Have our young people not suffered enough? FFS! You'll kill Grandma if you venture outside without a mask, really this is child abuse on a massive scale.
I remember in the 70s being told we are entering a new Ice Age and was actually quite frightened. Then came the 'over population' scare which led to me to feel guilty for having even one child.
No, I have had enough of this propaganda. Look, it makes sense to want less pollution and cleaner energy I get it, trouble is, the 'Green lobby' is not really about this is it? What is the 'Greener way' ? Increasing taxes on energy which affect poor people, enriching land owners with our 'green taxes' for windmill farms. How many normal people can afford an electric car?
I could go on about how much environmental damage those car batteries, windmills, solar panels produce, look it up for yourself.
Then we really do have a clean energy source nuclear but no, that's not allowed -why?
Because they don't want a solution, this is a new religion Malthusian in practice, let this continue to our peril.
The irony of course is that access to cheap reliable energy has the effect of increasing wealth which improves education and standard if living. This reduces populations. They lie about everything. It's not about climate nor energy it's about controlling energy which they intend to use as currency - the real social credit system that will never apply to the elites. Neo feudalism (neo-fascism) via corporatist technocrats is upon us.
The second part of the CURRENT Ice Age will come. We are lucky and privileged to be alive during an interglacial.
Science put simply is the pursuit of truth. The struggle of science is to achieve just that. What we knew last week can be totally changed by something new discovered this week. There should be no sacred cows in science. Science is what brought about the Enlightenment where empirical data based reason replaced religious and ideological dogma. We are very dangerously close to returning to the dark days which occurred before the Enlightenment with money and politics/quasi religion dictating claimed scientific outcomes. This is why for me as a scientist warning sirens go off when I hear fatuous statements about "settled science" and "scientific consensus". Who ever it was who coined those ludicrous terms they were not scientist but politicians. For a conclusion to be called science it must be based on statistically significant empirical data obtained by falsifiable methodology(s). Anything else is not science. Also it is critically important when conducting scientific experimentation to check for biases and omissions. There is a whole industry today in university research departments wilfully performing flawed experiments chasing predetermined outcomes. Worse, when empirical data does exist from Geological History and physics which contradict the CO2 obsession it is totally ignored. You may ask why when empirical data does exist then why the obsession with models fixated upon CO2, not one of which has ever predicted correctly. Simply put, when using models "scientists" can decide what is input and based on that they can control the output. This is not science of any kind but the corruption of science for political or financial ends. Sadly money, lots of money have corrupted some of our finest academic institutions.
It may surprise you to learn that there exists no statistically significant empirical data of any kind which supports the claim that CO2 liberated by the actions of man during the past 100 years can in any measurable way be shown to be responsible for all or any part of the current welcome warming which began 1800-1820, the fourth such warming in recent human history. You do not have to take my word for this. Go look, you will not find any such data.
What is equally shocking is that statistically significant empirical data does exist to support the contention that this is largely a non issue and certainly not a human "caused" one given that climate change is a continuous process which is 4.5 billion years old.
There actually IS an issue with CO2 not that there is too much free CO2 in the Carbon Cycle but there is dangerously too little. For 160 million years the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been in linear decline. This has been caused by the evolution of marine organisms which sequestrate CO2 to combine with calcium to create hard shells. When those organisms die, a significant proportion of that CO2 is not returned to the Carbon Cycle but remains locked up in organic carbonaceous shelly limestones. The huge volumes of such limestones around the world are testament to the success of these organisms. That linear decline reached a point in the first part of the current iceage where atmospheric CO2 levels fell to 180ppm. Simply put this is 20-30ppm only above the level at which photosynthesis is compromised. Plants die...everything dies. The concern of mankind should be how to avoid the natural intersection of the decline in atmospheric CO2 against the redline for photosynthesis which are due to intersect in a little over a million years from now. When did you read about that in the news??????
You will hear much nonsense spoken about the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The charlatans who talk about it never put it in its correct geological context. Back in the Cambrian the atmosphere contained 7000ppm CO2. When the decline 160 million years ago in the Late Jurassic started the level was 2500ppm which is what it was when the angiosperms ( vegetables we eat) evolved which is why commercial greenhouse growers pump CO2 into the greenhouses because even the increase to 410ppm is starvation diet for plants. If an average of atmospheric CO2 level over geological time is considered the resultant number is 2500ppm. That if all things were equal is where "optimal" is for the planet. Ignore any scare stories you hear about acidification of the oceans. NEVER EVER in geological history have the oceans EVER been acidic even when the atmospheric level of CO2 was 7000ppm. This is how bad the corruption of science has become when very very slightly "less" alkali is called acidification. It is not science but the use of science as an authority figure to influence the way people think. There is a whole industry today pushing such garbage and the BBC are one of the worst which for many reasons is not only shocking but totally unacceptable.
Weather is now called climate. The Great Barrier Reef is not in danger from warming seas(quite the opposite in fact is true) yet much money is at stake for people to tell lies and say it is. Sea level is talked about without any qualification. Sea level is a relative measure. land goes up and down as well as the sea and without any reference to that we hear asininity from all directions because at location X sea level is "rising" faster than anywhere else. The wilful disingenuous nature of such claims relies as so much else of the climate hokus pokus on silencing challenging voices via threats and bullying which are all too real.
To say I am in shock that a whole industry has been created which is visibly changing the way we live out lives (negatively) on the back of what is not data but wrong computer models is an understatement. This ideological/religious movement manipulated by people hiding in the shadows has the potential to bring an end to Western civilization. Yes the stakes are that high.
Excellent essay, Laura. At the ripe old age of 55, I have been hearing these alarmist messages my entire life: first the "new ice age" in the early 70s, then acid rain, then the disappearing ozone layer, global warming, rising sea levels, mass starvation, melting polar ice caps, then climate change. On and one they go with their doomsday scenarios, and yet none has come to pass and actually, I'd say that the future for young people is a bright one - if they're allowed to enjoy the fruits of the labours of previous generations. It's disturbing that they're being brainwashed into buying into these doomsday cults - that's exactly what they are; they even want non-believers excommunicated and cast out into the outer darkness. It would take a brave youngster to stand up against this relentless propaganda. But I hope that they will.
The ice age claims are likely true. Temperatures have been dropping over the last decade. We are after all in the midst of an interglacial of the quaternary ice age, a double ice age, with about 2my to go. They never reveal that.
I attended a Just Stop Oil recruitment evening in January when they were on the search for a fresh bunch of foot soldiers. Unsurprisingly, all the usual emotional manipulation techniques were rolled out by the presenters who spoke how they had found "camaraderie and solidarity" and now felt like they were living their lives "authentically" by being part of a "community with purpose".
Encouragingly there was a high number of sceptics in the group who weren't onboard with their agenda… I doubt they had many people sign up for the next stage of indoctrination and team-bonding in a pub.
Oh the Far right is it? Go look up 20th Century committers of genocide. The guys at the top were all pushing the left wing garbage called communism. Stalin and Mao between them killed more than 100 million of their own people, not in war but in purges of wrong think. Perhaps you should think on that next time you point fingers. Rather than calling names a more intelligent look at both extremes will see that they meet at the same point on the edge of a circle.
A simple rule: If the government promotes fear it's propaganda. The liars behind the climate fraud have been caught out time and time again tampering with data and using poor methodologies and groupthink to leap at wild claims of destruction. All of the fear claims failed to materialise and even the claims set forth that would validate their theories failed because it's all junk science. Similarly with population. In the west, whites, in particular, are having fewer children. Africa, Asia, and to a lesser degree South America are bucking the trend. Whites are the minority race on the planet yet it is the west and the whites who are targeted with the overpopulation propaganda while at the same time the west is expected to have open borders as well as support and sustain a largely uneducated and unskilled influx population of mainly fighting-age men. This is all deliberate.
Thanks for bringing a relatable focus on the problem, Laura. The Nudge unit's "principles for successful behaviour change initiatives" seems to be about pushing through the New Puritanism - let's stop making things, call out the wrong thinkers, erase Empirical reasoning and spirituality. Resist!
We think we know things but actually we know very little. Maslin and Lewis's 'The Human Planet' offers (IMHO) an optimistic and very open interpretation of the 'Anthropocene', in which evolution is impossible to predict (as if much beyond the next few seconds actually is) so that any seemingly 'bad' impact can enable all sorts of 'good' evolutionary developments. As ever 'modern' humans are very uncomfortable with uncertainty and so this creates binary divisions and arguments that seek to impose a 'certainty' interpretation (so that we don't have simply to 'be' in uncertainty, especially in the small hours, in silence, part-awake-part-asleep), which is not how nature and wider cosmos operate. Nuance and chaos are the natural state. Balance is a process, ever shifting and morphing, merging, beyond words and our three/four/five/ten or however many 'human-constructed' dimensions. Very few people in 'western' or 'developed world' science and academia (nor obviously officials in governments and corporations) are able to think and communicate outside of the conventional habits of debate. It is left to the artists and storytellers, and musicians, creatives and healers, (thank you Laura and many others for your brilliance and bravery) to offer wider possibilities of gratitude, zeitgeist, quantum, fearlessness/love, abundance, karma, collective consciousness, etc., and umpteen other perspectives of existential interpretations and door-openings for what life/death/thoughts/feelings/sensing actually are, and of our position within it all (arguably/perhaps simply what we imagine it to be, in turn a reflection of how we see ourselves and especially our fears). I realise that my words do not 'contribute to' or 'advance or clarify the debate', which IMHO is the point I'm trying to make - that we cannot understand or explain concepts of infinite nature using finite means. If just our notions of time and space and consciousness are flawed, which likely they are, then there becomes more justification for re-imagining how we think about these things, and especially ourselves. Incidentally I work in suicide, grief, death, disintegration and 're-birth', etc., which is all very interesting because (I'm bound to say) it's a powerful lens for death and therefore also life. Please consider that nobody knows what happens after we die (nor what was happening before we were born into human consciousness); there are very possibly infinite universes (therefore, which we each inhabit to infinite degrees); nobody even knows what happens when we sleep; nobody even understands fungi and the sense of smell; nobody can explain what Fiona Oakes does/did (runningforgoodfilm.com); nobody can explain placebo/nocebo; etc., etc., and yet we try to explain the weather and the cosmos and evolution, as if there was a 'big bang' and beginning (probably/perhaps not) and that there's a future except what we sense as every current moment. I love the debate, but I also love the uncertainty and that nobody really knows nor can predict anything :) And as to artificial intelligence: GIGO :) Homo sapiens have become so clever that we now scare ourselves to death. Thoughts become things. Choose the good ones and make your own universe: entirely what you want, but be careful what you wish for, because you likely don't know - not even what is best to eat, which in so many ways is a good place to start. Sui generis :)
Our need to control the unpredictability of life, is what is creating the very uncertainty that we are experiencing. Life is actually very ordered in its chaotic responses. The engineers, programmers and business peeps of the world, dream of creating the same systems that life has evolved to- just look at the exquisite information storing and self cleaning functionality of water alone!!
Here are the global death rates from natural disasters per 100,000 of population from 1900-2016. Basically, they've completely collapsed in every single category. This manic scaremongering by the likes of Hallam is even more nauseating than the obscenity of lockdowns.
Climate change is an interesting one. Is climate change real? Absolutely. Does it make certain parts of the world hotter and cause problems? For sure. Have the rate of extreme events increased? No, they have decreased possibly due to better land management. Is everyone going to starve due to climate change? Not unless a COVID like overreaction causes it since it actually gives a longer growing season further north. Are the governments/climate change activists pushing for more R&D into new green technologies? No, and this is telling if you’re not prepared to put even 1% of the money printed that vanished into the ether for COVID into an alleged existential crisis is it really likely to be as alleged? So is it just a cynical grab for power/control and money? Looks that way, the long time line means it can be the gift that keeps on giving, and by measuring carbon you can cut the usage of all members of the population’s resource usage or make them contribute far more real work for it. The seemingly apocalyptic nature means you can generate real fear in a significant minority (again). The sums involved are truly eye-watering. To get people to accept something so big you have to get them young.
The planet will still be here when we are all gone. There are probably too many of us anyway breathing out CO2 the whole time. My mother and school didn't burden me as a child during the war with fear of a German invasion or the possible death of my father in the Navy - though my religion did with threats of hell for misbehaviour. Adults alone should bear this kind of burden not children. Hitler had school books rewritten to be more German i.e his concept of it, when he came to power in the early 1930s and look what happened after that indoctrination. He failed and left a confused generation. Children need to read, write and do arithmetic properly. Let them find out for the world as it is by themselves if they are curious enough, not by teaching flawed concepts and ideas.
The BBC's Blue Peter has been tacitly recruiting the foot soldiers for a long time. In the 1980s it was "It's hard for poor old adults to change their ways, using cars less, remembering to drop glass off at the bottle bank. But children can get them to do it!" "Down with CFCs!" "Beware of the hole in the ozone layer!"
Excellent essay. Thanks for delving into this topic; it's going to a huge battleground over the next decade.
I remember back in the 90s we talked about environmentalism, e.g. curbing pollution, monitoring toxins in the environment, preserving natural habitats, halting the ivory trade, stuff like that. Then at some point -- perhaps around the time Al Gore pushed his first documentary -- traditional environmentalism was replaced purely by concerns over "global warming", which was then rebranded to "climate change" due to the fact that there wasn't actually a linear uptick in average temperatures across the whole world.
It's clear to anyone that the "climate emergency" is a top-down construct, far removed from grassroots environmentalism (which might include anything from litter-picking in a nature reserve to legitimate activism around the use of pesticides on crops or antibiotics pumped into livestock).
Life expectancy is stagnating in the Western world, even declining in some demographic cohorts. There are so many issues to examine around this -- the interplay between health and environmental factors, the impact of processed foods, the over-medicalising of the population, and yes, pollution in cities (both from cars and industrial sources). But instead what the government wants us to myopically focus on is consumptiom -- our own personal "carbon footprint" (itself a concept cooked up by the PR industry and corporate lobbies).
This is clearly a con and they're using the language of alarmism to rope us in. The problem is that the scientific establishment is completely captured -- they produce the models that support the policies. (For evidence of the lack of transparency around this field of research, see so-called 'Climategate', a scandal which involved an email hack of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in 2009.)
I've recently been going down the climate rabbit hole and one researcher I recommend is Canadian former physics professor Denis Rancourt (his podcast interviews and writing on covid have been stellar too). I'm not saying his theories are the right ones, just simply that they offer a credible counter-narrative https://denisrancourt.ca/categories.php?id=7&name=climate_change
Have our young people not suffered enough? FFS! You'll kill Grandma if you venture outside without a mask, really this is child abuse on a massive scale.
I remember in the 70s being told we are entering a new Ice Age and was actually quite frightened. Then came the 'over population' scare which led to me to feel guilty for having even one child.
No, I have had enough of this propaganda. Look, it makes sense to want less pollution and cleaner energy I get it, trouble is, the 'Green lobby' is not really about this is it? What is the 'Greener way' ? Increasing taxes on energy which affect poor people, enriching land owners with our 'green taxes' for windmill farms. How many normal people can afford an electric car?
I could go on about how much environmental damage those car batteries, windmills, solar panels produce, look it up for yourself.
Then we really do have a clean energy source nuclear but no, that's not allowed -why?
Because they don't want a solution, this is a new religion Malthusian in practice, let this continue to our peril.
The irony of course is that access to cheap reliable energy has the effect of increasing wealth which improves education and standard if living. This reduces populations. They lie about everything. It's not about climate nor energy it's about controlling energy which they intend to use as currency - the real social credit system that will never apply to the elites. Neo feudalism (neo-fascism) via corporatist technocrats is upon us.
The second part of the CURRENT Ice Age will come. We are lucky and privileged to be alive during an interglacial.
Science put simply is the pursuit of truth. The struggle of science is to achieve just that. What we knew last week can be totally changed by something new discovered this week. There should be no sacred cows in science. Science is what brought about the Enlightenment where empirical data based reason replaced religious and ideological dogma. We are very dangerously close to returning to the dark days which occurred before the Enlightenment with money and politics/quasi religion dictating claimed scientific outcomes. This is why for me as a scientist warning sirens go off when I hear fatuous statements about "settled science" and "scientific consensus". Who ever it was who coined those ludicrous terms they were not scientist but politicians. For a conclusion to be called science it must be based on statistically significant empirical data obtained by falsifiable methodology(s). Anything else is not science. Also it is critically important when conducting scientific experimentation to check for biases and omissions. There is a whole industry today in university research departments wilfully performing flawed experiments chasing predetermined outcomes. Worse, when empirical data does exist from Geological History and physics which contradict the CO2 obsession it is totally ignored. You may ask why when empirical data does exist then why the obsession with models fixated upon CO2, not one of which has ever predicted correctly. Simply put, when using models "scientists" can decide what is input and based on that they can control the output. This is not science of any kind but the corruption of science for political or financial ends. Sadly money, lots of money have corrupted some of our finest academic institutions.
It may surprise you to learn that there exists no statistically significant empirical data of any kind which supports the claim that CO2 liberated by the actions of man during the past 100 years can in any measurable way be shown to be responsible for all or any part of the current welcome warming which began 1800-1820, the fourth such warming in recent human history. You do not have to take my word for this. Go look, you will not find any such data.
What is equally shocking is that statistically significant empirical data does exist to support the contention that this is largely a non issue and certainly not a human "caused" one given that climate change is a continuous process which is 4.5 billion years old.
There actually IS an issue with CO2 not that there is too much free CO2 in the Carbon Cycle but there is dangerously too little. For 160 million years the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been in linear decline. This has been caused by the evolution of marine organisms which sequestrate CO2 to combine with calcium to create hard shells. When those organisms die, a significant proportion of that CO2 is not returned to the Carbon Cycle but remains locked up in organic carbonaceous shelly limestones. The huge volumes of such limestones around the world are testament to the success of these organisms. That linear decline reached a point in the first part of the current iceage where atmospheric CO2 levels fell to 180ppm. Simply put this is 20-30ppm only above the level at which photosynthesis is compromised. Plants die...everything dies. The concern of mankind should be how to avoid the natural intersection of the decline in atmospheric CO2 against the redline for photosynthesis which are due to intersect in a little over a million years from now. When did you read about that in the news??????
You will hear much nonsense spoken about the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The charlatans who talk about it never put it in its correct geological context. Back in the Cambrian the atmosphere contained 7000ppm CO2. When the decline 160 million years ago in the Late Jurassic started the level was 2500ppm which is what it was when the angiosperms ( vegetables we eat) evolved which is why commercial greenhouse growers pump CO2 into the greenhouses because even the increase to 410ppm is starvation diet for plants. If an average of atmospheric CO2 level over geological time is considered the resultant number is 2500ppm. That if all things were equal is where "optimal" is for the planet. Ignore any scare stories you hear about acidification of the oceans. NEVER EVER in geological history have the oceans EVER been acidic even when the atmospheric level of CO2 was 7000ppm. This is how bad the corruption of science has become when very very slightly "less" alkali is called acidification. It is not science but the use of science as an authority figure to influence the way people think. There is a whole industry today pushing such garbage and the BBC are one of the worst which for many reasons is not only shocking but totally unacceptable.
Weather is now called climate. The Great Barrier Reef is not in danger from warming seas(quite the opposite in fact is true) yet much money is at stake for people to tell lies and say it is. Sea level is talked about without any qualification. Sea level is a relative measure. land goes up and down as well as the sea and without any reference to that we hear asininity from all directions because at location X sea level is "rising" faster than anywhere else. The wilful disingenuous nature of such claims relies as so much else of the climate hokus pokus on silencing challenging voices via threats and bullying which are all too real.
To say I am in shock that a whole industry has been created which is visibly changing the way we live out lives (negatively) on the back of what is not data but wrong computer models is an understatement. This ideological/religious movement manipulated by people hiding in the shadows has the potential to bring an end to Western civilization. Yes the stakes are that high.
some of us grew up with nuclear war terror, this generation its climate and a return to nuclear war and be scared of viruses and others!
anyone else tired of supposed to be scared?
Yes
Excellent essay, Laura. At the ripe old age of 55, I have been hearing these alarmist messages my entire life: first the "new ice age" in the early 70s, then acid rain, then the disappearing ozone layer, global warming, rising sea levels, mass starvation, melting polar ice caps, then climate change. On and one they go with their doomsday scenarios, and yet none has come to pass and actually, I'd say that the future for young people is a bright one - if they're allowed to enjoy the fruits of the labours of previous generations. It's disturbing that they're being brainwashed into buying into these doomsday cults - that's exactly what they are; they even want non-believers excommunicated and cast out into the outer darkness. It would take a brave youngster to stand up against this relentless propaganda. But I hope that they will.
The ice age claims are likely true. Temperatures have been dropping over the last decade. We are after all in the midst of an interglacial of the quaternary ice age, a double ice age, with about 2my to go. They never reveal that.
You forgot the coral reefs.
Being taught what to think not how to think
I always think of these XR Foot Soldiers a "Extended Replicants"
There is NO climate crisis it is a total scam
XR, Insulate Britain et al are cults. dangerous ones.
I attended a Just Stop Oil recruitment evening in January when they were on the search for a fresh bunch of foot soldiers. Unsurprisingly, all the usual emotional manipulation techniques were rolled out by the presenters who spoke how they had found "camaraderie and solidarity" and now felt like they were living their lives "authentically" by being part of a "community with purpose".
Encouragingly there was a high number of sceptics in the group who weren't onboard with their agenda… I doubt they had many people sign up for the next stage of indoctrination and team-bonding in a pub.
Oh the Far right is it? Go look up 20th Century committers of genocide. The guys at the top were all pushing the left wing garbage called communism. Stalin and Mao between them killed more than 100 million of their own people, not in war but in purges of wrong think. Perhaps you should think on that next time you point fingers. Rather than calling names a more intelligent look at both extremes will see that they meet at the same point on the edge of a circle.
A simple rule: If the government promotes fear it's propaganda. The liars behind the climate fraud have been caught out time and time again tampering with data and using poor methodologies and groupthink to leap at wild claims of destruction. All of the fear claims failed to materialise and even the claims set forth that would validate their theories failed because it's all junk science. Similarly with population. In the west, whites, in particular, are having fewer children. Africa, Asia, and to a lesser degree South America are bucking the trend. Whites are the minority race on the planet yet it is the west and the whites who are targeted with the overpopulation propaganda while at the same time the west is expected to have open borders as well as support and sustain a largely uneducated and unskilled influx population of mainly fighting-age men. This is all deliberate.
Thanks for bringing a relatable focus on the problem, Laura. The Nudge unit's "principles for successful behaviour change initiatives" seems to be about pushing through the New Puritanism - let's stop making things, call out the wrong thinkers, erase Empirical reasoning and spirituality. Resist!
We think we know things but actually we know very little. Maslin and Lewis's 'The Human Planet' offers (IMHO) an optimistic and very open interpretation of the 'Anthropocene', in which evolution is impossible to predict (as if much beyond the next few seconds actually is) so that any seemingly 'bad' impact can enable all sorts of 'good' evolutionary developments. As ever 'modern' humans are very uncomfortable with uncertainty and so this creates binary divisions and arguments that seek to impose a 'certainty' interpretation (so that we don't have simply to 'be' in uncertainty, especially in the small hours, in silence, part-awake-part-asleep), which is not how nature and wider cosmos operate. Nuance and chaos are the natural state. Balance is a process, ever shifting and morphing, merging, beyond words and our three/four/five/ten or however many 'human-constructed' dimensions. Very few people in 'western' or 'developed world' science and academia (nor obviously officials in governments and corporations) are able to think and communicate outside of the conventional habits of debate. It is left to the artists and storytellers, and musicians, creatives and healers, (thank you Laura and many others for your brilliance and bravery) to offer wider possibilities of gratitude, zeitgeist, quantum, fearlessness/love, abundance, karma, collective consciousness, etc., and umpteen other perspectives of existential interpretations and door-openings for what life/death/thoughts/feelings/sensing actually are, and of our position within it all (arguably/perhaps simply what we imagine it to be, in turn a reflection of how we see ourselves and especially our fears). I realise that my words do not 'contribute to' or 'advance or clarify the debate', which IMHO is the point I'm trying to make - that we cannot understand or explain concepts of infinite nature using finite means. If just our notions of time and space and consciousness are flawed, which likely they are, then there becomes more justification for re-imagining how we think about these things, and especially ourselves. Incidentally I work in suicide, grief, death, disintegration and 're-birth', etc., which is all very interesting because (I'm bound to say) it's a powerful lens for death and therefore also life. Please consider that nobody knows what happens after we die (nor what was happening before we were born into human consciousness); there are very possibly infinite universes (therefore, which we each inhabit to infinite degrees); nobody even knows what happens when we sleep; nobody even understands fungi and the sense of smell; nobody can explain what Fiona Oakes does/did (runningforgoodfilm.com); nobody can explain placebo/nocebo; etc., etc., and yet we try to explain the weather and the cosmos and evolution, as if there was a 'big bang' and beginning (probably/perhaps not) and that there's a future except what we sense as every current moment. I love the debate, but I also love the uncertainty and that nobody really knows nor can predict anything :) And as to artificial intelligence: GIGO :) Homo sapiens have become so clever that we now scare ourselves to death. Thoughts become things. Choose the good ones and make your own universe: entirely what you want, but be careful what you wish for, because you likely don't know - not even what is best to eat, which in so many ways is a good place to start. Sui generis :)
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏❤❤❤🙏🙏🙏 bravo!!
Our need to control the unpredictability of life, is what is creating the very uncertainty that we are experiencing. Life is actually very ordered in its chaotic responses. The engineers, programmers and business peeps of the world, dream of creating the same systems that life has evolved to- just look at the exquisite information storing and self cleaning functionality of water alone!!
Here are the global death rates from natural disasters per 100,000 of population from 1900-2016. Basically, they've completely collapsed in every single category. This manic scaremongering by the likes of Hallam is even more nauseating than the obscenity of lockdowns.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/12/Death-rates-by-catastrophe-type-01.png
Climate change is an interesting one. Is climate change real? Absolutely. Does it make certain parts of the world hotter and cause problems? For sure. Have the rate of extreme events increased? No, they have decreased possibly due to better land management. Is everyone going to starve due to climate change? Not unless a COVID like overreaction causes it since it actually gives a longer growing season further north. Are the governments/climate change activists pushing for more R&D into new green technologies? No, and this is telling if you’re not prepared to put even 1% of the money printed that vanished into the ether for COVID into an alleged existential crisis is it really likely to be as alleged? So is it just a cynical grab for power/control and money? Looks that way, the long time line means it can be the gift that keeps on giving, and by measuring carbon you can cut the usage of all members of the population’s resource usage or make them contribute far more real work for it. The seemingly apocalyptic nature means you can generate real fear in a significant minority (again). The sums involved are truly eye-watering. To get people to accept something so big you have to get them young.
The planet will still be here when we are all gone. There are probably too many of us anyway breathing out CO2 the whole time. My mother and school didn't burden me as a child during the war with fear of a German invasion or the possible death of my father in the Navy - though my religion did with threats of hell for misbehaviour. Adults alone should bear this kind of burden not children. Hitler had school books rewritten to be more German i.e his concept of it, when he came to power in the early 1930s and look what happened after that indoctrination. He failed and left a confused generation. Children need to read, write and do arithmetic properly. Let them find out for the world as it is by themselves if they are curious enough, not by teaching flawed concepts and ideas.
The BBC's Blue Peter has been tacitly recruiting the foot soldiers for a long time. In the 1980s it was "It's hard for poor old adults to change their ways, using cars less, remembering to drop glass off at the bottle bank. But children can get them to do it!" "Down with CFCs!" "Beware of the hole in the ozone layer!"
Just the way it happened in the soviet union, here's an interest read, an anti-commie comic from the cold war which gives an apparently true exmaple of what the brainwashed young did: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/communism/Blood%20is%20the%20Harvest/
Excellent essay. Thanks for delving into this topic; it's going to a huge battleground over the next decade.
I remember back in the 90s we talked about environmentalism, e.g. curbing pollution, monitoring toxins in the environment, preserving natural habitats, halting the ivory trade, stuff like that. Then at some point -- perhaps around the time Al Gore pushed his first documentary -- traditional environmentalism was replaced purely by concerns over "global warming", which was then rebranded to "climate change" due to the fact that there wasn't actually a linear uptick in average temperatures across the whole world.
It's clear to anyone that the "climate emergency" is a top-down construct, far removed from grassroots environmentalism (which might include anything from litter-picking in a nature reserve to legitimate activism around the use of pesticides on crops or antibiotics pumped into livestock).
Life expectancy is stagnating in the Western world, even declining in some demographic cohorts. There are so many issues to examine around this -- the interplay between health and environmental factors, the impact of processed foods, the over-medicalising of the population, and yes, pollution in cities (both from cars and industrial sources). But instead what the government wants us to myopically focus on is consumptiom -- our own personal "carbon footprint" (itself a concept cooked up by the PR industry and corporate lobbies).
This is clearly a con and they're using the language of alarmism to rope us in. The problem is that the scientific establishment is completely captured -- they produce the models that support the policies. (For evidence of the lack of transparency around this field of research, see so-called 'Climategate', a scandal which involved an email hack of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in 2009.)
I've recently been going down the climate rabbit hole and one researcher I recommend is Canadian former physics professor Denis Rancourt (his podcast interviews and writing on covid have been stellar too). I'm not saying his theories are the right ones, just simply that they offer a credible counter-narrative https://denisrancourt.ca/categories.php?id=7&name=climate_change
And it's the sun, which the ipcc ignores everything but the light effect..
Magnetic, electric fields also heat the earth
https://youtu.be/dZwa2a2nJz0