Mar 14, 2022 Carbon and Climate Catastrophe
Dr. Patrick Moore-- Co-Founder and former President of Greenpeace, Director of the CO2 Coalition, Senior Fellow of The Heartland Institute, and author of “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and THreats of Doom”
The Dinner Keynote Address at The Steamboat Institute Energy and Climate Summit, The Nexus of U.S. Energy Policy, Climate Science, Freedom and Prosperity by Dr. Patrick Moore on March 12, 2022 at the Steamboat Grand in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Here is another scientist, not a climate scientist but a highly respected theoretical physicist and cosmologist who decided he needed to explain The Physics of Climate Change.
Of the two, who is more believable, the one who deals mostly with numbers (that’s what theoretical physicist and cosmologist do) or with the environmental activist?
“it is always important to know what you don’t know”.
Quite the assumption that the rest of the scientists do not know his information. They do.
The difference is the amount of CO2. He is admitting that. He then dismisses that.
He is saying the temperature is not going up. Then he is saying it is going up.
The take away listening to this man he does not know things after the facts come in. Where have I seen that before?
The vast majority of scientists do not subscribe to his conclusions which are somewhat random conclusions. He is in a tiny minority of scientists that do not get it.
Greenpeace is what? A paid lobbying group? Don’t confuse it with the Green party. It is not.
There are two options - Climate change is real or it is overblown - if we act as if it is real and we are wrong, we spent many dollars but improved the planet. If we don’t act and we are wrong; we cease to exist as a species and take many other species with us to extinction. (the planet will be fine either way).
But who am I kidding; we have already passed the point of no return and I give us 200 years!
Both scientists say that climate change is real. Dr. Patrick Moore says that we have increased CO2 to better levels. And he gives prescriptions about how to reduce the use of fossil fuels, to save them for better uses.
So what is the point of disliking Dr. Patrick Moore’s proposals?
I wonder how many of the responders bothered to watch Dr. Patrick Moore’s presentation.
Both videos are too long for me to watch right now but since this is the internet I’ll give my opinion anyway.
Moore can be ignored. He says pesticides are safe to drink and climate change is fake science. He is a political activist pretending to be a scientist and regularly lies.
Krauss is more interesting. I’ve browsed his book and read some reviews. He understands the science and seems to honestly believe what he says. He explores the uncertainty in the science, which is real, but still concludes action is warranted.
There are few certainties at the cutting edge of research. But the long-established truths we know for sure are terrifying.
and ends with
With time, better models and more data, the uncertainties associated with climate predictions will decrease. But even today, when important residual uncertainties remain, they cannot erase the fundamental realities of climate change now. Nor can they be used as an excuse for inaction.
Those words are Krauss’s, who I thought you liked because he works with numbers. “Long-established truths” sound a lot like facts.
You’ve successfully navigated a lifetime of financial and political uncertainty. Why do you pretend to not understand the interplay of risk and uncertainty when it comes to climate change?
The perception that a profit can not be made by taking care of the environment. Which goes further to a philosophy that the earth he here to use, take and rape for our benefit. Our being one or two people getting rich.
Really the philosophy is very entrenched. It is the only reason we have what we have now. And that is terrifying to some. That we would fall backwards instead of going forwards.
I have watched Krauss in a lot of YouTube debates, mostly on atheism. He does come across as a sincere scientist. Lots of facts is not enough, you have to make the connection which in this case he has not made. In scientific terms, at most, it would be a hypothesis.
My point about numbers is that the sciences of theoretical physics and cosmology cannot exist without numbers while the environment is about life. While Krauss dives into numbers Moore saves whales. Krauss proved nothing about life, only about atmospheric science.
One example of the differing approaches. Moore highlighted calcium carbonate as a huge carbon sink that depleted the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, marine life using calcium carbonate to create shells and exoskeletons to protect themselves. Life creating the White Cliffs of Dover. Krauss said that once in the atmosphere CO2 is there forever ignoring that life is terraforming. Like Sergeant Friday’s, “Just the numbers.”
It’s not “Not understanding the interplay of risk and uncertainty when it comes to climate change.” The issue is that there is a lot of politics involved which clouds the problem. When I say politics I really mean ‘power grabbing.’
I had the misfortune of being born into one of the worst wars we have yet seen. I had the incredible luck of surviving it. My mother told me that at one point I asked her, “How can there be a god with so much evil?” To put that question into context, my mother had us all baptized Catholic so that her two boys could be safely housed in a catholic boarding school. Being stubborn as I am, when she came to visit I would not let her leave without me. My brother loved the place so he stayed. I survived, he was shot by the NAZIs. There were some more incidents but I’ll spare you the details.
Fast forward some 20 years and I started to research the existence of god. I read about religions, I read about the war I survived, I tried reading the Quran, I read Das Kapital, I read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s bible. I read Ayn Rand and an anthology of Anarchism. I read Adam Smith and Niccolò Machiavelli. It took me three or four decades to become an atheist but with a twist, an atheist who believes gods exist but only as human created memes.
I found some incredible coincidences. Anarchism morphed into Socialism and later into Marxism but the incredible coincidence is that at the very beginning Anarchists and Ayn Rand had very similar ideas.
All the above is to tell you that life is about survival and power and there are three sources of power, force, wealth, and religion. Not god, religion!
Marxism survived only through force, as wealth it was a bust. Bretton Woods effectively abolished major force. But the spirit of power lives on and it is using wealth and religion to get there. Wealth as in Davos and religion as in Climate Catastrophe.
Of course the above will be muted and ignored as a conspiracy theory. In the old days Moore might have been burnt at the stake accused of heresy. Now just cancelled. The world is fighting back, truckers in Canada and farmers in Holland as two recent examples.
Climate change is real. It has been real since the day Gaia was born billions of years ago! That’s not the issue.
The issue is how they want to use climate change as the tool to control the population much like religion does. Analyze the policy proposals not just from a global point of view but what these policies do to people. Truckers losing their jobs, farmers losing their produce.
The botched Sri Lankan fertiliser ban
In May 2021, after Sri Lanka’s foreign currency shortages had become a serious problem and the country was unable to pay for essential imports, the Government introduced a swift and sudden ban on the import of all synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. They hoped this would save them up to $400 million USD on imports annually. This was marketed as a policy to promote organic farming, but really it was about cutting demand for foreign currency.
Almost overnight, the country’s two million farmers were forced to go organic. On top of that, power cuts, lasting upwards of eight hours, meant that water pumps that send water to higher areas often stopped working, cutting off the water supply for irrigation. The mills, which turn the paddy into rice, also rely on power, and some of the rice crop went bad as they couldn’t be milled in time. Rampant fuel shortages mean that farmers can’t run their tractors or get their products to markets, meaning the vegetables are often left rotting on the farm. At the time of the abrupt ban in 2021, most farmers did not have the knowledge and skills to successfully implement organic farming practices, and in protest, many refused to plant altogether last year.
Story by Greenpeace…
If you were a farmer, would you be worried?
I support Tesla because it’s a win-win situation but many climate policies are disasters.
Yes, Earth has existed for billions of years. And yes, the climate has changed over these billions of years. Except for catastrophic changes such as a large meteor, these changes take place over thousands and millions of years. We are currently seeing major changes taking place over decades.
My belief is that the 98 or 99% of climate scientists are correct, not the 1 or 2% of outliers.
This is not a political debate, it is a scientific debate. If the vast majority of climate scientists are correct, we may be in the process of destroying ourselves. You probably have fire insurance on your home. Why, because the odds of your house burning down is very small. The reason is because the result is catastrophic.
Earth is our home. There are no other options for us. Earth will survive just fine, but results for mankind may be catastrophic.
I prefer to take out insurance, even at the cost of some jobs and some profits (although I believe there are many ways to create jobs and profits when protecting our way of life on this planet).
I just finished a wonderful book, An Immense World by Ed Yong. It’s about how varied senses are in the animal kingdom and I highly recommend it (I’ll see what my book club thinks about it tonight). It is not a book about the environment, but rather about how animals exist using their senses to visualize the world we live in. It ends on sober note about how humans are changing the world which is causing large scale extinction. Kind of a canary in the coal mine.
We should act carefully before we close the door behind us.
You say we can’t afford to implement controls on our climate. I say we can’t afford not to.
Do not confuse policy decisions (like the Sri Lanka story) that turned disastrous, which was a bad decision, into evidence that the decision was nefarious all along. Was it malice, or bad judgement? You are still wearing a tin foil hat.
Continuing to use fossil fuels as if nothing is wrong is also a disastrous policy after all.
I don’t care one bit about past climate change. What I do care about is:
is the current climate change going to have a severe negative impact on our ability to live and feed ourselves? (hint: sure seems that way)
is the current climate change being accelerated because of our actions (hint: it is) and can we reverse what we are doing (hint: we can)?
Captain I agree it needs to enter as a political debate because we need to act. Denying it is a political debate is inaction.
In fact every time the science button is pressed we are wasting time. We need to press the economic buttons and the wealth buttons and the rising up of America big red button. Yep it is easy to get our way. So lets do it.
