertainty.
Truth matters. It goes without saying. Nevertheless, it is disconcerting that our side doesn’t have a standard script. Yes, I know, that’s not the nature of our side. Just wishing. But, again we have all heard the arguments that on an historical scale warming lags rather than leads increases in CO2. Perhaps it does, but what has that to do with the recent increase in man-made CO2 emissions and rising temperatures? It’s not clear, at least to me.
When it comes to rising temperatures, Australian scientist Jennifer Marohasy has for a number of years taken the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to task for the way it “homogenises” the temperature record, removes inconvenient past records, which makes it extremely difficult to obtain original data. A fair-minded person might conclude that the bureau has something to hide; to wit, that it is exaggerating warming. But where does that leave us? Exactly how much actual warming has there been this last 150 years or so? And what part, if any, do we concede is likely down to man-made CO2?
The other side, literally the lying side, has no regard for or interest in the truth. In fact, as their belief in God is largely absent, they have no reason to believe in or search for any ultimate truth. Their truth, built on their cockeyed pseudo-religion, is good enough for them. This gives them a grifter’s edge.
Steven Hayward:
The Ghost of the Unabomber Lives On
Aconservative comedian of my acquaintance remarked to me recently, “I see New York Times editorial writer Ted Kaczynski has passed away.” This is a callback to one of the earliest reactions to the Unabomber’s famous manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” that led to his capture in 1996. The late Tony Snow of Fox News was the first to notice a number of striking—and embarrassing—similarities between the language of Kaczynski’s manifesto and Al Gore’s pretentious and cliché-ridden Earth in the Balance.
In other words, many arguments of the manifesto were entirely familiar and even conventional, which is why he could easily be confused for the rote-cliché writers of monotonous Times editorials. Today it could even be written by ChatGPT, which is maybe what drove Kaczynski to his reported suicide in prison. The eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson, whom Kaczynski cited in his manifesto, observed in 1998 that “his paper resembles something that a very good graduate student might have written based on his own reading rather than the course assignments. If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane.” But combined with the evidence that Kaczynski had corresponded with—and perhaps attended events of—environmental radicals such as Earth First, the image of the notorious Unabomber as a murderous eco-terrorist stuck, and stuck hard.
A careful reading of his entire 35,000-word manifesto presents a more complicated picture, however, and one that in the end is more disturbing for what is missing from it, and hence the conclusions that should be drawn about him. And far from being a violent outlier, we ought to be concerned that the conditions that helped generate Kaczynski’s homicidal rage are more prevalent today than when Kaczynski formed his dark view of the world in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tom Finnerty:
Is the Polar Sea Ice Really Shrinking?
One of the climate crowd's most invasive claims has to do with the purported shrinking of global sea ice due to the warming of the oceans, which will, they say, raise sea levels precipitously and lead to the extinction of all of the cute, cuddly polar bears. -- any of which would eat you the first chance he got. That last bit is reportedly what set-off a youthful Greta Thunberg. Except that it isn't true. As they well know, since they've continued to invest in waterfront real estate on Martha's Vineyard.
Still, Gang Green's disinformation campaign has been remarkably successful, and it isn't always easy to counter each individual claim for the simple reason that news reports tend to parrot the preferred "climate change" harum-scarum. Enter the Climate Discussion Nexus, an invaluable resource for picking apart their assertions and discerning what's true and what isn't. As far as sea ice is concerned, here is a recent CDN post which compares the standard narrative to reality:
Scientific American, between bouts of wokery like claiming sex is not binary in mammals, tells us “Melting sea ice is opening new pathways through the Arctic such as the famed Northwest Passage.” And of course it’s terrible in every way including “Less ice means more fog, making it harder and more dangerous for ships to navigate the thawing sea.” More dangerous than what? Navigating intact ice? But the main point is that their claim that “Arctic sea ice is rapidly vanishing as the world warms, opening up potential new shipping routes across the top of the world” is just plain wrong. The Northwest Passage was open in the early 20th century and again in the 1940s, though not during the Little Ice Age when Henry Hudson went looking for it and didn’t come back. But since 2013 it has been rebounding, not “rapidly vanishing” as so often and confidently predicted. And if you make a prediction and it doesn’t come true, it’s not decent to assert that it did.
Lisa Schiffren:
Exporting 'Climate Change' Culture to the Muslim World
"Climate Change" is a comprehensive ideology that is meant to force societies to tilt their economies in progressive, Marxist directions and warp their social decisions. It is a tool of the Davos set for the imposition of World Economic Forum-approved policies on the world's wealthiest nations. All of this is well known. Nevertheless, it is shocking to learn that the U.S. State Department is exporting "climate change" – theory and practice – along with gender and diversity ideologies to, of all places, Iraq. Apparently, this is meant to "strengthen democracy” in that broken country.
Isn’t it bad enough that we destabilized a once functional, if authoritarian, nation by means of our poorly planned and poorly justified invasion? Now we're paying them back by drowning them in our culture’s most toxic ideas. Where once the U.S. tried to force democracy on countries with cultures not well suited to it, leading to the destabilization of their entire regions, now we are asking the people of that region to pledge allegiance to the dogmatic principles of the activist Left, with the justification that they are unalterable tenets of American culture. Which, by the way, they most certainly are not.
As it says about grants on the State Department website, “the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) aims to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange that assist in the development of peaceful relations.” Peaceful relations? Imposing radical wokeness on a tribal society and depriving an oil-producing nation of the ability to use fossil fuels for energy and profit seems calculated to bring about the opposite. And how are Dutch-style anti-farming policies going to go down in a nation where nearly a quarter of the labor force works in agriculture, with a special emphasis on raising cattle and sheep?
And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy:
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Eventuating
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