For all their hysterical pretensions, the crazed environmentalists do not love our world: if they did, they would not so officiously and rudely refer to it as the planet. These people are no friends of the earth. They are attention-seeking narcissists who are not dying from anything in their apocalyptic catalogue of environmental poisons. They are terminally-ill nonetheless: dying of sentimentality.
When it comes to sweet reasonableness, they are conspicuously lacking and many of the substances and processes they so disdain are in fact beneficial; likewise, many of their preferred alternatives are actually very injurious. Their loudly-trumpeted alternative sources of energy – the so-called renewables – are unreliable, uneconomical and very unfriendly to the environment they are alleged to protect. These intermittent power generators require back-up from the despised conventional sources. For instance, earlier this year in South Australia and Victoria, heat-waves caused widespread blackouts. The enormous, and enormously costly, back-up battery sold by Elon Musk to the gullible Labor government failed after only a few hours and so expensive diesel generators had to be fired up in order to keep the lights on.
Wind farms are the great favourite of the environmentalist flat-earthers, but these have been shown to have serious human health concerns. In 2013, a Canadian newspaper reported: “People who live or work near wind turbines suffer decreased quality of life, annoyance, stress, sleep-disturbance, headache, anxiety, depression and cognitive dysfunction.” And they also have annihilating effect on bird life. The Heartland Institute estimates that around 328,000 birds are killed every year in the USA by wind farms. But far worse, at least four million bats have been slaughtered by wind turbines since 2012. This is a catastrophe, because bats are our first line of defence in keeping the mosquito and other crop-damaging insects in check.
And then the mining of the rare earths used in the manufacture of these turbines has caused huge pollution problems for many countries, but especially in China. The Daily Mail Online recently reported: “Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-miles wide tailing lake. It has killed farm animals for miles around, made many thousands of people extremely ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy. This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is the dumping ground for seven million tons every year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components.”
Time Magazine’s renowned “Green Hero” Michael Shellenberger, for a long time an influential advocate of wind and solar energy, now teaches the virtues of nuclear power as a cheaper and more reliable alternative: “It turns out that scientists have studied the health and safety of different energy sources since the 1960s. Every major study, including the recent one by the British medical journal The Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear power is the safest way to make reliable electricity.”
Our great panic of the moment is of course the fires in the Amazon rainforest. Many of the comments in the newspapers and on TV have announced, “Apocalypse soon!” In fact, as Matt Ridley, reported in The Spectator: “The Amazon rainforest is not on fire. The fires are actually on farmland or already cleared areas. And the claim that the Amazon forest produces 20% of the world’s oxygen is either nonsensical or wrong.”
Besides, the number of fires this year is less than it was in most years of the 21st century. NASA has recently produced statistics to show that both wild fires and deforestation are on the decline, saying, “The net loss of forest continues to slow.” While last year’s study in Nature by scientists from the University of Maryland concluded: “Contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally, tree cover has in fact increased by 2.24 million square kilometres – up 7.1% from 1982.” Costa Rica, for example, has doubled its tree cover over the last forty years.
Of course, persuading people to use fossil fuels spares trees. Matt Ridley, in commenting on some of the destructive superstitions and follies of the worldwide Green lobby, writes: “700,000 hectares of forest was felled in South-east Asia to grow palm oil and so the world is currently feeding 5% of its grain crop to motor cars rather than to people.”
So we are left asking who put the “mental” in “environmental?” The deluded sentimentalists in the worldwide Green movement even have their own Patron saint: appropriately, she is the insane Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.
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Far from being “insane”, Greta Thunberg has more courage, poise and integrity in her little finger than you, with your obvious disdain for anybody whose opinion disagrees with your own.
You used two ludicrously pejorative descriptors in your first sentence, which probably says more about you than it does about the targets. And anyway, how can you be rude to a planet? What a meaningless dig.
But to take aim at a 16 year old girl, regardless of what diagnosis she has had, is disgusting and despicable. Out of interest, what exactly has she done to hurt you?
Hmmm, well anyway, your pals in government have now been found out – Boris called out as a liar by Ken Clarke will go down in history, brexit is on its deathbed, and you ignorant, pretentious cunts can all go and cry into your Bolly.
The element of truth in your protest is eclipsed by your intemperate response. Three points.
That climatist fanaticism has departed from reality is beyond all doubt. See for example the actual data which is selectively used by anti-Westerm and, bizarrely, by big financial/capitalist interests in a selective way: it’s on Paul Homewood’s Notalotofpeopleknowthat site. One example – the ex-chief scientist at the Met Office published an alarmist letter about the Amazon fires, but was immediately corrected by a real scientist (that they were lesser than for some years and nothing to worry about).
The second point is the abuse of an immature child with a distressing developmental, and incurable, disorder. If you look up the DSM criteria online for her condition, particularly Section B, you will see how easily a tendency to be cramped by single obsession has been manipulated in her case. Worse still, she has been persuaded by adults around her that she can see CO2 ( an essential plant food by the way without which the Amazon forest would die).
Finally – ‘the science’. Climate science in unintelligible to almost everyone, consisting as it does of fiendishly complex differential equations. (Differential and Integral calculus anyone?) Fantastic predictions are made of statistically insignificant changes (World temps have hardly altered for two centuries and then only locally.) Extrapolating a line on a graph is not science and over the last 40 years not one of the predictions has come true (4c rise by 1980, starvation in Africa, no ice caps or polar bears etc).
You can check how good climate models are yourself. Check the forecast for your region for a week and compare with actuality. 50% correct would be an outstanding result. So why trust the same models for 2050?
Correction. She has not been persuaded she can see CO2 – evidently (it is reported) it is her own notion which she has not been persuaded is foolish..
Greta Thunberg is used by the Green lobby (including the media) to promote a political issue. Yet we are supposed to accept political propaganda from an unwise teenager, without a counter-argument, simply because she is young? What odd people you lefties are.
Can’t help reading the truth in the SR can you? How bitter it makes you. Actually we will be leaving the corrupt EU despite the efforts of Big Business, hedge fund currency manipulators, Big Pharma, Agri-Chem earth polluters, arms dealers and the rest to remain in. Wonder why they are all so desperate to remain. You dopey socialisst should be ashamed of yourselves for supporting such organisations. But then most of you aren’t intellectually equipped to get it. You’ve been fooled again.
Greta Thunberg is probably not insane (and I would concede that ad hominems are out of bounds in civilized debate), and is also probably guiltless as she appears to be simply a gullible dupe of low intelligence with severe adjustment problems being manipulated by cynical adults, one of whom claims she can “see” CO2! Yeah, right.
The people who deserve the scorn and derision are the ones who are taken in by her, ones who should know better. Gove needs to go back to school.
Greta knows nothing about climate science. And no one knows yet what the truth is. Climate skeptics with scientific training do not necessarily claim that global warming is not happening, or that anthropogenic warming is not occurring. They are simply saying inter alia that i) it is not certain how much human activity is responsible for warming, if it is indeed occurring, ii) warming, if it is happening, may be the cause of higher carbon dioxide levels rather than the other way round, iii) insolation and solar radiation, the biggest driver of climate and cloud formation, the engine of weather, is not being taken into account in the IPCC’s models, iv) warming is not unprecendented in geological history, nor are higher carbon dioxide levels, and carbon dioxide is far from being the most important Greenhouse gas anyway (methane and water vapor are).
Gore and his co-religionists have been conned by Michael Mann, who has been proven to be a fraud with his hockey stick graph. It is a fundamental of science that hypotheses should be tested and reproduced to be accepted. His refusal to release the data on which he rests his claim is fraudulent. His methodology has not only been called into question by eminent Canadian scientists of integrity (and documented in immense detail by chemistry-trained Mountford). They also suspect him of fudging the data and not understanding statistics (PCA particularly) well enough to be able to analyse the data he has.
Human beings are uncomfortable with uncertainty, with not knowing. That’s why millions grasp at these absurd claims without any solid scientific basis. Real science proceeds by a series of hypotheses which are contingent until they are verified or proven wrong by subsequent experiments. There’s always a lingering doubt about what we think we know about the natural world.
There are many mysteries to climate which we have yet to solve. Jumping at simplistic explanations and ruining whole economies based on them is a recipe for global social disaster. We need calm, well-informed adults trained in scientific method running countries, not charlatans and mountebanks prophesying doom.
Climate skeptics share Greta’s fear about the environment and grieve over its destruction. But the solutions will not come from unscientific, hysterical claims about specific alleged “causes”, nor from fake “solutions” which simply make the situation worse.
“warming, if it is happening, may be the cause of higher carbon dioxide levels rather than the other way round”
Or of course, both in a catastrophic runaway greenhouse effect. It can be proven in the lab that co2 causes warming.
She simply likes the sound of her own voice, which many young persons do but most of them grow out of it. Her “brave ventures” are bankrolled by the gullible, just one more glorified monomaniac.
Nuclear power may be the safest way to generate electricity but the increasing female domination of our culture with its distaste for industry (especially heavy industry) and love of anything that can be characterised as “natural” will take a lot of persuading. There is already plenty of talk about toxic masculinity and capitalist man’s rape of the natural world.
Hmmmm. I await with trepidation to see if the female response to your comment results in your having to change your tag to Un-mana of London …
We recently had to renew our 30 year old double glazing because it was misted up, the seals having broken down. The cost was £12,000 as our old house has a lot of windows. All of the glass that was removed went in a skip to landfill. Asked why it wasn’t recycled I was told the remnants of sealing compounds adhering to the glass made that impossible.
I don’t know what energy saving the glass has provided over the 30 years but I suspect it’s not £12k. And as glass is manufactured at high temperatures the net damage to the blessed environment must be considerable. Still, the glass was British made, so I suppose we can be thankful it wasn’t shipped in from China.