"My gut tells me more sometimes than anyone else's brain can ever tell me"
"One of the problems of many people like myself is we have very high levels of intelligence but we're not necessarily such believers".
Dotard Donnie's assorted brain farts in the past week.
By now, virtually everyone not living under a rock is aware of the recently released congressionally- mandated National Climate Assessment. The report- compiled by 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies- ought to make every sentient being on the planet sit up and take notice. This is given that it forecasts "record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South," as well as the disruption of "American exports and supply chains,". Also, the decline of "agricultural yields" (possibly "to 1980s levels by mid-century"), and a "fire season [that] could spread to the Southeast."
All told the losses could come to "hundreds of billions of dollars" - which is definitely lowballed given we are on track to break all existing climate warming records. Nevertheless, one finds e.g. long time WSJ resident climate change denier, Holman Jenkins Jr., all in for his latest BS contribution: 'Climate Change Is Affordable', p. A15 yesterday). Jenkins insists the latest assessment "adopts the RCP 8.5 high emission scenario" despite which - get this: "we still arrive at a manageable $510 billion in estimated climate-related costs by 2090".
Do not believe that jabberwocky for one microsecond. As I noted in my post of October 10th, after the original IPCC report came out:
"The cost of doing nothing until 2040 and allowing the now forecast 4C rise (more likely 6C) by 2100 will be well over $100 trillion in worldwide costs - from the mega-disasters including massive flooding, fires, to loss of jobs, homes, infrastructure - including power stations."
I still stand by that, and it doesn't matter if little Holman J. Jr. still believes his own codswallop that:
"The new U.S. report, as well as a United Nations report issued in October...aim at frightening the public - exactly the approach that so manifestly has failed to move the needle for 35 years.
Maybe it's because voters are skeptical of doom-mongering. Maybe they have grown fatalistic about climate change. Or maybe, reflecting the folly of climate campaigners, they've gotten a message that acting on greenhouse gases requires giving up prosperity."
Which may well be valid to an extent (at least for Right wing troublemakers), especially given the riots and mayhem that's erupted in France after a relatively small fuel tax was imposed. In that episode, French police had to fire tear gas and water cannons to "disperse violent demonstrators" (Denver Post, Nov. 25, p. 2A). They also had to impose road blockades "as thousands gathered in the capital to vent anger against rising fuel taxes."
One demonstrator quoted actually vowed (ibid.):
"It's going to trigger a civil war and we're going to be ready"
A civil war? Really? Early indications are that the violent outbursts were instigated by the French far right (Marine LePen's cadre), which would put them right into Holman Jenkins' screed 'wheelhouse' or ideology. Don't give up a fucking thing, keep the planet burning on schedule, and let your kids and grandkids figure it all out or fry.
But the larger reason for inertia and even inattention cited by Holman is simply that too many of the "voters" Jenkins invokes are inundated with too much 24/7 news from a 24/7 media. They are no longer able to sustain the information load and hence their brains can't process what's coming at them - especially after the political tumult of the past two years. Oh, and that in the case of making this planet less inhabitable in the near future material sacrifices will have to be made. Unless they actually want the planet to be unlivable for their kids and grandkids.
As I wrote in that same Oct. 10 post, I have ten great nieces and nephews who will reach a youngish middle age by 2040. I am pondering now what kind of world awaits them. Will they, indeed, be able to find shelter and prosper in the world? I don't know, but I refuse to believe the majority of our people have become so innately self-absorbed and focused on their own immediate "prosperity" they refuse to look down the road at the welfare of their own offspring and their offspring.
Jenkins insists that: "the biggest holdup to direct action on climate is showing that preventing these changes would be cheaper than enduring them."
Seriously, mate? You are prepared to "endure" temperatures reaching 110- 115F in 40-day heat waves, even as power grids crash and a/c in millions of homes ceases to function? Think Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria when thousands died because their meds couldn't be kept cool in the smoldering temperatures, and food spoiled...oh yeah, and fresh potable water ceased to be available. Many Puerto Ricans had to dredge water from chemically -fouled pools and small ponds. Think that would be sport to endure? Think again!
Speaking of a/c (which we know is one of the major contributors to global warming), according to a WSJ Review piece ('Can India Afford to Cool Down?', Nov. 24-25, p.C3) - it is expected that there'll be a global addition of: "from 2.5 billion to 3.7 billion air conditioning room units by 2050". Already, India "is the fastest growing market for air conditioners."
Indeed, "annual electricity consumption from air conditioning is expected to multiply 30 times, from just eight terawatt hours in 2010 to 238 terawatt hours by 2030".
Which begs the question of what all those denizens will do when climate change - approaching the runaway threshold - renders all those a/c units the equivalent of useless junk. Fortunately, I will be long gone before then.
If people were rational beings, as opposed to pawns manipulated by the media pundits and BS'ers like Jenkins and his WSJ op-ed cohort, fear would not be necessary . Able -minded citizens could examine the climate news and data dispassionately e.g.
Climate report understates threat
And arrive at the same conclusion as climate scientists like Myles Allen. Prof. Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the IPCC report. was quoted in one NY Times piece after the release of the UN report:
"It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,”
This instead of paying attention to dummy Dotard Trump who most recently spewed reams of fucktard baloney on climate in one unhinged, inchoate statement after the release of the National Climate Assessment, e.g.
"One of the problems of many people like myself is we have very high levels of intelligence but we're not necessarily such believers You look at our air and our water and it's right now at a record clean. But when you look at China, Russia and many other places in the world...the air is incredibly dirty. And when you're talking about an atmosphere the oceans are very small and it blows over. I mean we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific. ….
Number two, if you go back and look at articles they talked about global freezing They talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it's going to die of heat exhaustion.."
Seriously, folks, that is our resident's "high intelligence" on display in all its glory, including the grammatical miscues. Those, by the way, pale in comparison to the sheer ignorance of what this imbecile is spouting. When I showed it to my psychology postdoc niece (Shayle), she wondered whether an 8 -year old wrote it. (A very dumb eight year old.) I had to tell her, no, it came from the Twitter account of our so-called president.
All Dotard's gut-spewing ignorance aside, the National Climate Assessment - despite its economic lowballing - represents a scientifically informed forecast of widespread environmental and economic devastation, and makes no bones about the source, i.e.:
"The evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen. The impacts are intensifying across the country and the climate-related threats to America's physical, social and economic well-being are rising."
One doesn't know how much more clearly the risks can be stated, and yet too many appear to have adopted the pose of the classic frog left in water that's increased in temperature 1 degree at a time - so it slowly boils.
Of course, the question many are asking is: why would this backward administration laden with science troglodytes and knuckle draggers agree to the Climate Assessment's unaltered release? (Although on Black Friday, when supposedly no one was paying attention. But alas for them, because it was a slow news day the headlines were captured big time.)
The answer for the cynically-timed release, reports the NY Times was because:
"White House officials made a calculation that Mr. Trump’s core base of supporters most likely would not care that its findings are so at odds with the president’s statements and policies."
The resident could tell them the sky is green, and they'd argue in defense of his atmospheric wisdom. (Or he could just tell these idiots that the "planet will die of heat exhaustion.")
Dotard's climate science retardation is buoyed by the likes of the clown Steven Milloy, who oversees the junk website junkscience.com and was a member of Mr. Trump's E.P.A. transition team. (Well, morons pick morons to do their dirty work for them, including spewing crap to other morons.) This twit actually declared:
"We don’t care. In our view, this is made-up hysteria anyway — part of the deep-state conspiracy to undermine Trump's spectacular agenda. We had to decide whether to stop the deep state from doing this in the first place, or trying to alter the document, and then creating a whole new narrative — it’s better to just have it come out and get it over with,"
Gee whiz, that's magnanimous of you, asshole! Would you have preferred to have waited for release until the entire country is in the midst of a contiguous wildfire, like California suffered? But this is the sort of dreck we have to deal with - and sadly- one still sees it surfacing in the high IQ societies like Mensa and Intertel, e.g.
Brane Space: Skewering The Spurious Global Warming Narrative Of ...
Why do so many 'brainiacs' subscribe to this balderdash? My guess is the Dunning-Kruger effect is operative. For reference and clarification, the Dunning-Kruger effect is defined by Wikipedia as “a cognitive bias whereby unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate.” Wikipedia adds that “This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.”
Or, as psychologist David Dunning (the discoverer) once explained to Errol Morris, writing in an essay series, “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is,” for the New York Times:
“If you’re
incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent … [T]he skills you need to
produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a
right answer is.”
Thus, bright though these Mensans and Ilians may well be, they lack the critical backgrounds in physics and basic climate science to claim any authority in validating their opinions. All we can do is make our cases against their twaddle and hope at some point their actual intellect kicks in and can differentiate between fact and fiction.
According to Bush I's E.P.A. administrator, William Reilly, what we're seeing with Milloy and Dotard (and even the high IQ deniers) is a new frontier of disavowal of science, of disdain for facts. According to Reilly:
"But many Americans — just how many is unknown — are becoming accustomed to it, which is the objective of every authoritarian state. It keeps pumping out the ignorance and lies until public muddlement morphs into the status quo; it persists in disdaining facts until facts become mere play things "
What we have to hope is that the percipient and truly intelligent citizens - who can decipher scientific facts from fabulist nonsense - remain in the majority. If not, we are all for the high jump - which would probably make the likes of Holman Jenkins and Steve Milloy ecstatic.
See also:
CNN's Anderson Cooper Cancels Segment With Climate Report Author to Give Rick Santorum More Air Time
