Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Monday, December 2, 2024
FOSSIL FUEL COSMETICS ARE COP-29 SWAG BAG HIT!
ENRON'S MAN IN BAKU
Bathing in Oil at a Climate Summit? It Leaves a Stain.
Anton Troianovsky reports from Baku for The New York Times
I bathed in oil during the U.N. climate summit.
It was crude oil from a half-mile underground, pumped into a bathtub at a hotel in Azerbaijan. It crept into every crevice of my submerged body and every fold of my skin. It smothered the hair on my limbs, making me look a little like an animal stuck in an oil spill.
Then came an attendant to scrape it all off.
Just a day earlier, I had been covering the United Nations’ annual climate conference, COP29, which is being held this month in Baku,… The chocolate-colored oil extracted there doesn’t burn. Instead, the locals and Azerbaijani scientists say, it heals. If you bathe in it.
But this oil, like all oil, is a finite resource.
“They tell us that we’ve got reserves for 60 years,” said Ayten Magerramova, the head doctor at a Naftalan resort called Garabag. “After that, I don’t know.”
Once you bathe in crude oil, it’s hard to get rid of it. For that reason, the Garabag’s towels, bathrobes and bedsheets are all brown.
“The resin itself is a bit toxic,” Dr. Magerramova said. “But for skin problems, the resin really helps.”
… Marco Polo, who traveled through present-day Azerbaijan, described its oil as a “salve for men and camels affected with itch or scab.” The Soviets said the unusual molecular makeup of some of the hydrocarbons in Naftalan’s oil made it suitable for treating arthritis, infertility, eczema and... in 2020 in an Azerbaijani science journal reported that the oil has been found to work as an antiseptic and to have a “peculiar hormone-like effect on the function of sex hormones.”
Aydin Mustafayev, 62, a Naftalan native, remembers people digging wells by hand when he was a child. They filled their own jars with the oil and brought it home to treat the wounds of turkeys, dogs and sheep...
Rita Dadasheva, 64, a schoolteacher, had previously sought out Naftalan oil treatments in Baku for her arthritis. But you could tell by the color, she said, that the oil was fresher closer to the source.
“The Naftalan here is the color of melted milk chocolate,” she said. “It’s just what you need.”
Friday, November 22, 2024
INTO THE UNCANNY VALLEY OF MEAT SUBSTITUTES
RODE THE YALE 360
Ahead of the holiday season, Yale Climate Connections sat down to talk about food, climate change, underspiced turkeys, the Uncanny Valley of meat substitutes, pro-mushroom sentiment & more.
Sam: Going into the holidays, we are thinking about food. Food is good. We like food. But … we live in a culture and society where moralizing food choices can be quite dangerous...
Let’s start with: When did you start thinking about food and its relationship to climate change and how did that make you feel? What did that mean for your life?
Sara: I switched over to being a vegetarian in college around the time when I was getting really concerned about environmental issues.
I was mostly vegetarian for decades but recently had to stop for medical reasons, and that has been a real shock… One thing that I really like is tacos with black beans and roasted sweet potatoes.
Sam: Black beans and sweet potatoes are an elite combination.
Sara: So tasty, you just gotta spice it.
Pearl: Everything needs to be seasoned...
When we were in Puerto Rico recently, we went to this vegan food truck, and they make the most amazing food. They have this fried mushroom sandwich that was amazing. And they had this chili with tofu and taro chips. And it was just unbelievable... Sometimes I find with the tofu chunks they still kind of have that artificial, kind of rubbery taste...
I was a vegetarian. I became vegetarian when I was 10, not for climate reasons. It was more watching a chicken get its head chopped off. It was already dead, but... getting a little bit grossed out about that...
Sam: I do buy the pre-marinated tofu from the grocery store for stir-fries and I think it’s pretty good.
Pearl: I don’t think I could be 100% vegan. I have too much of an affinity for cheese. And I know cheese is a really bad one.
I mean, I’m embarrassing to take to an Italian restaurant. You know when they come over to ask if you want Parmesan cheese? They have to stand there for a really, really long time as they grate the cheese over my plate.
Sara: I hear that the vegan cheeses are getting better.
Pearl: They have come a long way, for sure...
Sara: Can we talk about trophic levels, really nerd out?
Sam: Let’s do it.
Sara: OK, so every organism needs energy to live. And so if you’re eating just plants, you’re eating organisms that got their energy directly from the sun. That’s pretty efficient.
But if you’re eating a cow… By the time those calories get to your mouth, a lot of the energy that the cow got from the plants has already been used just to keep the cow alive and growing. So eating meat is a less efficient way to transfer the sun’s energy to your mouth, and it requires more land and other resources.
Pearl: We've done some radio stories about meatless Mondays or meals where you’re not eating meat. I think that's a nice, moderate way of thinking about it as a person of extremes. I don't think you have to be full-on militaristic about the way you eat.
Friday, November 15, 2024
TALIBAN CLIMATEERS ADAPT HEARTLAND BEST PRACTICES
KABUL (Ariana News):
A Post-Czarist Russian official has demanded Taliban representation at the UN COP-29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Ruslan Edelgeriyev, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change of the Russian Federation, said this as he met with Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in Kabul on Saturday, following the Afghan Ministry of Higher Education's Nangarhar University International Conference on Climate Change.
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
VINTAGE LATOUR
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
A Serious Man
by Steven Shapin
Three facts about Bruno Latour. He was from a wine-growing family; he was from Burgundy; and he was Catholic. These facts are related, and they are pertinent to understanding what his philosophical project was about. Bruno was born with silver in his mouth and that silver was a tastevin. I don’t believe that Bruno ever needed the money that came from an academic career... and I occasionally teased him about his poor career choice, for which my reward was several bottles of Corton when he came over to dinner at my house in San Diego.…
At the funeral service at the Chapelle Saint-Louis in the Salpêtrière, there it was.
Bruno left detailed instructions…for the production and display of a digitalized representation of Rogier van der Weyden’s mid-fifteenth-century Last Judgement polyptych altarpiece in the Hospices de Beaune, an art work that Bruno made much of in his discussions of salvation and of “the end of days.”
The service was… I believe, the first Mass—and plausibly the last—that contained readings from texts in Science and Technology Studies.
Sections of Bruno’s writings—from An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia,and the Irréductions appended to The Pasteurization of France—were read out by colleagues and friends...
most people in our part of the academic world knew of Bruno’s Catholicism… there were some who were embarrassed by it—including... I suppose, the great majority of the atheists and the religiously indifferent attending the funeral mass.
When, five years ago, the New York Times ran a sprawling panegyric introducing Bruno to the American public, the wine connection was mentioned, Catholicism and theological concerns not at all... his religion, like his philosophy, was idiosyncratic.
His conception of God was, it’s been said, “immanentist.” Schaffer once tagged him as a “hylozoist,” and “pantheist” might serve as well—God was everywhere, present in all things... in Bruno’s metaphysics the sorting of the categories of Nature and Us is ultimately in need of linguistic repair.
You’ve had the language for centuries, he once told me, give me a few years. Bruno’s religious focus was, as he often said, on eschatology and soteriology—the Last Days, apocalypse, salvation—the matters portrayed on the Beaune altarpiece.
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Saturday, October 19, 2024
NET ZERO: A VERY, VERY , BRIEF HISTORY
London’s sooty air held 280 parts per million of CO2 as Royal Institution physicist John Tyndall FRS set about measuring the climatic consequences of the coal-burning Age of Steam:
By 1896 Sweden’s Svante Arrhenius had fleshed out Tyndall’s work by quantifying what went up in smoke, and by the time Teddy Roosevelt progressed to the White House, Popular Mechanics had spread the results far and wide:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
In 1959, with 316 parts per million of CO2 in the air, the American Petroleum Institute celebrated the industry’s centenary at a Columbia University, where H-Bomb physicist Edward Teller made a startling prediction:
“Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth… It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York… and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
Some in the audience took him at his word. At 320ppm President Johnson commissioned this reporton what to do about CO2:
As ambient CO2 rose past the 10% mark in1985. and the world teetered on the brink of the Teller threshold, Carl Sagan took time off from touting his Nuclear Winter campaign to tell Congress what to do about the alarming rise:
“The idea that we should immediately stop burning fossil fuel has such severe economic consequences that no one, of course, will take it seriously. There are many other things we can do in response.”
In 1991, though model doubling sensitivity remained unsettled, Teller’s apocalyptic prediction met with success. The year CO2 reached 355 ppm saw Earth’s largest, coldest, and most Arctic warming sensitive nation disintegrated into a gibbering flock of Socialist Republics.
So devastating was the shock that just three COP meetings and two IPCC reports later, Sagan & Teller departed this world dry-shod, at 362 and 382 parts per million respectively.
Only after an underwater press conference in the Maldives did Global South’s foremost climate statesman, the Right Honorable Prime Minister of Australia reframe the meaning of our imperiled world breaking the 400 ppm barrier :
” Coal is now an essential part of our zero carbon future.”
Monday, October 14, 2024
CLIMATE: MANAGING CHANGE ONE PARAMETER AT A TIME
The future according to the Potsdam Institute's Johan Rockstrom makes better sense unedited than filtered through the histrionic Covering Climate Now playbook that colors The Guardian's prose:
Saturday, October 12, 2024
ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN AND THE WILL TO GOVERN.
In the days after his inauguration, President Biden signed his name to many, many, documents. Among them was Executive Order 14008
Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad
Which, without legislative authority, placed 40 percent of Federal climate, clean energy, and other benefits at the disposal of :
"disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution."
On April 1 2023, Biden signed an extension of environmental DEI into the future with Executive Order 14096
Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for Al
The precedent for Woke disaster relief and Green AI can be found in Obama's 2016 Executive Order 13707, launched by Presidential Science Advisor and past Harvard Center for the Environment Director John Holden to a hallelujah chorus of tofu-fed wannabe policy wonks at a West Wing Humanist Revival meeting worthy of a dystopic science fiction convention :
The Behavioral Science Insights Executive Order.
That guidance will help agencies identify promising opportunities to apply behavioral science insights to their programs and policies."
The "new guidance" of Executive Order 13707 applies to every departments of government, and requires the Department of Defense to report back to the newly institutionalized White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team at regular intervals, as to how the armed forces are being remodeled in accord with the executive guidance of that order, which, after all, was signed by their Commander In Chief.
Thus far no NAS Precautionary Principle advocates have stepped forward to tell us why it ought not to apply to the warning given by Yale Professor Roger Sherman of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence:
It is a fear George Washington echoed in his Farewell Address, when he warned the nation to:“If the Executive can model the army, he may set up an absolute government.”
avoid the necessity of those overgrown... establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty.
Friday, October 11, 2024
HICKS NIX CLIMATE HOAX, HAIL HURRICANE LASER ATTACK
YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE H.A.A.R.P |
US meteorologists face death threats as
hurricane conspiracies surge
"Meteorologists tracking the advance of Hurricane Milton have been targeted by a deluge of conspiracy theories that they were controlling the weather, abuse and even death threats… The extent of the misinformation... has stymied the ability to help hurricane-hit communities,
Katie Nickolaou, a Michigan-based meteorologist, … received messages claiming there are category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), that meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes (they aren’t) and even that scientists should be killed and radar equipment be demolished.
“I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane... a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can’t hope to control that. But it’s taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed.”
One post aimed at Nickolaou said:
“Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates.” She responded: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”... It’s very tiring.”
… several of Trump’s closest allies have baselessly asserted that the federal government is somehow controlling hurricanes.
“Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation,” claimed a video shared by Michael Flynn, a former national security advisor to Trump.
“Yes they can control the weather,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right congresswoman, wrote on X last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Chris Gloninger, a former TV meteorologist and climate scientist … said.
“I’m seeing my former colleagues getting threats, I’m getting messages that we are steering hurricanes into red states. It’s mindblowing, I’ve never seen anything like this in any disaster... What other profession are people targeted for simply doing their job? All we are trying to do is protect life and property during extreme weather.”
Thursday, October 10, 2024
HOW COULD SEA LEVEL RISE FASTER THAN TRUMP SAYS ?
SINCE TRUMP SAYS SEA LEVEL RISE ONLY SERVES TO INCREASE WATERFRONT PROPERTY VALUES, TUCKER CARLSON NATURALLY LAMBASTES FORMER PRESIDENT OBAMA AS A CLIMATE HYPOCRITE, FOR BUYING A HOUSE ON MARTHA'S VINEYARD,
Saturday, October 5, 2024
JUNK SCIENCE JUDO SQUASHED BY PUNK SCIENCE SUMO
Climatology basher Steve Milloy's K Street punch and judy show, Junk Science Judo has lost ground to energetic Danish climate policy discounter Jon Lomborg, who emphasizes global problems cheaper to fix than climate change.
WHAT COMES AFTER HURRICANES ZELENSKY AND ZYLVIA?
today's disastrous political climate has rendered naming hurricanes after politicians redundant
MORANO MORAINES
SINGER SIMOONS & SPENCER CYCLONES |
Greenlanders aghast at their icecap going down the drain can blame
MONCKTON MOULINS
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
BE KIND TO YOUR FRIENDS IN THE SWAMP, FOR A DUCK
MAY BE SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
Imprimus :
• 1.” Science is not done by consensus. “
So he and noted historian Tucker Carlson keep telling us. However, even Fox viewers who break their backs generally prefer the diagnosis of a team of neurosurgeons to a chiropractor or a K Street hack.
• 2.” There is no evidence that the Earth's climate -- whatever that is -- is warming or at an unprecedented rate.”
How can Steve declare the non-existence of something he cannot define?
And what on Earth enables him understand its physical attributes?
Only a far gone solipsist would deny the physical existence, form and function of the instruments scientists and engineers have devised to reproducibly measure “whatever that is ?”
Not far from K Street Steve will find the Naval Observatory, where the Oceanographer of the Navy can tell him how many wars have been won by reliance on the cogency and coherence of the atmospheric sciences, and also how many have been lost by those refusing to do so.
• 3. “The Earth has many climates that are regional in nature. There is no evidence that any of these regional climate (sic) has changed in any meaningful or discernible way. “
That first idea is Aristotle’s, which Humboldt was made scientifically compelling by relating temperature and elevation in biogeography, and kickstarting the monumental compilation of data that led to the discovery of the physical causes of climate change.
While Steve is free to shun science in the interest of credible denial, lobbyists paid to wax counterfactual earn negative credibility as well.
He might as well tell us to reject the so-called theory of “plate tectonics” because it is an affront to the power of the pre-Socratic Gods that invites the wrath of earth-shaking Poseidon.
• 4. I'm not aware of any "scientist" who has correctly predicted anything about climate. So who exactly should we consider to be a "scientist" when it comes to climate? “
Here Steve indulges in a fallacy so infamous that has a name:
‘Ignoramus et ignoramibus’
Best Englished ad " I don’t know and I damn well refuse to find out."
Friday, September 27, 2024
Monday, September 23, 2024
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
WARREN HARDING'S CLIMATE HOROSCOPE
ASTROLOGERS TAKE ON PENDULUM DOWSERS
IN A KNOCK DOWN-DRAG OUT TAG TEAM DEBATE AT Judith CURRY'S CLIMATE, ETC:
On September 3rd Climate Etc. fan William Fabrizio posted a 103 year old newspaper clipping headlined
Evoking this explanation from climate skeptic Burl Henry:
Nonsense! responded Climate Etc, contributor C.R. Sant ( aka Melitamegalithic). He blames the1921 meltdown on the same forces that provoked the baleful supernova of 1604, and has let Lenin and President Harding off the hook for the body count by running his astrological climate model:"Your article had me wondering WHY it occurred.
It turns out that it was due to the confluence of several factors that always cause temperatures to rise:
One: There was a 42 month interval between VEI4 volcanic eruptions...
Two: There was an American business recession between Jan 1920 and May 1921, and temperatures always rise during a recession due to fewer SO2 aerosol emissions, because of idled foundries, factories, etc…
Nothing mysterious about the warming, just temporarily rising temperatures because of decreased atmospheric SO2 aerosol pollution... But the millions of deaths are a foretaste of where we are now heading, due to the”Net Zero” idiocy!"
"Checking the year 1921 on astro software indicated that year as one of deadly inferior planet conjunctions
(Kepler Trigon).
‘Inferior’ is the worst. "
Maurice Allais seeing something no one else could |
"Gravity vector change (see Allais effect) due to planetary close approaches (noted in similar in the past two years), besides seismic effects, affects air density which give rise to short term abnormal air/vapour changes – thermal hot spots-."
Mr. Sant is the author of several fine self-published books proposing that the deviation of the orientation of megalithic temples from the canonical signs of the zodiac is best explained by the undetected tectonic rotation of Sicily & Malta by some tens of degrees in the Dark Ages.
Sunday, September 15, 2024
FOSSIL CARBON : THE FUTURE ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE
Full discosure: As an occasional archaeologist, I have a dog in the climate fight:
Impact of fossil fuel emissions on atmospheric radiocarbon and various applications of radiocarbon over this century
Heather D. Graven h.graven@imperial.ac.ukAuthors Info & Affiliations
July 20, 2015 112 (31) 9542-9545 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1504467112
Significance
A wide array of scientific disciplines and industries use radiocarbon analyses; for example, it is used in dating of archaeological specimens and in forensic identification of human and wildlife tissues, including traded ivory. Over the next century, fossil fuel emissions will produce a large amount of CO2 with no 14C because fossil fuels have lost all 14C over millions of years of radioactive decay. Atmospheric CO2, and therefore newly produced organic material, will appear as though it has “aged,” or lost 14C by decay.
By 2050, fresh organic material could have the same 14C/C ratio as samples from 1050, and thus be indistinguishable by radiocarbon dating.
Some current applications for 14C may cease to be viable, and other applications will be strongly affected
FANTASTIC CLIMATOLOGY
It goes on today, but its first century was chronicled by Peabody Museum Director Steve Williams in this cautionary book.
Nothing in it remains unrivaled by its lineal internet descendent,
Fantastic Climatology
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
ANIMAL SACRIFICES SOAR IN TRUMP'S SWAMPY BACK YARD
"In a little over a month… nine wounded animals or carcasses have been discovered in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge including a trio of piglets with their ears and tails cut off , a baby rat tied up in a bag, a decapitated chicken and a dead dog with its neck snapped… alongside statuettes of Hindu deities and a trio of prayer flags...
The US Supreme Court upheld the right to animal sacrifice on religious grounds in a 1993 ruling. "
Saturday, September 7, 2024
NO SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO
When General Gage and his Redcoat army landed to take over Boston in the aftermath of the Tea Party, John Adams did not greet him with a platter of macaroons and corn dodgers to declare:
"I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords."
Nor did the nation's Founders convene in 1787 to proclaim:
"As President Obama noted in his Executive Order 13707, behavioral science insights can support a wide range of national priorities including ... accelerating the transition to a low carbon economy.
That Executive Order, 13707, directs Federal agencies to apply behavioral science insights to their policies and programs, and it institutionalizes the Social and Behavioral Science Team...The adminstration is releasing new guidance to agencies that supports continued implementation of
The "new guidance" of Executive Order 13707 still applies to every department of government, and requires the Department of Defense to report back to the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team at regular intervals, as to how the armed forces are being remodeled in accord with the executive guidance of an order that remains one signed by the Commander In Chief.
No advocates of The Precautionary Principle at the National Academies -- and there are many , have so far stepped forward to ask if it applies to the warning given the 1787 Constitutional Convention by Yale Professor Roger Sherman ,of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence:
A fear General Washington astutely echoed in his 1796 farewell address, when he warned the nation to:“If the Executive can model the army, he may set up an absolute government.”
avoid the necessity of those overgrown... establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty.