American Elephants

Biden’s climate plan will not address gender and racial inequality by The Elephant's Child
December 28, 2020, 2:29 pm
Filed under: Politics | Tags: , ,

This was an actual headline at The Hill, and whoever wrote it should be spanked and sent to bed without any supper. According to the 2010 census (this year’s will not be available for a while) 76.3% of the American population are white, 13.4% are Black/African-American, 5.9% Asian, 1.3% American Indian or Alaska native, 18.5% Hispanic or Latino, 60.1% White alone, not Hispanic or Latino. and .02% Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian. All of the blather about “white supremacy” just reflects that 60.1% of Americans are white but not Hispanic or Latino. Doesn’t refer to “superiority” at all.

Gender is a different matter. One is born with a defined gender, and attempts to change that seem to be a matter of psychology rather than actual transformation. The sticking points seems to be preferred bathrooms, and the problems that causes for those who are not confused about their gender, and of course sports. The “gentler sex” usually does not have the muscle and strength of a man and is at a disadvantage on the playing field. But lumping it in with racial inequality seems somewhat not just unfair, but inappropriate. Unless facilities choose to add “gender neutral” bathrooms, which isn’t going to go down well unless there is an alternative, attempts to cater to “preferred gender aren’t going to work and the onus will fall on those who are attempting to change their gender. Treating this as some kind of racial inequality simply will not work. Changing how the world works to cater to a tiny minority isn’t going to work either. School districts probably shouldn’t be trying to cater to every new, new thing that comes on. Forbearance and courtesy will help, but not all problems have easy solutions.

Lord Christopher Monckton Wrote a Letter to the Lancet on the “Climate Crisis” by The Elephant's Child
December 28, 2020, 12:08 pm
Filed under: Politics | Tags: , ,

I am certainly not a climate scientist, but I do study up and read everything I can to try to understand what is going on.

Lord Christopher Monckton, who was a close advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote a letter to the Lancet on the “Climate Crisis” which the Heartland Institute has made public. He does know what he is talking about. It is not long and very worth your time:

The grave error of physics that created a climate ’emergency’

It was all a big mistake. Concern about dangerous global warming arose from a grave error of physics dating back to 1984. No one had noticed until now because climate scientists had borrowed feedback mathematics from control theory, another branch of physics,without understanding it.The control theorists whose science climatologists had borrowed had not realized how it had been misused. An international team of eminent climatologists and control theorists, gathered by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, spent years hunting the error. Their 70-page scientific paper calculates that, after correcting the error, manmade global warming will be only one-third of what climate scientists had predicted. There will be too little global warming to harm us. Small, slow warming will be a good thing overall. There is no climate emergency. There never was. The trillions wasted on destroying jobs and industries can now be spent on the world’s many real environmental problems. Global warming is not among them. As a result of the error, climate scientists had thought that, though only about 1 C° –a quarter of the global warming they were predicting from doubling the CO2 in the air–came directly from the added CO2, that 1 C° of direct warming would trigger another 3 C° of extra warming, called feedback response, mostly from more water vapour–a greenhouse gas–carried in the air the CO2 had warmed. Fig. 1(a) Erroneous and (b) corrected makeup of the natural greenhouse effect. They had thought the natural greenhouse effect–the difference between the emission temperature at the surface without airborne greenhouse gases and the surface temperature in 1850, at the start of the industrial era–was 32 C°. Of this, they had thought 8 C° was direct warming driven by the pre-industrial green-house gases, to which the remaining 24 C° was feedback response (Fig. 1a). They had made two mistakes, one small, one very large. Their small mistake: they had forgotten that without greenhouse gases in the air there would be no clouds to reflect solar radiation harmlessly back to space, like a mirror. The true emission temperature – the temperature that would prevail at the surface if there were no greenhouse gases in the air at the outset–would be about 12 C° larger than they had calculated. Thus, the true natural greenhouse effect was not 32 C° but 12 C° smaller, at just 20 C°. Their very large mistake:they forgot the Sun was shining. For very nearly all of the pre-industrial feedback response until 1850–the extra warming all of which they thought had been triggered by non-condensing greenhouse gases (gases other than water vapour)–was actually triggered not by those gases but by the Sun’s warmth. In effect, they added that solar feedback response to, and miscounted it as part of, the pre-industrial greenhouse-gas feedback response, which they overstated by 3200%.

The remainder of Monckton’s letter can be found here. It’s not long, but invaluable. Joe Biden is a true believer in the “climate crisis”. He intends to make it his initial issue of prime importance. Billions of dollars worth of wind farms and solar arrays which will not produce the energy required for a modern society. He intends to make John Kerry (John Kerry!) his guru for rejoining the Paris Climate Accords which are meant to allay the nonexistent warming that’s supposed to do us all in. The Earth has been warming and cooling for millions of years, and will probably continue doing so. There are cold winters and mild winters, hot summers and mild summers. We had a vast experiment with a project in the Southern California Desert called Solyndra. An enormous array of solar cells were designed to reflect their heat on a tower that was to produce all the energy needed for a big percentage of California. Cost billions, didn’t work, killed thousands of birds, Enter that name in your search engine and see what comes up.

Japan has just committed to switching to electric automobiles in around 3 years. Mr. Toyoda, president of the Toyota Car Company, spoke out, pointing out that Japan does not have enough electricity to support all electric cars, not even close. We can get in remarkable amounts of trouble by not investigating carefully, or as I usually refer to it as “doing your homework.” It’s not what you know that’s going to get you in trouble, but what you don’t know that you don’t know.
