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Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship between society and the individual.
In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to adapt to the society they lived in. Rather, society itself could become so pathological, so detached from a normative way of life, that it induced a deep-seated alienation and a form of collective insanity among its members. In modern western societies, where automation and mass consumption betray basic human needs, insanity might not be an aberration but the norm.
Fromm wrote:
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Challenging definition
This is still a very challenging idea to anyone raised on the view that sanity is defined by consensus, that it embraces whatever the mainstream prefers, and that insanity applies only to those living outside those norms. It is a definition that diagnoses the vast majority of us today as insane.
When Fromm wrote his book, Europe was emerging from the ruins of the Second World War. It was a time of reconstruction, not only physically and financially, but legally and emotionally. International institutions like the United Nations had recently been formed to uphold international law, curb national greed and aggression, and embody a new commitment to universal human rights.
It was a time of hope and expectation. Greater industrialisation spurred by the war effort and intensified extraction of fossil fuels meant economies were beginning to boom, a vision of the welfare state was being born, and a technocratic class promoting a more generous social democracy were replacing the old patrician class.
It was at this historic juncture that Fromm chose to write a book telling the western world that most of us were insane.
Degrees of insanity
If that was clear to Fromm in 1955, it ought to be much clearer to us today, as buffoon autocrats stride the world stage like characters from a Marx Brothers movie; as international law is being intentionally unravelled to restore the right of western nations to invade and plunder; and as the physical world demonstrates through extreme weather events that the long-ignored science of climate change – and much other human-inspired destruction of the natural world – can no longer be denied.
And yet our commitment to our insanity seems as strong as ever – possibly stronger. Sounding like the captain of the Titanic, the unreconstructed British liberal writer Sunny Hundal memorably gave voice to this madness a few years back when he wrote in defence of the catastrophic status quo:
If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?
As the clock ticks away, the urgent goal for each of us is to gain a deep, permanent insight into our own insanity. It doesn’t matter that our neighbours, family and friends think as we do. The ideological system we were born into, that fed us our values and beliefs as surely as our mothers fed us milk, is insane. And because we cannot step outside of that ideological bubble – because our lives depend on submitting to this infrastructure of insanity – our madness persists, even as we think of ourselves as sane.
Our world is not one of the sane versus the insane, but of the less insane versus the more insane.
Intimate portrait
Which is why I recommend the new documentary I Am Greta, a very intimate portrait of the Swedish child environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
Before everyone gets started, let me point out that I Am Greta is not about the climate emergency. That is simply the background noise as the film charts the personal journey begun by this 15-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome in staging a weekly lone protest outside the Swedish parliament. Withdrawn and depressed by the implications of the compulsive research she has done on the environment, she rapidly finds herself thrust into the centre of global attention by her simple, heart-felt statements of the obvious.
The schoolgirl shunned as insane by classmates suddenly finds the world drawn to the very qualities that previously singled her out as weird: her stillness, her focus, her refusal to equivocate or to be impressed.
Footage of her father desperately trying to get her to take a break and eat something, if only a banana, as she joins yet another climate march, or of her curling up in a ball on her bed, needing to be silent, after an argument with her father over the time she has spent crafting another speech to world leaders may quieten those certain she is simply a dupe of the fossil fuel industries – or, more likely, it will not.
But the fruitless debates about whether Thunberg is being used are irrelevant to this film. That is not where its point or its power lies.
Through Thunberg’s eyes
For 90 minutes we live in Thunberg’s shoes, we see the world through her strange eyes. For 90 minutes we are allowed to live inside the head of someone so sane that we can briefly grasp – if we are open to her world – quite how insane each of us truly is. We see ourselves from the outside, through the vision of someone whose Asperger’s has allowed her to “see through the static”, as she too generously terms our delusions. She is the small, still centre of simple awareness buffeted in a sea of insanity.
Watching Thunberg wander alone – unimpressed, often appalled – through the castles and palaces of world leaders, through the economic forums of the global technocratic elite, through the streets where she is acclaimed, the varied nature of our collective insanity comes ever more sharply into focus.
Four forms of insanity the adult world adopts in response to Thunberg, the child soothsayer, are on show. In its varied guises, this insanity derives from unexamined fear.
The first – and most predictable – is exemplified by the right, who angrily revile her for putting in jeopardy the ideological system of capitalism they revere as their new religion in a godless world. She is an apostate, provoking their curses and insults.
The second group are liberal world leaders and the technocratic class who run our global institutions. Their job, for which they are so richly rewarded, is to pay lip service, entirely in bad faith, to the causes Thunberg espouses for real. They are supposed to be managing the planet for future generations, and therefore have the biggest investment in recruiting her to their side, not least to dissipate the energy she mobilises that they worry could rapidly turn against them.
One of the film’s early scenes is Thunberg’s meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, shortly after she has started making headlines.
Beforehand, Macron’s adviser tries to pump Thunberg for information on other world leaders she has met. His unease at her reply that this her first such invitation is tangible. As Thunberg herself seems only too aware when they finally meet, Macron is there simply for the photoshoot. Trying to make inane small talk with someone incapable of such irrelevancies, Macron can’t help but raise an eyebrow in discomfort, and possibly mild reproof, as Thunberg concedes that the media reports of her travelling everywhere by train are right.
Cynically insane
The third group are the adults who line the streets for a selfie with Thunberg, or shout out their adulation, loading it on to her shoulders like a heavy burden – and one she signally refuses to accept. Every time someone at a march tells her she is special, brave or a hero, she immediately tells them they too are brave. It is not her responsibility to fix the climate for the rest of us, and to think otherwise is a form of infantilism.
The fourth group are entirely absent from the film, but not from the responses to it and to her. These are the “cynically insane”, those who want to load on to Thunberg a burden of a different kind. Aware of the way we have been manipulated by our politicians and media, and the corporations that now own both, they are committed to a different kind of religion – one that can see no good anywhere. Everything is polluted and dirty. Because they have lost their own innocence, all innocence must be murdered.
My latest: The more Greta Thunberg articulates the terrifying emotions of awakening to our impending extinction as a species – as she did at the UN this week – the more many of us dig in our heels to resist her role as an agent of change https://t.co/zEZYMuotZv
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 24, 2019
This is a form of insanity no different from the other groups. It denies that anything can be good. It refuses to listen to anything and anyone. It denies that sanity is possible at all. It is its own form of autism – locked away in a personal world from which there can be no escape – that, paradoxically, Thunberg herself has managed to overcome through her deep connection to the natural world.
As long as we can medicalise Thunberg as someone suffering from Asperger’s, we do not need to think about whether we are really the insane ones.
Bursting bubbles
Long ago economists made us aware of financial bubbles, the expression of insanity from investors as they pursue profit without regard to real world forces. Such investors are finally forced to confront reality – and the pain it brings – when the bubble bursts. As it always does.
We are in an ideological bubble – and one that will burst as surely as the financial kind. Thunberg is that still, small voice of sanity outside the bubble. We can listen to her, without fear, without reproach, without adulation, without cynicism. Or we can carry on with our insane games until the bubble explodes.
Is the author unaware of the suffering that will occur if the ideas of the now adult Miss Thunberg were adopted? Modern society cannot function without fossil fuels. Heating, cooling, storage, shipments of medicine and food. Shelter, clothing and employment all require the burning of fossil fuels to sustain even a third of our present world population. In order to live in the type of environmental utopia those like Thunberg, and apparently this author, want, we have to kill off more than two thirds of the world’s population and force future inhabitants to live as subsistence farmers. That seems pretty “crazy” to me.
Yes. The author is unaware. Unaware that hard-headed science guys have broken down every aspect of modern life in terms of BTUs or Joules produced and consumed and that under any proposed solar or wind future there will be a serious shortfall of energy necessary to sustain any but a primitive lifestyle.
Consider, shipping goods by truck. How many batteries would it take to pull an 80,000 pound trailer? The batteries would constitute half the weight of the load, the carrying of which would entail yet more batteries which would entail yet more batteries and so on ad infinitum.
Science is not necessarily hard but it is rigorous and honest.
And where does this author get off telling us that Greta must be listened to because she is autistic or whatever? This is supposed to give her special insight? I call bullshot. When I was a Romantic young man I subscribed to similar nonsense. To be a wacko is not to enjoy some special, privileged perspective. It is to be out of kilter, unbalanced and lacking a coherent center.
Give up Fromm and find the one project that will give your life meaning for you. Do your best to achieve in spite of, irrespective of whatever the sane or insane people around you may say, think or do. Matter of fact, that is precisely what Fromm does say. Stop worrying about the qualities of the crowd around you and become a productive individual.
Maybe you are unaware of the suffering that global warming is going to cause. Global warming is already causing a large number of victims. Scientific American (Gordon Gould) said in 2009:
Today we have probably much more than 150,000 deaths every year because of it. Robert Hunziker wrote once in an article that privately scientists believe that about 90% of humanity is going to die because of global warming. Maybe you should read more about this theme and about renewable energy. A lot has been done by people who know about the situation. The question wasn’t discovered by Thumberg last year. Many people have written before her about it, mostly scientists but also other writers like Bill McKibben in the US.
So you think that global climate is going to care about how many batteries you need to power a heavy truck? The climate doesn’t care but there are some people who care and try to find solutions to that. There are other kinds of fuels, for instance, synthetic fuels, there are electricity lines above highways, there is the possibility of resorting to local production (Read the book Deep Economy by Bill McKibben) and millions of other ideas:
Here you can see electric trucks, in Germany:
https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/energie/a5-in-suedhessen-drei-monate-elektro-autobahn-wo-sind-die-strom-laster/24871476.html?ticket=ST-116639-zQKSJCMUtafdTc19z4VO-ap3
https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/e-mobilitaet/erster-e-highway-in-betrieb-hybrid-lkw-rollen-ueber-die-a5/
I do not have any use at all for the unfortunate child or her “cause” or the poseurs that seek to maintain or improve their own positions by associating with her. I would include the author in this last group. However, the reminder (I did come across Fromm in a philosophy/ethics course 40 years ago) of some first principles and the doom which follows abandoning them is very well taken.
And other researchers say we’re about to enter a new Ice Age. “Official” scientists are required to kneel at the altar of “global warming ” because if they don’t, they won’t get grants or tenure and they’re papers won’t be published. What year did Al Gore’s “researchers” tell us we’d all be living underwater? What prediction of the global warmists has come true?
Where are these 150,000? Give me their names and addresses. And remember, people died from hurricanes, tornadoes and monsoons many moons before the industrial revolution.
Couldn’t you guys have just stayed with cleaning up pollution? Did you have to go overboard with the chicken little routine?
The Japanese psyche went from pre-war to post-war much like a burst bubble in the stock market.
The Western mind seems to be struggling with its own sea change. The century began with Western insanity: we were the ‘Free World’ bringing democracy and humanitarian relief to the downtrodden, who would eagerly embrace our good deeds. Hubris and nonsense, but at the time it still had traction.
Only a few short years ago it was possible to fool gullible kids into thinking adventure tourism meant going abroad to build schools out of mud bricks. Only when they arrived did they realize they’d been scammed. There were more than enough locals to do the work, the whole thing was a con game preying on Western ignorance. The locals would soon be on Facebook.
The insanity of the West is in its lingering notion of superiority. How in this century will whites cope with the necessary realization that we are no longer ‘on top’, that we are not the great white saviors?
We are in peril and our collective insanity prevents a majority from waking up to reality. Other races and cultures are set to devour us like the Eloi.
What’s the share of the white population of Earth? About 10%?
Regardless, Greta’s autistic ass is still useless like most modern Swedish women voicing a political stance. The solution isn’t green energy or CO2 reduction, it’s carbon capture. Carbon capture is scaleable, can reduce global CO2 presence regardless of what country it’s in and is capable of actually reducing the greenhouse effect with measurable results. We can actually clean up after China and India and demand that they pay for it.
Greta’s just a spoiled little Asspie who should have been thrown out with the rest of the malformed potatoes.
Fine. Fire away. But batteries are produced somewhere out of something using energy derived from some source. Even the factory that manufactures batteries will have to run on batteries. And those will need to be powered from solar panels or wind. Calculate how many square miles or kilometers of solar panels it will take to produce the solar panels needed to produce the batteries needed to produce the trucks needed to produce the trade upon which all modern economies depend. And so on all the way through the economy.
What are we left with? How many modern conveniences will have to be pared away? All that the critics of the facile thinking of the Green Utopians are pointing out is that life will have to become very stripped down and simple if we go that route. Fine by me, but I live pretty simply as it is. But something tells me that you’re going to have to pry that seven iron out of Steve Sailer’s cold hands before you implement your agenda.
150,000 will hardly make a dent in the 8 billion people running around today.
We can only wish.
You ignorant boob. Card-carrying member of the booboisie.
Anybody who says, “Science is not necessarily hard but it is rigorous and honest,” is a boob with a capital B.
Boob.
Absolutely shameful how the author takes the deep wisdom of Fromm (and by extension Augusto Del Noce) only to trample it with Globull Warming bullshiff. Or maybe it’s even a deliberate act, to smear and destroy that wisdom.
You can draw a straight line from “Silent Spring” over “Globull Warming” to “Corona Lockdowns”, and every time perfectism has lead to ignoring all side-effects of the proposed ‘solutions’ (millions of excess Malaria deaths; trillions wasted for mostly useless electric boondoggles; or destroying the economy and the structure of society to save the last nursing home inhabitant, even after the overall low danger of COVID became apparent.)
Talk about insanity, indeed.
This is thinly veiled “noble savage” myth, along the same lines as “children are smarter and kinder than adults” or “babbling psychos are actually prophets of God.”
I’m all for listening to outsiders, because they sometimes see things more clearly than those of us inside the problem. That’s pretty much the reason I’m here at Unz.
But the truth is that most crazy ideas are really just crazy ideas. Greta is basically just the modern version of Joan of Arc or Joseph Smith, and I’m not interested in going to war because a mentally unstable kid hears voices.
Thunbergs Grandfather was the president of the Swedish Society for Racial Hygeine. As much as I enjoy a largely ethnically homogenous society,I rather believe that the Thunberg family has some inherent problems. Scratch the surface of anything like Thunberg and you always find some nasty eugenicist,dysgenicist or transhumanist lurking there. It’s a vile phenomenon.
Thanks for all the answers above.
First there is the question of carbon capture. It will be nice if it works. But it’s doubtful that it can work. Manuel Garcia, a physicist who writes about such themes, has written an article some time ago showing that unfortunately it’s physically very unprobable that it can work. He makes calculations and says that the energy necessary to make it function would make the whole process unviable. I post bellow a link to this article and maybe another one.
Global warming is a question of physics. What oil lobbysts say, our wishes and ideologies, what Al Gore may have said 15 years ago don’t count. Global warming was discovered in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century by John Tyndal, Svante Arrhenius, who was also Swedish like Greta and others. Nobody until today has refuted it, nothing has falsified it. Nobody is even trying to do that.
That a global warming is true is visible, obvious and generally known because scientists and other people in the whole world have enough data and observations to confirm it. Even rangers, biologists and foresters who have contact with nature have noticed it a long time ago (we see in the north insects and other animals that previouly only existed in the south). Science has shown without any reasonable doubt the cause of global warming: CO2. Of course, lobbysts tried for a long time to fool people paying incompetent people to sow and spread doubts about global warming. Many people were fooled by them because they wanted and because it was convenient. Nowadays there is so much information, so many books that it’s not understandable how someone can still have doubts about it.
Another question is the question of batteries. I agree that it’s a difficult question. I’m not sure we will succeed. But we have to notice that there are some progresses. The half of the electricity in Germany nowadays, more or less, is renewable energy, even though Germany today produces twice as much as in 1990, the reference year in the calculations of increase or decrease of the use of fossil fuels. It’a a question of what we want and decide to do.
150,000 deaths because of global warming was the situation 10 years ago. I think I read about a report saying that there were 400,000 this year, but I may be wrong. The problem is that global warming can get out of control and temperatures may rise dramatically in a very short time without time to do anything at all about it. Then we will see what happens and how many people will survive. We never had so high temperatures since human beings appeared. And it keeps rising. Things that we thought would happen only at the end of the century begin to happen now.
Articles by Manuel Garcia, and by Robert Hunziker:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/08/another-model-of-atmospheric-co2-accumulation/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/18/the-climate-threat-from-arctic-methane-releases/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/16/global-warming-clobbers-ocean-life/
You’ll have to add another category to your list of haters, Cook: people who are put off, nay physically feel like throwing up, when seeing goddam Puritans and crusaders. This kid is not a kid, she’s some kind of Joan of Arc or Calvin or Cotton Mather or some other equally obnoxious freak.
Also, where do you get the idea that one can do anything about global warming and extinction? Just because some fanatical 15-year-old believes it can be stopped? That’s the craziest idea ever. All human society is organized by politicians, politicians depend essentially on the votes of a crowd of dumb animals — take US “democracy” just as a random example. Does that system look like anything that can stop major dangers? Or that it can be abolished on time? There is no stopping extinction if that’s real. Sometimes there is no hope and hoping is totally useless; sometimes the patient dies.
That was my opinion as well, but apparently that not really the case. According to the following article a Tesla semi would carry “only” about 4,000 pounds less cargo than a standard diesel model. I offer no warranty either express or implied as to the accuracy of this article but it sounds legit (and is not Tesla sponsored as far as I can tell).
https://www.teslarati.com/how-much-tesla-semi-truck-battery-pack-weigh/
So we have 8.5% less carrying capacity vs. 40% greater fuel efficiency. Fuel is roughly is between 35% and 40% of the operating cost of a rig, so overall costs would drop 15%. Whether that would offset the drop i capacity is beyond my knowledge base, would depend on how often trucks move at full capacity and how much they get paid on a per mile basis.
Cheers.
Now that @ThreeCranes has been suitably chastised, do you have anything substantive to add?
Liar or idiot. I think idiot.
Millions of cancer deaths prevented from banning DDT.
Carbon capture seems as unlikely to succeed as renewables. Current annual emissions ~36 Gt CO2, total ~3200Gt in the atmosphere, cost range of $50-100 per ton removed. So, to keep even, $50 x 36 billion = $1.8 trillion per year. And the process(es) take lots of energy, like 30% of a power plant’s output, so you have to create more to remove more. Fire up the printing press afterburners, I guess.
My current thinking is that keeping even won’t save us. I haven’t heard of any great new miracles of modern technology that will. It’d be a shame, though, to leave the entire planet a radioactive dumpster fire after we noble beasts are gone. Soil microbes are unlikely to evolve enough intelligence to monitor and maintain our nuclear facilities quick enough to save themselves.
CO2 is not the cause. Ozone holes caused by atmospheric nuclear testing is.
Has Greta been able to make her pronouncements freely in places like China or India or Sub-Saharan Africa? No, because it’s always the fault of the West i.e. white people. The rivers dumping the garbage that’s being found in the oceans is from those places. That’s something that can be controlled. No more plastic bags or food wrappers or millions in aid. It would be hard to do this, but a lot easier than reducing the so-called greenhouse effect, carbon offsets and all that other bull572t designed to make us feel bad. It’s the last great effort of the trust-fund WASPs to have some control over the situation. Remember people like the Bushes were the founders of Planned Parenthood. That’s why they hate Trump. He is elevating the peasantry.
You idiot. You didn’t even read what he said. Like most idiots, you just keep repeating your little hobbyhorse, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Plenty of good comments. Basically the author has it completely wrong, it is Greta that is insane.
On Global Warming: The amount of warming is small. The extra CO2 is a major reason for increased agricultural production, reforestation of vast areas of the World, and generally a more lush, life-friendly environment. A recent paper suggests the small degree of warming due to ‘greenhouse gases’ may be over, as the effect has reached saturation.
Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases
W. A. van Wijngaarden1 and W. Happer2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Canada, [email protected]
2Department of Physics, Princeton University, USA, [email protected] June 8, 2020
As noted in a comment above, Scientists are now projecting a grand solar minimum. A mini ice-age would, unlike global warming, really be a catastrophe for human existence.
For an antidote to all the environmental catastrophism (one of the new religions to replace the lost belief in a God) read the recent book by Michael Schellenberger:
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
You have a cite for that? DDT was abandoned for environmental reasons, most notably due to thinning of egg shells in certain bird species.
Scientific literature, in case you’re interested:
“The researchers followed 15,528 women participating in the non-profit Public Health Institute’s Child Health and Development Studies for nearly six decades. The team tracked the women’s age at first DDT exposure, their DDT levels during pregnancy, and the age when breast cancer was diagnosed. To determine levels of DDT exposure, they analyzed stored blood samples that had been collected from 1959 to 1967 during the women’s pregnancies at each trimester and early after childbirth. They used state records to identify 153 cases of breast cancer diagnosed from 1970 to 2010 in women age 50-54. They then matched each of these cases with comparable women who did not develop cancer.”
Source:
Barbara A. Cohn et al, “DDT and Breast Cancer: Prospective Study of Induction Time and Susceptibility Windows.” JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, February 13, 2019; DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djy198
153 cases out of 15,528 women, i.e. slightly under 1%. This is below what is found the general population today, decades after DDT was banned.
And also if you’re interested, Google “DDT malaria” to see how many lives its use has saved…
Any of the videos on CO2 by Patrick Moore (apostate founder of GreenPeace) are worth viewing. Among other things he points out that due to CO2 sequestration by shell-forming orgnanisms in calcium carbonate, the planet had become dangerously close to the minimum concentration of CO2 necessary to sustain plant (and all other) life. We were down to 150 ppm and below 120 ppm plants can no longer grow. So, thank God for the industrial revolution.
Without any doubt? Really? Whenever I do any research into the issue I find plenty of doubters. Maybe your Google machine isn’t working properly. There are plenty of scientists who believe we are actually entering a new Ice Age. Your brain, sir, has been washed. Dig a little deeper, if there’s anything still open in your mind. Your prophets have all been wrong, or in the case of the “hockey stick”, proven to be liars. Find a better Faith in which to believe.
It was funnier the first time, 40 years ago.
Jane’s boob[s]:
I repeat what I said because some facts are incontrovertible.
Yeah, Google and Wikipedia are your friends.
You bald-faced, lame-brained liar. You thought I wouldn’t look up the study. Not that I should have, because I know you are a liar right out of the box.
REALLY lame, trying to pawn off a study’s results as the opposite of what its results are.
For the information of the intelligent people out there (not you), Barbara Cohn did one study that showed that pre-menopausal women exposed to DDT before puberty showed a fivefold increased risk of getting cancer.
Then, Barbara Cohn did another study, the one you cite, on post-menopausal women. This is her conclusion: “DDT was associated with breast cancer through age 54 years. Risk depended on timing of first exposure and diagnosis age, suggesting susceptibility windows and an induction period beginning in early life. DDT appears to be an endocrine disruptor with responsive breast targets from in utero to menopause.”
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/111/8/803/5299924
Let me re-iterate, you lazy stupid troll
DDT was associated with breast cancer. Not not associated, as you so deviously contend.
You lying cheating sneaky bastard shill troll.
I got your number you phony lying shill troll bastard.
Okay, it harder for some than for others but, while you may not understand the math, you can get a pretty good picture of the world just by reading Isaac Azimov.
“ignorant boob”……I grew up in a family of research scientists and engineer/inventors. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
You made some sense until the last sentence, totally unnecessary callousness revealing your lack of objectivity.
How do you know this? Anecdote? Hyperbole? Scientific surveys?
Google? Is that your source of scientific knowledge about a physical process?
Liar or retard. I think both.
Millions of Malaria deaths -mostly children- definitely occur every year (and relatively quick),
while millions of potential cancer deaths were presumably prevented – according to which scientific source(s) exactly?
Plus the world has tried to come up with any as good approach to reducing/eradicating Malaria for the last 50 years, and has gotten nowhere.
And by the way, are you aware that there was Malaria in Southern US states, and it was eradicated by using DDT in the early 60’s?
And you, as most other retards, are trying to turn the argument into a black-or-white question: “no DDT or soak everything in it”
where the correct question would be “how much can we reduce use of DDT, while still having the immensely positve Malaria suppression effect?”
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915 has a report of OCO-2 satellite studies which show the Amazon rainforest emits more carbon than it takes in, as do other tropical rainforests, along with other surprises. Researcher Dr. Crisp said “we don’t know why” and spoke of paradigm shifts. For such candor he was sentenced to 50 lashes and a week in “the cooler.”
Greta, meanwhile, paddled a birch bark canoe from Malmo to the Amazon and spent weeks screaming “How dare you!” at the rainforest.
Finally calming down, Al Gore and I got her on board our startup company CHOP2STOP, which intends to chop down tropical rainforests planet wide to stave off this grave threat to humanity. Anything less would surely be insane.
It’s really remarkable, the virulent personal hatred that this child awakens in some. In Biblical terms, it reminds me of demons shrieking and cursing when confronted with innocence and decency. It must be very painful for those who have lost their souls to be reminded of what virtue looks like.
Somewhat funny but not enough to cancel the biased reporting. The NASA article you quote is heavily invested in the reality of global climate change. From the article:
“Crisp points out that scientists know the increases in carbon dioxide are caused primarily by human activities because carbon produced by burning fossil fuels has a different ratio of heavy-to-light carbon atoms, so it leaves a distinct “fingerprint” that instruments can measure.”
‘Nobody until today has refuted it, nothing has falsified it.’. You are merely asserting that you haven’t read the peer-reviewed literature or are being highly selective. Here’s something to check for yourself. Look up the widely ranging cluster of values for climate sensitivity. There are lots of them and they range from around 1.2 to 5. Moreover in recent years the values have declined towards 1. (at 1, there is no cause to do anything) There is no consensus on the value of the CS which means we don’t even understand the supposedly simple core relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature – one whose numerical value (reminder: no consensus!) drives trillions of dollars expenditure across the globe. Huge numbers of people have every incentive to keep that mountain of cash flowing.
How long do contemporary windmill generators last? When they reach their end, how are they disposed of?
The planet only warms because of solar output. How has solar output tracked temperature shifts on Earth? Where are we now with regard to the solar cycles and where will we soon be?
Just like ignorance can motivate doubt, it’s also true that knowledge increases doubts about false claims.
Consider also that the weather has been weaponized for a few decades now and the telltale signs of manipulating precipitation and storm paths are evident to those who watch and study what the satellites show rather than the limited abstractions of weather produced on television or for mainstream forecasting.
>Thunberg is that still, small voice of sanity outside the bubble.
So, not even a Prophet like Elijah; Greta Thunberg is G-d Herself. And you are to lecture us on sanity!
By the way, for someone talking of Left populism, an obsession shared only by élites is not the way forward.
As long as I get to chose.
On the basis of this piece Cook should be one of the 99 %.
Quite how The Autist formerly known as Greta got to have professionally shot videos of her spontaneous sole first demonstrations outside a small local school has never really been explained.
Nor has the fact that her blog has been run from a NYC United Nations IP address for a long while now.
Human generated CO2 is about 1 part in 60,000 of our total atmosphere (that’s 4% of 0.04%). anyone who thinks even the “nightmare” 50% increase in this quantity (of a BENIGN gas, more of which increases crop yields) will destroy the world is A F****** IDIOT.
Climate Science like COVID science is no science at all. It is public hysteria driven by computer models into which have been pumped scandalously false assumptions.
I’m surprised at Jonathan Cook. I thought he was a grown-up. If the science is lying bullsh*t (and it is), has it occurred to him that the narrative content of the “I am Greta” film is carefully manufactured, cynically calculated fiction also? Her mother and father are both actors. They are also deeply connected to the establishment. Theirs is a household that, the record demonstrates, has a primary interest in self advancement and PRETENDING.
Yes. The world is sick.
Because of degenerate leadership, its control over politics and the media and the gullibility of the majority of those exposed to the black magic designed to hypnotise us all into submission to our overlord’s appalling Luciferian agenda.
Jonathan. ffs.
Grow up!
ThreeCranes:
I appreciate your annoyance at this occasional drop-in troll. I suspect he’s probably some obese, acne’d adolescent at the bottom of the high school food chain or someone whose low IQ and/or lack of a real education creates a sense of inferiority and angst. In any event he’s desperately seeking attention when he posts anywhere on the Unz Report. The best way to discourage him is either to ignore him or, if the ankle biting gets too outrageous, to use the TROLL button.
“Do not feed the trolls” is always the best policy in cases like ob…, an un-amusing, failed attempt to lampoon our beloved Tiny Duck.
I don’t have to be objective to be right, dum-dum. China, India and Africa will in no way be going along with Greta’s little dipshit plan and the retarded little Swedish vegetable didn’t bother to consider that she could be wrong with the solution she is offering. The idea that anyone would be lectured by that scowling little skank, especially when she is wrong, is plain as day stupid.
And I would venture a guess you fall into Greta’s intelligence bracket. What I said doesn’t just make sense. It is the natural carbon cycle of the planet. Earth has had CO2 levels up to 20 times higher than now. That’s why big ass fucking dinosaurs were able to exist. Not only did they require much higher levels of atmospheric oxygen than is currently available, there had to be enough plant biomass to sustain that much animal mass.
You know what happens when there are lots of plants? They pull CO2 from the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect lessens. This isn’t hard. Geoengineering is the solution to this hypothetical problem, not economy killing carbon reductions that selectively target European nations.
She’s an actress, from a family of actors, playing a role. She’s just a willing tool in a psyop, an invention of others. The author is a similar tool.
The earth’s climate has cycles. These are largely, although not entirely independent of human activity. Around 1,000 years ago the earth’s average temperature was about 2 degrees higher than it is currently. Climatologists call the period the Medieval Climactic Optimum, since conditions were nearly ideal for human population growth. On Greenland, Norse settlers were supporting a European life style, raising wheat and cattle. Wild grapes grew in Newfoundland. England had a thriving viniculture industry. Then things started getting colder, a lot colder.
Later, in the 17th and 18th centuries, during the so-called Maunder Minimum/Little Ice Age, things got really cold. The cold was probably due to variations in solar output, which is treated as an exogenous constant in today’s so called climate models. We have still not returned to temperatures as high as those between the Medieval Climactic Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Human activity had little, if any, impact on these natural variations. It is certainly reasonable to suspect that currently observed rises in temperature are nothing more than a recovery from unusually cold conditions. That Greenland’s Ice pack was much smaller around 1000 AD than it is now suggests that concerns about its currently receding glaciers are at best overwrought.
This is all established science in that, while there is bickering over details, the broad picture has been empirically confirmed many times and is generally accepted as a basis for further research.
One area in which I do have some professional experience is the analysis of time series using ARIMA and Box-Jenkins methods to fit data and test for effects of interventions. These are among the preferred methods for analyzing time series data such as temperature variations over time. My impression of the analyses of temperature time series done by most climatologists is that it is shoddy and incorrect. Fitting lines or curves to these data yield misleading results. A few researchers have used ARIMA to test for trends in recent temperature data. They invariably find that there is no trend. The data are an instantiation of an underlying random walk. Supposed correlations with rising CO2 levels are hallucinatory. This leads me to my professional opinion that much of the current AGW hoopla is a con.
And her role is to be the young figurehead so that when you attack her masters’ policies, and even her masters; scum like @Observator will accuse you of hating HER.
“How dare you abuse this poor little girl!”
I’m not a specialist in this field but I try to answer the questions above to what I had written:
Of course we understand the core relationship between CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature. That’s why we call CO2 a green house gas. This has been known for more than 150 years and no scientist doubts this. You confound this fact with the exact climate sensitivity that results from that and which depends on many other things like clouds. It’s something that is difficult to calculate and there are going to be different answers. But scientists have been researching this and getting more precise results, even if there are different models. I’m not going to read now all the available information about this question, no result changes the basic fact that there is a dangerous course of climate change. From wikipedia:
This is happening already. There are specialised firms which do this work. The link bellow shows one firm which has a new more efficient method.
Yes and no. Planets which don’t have an atmosphere with green house gases are cold and ones with a lot of green house gases are hot, even much hoter than the Earth.
It’s known that we have had a period of low solar activity. In spite of that temperatures rise. There is no sign of global cooling in the next times (for a very long time in the future). Scientists know the information provided by satelites and of course, it’s a part of the data that they use in their work. Everything we know confirms climate science and the fact of global warming. Only oil and industry lobbysts had another view, but even they have given up because there aren’t so many stupid people nowadays to believe what they said.
Jus’ Sayin’… s,
Scientists have heard what you say, but it’s simply considered to be wrong. For as long as humans live in this planet we have never had so high temperatures as now. There are natural climate variations, including a Medieval period of warm weather in Europe, (but not in the whole planet). But what we have now is caused by our emissions of CO2, has no precedent and is causing a dramatic climate change. There is no doubt about that. I would reccomend that people read at least what Robert Hunziker writes in his articles, if you don’t want to read books and specialised papers of scientists which work in this field.
https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/westfalen-lippe/neues-verfahren-sprengung-windraeder-100.html
Yes, that’s it. Everything I know comes from the high lord Google and Facebook is where I get my friends and Twitter keeps me up to date on the news. Netflix is my culture, amazon is my shopping mall and fresh direct my supermarket.
Are you fo real?
Criticism of Greta is valid. She does more harm than good plus reminds people of the children’s crusade centuries prior and medieval child saints.
Ed Dutton (Jolly Heretic) has observed that most extreme leftists like Greta and Extinction Rebellion tend to be social misfits with genetic issues. Sailer has highlighted the same thing on Antifa types – poor mental health, drug addiction and bad teeth.
Our modern prosperity is built on petrochemicals. It’s not just energy but things like cosmetics, fertilizers, industrial explosives, electronics, paints and dyes, household chemicals, textiles, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, plus packaging (plastics). People who have studied organic chemistry at college or university can confirm this.
The other aspect is cost. Most alternative energy sources aren’t viable without subsidies and other props. Things like solar cells (semiconductors) in fact come with high environmental costs in terms of hazardous chemicals used during manufacture.
Years back biodegradable plastics were praised as the solution to pollution. However, these remain expensive plus give off carbon dioxide. Today people are talking about using mycelium (mushrooms) to replace styrofoam which is made from petrochemicals.
I didn’t notice that Greta is leftist. How do you know that she is a leftist? The people who represent Fridays for Future in Germany, for instance, or who lead the protests belong to the higher classes. The most known are 2 girls who are very well educated, pretty and belong to a very rich family (they are cousins). Actually, Fridays for Future is a movement of the high bourgeoisie. They don’t have bad teeth. They are certainly more intelligent than the people who deny global warming.
This is not really true. On the other hand we must say that fossil fuels are not viable without the destruction of our environment.
Are you OK with the Aspies who work on designing the apps and technologies you love so much?
Moreover, fossil fuels (the use of which causes significant harm to public health) are a finite resource. Humans must transition eventually to green energy. By all appearance the transition will occur not at will in prudence and agreement between nations but in aftermath of an epic civilization-dissolving crisis.
No, that’s merely a statement that scientists track an increase in atmospheric CO2 to human activities. The climate scare hysteria is something else entirely.
There’s an interesting article at earthsky.com dated 02/02/2020 where scientists studying sand-particle-sized micrometeorites deduce atmospheric CO2 levels at 25-50 percent 2.7 billion years ago and note that temperatures were not elevated and that terrain was glaciated. They ponder the lack of greenhouse warming and speculate that a reduced atmospheric nitrogen concentration resulting in lowered atmospheric pressure as the reason why. Of course, there are too many unknowns and unknowables.
No one can explain even recent climate changes nor determine global conditions connected to them, such as the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warming Period nor explain the phenomenally rapid melting of the ice caps and desertification of the Sahara. The current “ten years to net zero CO2 or we’re baked in earth’s oven” is nonsense. To obliterate the economy in pursuit of unreliable energy strategies is ignorant and to do so at the expense of important environmental concerns is unforgivable.
Fortunately, there are technologies that will revolutionize energy production on this planet. Go to
e-catworld.com, ecat.com, aureon.ca to learn how far along this is. Whether human ingenuity and scientific breakthroughs will prevail over human greed, power-seeking, fear, and ignorance is the “$60,000 question.”
Your sister told me.
Oh. Thank you for clarifying.
No wonder you’re a liar.
The article started out good, but then came this,
Then I read a little more and started skimming. A child that was thrust into the spotlight by her actor parents. All for pushing some bogus Al Gore hoax then has mutated into a pagan cult. Earth worship is paganism and that’s backwards and evil.
My favorite applications are designed by tiny Japanese men who watch anime and listen to punk rock and metal. Happy to disappoint you! 😀
Tsk, tsk, tsk, bullying a poor little girl with Asperger like you do, you have issues man …
Like I suspected.
Thank you for your informative response. I mistakenly thought you were one of those flat-earthers that replied to me in this thread.
Yes the problem is very complex and there are many crazy fanatics and poseur politicians exagerating the impact of Co2 build up and warming itself. Having said that, the best evidence does point in the direction of global warming happening because of our intense burning of fossil fuel. A population of large mammals numbering billions having just passed exponential growth that burns long ago buried energy and that cover the entire planet is expected to have some impact on physico-chemical processes in the troposphere.
I asked my students: what is the species with the highest impact on the biosphere as a whole? Predictably, there is silence first because they feel it’s a trick question. If pressured some say “Man” or “Humanity”. Then I say it is Prochlorococcus spp., a humble cyanobacteria. She and the other cyanobacteria are responsible for keeping the troposphere out of chemical equilibrium by releasing the highly reactive O2 on which nearly all metazoans depend for immediate survival.
Greta Thunberg is just an organ grinder’s monkey, animated by someone else’s tune. She’s 17, soon to be 18, and is mentally and physically handicapped. She’s not a scientist and has no background in anything whatsoever except in displaying an autistic’s monomania. It’s a pity she’s being exploited by adults like this. Now, on to the next fortune teller of the moment.
Thank you!!
In 1986 lake Nyos, in Cameroon, suddenly released a massive amount of carbon dioxide, amongst other gasses that had been trapped at the bottom of the lake. Close to 2000 villagers died, as well as animals on the shoreline as the gas permeated the surrounding area. Carbon capture is not just expensive pie in the sky tech, but also dangerous, as the lake Nyos incident showed.
It’s a shame the hydrocarbon industries own so many politicians, or else we would be seeing investment in safer types of nuclear power stations.
I can’t remember the exact figure, but the batteries in the Tesla sedans contains about the same amount of energy as a gallon of petrol. That they can travel so far on so little, shows the difference in friction and lost energy when compared to a i.c. Engine. For electric vehicles to be a viable alternative, there obviously needs to be coast to coast recharging stations criss crossing countries, which won’t happen for a long time. But one can dream.
By the way, get ready for the celebrations as it’s the 75 th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials.
Ozone holes caused by atmospheric nuclear testing is.
How’s the weather back there in 1960? Still riding the short bus?
Got it.
I’m not going to go through the numbers but my immediate instinct is to disagree with any author who puts forth the proposition that solar and batteries could possibly be anywhere near as “efficient” as diesel. I say this as an owner of both a diesel power plant and solar panels. And frankly, I wouldn’t believe anything coming from a spokesperson for Tesla. Their auto is so inefficient (all factors taken into account e.g. depreciation) that it can only be sold to those who can absorb the exorbitant cost of owning one.
Small 4 passenger sedans in Europe could go 50 miles on a gallon of diesel. That’s pretty hard to beat. Diesel is only being phased out because of zero carbon emissions requirements. Don’t get me wrong. I wrote my senior high school paper on alternative energy automobiles in 1969! The problem has been with us a long time. Of course, everything’s changed since then, the technology so much better, but the point is I’m not opposed to electric, I just think we should acknowledge that if you’re speaking of a great reset then switching from today’s energy sources to solar/electric will be a far larger affair than adjusting society to accepting transvestite bathrooms etc.
Oh, don’t worry. I bully people older and technically more qualified than her as well. Would you kindly tell me your opinions so I can tell you why they’re wrong and you’re a fool for having them?
Rossi is a serial fraudster. Every iteration of “the e-cat” is a fraud. If it worked it would have been commercialised at least ten years ago. It doesn’t work because it can’t work. Just as Shawyer’s fraudulent em-drive doesn’t work because it can’t work.
Another ‘free energy’ fraud is Brilliant Light Power(nee black Light Power) which also doesn’t work because it can’t work. There are no “hydrinos”. Just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean that we know nothing.
The greenhouse effect is real and CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I haven’t seen ozone holes mentioned in any debate so far, maybe I missed it. If you have any information please share it with us, otherwise it is just an unsupported assertion by a guy on the internet.
Much of what you say is true, we are far more dependent on fossil fuels than is good for us. You are also correct in pointing out that our population levels are well above the planet’s sustainable carrying capacity. However, I think you are being wildly pessimistic about the degree to which we would have to scale down our lifestyle. The idea of killing off 4 million people and turning the rest into subsistence farmers is ridiculous.
Firstly, one could ask the question, ‘how much of what we make is actually useful’? We are drowning in junk.
We make disposable crap when we could be making stuff that lasts a lot better and actually works. As a result of which we are consuming natural resources at an unnecessarily high rate and polluting the environment with the resulting garbage. I am old enough to remember when there was far less stuff and the stuff we did have was worth repairing. How many things are deliberately designed so they can’t be repaired, or even cannibalised? Even if you can buy spare parts for something they will usually make you buy far more than you need.
We could make things more locally, why do we buy stuff from (say) China that we can make perfectly well in our own countries? Along with the cheap (often tacky) goods we also (in effect) import unemployment. Yes, that would mean bringing back trade tariffs, big deal. It would also reduce the traffic on national borders, slowing the spread of disease and pests. Globalisation isn’t environmentally friendly, never was never will be and has had far reaching and damaging effects on our societies to boot. Globalisation has made the rich richer, the poor poorer. It has created mass unemployment in the western world and turned China into an economic superpower (I have nothing against the Chinese btw, they are just the biggest and most obvious example)
We could put an end to the warmongering, imagine if most of the money currently spent on the military was spent on improving our infrastructure. Most of the wars are deliberately created anyway.
The biggest problem is an economic system that demands continual economic growth, especially because of the focus on GDP which is purely a measure of turnover rather than usefulness.
If someone invented a cheap cure for all known ailments then GDP would fall drastically but would we be worse off? World peace would also be a global GDP disaster in the same way. How can we move forward with such a crazy system in place?
As to the population issue, we do need to end up with a sustainable population, that doesn’t mean killing people off, that is a silly view. If we could at least stabilise the world’s population then our improving technology will have a chance to close the sustainability gap, that gap is not going to close when the world needs to feed an extra population the size of England every year. In my view we have to discourage populations from breeding irresponsibly, using more responsible countries as an over-spill facility is not acceptable, another reason to oppose globalisation.
Bob Greenyer at the e-catworld.com site describes many scientists and their work for decades involving EVOs (exotic vacuum objects) which he maintains are at the heart of the LENR phenomena–whether it be Mills’s, Rossi’s, or someone else’s attempts to manipulate them for energy extraction. Frank Ackland, site moderator, is in regular contact with Rossi, as are others.
You claim Rossi and Mills are outright frauds and the technology is impossible (you say “it doesn’t work because it can’t work”). I presume, then, your theorems proving such are ready to rock the scientific world. Physicists (such as Greenyer) will be glad to stop wasting their time once you show them your proofs, as will the scientists at aureon.ca, who are dealing with the same phenomena. Or is your statement “just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean that we know nothing” all ya got? I don’t know if hydrogen atoms can have an energy state below their base state (Mills’s hydrino), but his theory and experiments are interesting.
Looking back to my childhood, we had never heard of plastic. We got our shopping in biodegradable paper bags, and bottles made of glass which we could take back to the shop and get a penny deposit on the bottle. We walked to the shops since they were just around the corner. No supermarkets. On Saturday mornings we used to go to the local open market transported by the bus. There were not many cars but a widespread use of bicycles. This is how the mass of people lived.
In the present age car ownership and driving is becoming increasingly obsolescent but the demand for cars is still absolute. The traffic in central London and even provincial cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Birmingham and most cities is now slower than it was during the late 19th century.
Progress is in some respects over-rated as we get fatter, more stupid, and easy to manipulate and in some instances frankly neurotic.
Yes, I know all about the advances in medicine, science, and so forth, but I also know about the very real possibility of obliteration through nuclear war and human stupidity which is going off the scale. Yes, it is a crazy world with crazy people and an increase in GDP isn’t going to make it any better, in fact it will probably make it worse.
For a zoned-out stupified populace ‘democracy and progress ‘ will be nothing more than the opportunity be the right to shop and choose between Wendy’s and Berger King or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news and there are many examples of this destructive trend. Progress is a Janus-faced trade off and with all trade-offs there were costs.
”Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; with money a long way first. The individual asserts itself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love. Look at Michaelis (a character in Lawrence’s novel) His live and activity were just insanity. His love was almost insanity. ” (D.H. Lawrence)
Have a nice day all!
Joan of Arc was probably similar – a messenger from God to some, a pain in the ass or even a witch to others.
I don’t know where you are getting your information from but either they are deliberately misleading you or they are incompetent frauds. 2.7 billion years ago the sun’s output was much smaller than it is today. The sun is a main sequence star and like all main sequence stars it gradually gets hotter over the course of it life. (Anticipating a pathetic attempt to confuse the subject I am NOT talking about short-term fluctuations and mere hundreds of years is short-term on this scale)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
To save people time, under the section entitled ‘main sequence’ you will find..
Perhaps you might like to compare that to the 0.1% fluctuations that climate ‘sceptics’ are claiming as the main cause of climate change. Anyhow that is why the much higher CO2 levels in the distant past did not lead to disastrously high temperatures.
More bullshit. The so called ‘medieval warming period’ was not a global phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
As for the ‘little ice age’ here is a proper scientific study of it…..
https://www.swsc-journal.org/articles/swsc/full_html/2017/01/swsc170014/swsc170014.html
And here is the abstract for to make life easier for anyone who can be bothered.
One of the main tactics of the greenhouse denialists is to tell only part of the truth, only persons with a good general knowledge of science are likely to spot the deception. Going to a website that is telling you what you want to hear and which sounds suitably ‘sciency’ is NOT research. If you do not have a good basic grounding in the natural sciences you are very likely to be misled.
Little Greta not worth the effort.
Pull the curtain; toss all the OZs.
Cook lives in the land of the sick,
demented, violently insane.
Remarkable? She looks, breathes, speaks and moves like any possessed Puritan Witch-Burning Calvin, Torquemada or YouKnowWhoWeCannotName. She is the one to remind us of the demons shrieking and cursing. “Innocence”… yes, in its old meaning of mental slowness and crass ignorance. “Decency”? Come again? The decency of ignorant, bullying, goosestep crowds?
Anyway, I suppose that people who can casually speak of “lost their souls” and “virtue” belong to that crowd anyway.
You consider the scientists frauds or incompetents who interpreted the micrometeorite evidence because you “know” the sun’s output 2.7 billion years ago was 30 percent less than it is today. You only surmise it, based on a cosmological theory which presumes the sun will do the red giant, white dwarf, etc., dance. Hell, we can’t even know the earth’s distance from the sun 2.7 billion years ago, the tilt of its axis, or it’s period of diurnal rotation. Refer to chaos theory and electric universe and electric sun models.
You misinterpreted my statement that no one has determined global conditions related to past climate changes and cry “more bullshit.” Global conditions back then are simply indeterminable since we don’t have and cannot acquire precise and thorough data on the matter. The “proper scientific study” you mention on the little ice age uses simulation, northern hemisphere surface air temperature reconstructions, paleoclimate reconstructions, and climate model simulations to cast doubt on the notion, which I never advanced, that reduced solar irradiation alone can explain it. It’s an interesting effort, but still guesswork burdened by unknowables.
You then veer off about “tactics of greenhouse denialists…websites telling you what you want to hear….that sound sciency.” Sheesh.
Humans make enormous changes and inputs to earth’s natural systems, eliminating forests and wetlands, damming and diverting rivers, irrigating deserts, paving landscapes, etc.. We spew pollutants to air, land, and sea and create dead zones off our coasts. I merely object to CO2 mania based on pathetic modelling, fraud (think Michael Mann), and politics, and then making huge mistakes as a result, ignoring all else. Earth is not a toaster oven set to broil.
Dr. Duane Thresher is a computer modelling expert, atmospheric scientist, and environmental researcher who wrote some very interesting articles awhile back on realclimatologists (.org?–don’t know if it’s still around), in which he explains the many difficulties of computer modelling. He was a onetime student at NASA-GISS and describes how students were told that if they used the institute’s climate models to predict future climates they would be kicked out of the program, since the models were useful for only narrow research aims. He called James (nm?) Hansen, an instructor there, whom he considered a friend and who went on to be NASA’S head climate fearmonger, a fraud, and explained why. Michael Mann sued Dr. Tim Ball for libel, refused to turn over the temperature data the B.C., Canada Supreme Court required, and lost his shorts. The tactic of suing those with whom one disagrees can be hazardous. Mann is suing some website or media outlet, the name of which escapes me, and that case has bounced around the courts for a few years. Perhaps he’ll get spanked again.
Give the man a break. At least he is trying to argue with some sort of evidence. Other climate sceptics in this site just pull opinions out of their assess and expect to be treated with respect.
“Preface. Even a simple object like a pencil requires dozens of actions to make and dozens of objects that took energy to make. This is why it is unlikely wind, solar, or any other contraption that make electricity, have a positive return of energy, or energy returned on energy invested. If you look at all of the energy of the steps to create a wind turbine or solar panel, they don’t produce as much energy as it took to make them, and certainly not enough extra energy to replace themselves. Besides, electricity is only about 15% of overall energy use, with fossils providing the rest transportation, manufacturing, heating, and the half a million products made from fossils as feedstock as well as energy source.”
http://energyskeptic.com/2020/invisible-oil-and-energy-payback-time/
Remarkable? She looks, breathes, speaks and moves like any possessed Puritan Witch-Burning Calvin, Torquemada or YouKnowWhoWeCannotName.
How many of your neighbors would be wiling to give up their lifestyles and forego all their “junk”? How have non-industrial nations fared with feeding and caring for their populations over the course of human history, up to our present times? No, it can’t be done unless you’re willing to empower a powerful government that severely restricts human freedoms and comforts. Only an iron-fisted dictatorship could enforce rules restricting number of children and passing your “overspill” onto other countries isn’t acceptable to most, unless forced to accept them at gunpoint. Humans are, mostly, irresponsible and that can’t be changed, unless you’re willing to make slaves out of everyone. Advances in technology are possible, but jumping the gun based on fake hockey sticks and money-grubbing ex American vice presidents isn’t the “responsible” way.
The farther I got from the college bubble the less impressive did Fromm become.
Besides, the author — and Fromm– view the post-war years through sentimental eyes: the most defining feature of the ‘victors’ was their viciousness: if insanity was to be found anywhere it was in the Allies who destroyed vast swathes of history and civilization and called it Liberation.
What piffle.
Any piece on Greta needs to recognize she is a third generation acting, directing, and opera performance filthy rich spoiled brat.
Shame on the author for pretending her conscience-free parents, her school, the media, and government had nothing to do with coaching her, allowing her to break truancy laws for which other parents are punished, in order to push the global warming (now climate change) hoax the richest people on the planet are pushing.
How disgraceful to take a millionaire carbon-composite yacht to a global conference, requiring six people fly home (the crew of the boat) as some demonstration of frugality in “emissions”. Plant food.
They cannot even say “carbon dioxide”. They first called it “carbon” as if H2O was “hydrogen” but now to “emissions” so that they don’t even have to name the dastardly poisons.
This is the most fake, the most highly engineered hypocritical little bitch in history.
The author appears to be just as insane as Thunberg. Climate Change hysteria seems like a good example of induced collective insanity.
Forget whether these numbers are right or the forecast for global warming apocalypse is true. The solution to this problem if there is one is molten salt cooled nuclear reactors using the thorium cycle. We have enough thorium to produce all the world’s energy consumption of today for the next 5000 years. Thorium was considered as a potential source for nuclear bombs back in the 40’s and was rejected for that purpose. It is much easier to use uranium. But thorium is ideal for nuclear power and when you couple it with molten salt cooling you have an extraordinarily safe means of making nuclear power. We actually did this at Oak Ridge in the 60’s. Ran a plant on molten salt and used thorium briefly for proof of concept. The plant ran for five years.
Every disaster we have ever had with nuclear power was due to water as a coolant. Water must be pressurized as much as 175 atmospheres to keep it liquid so it can be an effective coolant. But using salts instead of water solves that problem as they can stay liquid up to 1,000C or more with no pressurization.
And nuclear power is a million times as energy dense as fossil fuels. We can explore the solar system with this form of nuclear power, perhaps even go to other stars. It is the energy of the future. The energy we were supposed to have but never got, simply because the thorium cycle was not as easy to make nuclear weapons with as uranium and the uranium cycle.
This kind of power can easily make fossil fuel equivalents out of CO2, if we desire. It would be far cheaper and easier than drilling for the stuff. The oil industry has always hated the nuclear industry for fear it would put the oil industry out of business. But in fact, nuclear is probably a better source for an oil product than fossil fuels.
** the long-ignored science of climate change **
Which brand of science did not exist until a few years ago when global warming was shown to be a scam.
Give it up, Mr. Cook. There’s no “climate emergency.”
PS – Please define “climate” and also identify the top three phenomena that indicate, however remotely or tenuously, that there is now a climate “emergency.” Make it ten if you prefer.
Remember that more than 80% of the energy/fuel used in internal combustion engines is given off thru waste heat and does no work ! Look at the radiators on large trucks ,when have you ever seen a radiator on a Tesla-Answer never !
Sorry if it sounded so, but I wasn’t indicating that every single word Fromm wrote was true. I came across Fromm from another author’s mention.
Augusto Del Noce wrote:
(Bold and italic mine.)
Remember that more than 80% of the energy/fuel used in internal combustion engines is given off thru waste heat and does no work
How much of the energy / fuel used to generate electricity for Teslas is given off as waste heat and thus does no work? What about the line losses in the power lines from the power plant to the Tesla charging station?
The Tesla is powered by coal and natural gas. With a little nuke on the side. But still a lot of coal.
Coal powered car.
You try to turn us into hostages of a teenage girl when it comes to questions of science, Jonathan Cook. Erich Fromm was all in for objectivity and science and proofs and methods and stuff – and all against emotionalizing such questions instead of approaching them with methodological rigor.
Greta Thunberg can’t do that, because she does not know anything about science at all. She lacks the simplest skills. She is a science pretender and therefore her criticism should be taken with lots of grains of salt.
He who thinks, that all fruits are ripe at the same time doesn’t know about strawberries. (…) He who doesn’t know much is not worth much.
Paracelsus (= Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim – as quoted by – – – – Erich Fomm, in – The Art of Loving).
It will stabilise. Demographic collapse is much more likely than overpopulation.
Because when we made that stuff in our own countries it was much more expensive. It makes more sense to have the stuff made where it can be made cheaply and efficiently.
Making stuff locally requires tariffs (so consumers have to pay a lot more) or subsidies (so taxpayers have to pay a lot more). And propping up inefficient uncompetitive industries makes no sense.
The only way to make stuff cheaper locally is by making manufacturing heavily automated (which means fewer jobs), and even then it can still be made cheaper in other countries.
Tariffs and subsidies will just be putting money into the pockets of inefficient manufacturers who will simply keep the money and continue to be inefficient and uncompetitive.
I remember Australia pre-globalisation. We made lots of stuff locally. It was ludicrously overpriced and the range of consumer goods available was dismal.
The West cannot return to the 1950s, as much as many people on the Right fantasise about that happening. The dissident Right in particular seems to be permanently stuck in a 1950s dream world.
Environmentalism has always had a strong Puritan streak. Industrialisation is a sin and we must be punished for it. We should all go back to being subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers and Live In Harmony With Nature. Living in mud huts is awesome. It’s so – natural. And environmentalism has always been a moral crusade.
I share your contempt for Puritans and crusaders.
I don’t see it that way.
Although anti-litter campaigns in the U.S. go back to at least the 1930s, the modern environmental movement was launched primarily by the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962. Although she grew up in and disliked grimy, industrial Pittsburgh, Carson’s landmark book really had very little to do with industrialization, per se, and actually was focused on chemical pesticides and herbicides, especially DDT, and the harm these chemicals were doing to wildlife, and also to humans.
In six months, Silent Spring sold 500,000 copies, and in 1963, CBS aired a documentary on it..
https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/pests/silent-spring-the-environmental-movement/
The bandwagon has turned into a reliable feeding trough for hack academics, and especially for special interests promoting so-called “renewable” and “clean” energy, like wind turbines and solar arrays, which require government subsidies to stay afloat. The modern environmental movement has been hijacked by climate alarmists, carbon demonizers, and other nitwits who would indeed like to “tear it down,” so President-elect Biden can steamroll us with his Green New Deal, and “Build Back Better.”
It is only ignoramuses, alarmists, and special interests who think man is responsible for climate change, or that the trace gas CO₂ is the control knob on Earth’s climate.
In any event, it is doubtful Pres. Ronald Reagan had any environmental concerns in mind when he began facilitating the transfer of U.S. industry to China during the 1980s with the downsizing, outsourcing, and off-shoring that became prevalent during his presidency, even as our balance of payments deficits with China became apparent during that decade, the national debt tripled, and the U.S. became a debtor nation.
I agree with all of that.
But environmentalism has always tapped into a quasi-religious belief that there’s something inherently wicked about the modern industrialised world. THat’s the thinking that motivates the environmentalist foot soldiers.
I don’t know who “Jonathan Cook” is, nor what his credentials are, but anyone who thinks that capitalism can be best described as “the right of western nations to invade and plunder” or that “extreme weather events” (which are not increasing in either frequency or severity), is a first-class dunce.
Rejected heat is the main feature of both combustive and fissile electrical power generation with the most thermally efficient plant being NG-fired combined-cycle technology, gets up to ~60%.
Thermodynamically the most efficient form of electrical power generation is hydroelectric.
Solar and wind turbine which are the perennial favorites of both the Berkeley/Birkenstock generation as well as the imbecilic undereducated/over-indoctrinated Prog Green New Dealers, are extremely inefficient compared to hydro, and still significantly inefficient compared to fossil fuels.
Wind is 2-3x the efficiency of solar, but still doesn’t crack 25%; diesel, coal, and NG are all many times as efficient as solar.
We are never going to “transition” to a “renewable energies” economy, not at these population levels, anyway. Maybe at global pop = 1% of today’s level, it could be feasible. Certainly not at the levels of any population in the modern (1500AD onwards) era though.
Good points. Scientists recently were “surprised” to learn that there are multiple states of water (the liquid phase). Skeptics of the theory , which is not new at all, used to make hyperbolic claims such as “the hydrogen bond angle cannot be changed”, which sounds great in theory, but unfortunately for the people making these claims, they had not done any of the work to actually prove this statement.
And in fact, they made these claims, with zero evidence other than the only water they had ever observed had a very narrow range of bond angles. The fact that it wasn’t always the same should have been the first clue they were wrong. If it can’t be changed, it would only ever measure one value. They also ignored that someone had actually patented a device to modify these angles. Because SCIENCE!
The mere fact you can observe different angles in different specimens or across different measurements is proof that a statement that it can’t be changed is false.
So I don’t wish to say the EmDrive does or does not work. But to say it does NOT work or CANNOT work requires proof. Not just assertions.
Bwahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhahaha
I disagree with everything the author writes, so I must be insane.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah
There’s a handy word for that; “pedophrasty”.
One thing you can absolutely guarantee, whether it’s some girl blubbering about babies being tipped out of incubators (Kuwait), drowned kids on Greek beaches, allegedly teargassed tots at Balkan barbed wire, “legit. schoolkids” speechifying about gun-confiscation after any old US massacre, or wailing about the climate/environment/da plan-e-e-e-e-t-t! from any number of young girly muppets (anybody remember Severn Suzuki? Nope me neither), is that it’s a globalist-megacorp-UN-“socialist”-whatever-run psyop. Every single time.
A good rabbithole for a lazy weekend is to follow up the backgrounds of the handlers, who can be seen almost permanently in the young saints’ close company when performing. Greta in particular needs a fair bit of prompting and “support”, due to her evident difficulties.
On the continent it’s Luisa Neubauer, in England it was one of Frank Furedi’s old cast-offs, or someone very like that. I could dig it out eventually I suppose.
Which does go part of the way to explaining the remarkable disinclination of this unadvisedly-opinionated and narcissistic young idiot to take on the likes of India, China, Russia and so on, as noted in comments above.
Why anyone entertains the hectoring of an almost completely uneducated, likely innumerate “child” (18 this coming New Year) who once claimed to be able to “see” CO2 emissions (I suppose it’s preferable to having visions, or sniffing out witches) is entirely down to our own desire to be fooled, and the almost complete control of the narrative by the backers of those assiduous “handlers”.
I’m English. Zealots annoy the f. out of us, always have done. We have our methods.
We sent the last really, really exasperating ones off West somewhere, after even the lovely Dutch tired of their relentless fuckery and kicked them back to us.
[Dear Injuns, we’re very very sorry. We didn’t know. They were just supposed to fall off the edge.
Instead their descendants are sitting around having a humongous triumphant beano, right now].
As for young miz Jeanne d’ …
.. Zippo, lad, quick as ye please.
I am reminded of the classic Seinfeld episode in which Elaine is viewed as crazy because she does not like the movie “The English Patient.” She is widely denounced, loses her boyfriend, and is intimidated by her boss. She then becomes a “shy” critic, telling her boss that she has not seen it. As you might recall, this film controversially (I am being polite) won best picture, with most objective people feeling that Fargo was the far better film. Seinfeld was insightful and prescient.
If having no concept of reality and propaganda makes you insane this writer proved his insanity.
I am tired of so called and often self proclaimed dissenters telling me to trust the governments and the ngo`s of the UN.
Make up your mind, you guys can not be dissenters when you spew out WEF/UN/governmental bulletpoints and buzzwords.
And NO, there is no chance i follow your lead and kneel for the fascist billionaire class.
You brave keyboard warriors that are trying to tell me i should believe certain parts of their propaganda but oppose other parts of the same propaganda, you guys are larpers or fed posting.
““In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.””
https://archive.org/details/TheFirstGlobalRevolution/page/n1/mode/2up
So i say to all covidians and “believers” in the climate hoax, open your eyes or get a new job🤷♂️
(i believe sane thinking people have thrown the climate hoax in the dustbin, only those which salary depends on “believing” still blather on about CO2 and “more severe storms” or any other of the 6 gorillion gretaeque buzzwords. Us normies notice the actions of people rather then listening to their words😉)
For the record, I too was petrified by tedium / confused / exasperated, and irritated to the point of near-violence against inanimate objects by the fundamental failures of the filmic abortion which was The English Patient. It’s ineffable psuedo-English “atmosphere” (in reality just another pathetic ignorant Jewish sketch of the “old Raj” which never existed) – was by turns off-putting, boring and then almost suffocating, and the thousand small lazy errors of historical detail in language, period attitudes and everything else were the last straw – not to mention the entire absurd wider plotline of the godawful source novel itself. A disaster every bit as worthy of a Razzie Award as any film ever was.
Still, same old problem over there in the Valley. Pig-ignorant and malicious Jew Hollywood got to keep trotting out the same old stinking anti-White, anti-Western pseudo-historical garbage for the next buck – or few million of them, from the know-nothing under-30’s cretins at the box office.
And Yes, on every level Fargo was indeed an almost infinitely finer film.
The reasons that “the emdrive” cannot work are obvious to anyone with any understanding of physics.
1. It violates conservation of momentum. This is a no-no. Momentum is conserved, always and everywhere. Anybody who doesn’t understand this is not competent to discuss the Shawyer fraud.
2. The ’emdrive” consists of a metal frustum of a hollow cone closed at each end with a flat plate.
Microwave RF is injected into the cavity and it is claimed that thrust is produced because the total pressure on the large plate is greater than that on the small. This is absurd because it totally ignores the sides.
The whole idea isn’t just bad it’s mad. So obviously impossible that it must be fraud not error.
Tesla losses at car would probably be less than 10% and line losses would also be minimal,probably less then energy losses in refining/delivering fuel and if renewable solar supplies energy even less !
Tesla losses at car would probably be less than 10% and line losses would also be minimal,probably less then energy losses in refining/delivering fuel
Suggest you show your work.
if renewable solar supplies energy even less !
Solar energy devices are not just slices of extremely pure silicon, they include rare earths and other minerals that are not free. Night time storage is also not free.
2nd law of thermodynamics is not yet repealed.
Yes, the whole Greta fraud is an absolute disgrace. She is a brain-damaged child who should have been protected not pushed to further the climate fraud. Not meaning to criticise here, but you are a bit out of date with “climate change”. This has now been changed to ‘climate emergency’. In New Zealand, we have a moronic child Prime Minister who has so absolutely loved the covid fraud, sorry emergency, that she now wants to declare a “climate emergency”. New Zealand is done for.
I’m well aware of the conservation postulates.
However, I fail to see the relevance of your comment. Merely stating it should be obvious that it cannot work, is not an argument. Do you have any evidence or proof that it does not work? That would be more compelling.
Experiments demonstrated thrust was produced when the drive was operating, so perhaps the case is that a simplified characterization of the device and its action is missing some details. Perhaps what appears to be a violation of conservation laws is in fact due to erroneous assumptions about the system itself, and/or the nature of the drive action.