RSS
From the NYT:
The Message of Thomas Friedman’s New Book: It’s Going to Be O.K.
By JOHN MICKLETHWAIT NOV. 22, 2016
Micklethwait is editor in chief of Bloomberg News and before that editor in chief of The Economist.
THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE
An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
By Thomas L. Friedman
486 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.From Donald Trump to Brexit to Marine Le Pen, one thing that unites the unhappy West is a profound sense of mystification. Across Europe and North America, people have an acute feeling that their world is accelerating away from them — but they can’t quite understand why. There is no narrative.
It’s almost as if the Internet allows readers to answer back to The Megaphone, thus subverting The Narrative.
Hence the attraction of leaders who “tell it like it is” and identify convenient scapegoats, like immigrants or the European Union. …
The problem is that our capacity to adapt is being outpaced by a “supernova,” built from three ever faster things: technology, the market and climate change.
I don’t get the status appeal of claiming that climate change is happening fast. Wouldn’t it be more prestigious to say, “Sure, you can barely notice the climate changing with your own senses, but if you read the scientists aggregating enormous amounts of data from around the world using sophisticated statistical techniques, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
It could be that climate change could speed up in the future, but right now it’s pretty slow.
For example, I was pretty obsessed with things like the tree line at high elevations when I was a Boy Scout in 1970-71. Above a certain elevation, the growing season is just too short to support trees. For example, in Southern California, Mt. San Jacinto above Palm Springs has trees all the way to its peak at 10,831 feet. However, Mt. San Gorgonio at 11,503 feet is known as Old Greyback because it’s summit is above the tree line: tree species on the top exist only as shrubs a few feet tall. In the Sierra Nevadas to the north the tree line is a little lower because of the altitude / latitude trade-off. So I went to look up whether global warming has raised the tree line over the last 45 years. In turns out, according to Wikipedia, that scientist have created theoretical models predicting that the tree line will rise in the future if global warming continues and/or happens. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that anything noticeable has happened since I was 12.
It’s hardly a “supernova” of ever faster change. For example, the NYT recently trumpeted the bad news that in Niger, the average temperature has gone up 0.7 degrees centigrade over the last four decades. That’s not nothing, but it’s awfully hard to notice in your daily life.
In contrast to climate change, demographic change is awfully obvious and does vastly more to explain “Donald Trump to Brexit to Marine Le Pen” than climate change. But for some reason it’s not something that we’re supposed to pay much attention to. Thus:
The chapters on climate change and the market are stuffed with similar nuggets. But Friedman also shows how all three forces interact, complicating and speeding up one another. In Niger, climate change is wrecking crops even as technology is helping more children survive, so a population of 19 million will reach 72 million hungry people by 2050.
So you are supposed to take away the message that causality runs from Climate Change to population growth. And, although Micklethwait isn’t going to sully himself by mentioning immigration, if you are wondering why your recent trip to Paris kind of failed to live up to your expectations of the City of Light due to all the Third Worlders cluttering up the avenues, well that’s due to Climate Change too. Sure, 0.7 degrees doesn’t sound like much, but you can’t go around asking Africans to have a more sustainable number of children. Because Demographic Change just isn’t a Thing, while Climate Change is a Thing you are allowed to worry about.
African overpopulation seems like the least difficult global crisis to do something about. Most of the rest of the world has brought their fertility under control. It’s just that nobody wants to be so crude as to publicly suggests to Africans that they do the same. It seems kind of racist to suggest that if the world has eight times as many Africans in 2100 as in 1990, that might not be a wholly wonderful thing, so nobody mentions it.
Commenter FactsAreImportant observes:
For the past few decades, an increasingly popular cliche has been to insert “increasingly” in front of an adjective even when there is no real evidence that the adjective is actually increasing. Friedman, the lazy cliche-slinger par excellence, uses the trope here in its “ever faster” incarnation:
The problem is that our capacity to adapt is being outpaced by a “supernova,” built from three ever faster things: technology, the market and climate change.
But behold. Friedman introduces a new cliche, an increasingly new and insightful cliche, the cliche of intersectionality.
Friedman also shows how all three forces interact, complicating and speeding up one another.
Not only are all the derivatives positive (all the forces are “speeding up”), but all the cross-derivatives are positive as well (all the forces are “speeding up one another”)!
So, Friedman’s insights and farsightedness are not just increasingly insightful and farsighted any more. No. His increasingly insightful insights and farsighted farsightedness are interacting and accelerating each to increasingly higher levels of intersectional insightfulness and farsightedness. He has become a raging, swirling vortex of insight and farsightedness.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
“Micklethwait is editor in chief of Bloomberg News and before that editor in chief of The Economist.”
Once you know that, you know what filter to use when reading anything he writes (assuming you then bother).
“they can’t quite understand why. There is no narrative.”
* and anyone who provides a narrative is a Nazi *
If Friedman says it’s going to be OK, then it’s time to start prepping.
You can bank on it.
Why that particular magazine is richly endowed with the anti-talent of immitigable falsehood in the augury business, the gods only know.
Put it this way, its use - apart from being expensive toilet paper - is as a useful reverse oracle. Just a little jinx that the fates are playing on us.
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/810556488020361216
Ages ago, when Thomas Freidman's life was slow-paced (2009), Pielke's intersectionality with Michael Mann earned him the scorn and derision of the consensus climate-alarm community, both published-scientists and bloggers. Pielke had noticed that in Mann's magnum opus climate-reconstruction paper (PNAS, 2008), Mann's faulty procedures had caused him to use the heavily-contaminated Tiljander proxy -- and to use it upside-down.
The better kind of academic just doesn't go around making that sort of observation, not when it implies that the good-guy team's celebrity-scientists might be fallible.
The climate science establishment doubled down on Mann '08, this and other major errors notwithstanding. The Loyalty Test aspect of their performance was one of the episodes that led to Mark Steyn's scornful remarks in National Review, and thus to the long-running, ongoing Mann v. Steyn libel case.
Pull on one thread, and the whole ball of string comes a-tumbling.Replies: @gda
I don't quite see how this is contributing to slowing population growth. Can a more numerate iSteve commenter 'splain me? Thanks.Replies: @slumber_j
And this is the optimist’s guide who’s telling us that things are going to work out just fine, when we’re facing a “supernova.” I sense a disconnect in the reasoning.
I think I’ll save my $28.
Your trip to Paris didn’t live up to your expectations, and neither will your trip to Sweden.
Ami Horowitz made a 10-minute documentary in which he interviewed Swedes about their changing country. (In the process, he got assaulted by immigrants.) Not surprisingly, Swedish cops see things somewhat differently than Swedes with blue hair and nose-piercings.
The blue haired SJW gang and toxic boomer generation who fouled their own nest are unwelcome in sane countries. They must stay in the broken ex-Sweden & face the consequences of their suicidal worldview. If that is as slave to some feral chap named Ahmed, so be it.
I don’t get why Thomas Friedman has a career, at least not post-2008. He’s selling a vision of the world that was all the rage in about the year 2000, was bloodied but tried to remain unbowed after 9/11, but increasingly seems like it’s being written for some alternate universe. My take is that his readership is mostly middlebrow, middle-management types who do a lot of their reading in airports or via audiobooks and want to feel like they’re being given the inside track on how a bunch of disparate, dispersed and complicated phenomena that don’t intuitively fit together somehow all do, sort of like a real-world version of a Tom Clancy novel or Infowars for the Times-reading, Hillary-voting set.
This site though remains a piece of Internet comedy gold: http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_Unit
There should be a name for this genre.Replies: @yaqub the mad scientist, @guest, @Thomas, @Ivy
That's a good description of Friedman. Infowars for ernest liberals.
"This site though remains a piece of Internet comedy gold: http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com"
Outstanding. The columns it generates appear to be more thoughtful and interesting than those actually written by Friedman
I found that to be the cutest part of the article. To normal folks, it shows how incestual modern journalism is, always hiring one another, always writing for one another, always lauding one another, always trying to cover up how incestual they are with some warped self-serving ethical rules, but to the in-the-bubble folks of the Left, it’s just “proof” of how “unbiased” they are and how strong their “ethics” are.
The way for the Times to avoid appearing to have biased reviews of their employees’ work is, you know, not to run reviews of their work and not hire people “outside” (wink wink) to write them in the Times’s pages. But that’s a ridiculous idea, no?
This all goes hand-in-hand with Journolist-message coordinating; regular off-the-record meetings with political honchos that Wikileaks revealed; socializing with said political honchos; and then turning around and working for said political honchos from time to time in revolving door-scenarios (Jay Carney, anyone?).
To the Left, it’s all just proof of how the Corporate Media are all such wonderful, informed, connected, unbiased folks. To everyone with a brain and a cold eye, it’s just proof they’re untrustworthy suckups and bootlickers.
Why the Change?
– http://cis.org/articles/2001/forsaking/why.html
I am so grateful you are exposing this, Mr. Sailer! Thank you!
African Overpopulation Is Your Fault Because Climate Change
https://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1694331
https://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1695192
https://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1696396
Methinks we are seeing a shift in the preferred cliche of lazy pundits.
For the past few decades, an increasingly popular cliche has been to insert “increasingly” in front of an adjective even when there is no real evidence that the adjective is actually increasing. Friedman, the lazy cliche-slinger par excellence, uses the trope here in its “ever faster” incarnation:
But behold. Friedman introduces a new cliche, an increasingly new and insightful cliche, the cliche of intersectionality.
Not only are all the derivatives positive (all the forces are “speeding up”), but all the cross-derivatives are positive as well (all the forces are “speeding up one another”)!
So, Friedman’s insights and farsightedness are not just increasingly insightful and farsighted any more. No. His increasingly insightful insights and farsighted farsightedness are interacting and accelerating each to increasingly higher levels of intersectional insightfulness and farsightedness. He has become a raging, swirling vortex of insight and farsightedness.
Perhaps instead Friedman might leave his Maryland mansion and drive his Prius over to Maureen Dowd's brother's house to get some actual farsighted insights. Sadly exotic tea might not be on the menu, but it's also in Maryland.
When did ‘climate change’ become a religion?
More importantly, when is this peculiar cult going to implode?
Are there any doomsday cult experts present who care to comment?
Welcome to the cult of Near -Term Human Extinction!
https://guymcpherson.com/
A few months ago John Micklethwaite was going around telling everyone who would listen that he had ‘won a fortune’ by putting a £1 accumulator bet – his annual custom – on his home soccer team, the perennial losers Leicester City FC, winning the FA Cup.
Only, it turned out that he hadn’t.
Why lie?
Yep.
Explain ‘global warming’ to Americans who currently having certain intimate ‘globes’ being frozen off right now rather than being warmed.
Steve, you’re too nice.
It is humiliating to see trained monkeys like Friedman being taken seriously; it makes you curse your intellect and education.
Because Demographic Change just isn’t a Thing
I think people see it is a ‘Thing’ — it’s just a ‘Thing’ that’s uncool to worry about — only uptight people worry about it — I often get a kind of laissez-faire, retro hippy vibe from people who think like that — hipsters et al — next to being seen as a racist, the next-to-last thing people want to be seen as is uncool — this goes pretty much for all ages, to one degree or another.
Watch the BBC’s Question Time program. The left-wing panelists will find some way to bring the conversation back to climate change, even if the topic is Brexit or TV license fees. It’s like a nervous tic with these people. It’s insanity.
The only thing puzzling about Donald Trump, Brexit and Marine Le Pen is the fact that it has taken so for people to revolt against the Left.
Are there lights in the dark?
http://www.mariestopes.or.ke/about-msk – that’d be one African example in the field of family planning -and a fine cooperation between Australia, The European Union, German Development Bank – and the B & M Gates and the D & L Packard Foundations.
Here in Europe, it’s the very articulated voice of Gunnar Heinsohn (who now, as a retired social scientist, works for NATO (!) in Rome) – – and even the voice of German secretary of defence Ursula von der Leyen at times (who has seven kids – all wonderfully being taken care of). She mentioned African overpopulation when asked, what she thinks would be the biggest problem we have to face in the 21st century – by Henry Kissinger, a few years ago. Kissinger, of course, was not amused. But that should be ok – he’s getting old…
In the Christian churches, a – hmhm – there’s a big step to be taken, after the being-gay-is-ok revolt, we need hermeneutic progress considering Moses 9, 7 – Be fruitful and multiply!
It’s Old Testament – that should make hermeneutic progress easier.
PS
Not surprisingly, Gunnar Heinsohn teaches “war demographics” at the NATO Defence College in Rome. He and Thilo Sarrazin are the two rebellious retirees in Germany – for my mind (mostly concerned with photography, so this mustn’t mean much – – ) Sarrazin and Heinsohn are the most important intellectuals right now in Germany. Third would be Hans-Werner Sinn, fourth Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
That said, pretty sure getting off the Earth will be required/inevitable eventually. If nothing else, Mother Nature's always been pretty ambitious about expanding her horizons.Replies: @Dieter Kief
I always liked Friedman Units:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_Unit
Whenever I see that name…
http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php
Only, it turned out that he hadn't.
Why lie?Replies: @dearieme, @Bill Jones
“Why lie?” Because it’s not only the Clintons who are given to spontaneous, instinctive yet often pointless lying. I know of a chap who lies about trivial things when (i) he gains no advantage from the lie, and (ii) the lie is easily shown to be such. It’s just him, it’s how he is, as in the old scorpion yarn. (By trade he’s an accountant.)
Friedman seems to have discovered Alvin Toffler at some point and has been working the “faster” racket every since. IIRC, it was Future Shock where Toffler coined the term “information overload” and the idea of change accelerating.
Lots of the elite are still fond of globalization. It’s good for them.
A liberal friend that I used to have complained a couple years ago about how climate change was ruining Africa and when I asked why they were having 5-6 kids if their food supply was in imminent danger and if it was brought down to maybe 2-3 kids like the west that the situation could be much better, she claimed it was a racist question to ask that. The progressive stack/thirdworldism ensures that black people dindu nuffins at all times and that it’s always the fault of whitey somehow.
At a loss why the Western elites want to stifle economic activity to supposedly inhibit “climate change”. Yet while there is clearly some man-made effects, they are relatively minor. One Krakatoa event dwarfs the entirety of man’s contributions. And most of the proposed changes would not change Chinese nor Indian nor other 2nd world energy practices. And further to avoid being called racist the elites, in their huge Maryland redoubts financed by dear old Dad’s mall billions, will not even begin to discuss African population control. Where is Sam Kinison when you need him?
For the past few decades, an increasingly popular cliche has been to insert "increasingly" in front of an adjective even when there is no real evidence that the adjective is actually increasing. Friedman, the lazy cliche-slinger par excellence, uses the trope here in its "ever faster" incarnation:But behold. Friedman introduces a new cliche, an increasingly new and insightful cliche, the cliche of intersectionality.Not only are all the derivatives positive (all the forces are "speeding up"), but all the cross-derivatives are positive as well (all the forces are "speeding up one another")!
So, Friedman's insights and farsightedness are not just increasingly insightful and farsighted any more. No. His increasingly insightful insights and farsighted farsightedness are interacting and accelerating each to increasingly higher levels of intersectional insightfulness and farsightedness. He has become a raging, swirling vortex of insight and farsightedness.Replies: @Bugg
You only are privy to such farsighted insights when YOU, BIG DEAL NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST, gets hosted by some faraway intersectional elite in an exotic land who confirms all of your farsighted insightful biases. And when the Times is vacating 8 floors of their building, even better if said faraway intersectional elite in an exotic land insightfully offers to pay for it.
Perhaps instead Friedman might leave his Maryland mansion and drive his Prius over to Maureen Dowd’s brother’s house to get some actual farsighted insights. Sadly exotic tea might not be on the menu, but it’s also in Maryland.
Why the Change? - http://cis.org/articles/2001/forsaking/why.html
I am so grateful you are exposing this, Mr. Sailer! Thank you!
African Overpopulation Is Your Fault Because Climate Changehttps://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1694331
https://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1695192
https://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1696396Replies: @Anon, @Opinionator
I thought that big donor to the Sierra Club stopped them talking about population?
I was in Indiana visiting some relatives around Thanksgiving. It was in the high thirties/low forties, no snow yet, and there had been a day in the sixties a week or two before. My crusty old Navy vet grandfather and his brother, both of whom had grown up in the area, told me that “it used to pretty much get down below zero with snow on the ground around November first and stay that way till April or so.”
Course, it’s pretty cold about now. Nevertheless.
You think the Left has to be wrong about everything?Replies: @whorefinder, @Desiderius
That nomenclature makes just about all the right enemies.
And it’s fine if they want to be their own global archipelago country. Empire over the rest of us isn’t.
It's Old Testament - that should make hermeneutic progress easier.PS
Not surprisingly, Gunnar Heinsohn teaches "war demographics" at the NATO Defence College in Rome. He and Thilo Sarrazin are the two rebellious retirees in Germany - for my mind (mostly concerned with photography, so this mustn't mean much - - ) Sarrazin and Heinsohn are the most important intellectuals right now in Germany. Third would be Hans-Werner Sinn, fourth Hans Magnus Enzensberger.Replies: @Desiderius
Prudent husbandry is implied in the “fruitful.” It’s not “be cancerous and multiply.”
That said, pretty sure getting off the Earth will be required/inevitable eventually. If nothing else, Mother Nature’s always been pretty ambitious about expanding her horizons.
Allowed?
What’s not forbidden is mandatory, comrade!
In Soviet America climate changes human activity, or else!
Ami Horowitz made a 10-minute documentary in which he interviewed Swedes about their changing country. (In the process, he got assaulted by immigrants.) Not surprisingly, Swedish cops see things somewhat differently than Swedes with blue hair and nose-piercings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaIgeQXQgIReplies: @TheJester, @Almost Missouri, @CrunchybutRealistCon
My wife’s fraternal grandparents immigrated from Sweden in the early 20th Century. In the 1970s, we had multiple opportunities to visit the relatives who stayed behind. What a well-ordered society … back then! One could “eat off the streets” in Malmo it was so clean.
It is sad to watch an advanced European society commit suicide. The pro-immigrant comments by Swedes at the end of the video in the face of the immigrant-driven crimes of rape and other violence suggest a Swedish population indoctrinated in liberal self-hate from the cradle. One would not want to be branded as a racist by opposing Islamic immigration, right?
It is probably too late for the Swedes to take correction action since, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the Islamic demographic will consume them. An obituary for Sweden is in order.
Merkel's Boner...Replies: @flyover hick
Sweden delenda est. Die, Sweden, die.
That said, pretty sure getting off the Earth will be required/inevitable eventually. If nothing else, Mother Nature's always been pretty ambitious about expanding her horizons.Replies: @Dieter Kief
Yes – that’s what I meant. We have to find a way to understand Moses 9,7 so that it fits the 21st century.
Plus – I wrote very nice things indeed about the seven kids of German Minister of Defence Ursula von der Leyen – and – without mentioning him, I’d admit that – also about her husband. (I wrote these nice things purposely).
Of mother earth I tend to think like Wittgenstein tought of lions. – If she would talk to me, I couldn’t understand.
Then why do the same people think the population of Africa is eventually going to reach four billion? Shouldn’t African women already be having fewer children if this were true?
Here is Matt Taibbi’s latest on Friedman:
“http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-reviews-thomas-friedman-book-thank-you-for-being-late-w453529”
Taibbi’s original takedown, “The Mustache of Understanding”, will barring a complete collapse of civilization be featured in anthologies of comic writings some day. But the man still has a career. Indeed a more successful career, as Taibbi notes, than any of his critics.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-reviews-thomas-friedman-book-thank-you-for-being-late-w453529Replies: @Anonymous Nephew
It is. He is popular because he is skilled at putting a positive spin on unpleasant facts. Most of the elites are fairly well informed about the world, they just can’t live with certain unpleasant conclusions that are otherwise difficult to avoid.
African very high fertility rates are consistent with a society where most children die in infancy. Having a lot of children is a hedge that at least some will survive. Modern Western medicine in Africa has changed that, and now most children there are able to survive, but African cultural mores have not changed. But the West has lost its cultural self confidence to tell Africans they should have less children.
Bravo, Steve!
I myself firmly believed in climate change until recently … but twenty years on, I began to notice that nothing much had changed–not even the temperature. I mean, if climate were a real full-on catastrophe like the media keep telling us, you’d think that after all that time, we would have lost at least one coastal city by now. As it happens, I don’t think we’ve even lost one, single Pacific atoll. The whole thing now makes me think of that famous line from Godfather Part II: “Hyman Roth has been dying of the same heart attack for twenty years!” We’ve all been dying of global warming for twenty years, but have somehow just failed to notice!
Exactly. It reminds me a DC guy I know who reads the Economist religiously–a one paragraph synopsis on every country in the world and he’s ready to go out and talk issues with “educated” company.
There should be a name for this genre.
It's called "journalism."
Way back in the late 90s when I was still firmly on the left and earnestly reading the NYT opinion page to know what smart people should think, I realized Thomas Friedman is consistently wrong about just about everything. He comes up with tidy little theories of everything that are always proven wrong, at which point he just generates a new one and writes about that for a few years. Also, the next 6 months are the most critical for any issue he writes about…and then the next 6 months, the next 6 months, etc.
Also, the guy who loves to preach about climate change, over consumption of resources, etc lives here: http://wonkette.com/413811/this-is-literally-thomas-friedmans-house.
As Glenn Reynolds says, I’ll start believing climate change is a crisis when the people who say it is start acting like it.
Take his predictions, and determine which stocks will go up if they are right.
Short them.
1. Call out overpopulation.
2. Travel habits of well-off SWPLs. Trips to dig wells in Malawi, commune with the Costa Rican rain forest, breathe the pure, frosty air at the top of the chairlift.
3. Lifestyles of the 1%.
4. Millions raising their carbon footprint by immigrating to the first world.
5. Trim regulation of nuclear power, crash program to develop thorium reactors.
6. Call explicitly for high energy prices. Yeah, that sucks if you're poor, but it sucks to be poor anyway.
7. Denounce the sale of climate neo-indulgences (since this is Science, not Post-Christianity).
“……sort of like a real-world version of a Tom Clancy novel or Infowars for the Times-reading, Hillary-voting set.”
That’s a good description of Friedman. Infowars for ernest liberals.
“This site though remains a piece of Internet comedy gold: http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com”
Outstanding. The columns it generates appear to be more thoughtful and interesting than those actually written by Friedman
"http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-reviews-thomas-friedman-book-thank-you-for-being-late-w453529"
Taibbi's original takedown, "The Mustache of Understanding", will barring a complete collapse of civilization be featured in anthologies of comic writings some day. But the man still has a career. Indeed a more successful career, as Taibbi notes, than any of his critics.Replies: @another fred
Your link did not work. Maybe this:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-reviews-thomas-friedman-book-thank-you-for-being-late-w453529
"Watch Fiona Apple Yell 'Donald Trump, F--k You' at Standing Rock Benefit. "
Apparently "Trumps Nuts Roasting On An Open Fire" is her contribution to the festive season. How original.
Wow, we get to talking about Thomas Freidman’s ever-faster pace of the increasing intersectionality of overpopulation and climate change. And then a Roger Pielke Jr. tweet makes a cameo appearance in Comment #3.
Ages ago, when Thomas Freidman’s life was slow-paced (2009), Pielke’s intersectionality with Michael Mann earned him the scorn and derision of the consensus climate-alarm community, both published-scientists and bloggers. Pielke had noticed that in Mann’s magnum opus climate-reconstruction paper (PNAS, 2008), Mann’s faulty procedures had caused him to use the heavily-contaminated Tiljander proxy — and to use it upside-down.
The better kind of academic just doesn’t go around making that sort of observation, not when it implies that the good-guy team’s celebrity-scientists might be fallible.
The climate science establishment doubled down on Mann ’08, this and other major errors notwithstanding. The Loyalty Test aspect of their performance was one of the episodes that led to Mark Steyn’s scornful remarks in National Review, and thus to the long-running, ongoing Mann v. Steyn libel case.
Pull on one thread, and the whole ball of string comes a-tumbling.
http://www.vividmaps.com/2016/12/trumpland-and-clinton-archipelago.html
However, living as I do in Trumpland, safe from the rising waters, I can more rationally consider the "evidence" for the "science is settled - run for the hills" silliness. Real-world, observational evidence? So far, still waiting.....
Meanwhile, it's heartening to see that there's a disturbance in the force, at least in relation to the future funding for this out-of-control behemoth.
“I don’t get the status appeal of claiming that climate change is happening fast.”
Didn’t you see The Day After Tomorrow, Steve? Climate Change moves with lightning speed. It can freeze the very breath you exhale.
“The problem is that our capacity to adapt is being outpaced by a “supernova,” built from three ever faster things: technology, the market and climate change.”
Friedman likes to use words like “supernova” (why exactly is it in quotes here) – it proves that he is au courant with sciency stuff.
Friedman himself is a “supernova” of “bullsh*t”.
Friedman’s a great contrary indicator, but then we also have to look at Malcolm Gladwell…
Also, the guy who loves to preach about climate change, over consumption of resources, etc lives here: http://wonkette.com/413811/this-is-literally-thomas-friedmans-house.
As Glenn Reynolds says, I'll start believing climate change is a crisis when the people who say it is start acting like it.Replies: @oddsbodkins, @candid_observer, @ic1000
Friedman is useful in his consistent wrongness. Similar to William Kristol.
“Hence the attraction of leaders who “tell it like it is” and identify convenient scapegoats, like immigrants or the European Union. …”
Ever notice how globo-crats and their lackeys have been stealthily trying to re-define the word “scapegoat”? I see this everywhere. A scapegoat, by the old standard definition, has nothing to do with what it’s being blamed for. It is innocent. It is simply not the, or a, causal factor in the bad things happening. Now, as used by people like Micklethwait, it just means “something that we want and like but that they don’t want or like”. Whether things like the EU or immigration have observable negative effects on people who aren’t us is irrelevant in the new definition. If one can trot out stats showing some positive effects, then drawing any attention to the negative effects is ipso facto “scapegoating”, even if those negative effects are real.
Sometimes (usually among far-lefty types) this practice is refined by permitting blame to be applied only to some ultimate causal factor (NAFTA, colonialism, Western bombing, global warming) while labeling as “scapegoating” any blame attached to a real, local, proximate cause of distress. (Don’t “scapegoat” a rapist for raping because global warming…)
Thus in reading contemporary punditry, one gets the impression that no one among hoi polloi is capable of identifying any of the real causal factors of their distress at all.
The same process can be observed for “populist”, which now apparently means “someone who has the temerity to think that the people who govern him should attend to his interests, who’s noticed that we’re a sorry excuse for an elite, and who would prefer competent leadership to the glorious Clown World utopia we offer.”
You're right about the decline and fall of the term generally, however. It now means things people mistakenly blame, or blame excessively. But what do you expect, people who make a living using words to understand their meanings?
I’ve run out of words to describe the sheer… awfulness of these people.
“Those immigrants running amok and attacking women near their no-go zone housing project? That’s all in your imagination! Wages stagnated? You just need to go back to school and study harder so you can be the next Mark Zuckerberg… or Tom Friedman! Job shipped overseas? You’re just “scapegoating” someone!”
“In contrast to climate change, demographic change is awfully obvious and does vastly more to explain “Donald Trump to Brexit to Marine Le Pen” than climate change.”
I find this part really striking. The same arguments seem to apply to both. Hopefully, people who are worried about climate change can gain some insight and empathy with those worried about demographic change and vice versa. Just to be clear, I mean the “global population growth” demographic change, not the immigration demographic change, although I suppose there is some connection.
For example, both groups don’t find mere survival a very compelling counter argument. San Franciscans don’t find it very reassuring to be told that the city can “survive” and even thrive economically with Manhattan-level density. And people worried about climate change won’t be reassured by claims that we’ll just innovate our way out by vastly changing crop patterns, vast migrations of people out of coastal areas etc.
And if an effect is undesirable due to one cause, it should be equally undesirable due to the other. If dwindling elephant populations are a bad thing, they’re bad regardless of whether the cause is demographic change or climate change.
Here’s the rest of the excerpt:
So, let me get this straight. Is she saying that families are having fewer children because more of their children are growing to adulthood?
I don’t quite see how this is contributing to slowing population growth. Can a more numerate iSteve commenter ‘splain me? Thanks.
Micklethwait was truly where the rot set in at the Economist. Before him, it had always had it’s bien pensant moments, but he turned it into a beltway smugfest, always preaching to the choir. An ersatz Atlantic or Prospect but with slightly apologetic pro-market instincts.
Although a long-term subscriber, I read it less and less until I glanced over a slavishly pro-Scandinavian review a few years back which mentioned the rocketing rape-rates in Sweden in passing, but put it down to women reporting it more than they had in the past.
I cancelled my sub the next day. No wonder Obama likes to be seen with it under his arm.
Polar ice caps not melting fast enough for you?
Climate change can feel slow when the temperature in Van Nuys changes from 22 to 22.5 degrees. But in places where the temperature changes from -0.3 degrees to +0.2 degrees, ice melts, volume of water increases, water and wind current patterns change, coastlines recede, Arctic wildlife moves southwards. Doesn’t have much effect in the San Fernando Valley, but still….
You miss the point. It's only part of the "supernova" of accelerating change because panic was incited by it being sold as GLOBAL Warming, not Particular Areas of the World Where No One Lives Warming.
Also, the guy who loves to preach about climate change, over consumption of resources, etc lives here: http://wonkette.com/413811/this-is-literally-thomas-friedmans-house.
As Glenn Reynolds says, I'll start believing climate change is a crisis when the people who say it is start acting like it.Replies: @oddsbodkins, @candid_observer, @ic1000
I like to see a new Thomas Friedman book as a financial opportunity.
Take his predictions, and determine which stocks will go up if they are right.
Short them.
My own, personal little measure of these things is this – any major editorial or policy position advocated by The Economist magazine will, ultimately – after the damage has been done, of course – will be seen to absolutely, completely and catastrophically wrong.
You can bank on it.
Why that particular magazine is richly endowed with the anti-talent of immitigable falsehood in the augury business, the gods only know.
Put it this way, its use – apart from being expensive toilet paper – is as a useful reverse oracle. Just a little jinx that the fates are playing on us.
Part of the problem is that a lot of native French, especially from the south of France, look like North Africans and Arabs.
Also, the guy who loves to preach about climate change, over consumption of resources, etc lives here: http://wonkette.com/413811/this-is-literally-thomas-friedmans-house.
As Glenn Reynolds says, I'll start believing climate change is a crisis when the people who say it is start acting like it.Replies: @oddsbodkins, @candid_observer, @ic1000
> I’ll start believing climate change is a crisis when the people who say it is start acting like it.
1. Call out overpopulation.
2. Travel habits of well-off SWPLs. Trips to dig wells in Malawi, commune with the Costa Rican rain forest, breathe the pure, frosty air at the top of the chairlift.
3. Lifestyles of the 1%.
4. Millions raising their carbon footprint by immigrating to the first world.
5. Trim regulation of nuclear power, crash program to develop thorium reactors.
6. Call explicitly for high energy prices. Yeah, that sucks if you’re poor, but it sucks to be poor anyway.
7. Denounce the sale of climate neo-indulgences (since this is Science, not Post-Christianity).
Yeah, I don’t really feel like I’m getting an honest accounting of globalization from places like Tom Friedman, the Economist, WSJ. If I recall correctly, the main argument from The World is Flat was “Even though we lost millions of solid blue collar jobs, we can all just buy cheap shit at Walmart!”. The discussions of immigration are much worse.
As for climate change, the latest IPCC projections give the mean forecast at 3.2 C of warming by the end of the century, and they give the high forecast at 5.2 C (9.4 F). So maybe this will get me in trouble with the other commenters, but I think we should be hedging against this really bad scenario. Of course the main thing we can do is limiting immigration from the third world, and then on top of that a carbon tax.
Yep. And encouraging them to regulate the growth of their own populations.
Do we know if crop failures are:
1. More common in Niger now than in the 1970s, when global cooling was all the rage?
2. Not due to factors like soil erosion or nutrient depletion from slash and burn agriculture?
3. Not more common due to ballooning populations forcing the cultivation of more marginal land?
There should be a name for this genre.Replies: @yaqub the mad scientist, @guest, @Thomas, @Ivy
“Sophomoristics”
Why the Change? - http://cis.org/articles/2001/forsaking/why.html
I am so grateful you are exposing this, Mr. Sailer! Thank you!
African Overpopulation Is Your Fault Because Climate Changehttps://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1694331
https://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1695192
https://www.unz.com/isteve/african-overpopulation-is-your-fault-because-climate-change/#comment-1696396Replies: @Anon, @Opinionator
Interesting. One might have expected to see jewish groups behind the abandonment of population control by the environmental movement. But these blurbs indicate Catholic leadership was involved.
Since Friedman is quasi-agnostic, though ethnically Jewish, it would be more accurate to say he drank the Stephen Jay Gould Kool-Aid which banishes genetic differences as a contributing root cause leading to civilizational dysfunction (eg. in Niger). Tend to tune out most of what Friedman says anyway, since it is mostly a neoliberal reboot of Julian Simon's utopian & reckless world view with a patina of environmental concern & gobbledygook.
In the discussion of Friedman’s influences, his age and golly-gee-whiz-bang mindset makes Marshall McLuhan a possible candidate.
I don't quite see how this is contributing to slowing population growth. Can a more numerate iSteve commenter 'splain me? Thanks.Replies: @slumber_j
My guess is that he means that’s what has happened in parts of the world that happen not to be Africa, no? Which is generally true, but I think he’s implying causation where it may or may not exist–or at least may not exist to the exclusion of other causes.
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2016/12/who-is-eric-garland.html
I think the Progs would be less nutty if Trump won as the billionaires club candidate, the Goldman Sachs candidate, as the war-mongering candidate, as the big business/free trade candidate, as the neo-cold-war-candidate, etc.
They would say, “you see, the Establishment used their power and privilege to put a puppet in the white house.” They would feel smugly superior in their noble loss.
What they can’t admit is that Trump won as the workers’ candidate, the peace candidate, the anti-establishment candidate, and anti-elitist candidate. He also had 1/2 money that Hillary had. And Establishment Media were out to hang him high. So many trad-progressive themes stolen. Trump knew that Romney’s albatross around neck was Wall-Street-guy.
Progs can’t face the fact that the Dems rejected left-populist Sanders in favor war-monger-Goldman-girl Hillary while those dumb stupid deplorable Republicans successfully rebelled against the establishment war-party neocons.
Progs can’t admit that their agendas and policies betrayed the interests of the American nation and people. And now, this anti-Russian hysteria is making a mockery of one of the most sacred narratives of American Liberalism: McCarthy was evil cuz of his anti-Russky paranoia. In contrast to today’s nuts and proglodytes, he was downright sober.
PS. To be sure, Trump may well turn out to be an establishment favorite(at least in the private sector). It could be all those super-rich who supported Hillary and Dems did it out of fear of repercussions if they came out for Trump and if Hillary won. Wall Street seems secretly happy that Trump won. And remember that Bill Gates was strong-armed with anti-monopoly measures into being a good boy. Now that Trump won, he is comparing Trump with Kennedy.
It’s like when Stalin or Mao was alive, those around him were totally servile and loyal, but as soon as he died, no one wanted to see the likes of him ever again. Ding Dong the witch is dead, whew.
There is support out of enthusiasm and support out of fear.
And I think many Zionists are upset with Trump because the fear factor regarding Jewish power seems to be have ebbed. Without that fear factor, Jewish dominance is shaky. This is why people like William Kristol are so upset. trumpism may mean cons saying no to neoconism.
I think there was fear of the Clintons among the rich cuz Bill and Hillary have shown how nasty, vindictive, and cruel they could be. Also, DC government is 96% Democratic and could use all sorts of lowdown tricks to hurt business with endless red tape, blackmail, etc.
After all, the only reason Blago was taken down was cuz he did it too blatantly and threatened the whole system by making it too obvious. Otherwise, the system is rigged to be the Demo-Deep-State.
Friedman:
Always wrong, never in doubt.
Just one more Little Billy Kristol.
These population stats and UN projections (2015) are pretty breathtaking:
(millions)
——- Africa——Europe
1900— 133- —— 408
2000— 814——- 726
2050— 2,478—– 707
2100— 4,387 —- 646
Thus, in two centuries Europe would have gone from outnumbering Africa 3 to 1 to being outnumbered by nearly 7 to 1, a relative change by a factor of 20.
(sorry about the formatting)
I remember when we were told that we need immigration because we’re not having enough children; and who will take care of us in our old age?
So if all of the world except Africa is not having enough children then we need for Africa to have more children so that they can take care of us in the future.
Surely in both cases we could just plan carefully for the future. Perhaps robots could be part of that planning.
Only, it turned out that he hadn't.
Why lie?Replies: @dearieme, @Bill Jones
“A few months ago John Micklethwaite was going around telling everyone who would listen that he had ‘won a fortune’ by putting a £1 accumulator bet – his annual custom – on his home soccer team, the perennial losers Leicester City FC, winning the FA Cup.”
And he was born in London, not Leicester.
Why did he lie?
It’s what they do for a living.
“…you can’t go around asking Africans to have a more sustainable of children. Because Demographic Change just isn’t a Thing ..”
Because whites aren’t allowed to speak to blacks.
It hardly matters how fast the climate is changing, or in what direction, if at all. All they have to do is tell people it is, and those who believe him will provide their own experience. Hot outside? Cimate change. Cold today? Climate change. Did it rain? Climate change. Did it not rain? Climate change. You get the point.
Since weather varies, you’ve got your accelerating change right there. Even where you get the same weather all year round, people can be made to feel as though events are getting away from them by the power of suggestion. Mass hysteria, maybe, but useful.
That doesn’t apply to me or apparently you on the subject of climate, but to True Believers, yes. To those like Friedman, with access to the Megaphone, of course, immigration is a “scapegoat” despite the fact that unlike climate change it’s obviously and undeniably happening. So he’s not overly concerned with what regular people can see for themselves.
When I first read the sentence “there is no narrative,” I thought Friedman was engaging in routine Narrative Denial. But he’s speaking the truth, because what he means to say is that people don’t automatically believe the Narrative anymore. There are competing narratives, and if the Narrative is not THE Narrative, that’s the same as there being no narrative.
He casts this in terms of a time crunch. Events are moving too fast, or appear to be, and Narrative-weavers can’t keep up. That may be so, but the more important fact is that they don’t have a monopoly on Megaphones anymore, and less and less people reflexively believe them everyday. That’s the problem, not accelerating change.
There should be a name for this genre.Replies: @yaqub the mad scientist, @guest, @Thomas, @Ivy
“There should be a name for this genre”
It’s called “journalism.”
Would it help to know that they want to do those things anyway (not stifle the economy, exactly, but control it), and climate gives them an excuse?
Friedman lectures us that it’s ultimately a Good Thing that we’re all Fried, man?
Just proves that our “Nation of Immigrants” increasingly needs more charging stations for all those electric cars whose charges come from . . . burned fossil fuels.
The day after the election I gently introduced a shocked liberal to the idea of the globalist high-low squeeze as a partial explanation of Trump’s victory.
Lib: “Well if money is the problem why would they vote against someone that would expand welfare programs?”
Me: “People don’t want a handout, they want a job and dignity.”
Lib, hysterical now: “Well in 50 years when the planet is destroyed by global warming because we didn’t do anything with Trump in office there aren’t going to be any jobs anyways!”
Then they don’t understand why people don’t take them or AGW seriously.
Could you state this succinctly?
In this case Friedman’s not abusing the term; he’s simply a liar. I think he’s saying people like Trump know immigration isn’t a real problem but blame it anyway.
You’re right about the decline and fall of the term generally, however. It now means things people mistakenly blame, or blame excessively. But what do you expect, people who make a living using words to understand their meanings?
Maybe I see actual elites as a “rarified” set, but I think Friedman is aimed more at the upper-middle, professional class than billionaires: the law partner or the senior VP rather than the people they work for (basically the “Outer Party” in Orwellian terms).
There should be a name for this genre.Replies: @yaqub the mad scientist, @guest, @Thomas, @Ivy
“Brain lifts?” (Let you stand taller than you are.) There’s a definite market for media that makes you sound smart without actually having to put in the work.
OT: fake news…
http://www.msn.com/sv-se/halsa/medicin/if-you-have-blue-eyes-they%e2%80%99re-actually-brown/vi-AAlKgKd?ocid=iehp
Climate change can feel slow when the temperature in Van Nuys changes from 22 to 22.5 degrees. But in places where the temperature changes from -0.3 degrees to +0.2 degrees, ice melts, volume of water increases, water and wind current patterns change, coastlines recede, Arctic wildlife moves southwards. Doesn't have much effect in the San Fernando Valley, but still....Replies: @guest
“Polar icecaps not melting fast enough for you?”
You miss the point. It’s only part of the “supernova” of accelerating change because panic was incited by it being sold as GLOBAL Warming, not Particular Areas of the World Where No One Lives Warming.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-reviews-thomas-friedman-book-thank-you-for-being-late-w453529Replies: @Anonymous Nephew
Blimey. When did Rolling Stone turn into a Huffpo/Slate amalgam? Was it always like that?
“Watch Fiona Apple Yell ‘Donald Trump, F–k You’ at Standing Rock Benefit. “
Apparently “Trumps Nuts Roasting On An Open Fire” is her contribution to the festive season. How original.
There should be a name for this genre.Replies: @yaqub the mad scientist, @guest, @Thomas, @Ivy
I am sitting in the smallest room in the house, with The Economist in front of me. Soon, it will be behind me.
I guess you’re also not supposed to notice all the recent terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States. Or if you do notice them, you have to connect them to climate change.
Given Mr. Friedman’s oracular powers of being dead wrong about everything, and given that his latest offering is a paeon to optimism, we must conclude the sky IS really falling this time.
News reports are trickling in that a truck has been intentionally crashed into a crowded Christmas Market in Berlin. So far, 9 dead and 50 wounded.
Merkel’s Boner…
“Inevitably, the sight of a lorry jammed into market has evoked memories of July’s attack in Nice when a 19-tonne truck went on a rampage through a similarly symbolic setting – in that case the annual Bastille Day parade on the sea front promenade.”Apparently, the Nice massacre was the result of a 19-ton truck becoming sentient and going on an inexplicable rampage.The title of journalist does not fit most “journalists.” Obscurist would be a more accurate titleReplies: @Frau Katze
I have to believe the climate change figures reported (present and past, not future). Billions have been spent collecting data. However, as a keen observer of such things I have seen no evidence of sea level rise at all over a few decades. I’m not talking about things like “the beach doesn’t look any different.” I see no change in levels on seawalls, pilings, etc. Comments?
What is controversial is whether or not there has been an acceleration of the rate of rise due to the recent warm period (warmer than the LIA). There are all sorts of difficulty in determining this (lack of datum due to changes in landforms due to subsidence, isostatic rebound, and magma intrusions, e.g.).
That's it. I don't even propose they pay me for each port they call where the sea level hasn't changed. So far, no one has taken the bet, even though it has unlimited financial upside and no financial downside. Just the fear of being shown to be wrong scares them off. (Or maybe they're afraid to make a phone call that a working class longshoreman might answer.)
So I haven't made any money yet. But it does shut them up.
Two things really are are accelerating: first the situation in Israel, whereby it is increasingly becoming seen as an Apartheid state, and second China is showing unmistakable signs of supplanting the US on present trends.
Friedman is having serious problems maintaining his voice of reason position by triangulating himself with the Jimmy Carter school of thought and Trump’s Israel policy. He is reduced to presenting David Friedman, the Trump pick for ambassador, as a raving Meir Kahane figure: a Jewish racist.
Friedman is on surer ground when he suggests Trump will move left on the environment. It won’t be due to him listening to his daughter the Al Gore fan. No, in line with his intention to make the US preeminent into the future, Trump is going to act for the benefit of the US and its workers. The Chinese are trying to get clean cheap energy because China is desperate to continue with their open access to Western markets, while the West is being hamstrung by employment and environmental standards protection. You will see Trump taking measures against the polluting axis of outsourcing profit on the grounds of global environmentalism. which will give Western advanced clean-energy-using industry a way back into competitiveness. Trump will ensure the cheapest energy in the world stays in the US, and stop handing the Chinese exponential economic growth on a plate with us tech such as advanced shale gas extraction for the Russians to supply Chinese with unlimited profits from supplanting the US with the possible side effect of tipping the balance on global warming. A green stick is going to be used to beat China and their slavic sidekick with.
http://patch.com/new-hampshire/concord-nh/shaheen--sierra-club-push-habitatwrecking-immigration-bill — David Gelbaum told the Sierra Club that he wouldn’t donate anymore money if the Sierra Club called for environmentally friendly immigration reductions. Gelbaum got what he wanted; the Sierra Club got about $100 million.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4798809/ns/us_news-environment/t/anti-immigration-group-loses-sierra-club-vote/#.WFhkJ1MrKUkReplies: @Charles Pewitt
Your link is broken. The Sierra Club switched a pro illegal immigration stance years ago. Here is an article about members trying to restrict immigration losing election to the Sierra Club board in 2004. I can’t find the link, but I read another article where proposal made to restrict immigration only received 16% of the vote in 2005.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4798809/ns/us_news-environment/t/anti-immigration-group-loses-sierra-club-vote/#.WFhkJ1MrKUk
Ages ago, when Thomas Freidman's life was slow-paced (2009), Pielke's intersectionality with Michael Mann earned him the scorn and derision of the consensus climate-alarm community, both published-scientists and bloggers. Pielke had noticed that in Mann's magnum opus climate-reconstruction paper (PNAS, 2008), Mann's faulty procedures had caused him to use the heavily-contaminated Tiljander proxy -- and to use it upside-down.
The better kind of academic just doesn't go around making that sort of observation, not when it implies that the good-guy team's celebrity-scientists might be fallible.
The climate science establishment doubled down on Mann '08, this and other major errors notwithstanding. The Loyalty Test aspect of their performance was one of the episodes that led to Mark Steyn's scornful remarks in National Review, and thus to the long-running, ongoing Mann v. Steyn libel case.
Pull on one thread, and the whole ball of string comes a-tumbling.Replies: @gda
Personally, if I lived in the Clinton Archipelago, I might be more easily gulled into the Chicken Little aspect of the AGW thing too.
http://www.vividmaps.com/2016/12/trumpland-and-clinton-archipelago.html
However, living as I do in Trumpland, safe from the rising waters, I can more rationally consider the “evidence” for the “science is settled – run for the hills” silliness. Real-world, observational evidence? So far, still waiting…..
Meanwhile, it’s heartening to see that there’s a disturbance in the force, at least in relation to the future funding for this out-of-control behemoth.
More importantly, when is this peculiar cult going to implode?
Are there any doomsday cult experts present who care to comment?Replies: @Paul Yarbles
I’m no expert, but here’s a link for ya’.
Welcome to the cult of Near -Term Human Extinction!
https://guymcpherson.com/
“1. More common in Niger now than in the 1970s, when global cooling was all the rage?”
The 1970s saw a terrible drought in Niger and other Sahel countries. John Updike’s 1978 novel “The Coup” is set in a fictional Kush in the Sahel after years of drought. It’s explained at one point that the drought may be caused by the population boom leading to more farm goats, who eat the young saplings so there are fewer and fewer trees to shade the land from the sun so rain evaporates more quickly leading to desertification.
Does Thomas Friedman ever wright or talk about anything he actually knows about? To be a NYT intellectual in the tradition of Herbert Matthews or Walter Duranty you have to have an affinity for left wing con men (women) and a disdain for reality. See:
http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2016/11/nicholas-kristof-walter-duranty-of-21st.html
Climate Warming and the Recent Treeline Shift in the European Alps: The Role of Geomorphological Factors in High-Altitude Sites
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3357808/
Ami Horowitz made a 10-minute documentary in which he interviewed Swedes about their changing country. (In the process, he got assaulted by immigrants.) Not surprisingly, Swedish cops see things somewhat differently than Swedes with blue hair and nose-piercings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaIgeQXQgIReplies: @TheJester, @Almost Missouri, @CrunchybutRealistCon
This video of a Jewish guy trying to persuade Nordics not to bring in more Muslims/Africans, while the Nordics insist they must bring in more, is a nice antidote to the Barbara Lerner Spectre video that’s been around.
I’m not a Climate Change disbeliever, I just don’t have an informed opinion. I don’t see my investing a huge amount of effort in understanding the issue as to offer intelligent commentary as having a large marginal return on my investment in terms of making people better off. In contrast, my devoting, oh, maybe, 50 to 100 hours to recent UN population projections has allowed me to create a graph that really opens people’s eyes. So Demographic Change has a much higher ROI for me because there is so much less competition.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4798809/ns/us_news-environment/t/anti-immigration-group-loses-sierra-club-vote/#.WFhkJ1MrKUkReplies: @Charles Pewitt
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/27/local/me-donor27 The link is broken from previous post. The 2nd page of this LA Times article reveals that sometime in 1994 or 1995 financier David Gelbaum told Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope that he would not make any donations if the Sierra Club came out anti-immigrant. Gelbaum ended up donating around $100 million to the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club is a tax dodge outfit that sells out to the highest bidder. The concentration of wealth in the USA has narrowed debate on immigration and a whole host of other issues.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3357808/Replies: @Steve Sailer
In the Alps, global warming is real obvious because glaciers are receding, right? I think that has happened to the 14 tiny glaciers in the Sierra Nevadas, but they are at such high altitudes that tourists can’t really see them from their cars.
Of course, most CO2 comes from Asia now and for the foreseeable future, but you have to dig a little to get that information as it is "inconvenient".
For the record, I acknowledge that the "greenhouse effect" is real, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and probably causing some warming in excess of natural variation. It is also almost certain that the models of the IPCC are grossly exaggerated as to the degree. The simple physical effect of a doubling of CO2 (without feedbacks) is 1.4 degrees Centigrade per doubling. The IPCC models assume all sorts of positive feedbacks that amplify the warming. IMO, the best read of the data (and earth history) shows that feedbacks are negative and the system is negatively damped.
Warming could likely be a stressor of civilization in the next century, but far from the largest or most dangerous. It is even possible that it could be beneficial on net due to increased fertility and opening up less habitable regions.Replies: @another fred
I had more in mind “cognitive elites.” At least those who see themselves that way.
Sea level has been rising since the peak of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago. The rate of rise slowed down about 10,000 years ago but it has continued to rise (there is uncertainty whether intervals like the Little Ice Age (LIA) slowed it even more).
What is controversial is whether or not there has been an acceleration of the rate of rise due to the recent warm period (warmer than the LIA). There are all sorts of difficulty in determining this (lack of datum due to changes in landforms due to subsidence, isostatic rebound, and magma intrusions, e.g.).
Glacier National Park provides more evidence of receding glaciers, and has one of America’s great roads, too: the Going to the Sun Highway.
Merkel's Boner...Replies: @flyover hick
Here is a Telegraph article about the Berlin attack:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/19/berlin-terror-attack-leaves-angela-merkel-isolated-far-right/
This is a paragraph in the article:
“Inevitably, the sight of a lorry jammed into market has evoked memories of July’s attack in Nice when a 19-tonne truck went on a rampage through a similarly symbolic setting – in that case the annual Bastille Day parade on the sea front promenade.”
Apparently, the Nice massacre was the result of a 19-ton truck becoming sentient and going on an inexplicable rampage.
The title of journalist does not fit most “journalists.” Obscurist would be a more accurate title
The Telegraph has deteriorated markedly in the last few years, IMHO.
So maybe this will get me in trouble with the other commenters, but I think we should be hedging against this really bad scenario. Of course the main thing we can do is limiting immigration from the third world, and then on top of that a carbon tax.
Yep. And encouraging them to regulate the growth of their own populations.
Something I routinely propose to liberals when they accuse me of Climate Denialism is that we have a little wager. They can call any port in the world they like and ask how much the sea level has risen this decade. For every inch the sea level has risen, I will pay them one dollar.
That’s it. I don’t even propose they pay me for each port they call where the sea level hasn’t changed. So far, no one has taken the bet, even though it has unlimited financial upside and no financial downside. Just the fear of being shown to be wrong scares them off. (Or maybe they’re afraid to make a phone call that a working class longshoreman might answer.)
So I haven’t made any money yet. But it does shut them up.
Then they don't understand why people don't take them or AGW seriously.Replies: @Opinionator
The day after the election I gently introduced a shocked liberal to the idea of the globalist high-low squeeze as a partial explanation of Trump’s victory.
Could you state this succinctly?
Soot plays a large role in ice melt, a factor that does not receive much play because most of it comes from places like China and India, not the West. Inefficient, polluting, Russian Diesels and oil field flares probably play a role also. It also may be that new algae blooms on ice may play a role (fertilized by NOx, possibly, this is a new “discovery, yet to be confirmed”).
Of course, most CO2 comes from Asia now and for the foreseeable future, but you have to dig a little to get that information as it is “inconvenient”.
For the record, I acknowledge that the “greenhouse effect” is real, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and probably causing some warming in excess of natural variation. It is also almost certain that the models of the IPCC are grossly exaggerated as to the degree. The simple physical effect of a doubling of CO2 (without feedbacks) is 1.4 degrees Centigrade per doubling. The IPCC models assume all sorts of positive feedbacks that amplify the warming. IMO, the best read of the data (and earth history) shows that feedbacks are negative and the system is negatively damped.
Warming could likely be a stressor of civilization in the next century, but far from the largest or most dangerous. It is even possible that it could be beneficial on net due to increased fertility and opening up less habitable regions.
system is
negativelypositively damped.Of course, most CO2 comes from Asia now and for the foreseeable future, but you have to dig a little to get that information as it is "inconvenient".
For the record, I acknowledge that the "greenhouse effect" is real, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and probably causing some warming in excess of natural variation. It is also almost certain that the models of the IPCC are grossly exaggerated as to the degree. The simple physical effect of a doubling of CO2 (without feedbacks) is 1.4 degrees Centigrade per doubling. The IPCC models assume all sorts of positive feedbacks that amplify the warming. IMO, the best read of the data (and earth history) shows that feedbacks are negative and the system is negatively damped.
Warming could likely be a stressor of civilization in the next century, but far from the largest or most dangerous. It is even possible that it could be beneficial on net due to increased fertility and opening up less habitable regions.Replies: @another fred
erratum:
system is
negativelypositively damped.Course, it's pretty cold about now. Nevertheless.Replies: @Eric Novak, @SFG
Indianapolis has average Jan. lows in the 20s. Maybe Baffin Island has average temps of 0F on Nov. 1, but not Indiana during hunting season.
You know what the best thing about this site is ? Any crackpot can post here , even the Donut . And I can express a love for all mankind or call for the extermination of our racial enemies and Sailer tolerates all and that is as it should be . If there was a god of which I am unsure of I would ask him to save Sailer’s little bunny rabbit . God bless you all . Merry Christmas to one and all .
Course, it's pretty cold about now. Nevertheless.Replies: @Eric Novak, @SFG
I believe in global warming. Every new year is the hottest year on record? Come on, something’s going on.
You think the Left has to be wrong about everything?
I think it’s a far better term than the tired “Mainstream Media” (MSM) tag, for a couple of reasons.
First, “MSM” is pretty old, meaning it’s freshness as a phrase is lost, and people don’t think about what it’s name implies anymore due to its becoming a cliche (thank you George Orwell).
Second, calling it MSM claims that it is mainstream thinking, and therefore trustworthy on most levels. That’s playing right into their frame of being the “source” and “home” of the news. Call it “corporate”, however, and it divorces them from seeming like an old pal and makes them seem colder, more distant, which they are.
Third, “Corporate Media” says exactly what it is: a large multinational, conglomorate media empire beholden to its stockholders. That shows it to be a lot less trustworthy than “all the news fit to print”.
Fourth, Corporate Media is just fresher. (Orwell).
Fifth, it brings Leftists into the fold. They’ve been screaming about corporations running amok for years; when they realize that the very news they rely on is “corporate”, they start to wake up that the alt-right isn’t just a bunch of wackos.
You think the Left has to be wrong about everything?Replies: @whorefinder, @Desiderius
Have you ever heard of things like the Medieval Warming Period or the Little Ice Age? Google them. Neither were caused by global warming, they were caused by non-man-made natural events. To assume that if the climate of a place must ALWAYS be the same is ahistorical. To assume that ANY change is because of man-made events is illogical.
The Catholic Church is a follower, not a leader.
I believe that when the glaciers melted they found remnants of villages, indicating that the glaciers were not “ancient “.
“Inevitably, the sight of a lorry jammed into market has evoked memories of July’s attack in Nice when a 19-tonne truck went on a rampage through a similarly symbolic setting – in that case the annual Bastille Day parade on the sea front promenade.”Apparently, the Nice massacre was the result of a 19-ton truck becoming sentient and going on an inexplicable rampage.The title of journalist does not fit most “journalists.” Obscurist would be a more accurate titleReplies: @Frau Katze
Unbelievable! I had to check myself, it is that bizarre.
The Telegraph has deteriorated markedly in the last few years, IMHO.
Certain religious leaders see opportunity for recruiting converts and are & thus happy to see increases in both world population & immigration stemming from that growth. Groups within Mormonism, Catholicism, & Islam fall into this category, but it would also be interesting to see where a few Protestant & Hindu groups stand on this. A hunch is that their congregations are mostly good with population stabilization, but a few leaders have been bought off with refugee advocacy money.
Since Friedman is quasi-agnostic, though ethnically Jewish, it would be more accurate to say he drank the Stephen Jay Gould Kool-Aid which banishes genetic differences as a contributing root cause leading to civilizational dysfunction (eg. in Niger). Tend to tune out most of what Friedman says anyway, since it is mostly a neoliberal reboot of Julian Simon’s utopian & reckless world view with a patina of environmental concern & gobbledygook.
Ami Horowitz made a 10-minute documentary in which he interviewed Swedes about their changing country. (In the process, he got assaulted by immigrants.) Not surprisingly, Swedish cops see things somewhat differently than Swedes with blue hair and nose-piercings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaIgeQXQgIReplies: @TheJester, @Almost Missouri, @CrunchybutRealistCon
Chilling Sweden video. If that country passes a tipping pt, & is not salvageable, there should be a firm lesson to western nations who did summon the courage to survive:
The blue haired SJW gang and toxic boomer generation who fouled their own nest are unwelcome in sane countries. They must stay in the broken ex-Sweden & face the consequences of their suicidal worldview. If that is as slave to some feral chap named Ahmed, so be it.
Corporate Propaganda Apparatus — Sam Francis
You think the Left has to be wrong about everything?Replies: @whorefinder, @Desiderius
Science doesn’t do creeds.
Which record? Do you trust the record-keepers?
As Comrade Dzhugashvili reminded us, it’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.
Why would it being mainstream imply trustworthiness? It doesn’t. No one who uses the term thinks it does. That’s why the term was invented.
It’s not so fresh anymore, and I welcome alternatives. But by no means is “MSM” a stale cliche in the Orwellian sense. People don’t think about its origins or exactly why it came to be. But who cares? They don’t have to know for it to work through them. “MSM” is a mockery of bureaucratic speech, and in that sense anti-Orwellian.
Anyway, so far as I can tell everyone uses it correctly and knows what it’s supposed to refer to. It’s not a dead metaphor, a euphemism, empty rhetoric, or any of the bad things you might imagine it to be.
“Corporate Media is just fresher. (Orwell)”
Is that all you took away from Politics and the English Language? Freshness? I recommend you read it again.
Personally I’m looking forward to the complete destruction of Sweden by Third Worlders. The sooner the better. Then we can point to the wreckage of what was once a First World country and say that this is what happens when you allow liberals and feminists to run a country. Sweden’s destruction may perhaps serve as a warning to other nations.
Sweden delenda est. Die, Sweden, die.
Just proves that our "Nation of Immigrants" increasingly needs more charging stations for all those electric cars whose charges come from . . . burned fossil fuels.Replies: @dfordoom
Bad Auntie Analogue. You’re not supposed to notice that!
The right should switch from Climate Change Denial, to Climate Change Subversion. Use the Climate Change pulpit to preach about closing the borders, putting downward pressure on population growth, and economic barriers against dirty countries.