Why are we constantly being hammered with climate alarmism, Covid alarmism and racial alarmism?
The journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken explained it decades ago: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Or paraphrasing President Obama’s chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste, even if you have to invent one.” Of course, the solutions proposed are always more massive government intervention and scrapping our capitalist economic system.
What do Climate Activists Want?
It certainly is not about saving the environment. It is about forcing us to accept a socialist system. Here are a few examples of what key climate alarmists have said.
Maurice Strong, who spearheaded the United Nations 1992 Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where the unveiling of Agenda 21 kicked off the original climate crisis campaign linking dire environmental dangers to Western prosperity has said: “In order to save the planet, isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring about an economic collapse?”
Christine Stewart, Canada’s former minister of the environment said: “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. … Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Tim Wirth, former U.S. undersecretary of state for global affairs under Bill Clinton and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol, said: “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
“Climate justice” campaigner for Friends of the Earth, Emma Brindal, said bluntly, “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.” Not protecting earth from manmade carbon-dioxide emissions or natural and manmade climate change, but redistributing wealth and resources, presumably according to formulas self-appointed ruling elites like herself decide are “socially just.”
Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Reportsummed up the situation quite clearly. He advised: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
Or as U.N. climate chief (executive secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres candidly remarked, the true aim of the recent Paris climate conference (2014) was “to change the [capitalist] economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
Chief of Staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Saikat Chakrabarti said in 2019: “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all … Do you guys think this is a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Prominent climate activist and meteorologist Eric Holthaus admitted in 2020 that climate change activism is not about climate science, but really about “justice.”
President Biden is trying to sell the UN plan for worldwide socialist government “Build Back Better”. This is the same old UN Agenda 21 plan being marketed with a new name.
Comprehensive coverage of climate facts is found in the book, Climate Change Reconsidered, by the Heartland Institute. All the alarmist deceptions and lies are exposed
What have the proponents of bigger government done in response to the Covid “crisis”?
The Democrat governors and Democrat mayors have used the Covid problem as an excuse to take more control over the people they govern while making special allowances for their major donors. Democrats in the US Congress got the federal government to provide massively more welfare that encourages people to not work, and funds to pay for the debts they incurred paying for ill-advised programs. The sending of senior citizen Covid cases back to the nursing homes by the New York governor looks as if he was channeling Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution to get rid of the elderly and more conservative population.
We also see that teachers unions are demanding that socialist policies be implemented before the teachers will go back to work. They ignore the fact that children have minimal risk of serious problems or death due to the virus as well as that most teachers and parents are in an age group that is not likely to be seriously affected.
What are the Black Lives Matter and other organizations promoting?
The Black Lives Matter organization and their supporters are promoting Marxism. Since the original Marxist class warfare model (workers vs. capitalists) did not sell in the USA, they are using a different class warfare model – blacks vs. whites. This new brand of Marxism is also being presented with the title “Critical Race Theory” in order to obscure its Communistic – Marxist intent. How can causing division and stirring up hatred ever lead to a positive outcome?
If the BLM organization and others really cared about poor black people, they would work to eliminate the black on black violence and inner city crime that disproportionately victimizes black Americans and deprives them of safety in every aspect of their lives. If the BLM organization and others really cared about poor black people they would promote better education options in black communities and stable, strong families. As the late Walter Williams wrote, “marriage, stable families, education and hard work…are immeasurably more important” to black success than divisive identity politics or politicians’ skin color.
In Conclusion
If you agree that these alarmists and their fellow travelers in the media are pushing our country in the wrong direction, then you must become active in spreading the truth and countering their false narratives. You must provide verbal and written testimony to our County Commissioners, City Council members, school boards, the print media and wherever else you see misinformation being presented. You must run for public office or actively work to get kindred souls elected to government positions.
In a June 30, 2020 article in The American Thinker Charles Battig points out that Planet of the Humans, the recent film produced by Michael Moore, shows how the reality of needing to provide 24/7 reliable electricity to consumers requires that fossil fuels remain the world’s primary energy sources. This is because of the failure of wind or solar to provide power if there is no wind or insufficient sun. Renewables cannot displace reliable fossil-fuel power plants. And consumers’ energy bills do not go down, but go up, when renewables are imposed.
With his recent book, False Alarm, Bjorn Lomborg continues to straddle the fence on global warming, aka “climate change.” As the original “skeptical environmentalist,” Bjorn has argued that there are more productive ways to aid humanity than spending billions trying to influence planetary climate change. He has argued for improving sanitation, clean water supplies, basic nutrition, and providing paths out of poverty for the millions living in underdeveloped countries. In this book, he continues to press for a concerted effort to alleviate these ills, rather than accepting the decades of panic-driven calls for “fixing the climate.”
Keeping much of the world in poverty while billions are thrown at a climate change crusade is even more unjustified because the scientific data does not support alarms of an existential climate emergency.
Climate Change CO2 Theory Failures
When all the dozens of temperature prediction models driven by CO2 levels are run with real data starting in 1979, they grossly over estimate the global temperatures.
This was presented to the Environment And Public Works Committee of the United States Senate in 2013 by Roy W. Spencer, PhD of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Buried 774 pages into the UN IPCC’s Third Assessment Report summary, is this disclaimer regarding the existence of scientific certainty. It stated: “In research and modeling of the climate, we should be aware that we are dealing with a chaotic, nonlinear coupled system, and that long-term predictions of future climate states is not possible.”
It should also be noted that it is these grossly exaggerating temperature prediction models are the same temperature models that drive the sea level increase models.
Looking at real world data we see that glacier melting and ocean lever rise started long before our heavy use of fossil fuels started.
Looking at the “Greenhouse Layer” in the upper atmosphere we see that the models fail miserably when compared with real data from UK Hadley Center atmospheric balloon data. Similar results are found in data from satellites.
Deceptive Use of Data
Claiming we are seeing more drought conditions by only looking at data after 1940 totally ignores the extreme drought conditions of the 1930’s. Here is all the data from NOAA.
Then there is the claim that global warming is causing more fires. The data runs counter to that claim, as shown by data collected by the National Interagency Fire Center. And using “acres burned” as a stand-in for fires is highly deceptive. Most forest management experts indicate that the increase in acreage burned is due to mismanagement.
Also, it should be pointed out that during the last 600 million years, there where times where global CO2 levels were as much as 10 to 20 times higher than now and times when global average temperatures were as much as 20F higher but nothing dastardly happened.
A joint NASA and MIT research effort reported in 2019 as having identified and quantified a feedback effect in tropical cloud formations that dumps excess heat into outer space.
NOAA Hurricane and Tornado data shows no increase in severe weather events and WHO data shows a phenomenal decrease in world-wide per capita deaths due to extreme events.
Topping all this off, the UN IPCC 2012 Risk Assessment Report found no metrics that indicate a problem associated with the slight warming we have experienced since the 1970s.
What is Going on Here?
As my daughter once asked: “Why are the politicians lying to us?” The answer was provided by the journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken decades ago when he wrote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Or expanding on what President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste, even if you have to invent one.
The media is reporting “More virus cases”, “Cases surge”, and raising other terrifying alarms. Or as Chicken Little would say: “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” But emphasizing just the number of “cases” is very deceptive.
There are key questions that should be asked and reported: “Are our hospitals reaching their capacity limits?” and, “Is the death rate due to the corona virus increasing?” For the USA overall, and in Washington state, the answers are NO and NO!
Some states and counties in the USA are seeing an increase in death rates and hospitals being stressed. However, even in states such as AZ, FL and TX where the death rate has increased, the deaths per capita are 5 to 14 times lower than New York State and below the USA overall deaths per capita.
Washington State virus deaths per capita is about 1/2 the USA overall value.
All this data indicates that the increase in cases reported recently is most likely due to more testing rather than the epidemic getting worse. We are over the hump.
From the data, we now know that children are not likely at all to be seriously affected by this virus and their parents are mostly in an age group that is minimally affected by this virus.
Of course, specialists in viruses call for measures to control the spread of this virus, but we also need to listen to other specialists who point out the bad effects of the shutdowns. The depression and desperation caused by the shutdowns and the media alarmism is causing more suicides, drug overdoses, spousal abuse, child abuse and deferred medical attention.
Since WA is over the hump, there is no reason to continue the severe restrictions on school kids, workers and our general population.
Senior citizens and those with health problems should continue to be very careful, as these are the people shown by the data to be most at risk. WA state and our county should concentrate on protecting these people.
Our state and county should move on to Phase 3 and 4 quickly.
This article by Gene Farr was originally a letter submitted to, but not published by the Port Townsend and Jefferson County Leader. At our request, Mr. Farr expanded upon his original submission.
[For an examination of how Washington’s hospital capacity has never been close to being overwhelmed, please see our article on this point.]
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