Sunday, December 27, 2020
THE 1659 PROJECT : CAMBRIDGE TO EXTEND SALEM BAN
ON USE OF FOSSIL FUELS FOR WITCH BURNING
CAMBRIDGE HAS GIVEN NOTICE THAT FLAMING A CHRISTMAS PUDDING IS AS HATEFUL TO GOD AND THE LORD'S ELECT AS BURNING GASOLINE.
Thursday, December 24, 2020
YOU CAN'T EXPECT TO BAKE ALASKA WITHOUT
BREAKING SOME MUSKEGS
From The Climate Desk , via GRIST
Another Victim of Global Warming:
The Great British Bake Off
Increasing summer temperatures are proving a menace to butter, chocolates, and baked Alaska. |
Mousse would morph into ooze, tiered cakes would start to slip and slide, and delicate chocolate decorations would melt into unrecognizable blobS.
Heat is now the show’s central villain.
“ It’s like Satan’s kitchen in here, ” Laura Adlington, one of this year’s bakers, joked in an episode filmed in July.
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
THE FOX INAUGURAL COUNTDOWN: 27 BAD HAIR DAYS TO GO
JOY TO THE WORLD FROM THE MINISTER OF AGITPROP
This article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.
“I CALL ON ALL LEADERS WORLDWIDE to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their own countries until carbon neutrality is reached.” So said United Nations Secretary General Antรณnio Guterres in his speech to the Climate Ambition Summit on December 12, the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Guterres’s appeal seemed aimed at leaders of national governments; the Secretary General noted that “thirty-eight countries have already” made such declarations [among them, such big emitters as the United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada]. But it’s time for media leaders to declare a State of Climate Emergency as well.
Journalists and news executives in charge of newspapers, TV, and radio programs exercise a profound influence over how the public thinks and feels about the defining problem of our time—and what, if anything, governments, businesses, and other powerful actors end up doing about it. Shouldn’t news organizations be telling the unvarnished truth about the climate problem and, not least, its solutions?
Among major news organizations, only The Guardian has thus far made the kind of climate-emergency declaration the UN Secretary General urges.
On October 16, 2019, the newspaper issued a statement from Katharine Viner, its editor in chief, promising “to provide journalism that shows leadership, urgency, authority, and gives the climate emergency the sustained attention and prominence it deserves.” A month later, the Oxford Dictionaries named “climate emergency” its word of the year for 2019, partly in recognition of the hundreds of cities, towns, and countries that had declared such emergencies. Yet news organizations have held back.
Some of my media colleagues will feel uneasy about taking such a step, fearing that this would cross the line between journalism and advocacy. That is a serious, understandable concern—after all, activists from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future movement, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement, among others, have all repeatedly invoked the “climate emergency” as a rallying cry to demand a rapid decarbonization of the world’s economies.
But here is a companion fact that too many newsrooms seem unaware of—or, worse, ignore: it’s not just activists who talk about a “climate emergency.” As this column has mentioned more than once, more than eleven thousand leading scientists have expressly chosen the phrase “climate emergency” to describe the situation currently facing our civilization. Skeptical journalists should bear in mind that scientists tend to be data-driven, rationally inclined individuals who generally shun emotionally charged words.
Saturday, December 19, 2020
CAN THE GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
MAKE AMERICA GROOT AGAIN ?
NPR
Space Force Members Will Be Called 'Guardians'
December 19, 20202:48 PM ET MATTHEW S. SCHWARTZ
Vice President Mike Pence revealed the moniker during remarks celebrating the first anniversary of the military branch on Friday.
"It is my honor, on behalf of the president of the United States, to announce that, henceforth, men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as 'guardians,' " Pence told a room of military and other government officials, who broke into applause as Pence nodded and smiled.
Friday, December 18, 2020
WAR FOOTING IN MOUTH DISEASE HITS SKEPTIC HERD
There may be worse...
the gestapo-like EPA...eliminating and/or neutralizing the climate skeptics. It’s war psyops 101 –
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
THE EXTINCTION REBELLION OF 1962
Societal collapse
A couple of days ago, a letter was signed by a group of academics suggesting that
People who care about environmental and humanitarian issues should not be discouraged from discussing the risks of societal disruption or collapse.
I largely agree with this and it is certainly an improvement on suggestions that climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term. I think we should be willing to discuss worst-case scenarios so as to, ideally, avoid them.
THOUGH BEYOND THE FRINGE DEBUTED ON THE HEELS OF THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS , ITS PRODUCERS THOUGHT RECENT PROPHETS OF DOOM WHO FAIL TO DELIVER AS SATIRE-WORTHY AS VICTORIAN PREDECESSORS, THE MILLERITES:
Sunday, December 13, 2020
EXTINCTION REBELLION SHOCK HORROR:
REACTIONARY MYXTOGASTRIA DEVOUR HEAD OF DEAD RED
RED GREEN NIGHTMARE: SLIME MOLDS OF THE WORLD UNITE TO GNAW ON MARXIXT MONUMENT |
Concerned at rampant fungi, freak storms and shifting graves, the cemetery's custodians are now seeking expert help to ensure its survival.
They have launched a competition for landscape designers to come up with a strategy to help the north London cemetery withstand the warming climate in the next decades. --AFP
Saturday, December 12, 2020
COSMIC RAYS BLAMED FOR COVID-19 & CLIMATE CHANGE
LIVE FROM WATTS UP WITH THAT :
This is somewhat at odds with the mainstream assertion that it originated in bats in WUHAN, China. Given this disparity, they went to great lengths to produce a timely research paper to back up their argument.
From Steele, Wickramasinghe, Howard et al.
August 1, 2020
If you are interested in Covid from Space this is your summer reading. While it is preceded by a variety of other articles, in fact many hundreds if you include the wider literature of Panspermia, these two publication are the starting point for truly understanding Covid. They tell us more about the disease in one fell swoop than all the other global science pubs since January 2020 combined
Short Communication Open Access
Virology: Current Research
Mid-Ocean Outbreaks of COVID-19 with Tell-Tale Signs of Aerial Incidence
George A. Howard1, N.Chandra Wickramasinghe2,3,4,5*, Herbert Rebhan6, Edward J. Steele4,6, Reginald M. Gorczynski7, Robert Temple8, Gensuke Tokoro3, Brig Klyce9, Predrag Slijepcevic10, Max K. Wallis3 and Stephen J. Coulson3
The conventional belief in epidemiology is that epidemics start and end with animals and humans on Earth.... assumptions have been challenged for 40 years but the idea of a primary significant non-human or non-animal reservoir has been difficult for orthodox science to embrace.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s 1979 provocative classic Diseases from Space cited many examples of pandemics where person-to- person infection as the sole mode of origin and spread was shown difficult to defend [1,2].
The sudden onset of a pandemic, the speed and patchiness of its spread, and sudden termination were factors that were satisfactorily interpreted by atmospheric transfers of a viral or bacterial pathogen.
The 1979 analysis documented the distribution of influenza in the 1977 H1N1 pandemic in boarding houses inschools in England and Wales; and the study of earlier epidemics as were reported in medical as well as media sources were also discussed [1].
An atmospheric mode of transport and transfer of the influenza virus was clearly described as the most parsimonious and arguably the only suitable interpretation of all the facts. In the 1918/1919 influenza pandemic the incidence was found to be both temporally and geographically patchy, strongly suggesting an atmospheric reservoir, albeit a transient one. For instance, communities in the most remote Alaskan regions succumbed to the virus -- as did ships at sea. Passenger liners arriving in Australia following weeks sailing in the high seas recorded attack rates that varied between four and forty-three percent.
References
Hoyle, Fred and Wickramasinghe, NC. “Diseases from Space. J.M. Dent Ltd.” London (1979).
Wickramasinghe, NC. “Diseases from Outer Space, World Scientific Publishing”. Singapore (2020).
Wickramasinghe, NC, Steele EJ, Gorczynski RM and Temple R et al. “Comments on the origin and spread of the 2019 Coronavirus”. Virology: Current Research 4(2020):1.
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
CLIMATE HAWKS SAVAGED BY WILD TURKEY
CRONY CORNER
Biden's’ Neoliberal Climate Cronyism
They’ll have their climate cake and eat it, too — and the rest of us will pay for it.
by JORDAN MCGILLIS
December 7, 2020, 12:00 AM
The incoming Biden administration has made climate change a signature issue, deeming its importance on par with the COVID-19 recovery and racial inequality. According to the Biden transition website, climate change poses an existential threat to our environment, our health, our communities, our national security, and our economic well-being
...for all its rhetoric on these issues, Team Biden has already run afoul of the Democratic Party’s environmentalists. Because instead of rallying around the Green New Dealers and climate strikers, the Biden camp has turned instead toward the party’s climate neoliberals.
Personnel Is Policy
As goes the old Washington adage, personnel is policy. Three key Biden personnel decisions that have already been made public — John Kerry as presidential climate envoy, Janet Yellen as Secretary of the Treasury, and Brian Deese as top economic adviser — mark cumulatively an embrace of climate neoliberalism, the ideology that seeks to fuse the economic vitality of markets with centrist environmentalism.
In conjunction with their Panglossian view on the Paris climate agreement, climate neoliberals have a cronyism blindspot.
John Kerry, former Secretary of State, five-term Massachusetts senator, and 2004 Democratic Party presidential nominee... brokered the Paris climate agreement and is a known entity on the global stage.
Janet Yellen, Fed chair from 2014 to 2018... is one of the faces of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a carbon tax advocacy group that counts major corporations among its founding members.
Brian Deese, aide to President Obama and most recently head of sustainable investing at finance behemoth Blackrock, represents politically correct capitalism.
These picks and the neoliberal policies they augur will invite a populist backlash from both the political left and the political right.
Climate Neoliberalism
Climate neoliberalism deems business to be part of the solution to climate change, rather than a bogeyman. It eschews the hard-left, ban-everything approach to the environment, instead advocating the Sunsteinian nudge method by which the neoliberals allege we can have our cake and eat it too...
In conjunction with their Panglossian view on Paris, climate neoliberals have a cronyism blindspot. Yellen’s pro-carbon tax Climate Leadership Council is a case in point. Plenty of companies that readers would expect to favor the carbon tax — like Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs — are CLC founding members, but so are some oil and auto titans — like Shell, Total, Ford, and GM. While at first blush taxing your product or your product’s fuel would seem self-defeating, megacorporations like Shell and GM and fossil-fuel investors like Deese’s Blackrock have diverse portfolios that will enable them to absorb the costs of a carbon tax and still prosper...
The Climate Bubble Test
... Some on the political right are still straining to portray Kerry, Yellen, and Deese as eco-radicals bent on destroying America’s industrial prowess. The truth is more insidious. Kerry, Yellen, and Deese want America to succeed, but only in a form they and their corporate allies deem appropriate. The result will be an economy in which their preferred technologies — and those who can afford them — thrive. In the minds of climate neoliberals, this is paternalistic benevolence. “Who wouldn’t want to drive a Tesla?” they ponder, forgetting that for every yuppie in Cupertino who opts for a Model X on account of a gradually rising carbon tax, there is a family in Carson City that sees its household budget shrink each year and is forced to tighten the belt.
Climate and environmental justice will be on the tongue of every Biden appointee, but as Americans on the left and the right both recognize, climate neoliberalism is anything but fair.
Monday, December 7, 2020
THE NEXT BIG THING IN CLIMATE COMMUNICATION:
THE GUILLOTINE
CUT OFF THEIR HEADS, AND THEIR CARBON FOOTPRINT WILL SURELY FOLLOW |
Saturday, December 5, 2020
IS YOUR HOCKEY STICK CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING?
Thursday, December 3, 2020
LAME DUCK CLIMATOLOGY: PINTAILS , PINHEADS & QUACKS
PINTAIL NOUN
A species of quack.
1. A species of ignoramus
2. Pinhead-sized French coin not worth a sou
CLIMATE DENIER
Species of pinhead most favored for Presidential lame duck appointments
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
BOVINE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE COWS CHEMTRAIL CAMP
Geoengineering super low carbon cows:
food and the corporate carbon economy
in a low carbon world
Climatic Change volume 163, pages135–153(2020
Jim Ormond
"... This paper examines one of the less documented examples of climate geoengineering, namely the creation of ‘super low carbon cows’... the role of the cow within the Anthropocene now extends from meat machine and sentient being to climate change saviour.
... super low carbon cows represent part of a wider climate ‘responsibilisation’ in which business interests and corporate storytelling are governing and enacting everyday mundane practices of climate engineering as part of the corporate carbon economy...
I contrast the extensive efforts to change the everyday behaviours of a cow with the limited attempts to meaningfully challenge the everyday practices, consumption lifestyles and dietary choices of the general public."
VICE reports a corporation has risen to Ormond's challenge with a cow-based vodka to compete with Beefeater Gin for a Green market share:
MILK VODKA: DOUBLING DOWN ON THE CARBON FOOTPRINT OF BEEFEATER GIN |
Milk Vodka
Black Cow is a company based in England’s West Dorset and boasts they’re the only company making vodka from milk and nothing else. Well, nothing but yeast.
Jason Barber is a dairy farmer who wanted to make different stuff with milk besides cheese and grocery store milk. Since he was interested in vodka already, he made the illogical connection between the two and started distilling milk vodka. We wish we were in the room with him when he made the decision, not because we want to talk him out of it, but because we can barely imagine a situation where we’re looking between a cow and a bottle of vodka thinking, “hey, wait a minute…”
To make the spirit, the milk is separated into curds and whey, just like your nursery rhymes used to tell you. The curds are taken off to make cheese while the whey is combined with a special yeast for converting the naturally present milk sugars into alcohol. We won’t go step by step, because it’s basically the same as making other types of alcohol and the weird part is right there at the beginning. Where we said milk.
ORMOND'S BOVINE RIFF SEEMS TO CHANNEL OBAMA'S EXECUTIVE ORDER 13707 , A PRODUCTION OF JOHN PODESTA'S CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS,
Friday, September 16, 2016
THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE INSIGHTS EXECUTIVE ORDER
OF STATE OF THE ART SOCIAL ENGINEERING
The right gear for washing brains and milking geoengineered cows |
The Behavioral Science Insights Executive Order.
That guidance will help agencies identify promising opportunities to apply behavioral science insights to their programs and policies."
Monday, November 30, 2020
OCEAN ACIDIFICATION STUNTS TRUMP RECOUNT GROWTH
Sunday, November 29, 2020
REVOLUTIONS THAT DINE CHEZ PANISSE SELDOM
EAT THEIR CHILDREN
To teach people about climate change,
feed them journalism
By Miranda NeubauerColumbia Journalism Review
THERE’S A STORY BEHIND EVERY INGREDIENT THAT GOES INTO OUR MEALS EACH PLANT OR ANIMAL WE CONSUME CARRIES THE WEIGHT OF THE PLACE WHERE IT WAS RAISED, THE WAY IT WAS CULTIVATED, THE HISTORY OF ITS BREEDING... THE VERY NATURE OF OUR PLANETARY ECOLOGY...
These granular food narratives, which are rarely told, often hide within larger stories... although the story of what we eat is critical to understanding the day-to-day experience of our changing ecosystem, climate journalism often looks beyond food, and food journalism rarely gets at the issues behind the experience of the meal.
But could a meal itself be a form of journalism—one that could bridge the gap between these two storytelling genres?
It’s an esoteric question, admits Mark Hansen, the director of Columbia’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation...
Hansen teamed up with legendary chef Alice Waters for a 70-person... four-course meal prepared by... her Berkeley-based organic food restaurant, Chez Panisse... presented by the Aspen Institute as part of its Morris Series on Leadership and Innovation, the Asia Society, and the Brown Institute.
Waters collaborated with Andrew Revkin, a science journalist at the National Geographic Society; Corby Kummer, a senior editor at The Atlantic and the editor in chief of IDEAS: The Magazine of the Aspen Institute; and Lisa Goddard, the director of Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
Seated around the room, Kummer noted, were various “plants”: writers and experts on climate and food topics—such as New York Times climate change journalist Somini Sengupta, food writer Nathanael Johnson, and former Department of Energy assistant secretary Andy Karsner—
The goal was to create an experiential event that would show how food could be a backdrop for conversations about climate change.
These granular food narratives, which are rarely told, often hide within larger stories... although the story of what we eat is critical to understanding the day-to-day experience of our changing ecosystem, climate journalism often looks beyond food, and food journalism rarely gets at the issues behind the experience of the meal.
But could a meal itself be a form of journalism—one that could bridge the gap between these two storytelling genres?
It’s an esoteric question, admits Mark Hansen, the director of Columbia’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation...
Hansen teamed up with legendary chef Alice Waters for a 70-person... four-course meal prepared by... her Berkeley-based organic food restaurant, Chez Panisse... presented by the Aspen Institute as part of its Morris Series on Leadership and Innovation, the Asia Society, and the Brown Institute.
Waters collaborated with Andrew Revkin, a science journalist at the National Geographic Society; Corby Kummer, a senior editor at The Atlantic and the editor in chief of IDEAS: The Magazine of the Aspen Institute; and Lisa Goddard, the director of Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
An ever more perfect dataset?
Do you remember when global warming was small enough for people to care about the details of how climate scientists put together records of global temperature history? Seems like a long time ago…
— gavin @ 15 December 2020
Carbomontanus says:
17 Dec 2020 at 4:45 AM
Hr. Schmidt
What interests me again is that fameous bump in the curve around 1940, that seems to start 1910 and end 1975, period 65 years. Which is not Saturnus. But it has been helping a lot of surrealism all the time that I have followed the climate dispute.
As a specialist on music acoustics feedback and oscillation however, I must take that quite more serious, and it is quite common in nature, the meandering of rivers, tigers, zebras and mackrels...
To study this, I did take pictures for a while of all kinds of possible “mackerel- clouds” Altostratus undulatus, Kelvin- Helmholz oscillation, due to certain conditions and instabilities of “unlinear” kind in viscous systems.
It takes microchosmic forces, van der Waals- forces in addition to and different from “classical physics”, and thus very important to organology... That together is easily shown experimentally on the oscilloscope...
I see clearly that the smaller and shorter details in the curve are chaotic, like “random noise”. But I lack the 11 year sunspot swells in your recent presentation,...
Bumps and scratches in the waterline of the Oslo-Kiel- ferry, that even could be dated by the successive layers of paint… did follow the 11year +- sunspot- curve for years, because of varying ice in the fjords and the belts.
And that this explains your vanishing of obvious solar cycle-swells from earlier curves.