Climate Hypocrisy
- Thread starter GURPS
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Fox Weather ran another record-shattering story yesterday headlined, “Second destructive derecho in a week slams central US with 100-mph winds, baseball-sized hail.” I never even heard of a ‘derecho’ before. Is it Mexican? The historic storm is still raging like a slow-motion hurricane across the Midwest.
Apparently the ‘derecho’ is a thing. The problem with reporting on extreme weather events — whatever their cause — is that inevitablely some smart-aleck pundit will pop up in the comments saying something like “I live in Penciltuckee and we always get these big storms around this time of year.”
In other words, weather’s rhetorical battlespace is so polluted by the fog of war and bull puckey that it’s nearly impossible to figure out whether the wild weather is really remarkable or is just a deranged figment of our conspiracy-minded imaginations.
But in authorial self-defense, here are a few recent headlines to buttress my argument that things are not as normal as some weather-watchers would have us believe. First up, Bloomberg, headlining Monday’s long-form, magazine-style article:
Giant hail? Bloomberg told readers that on May 9th, hailstones the size of baseballs blasted San Marcos and Johnson City, Texas, taking down power lines and cracking car windscreens. In mid-March, grapefruit-sized hail battered Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, causing damages exceeding $4 billion.
I never heard of grapefruit-sized hail before. You? I wonder how much they weigh. Whatever it is, it would probably smart. Have you heard about hail drifts? This new hail phenomenon is wreaking havoc on insurance company wallets. Independent reports abound. For instance:
But predictably, someone will come along and pooh-pooh all this, confidently claiming that grapefruit hail is rare but it happens all the time where I live. Which doesn’t explain why insurance companies are freaking out. Nor does it explain this deliciously ironic development. Headline from Fox, in late March:
It wasn’t just one installation, either. A growing number of reports all over the world describe how giant, ugly solar “farms” are being rendered instantly inoperable by a single hailstorm. It seems logical that if it really does happen more often than you think, multi-million dollar solar installations would already be protected from simple weather events.
How ironic that these fabulously expensive, inefficient climate mitigations are being destroyed by the same climate they are intended to preserve.
Similarly, the data crunching on last week’s dramatic solar storms continues, and it looks like we weren’t over-selling its historic nature after all. Monday’s record-setting headline from Space.com:
According to a preliminary NASA statement, the auroral displays that enthralled sky-watchers worldwide two weeks ago may have been the strongest since record-keeping began. In other words, grapefruit-sized solar hail shattered another record.
And it proved these kinds of solar storms don’t happen all the time.
In another dramatic Space.com headline, also published Monday, we learned that deep sea detectors measured the Earth’s magnetic field’s strongest response to these storms:
The readings were so strong they first thought it must be earthquakes:
It was so unusual that they initially didn’t even consider the storms could cause strong deep-sea readings. But the same scientists will swear on a stack of Q’rans that all this extra solar energy has no effect on Earth’s climate, because science. Shut up! Don’t ruin it for everybody.
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Big Tech championed zero emissions but now its power-hungry data centers are straining the grid
For years, tech giants in California and Washington have been leading the charge to eliminate fossil fuels from the grid. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple, for example, are members of Climate Group RE100, an organization of major corporations who are dedicated to accelerating “change toward zero-carbon grids at scale by 2040.”
In 2018, Apple proclaimed that it was globally powered entirely by 100% renewable energy.
“This achievement includes retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India,” the company boasted in a press release.
At first glance, it may appear that the company managed to run its operations entirely on wind and solar power, which likely promoted the idea that it was technically feasible to do. The press release includes photos of yaks grazing next to solar panels, and it highlights a number of wind and solar projects that the company had built or was planning to build.
The company, however, never managed to power facilities like data centers, which require 24/7 electricity without interruptions, using intermittent power from wind and solar. While the company makes no mention of it in its press release, Apple explains how it accomplished “100% renewable” in its annual “Apple Environmental Progress Reports.” Apple invests in “high-quality carbon credits to offset the remaining hard-to-decarbonize corporate emissions.” In other words, Apple is powered by fossil fuel energy, but other companies that have low emissions sell Apple credits to offset Apple’s high-emission energy.
Let's make this clear: anyone that says carbon emissions come from food and agriculture wants you to starve to death. You are the carbon they want to reduce.
CBS writes:
As Climate Lawsuits Ramp Up Against Oil and Gas, So Could Energy Costs
Analysts say there are multiple goals driving these suits.
“It’s partly ideological, trying to drive these companies out of business,” Kenny Stein, policy vice president at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Epoch Times. Mr. Stein also believes it has to do with consumers’ use of fossil fuels.
“These governments are trying to mandate that people use less oil and less natural gas, but people want to heat their homes as much as they want, they want to drive as far as they want,” Mr. Stein said. “If the state banned the sale of oil the population would revolt, so this is their backdoor way of trying to impose their will.”
Many of the climate lawsuits assert that pollution caused by oil companies created a “public nuisance” and the companies intentionally deceived the public about the harmful impact when they caused global temperatures to rise.
Activist organization Climate Analytics tried to calculate the alleged damages.
This writer read this post a half dozen times and it's a contradiction in terms.
The AP tries to explain:
Ah. There's the rub: UN-approved methods.
So, lies.
Narrative shift incoming. Could climate change graft finally be reaching its outer limits? The Economist ran this startling headline yesterday:
Those zany scientists! What will they come up with next?
The most striking thing about the article was not the zany proposals — and they are zany — but its tone. It (relatively) even-handedly described opposition to climate change intervention. It admitted different opinions exist. And it generously labeled sane scientists as ‘critics’ rather than mocking them as discredited fringe scientists:
In fact, the scientists the Economist’s headline called ‘zany’ were the ones proposing ways to cool the planet by blocking the sun and wrapping icebergs in gigantic thermal blankets.
It was suggestive and gratifying that the Economist admitted chemtrails exist (albeit indirectly), and even called weather engineering “controversial,” rather than “innovative,” “creative,” or something equally moronic.
Maybe the adults are returning to the conversation. The Economist’s new narrative is that real scientists couldn’t believe how stupid and crazy the climate argument was going, so they stayed out of it, but now they are finally speaking up:
The truth is that sane scientists have been trying to speak up for years, but the Economist has ignored them as diligently as a teenager pretending he never saw the list of chores taped to the refrigerator handle.
Progress.
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