BrianGarst.com

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.

hysteria Archive

Saturday

11

June 2011

0

COMMENTS

The World is as Empty as Tom Friedman’s Head

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Energy and the Environment

Pop pseudo-intellectual and China fetishist Tom Friedman apparently went somewhere and had a thought, as he is wont to do. This time, in a column titled, “The Earth is Full,” he has determined that there’s too many plebes and they’re fouling up his precious Gaia (Hat-tip: NewsBusters).

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

…We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

As if Tom Friedman wasn’t insufferable enough already, now he’s dabbling in the Malthusian claptrap, too? No Tom, the Earth is not full, and the world’s population is not a problem. In most developed countries, birth rates are below replacement level, and elsewhere in the world they are declining as well. Estimates suggest the world population will peak around 2050 at 9 billion or so, then begin to decline. Meanwhile, the entire population of the world today could fit in the state of Texas and it would about as dense as New York City today.

As for resources, there’s considerable capacity currently not being used (see American government paying people not to farm), or being used stupidly (see ethanol). Moreover, technological development will continue to allow us to provide more for less, as it has done throughout history. Simply put, this is Paul Erlich level nonsense.

The economics is also head-smackingly stupid. We do not build factories to create jobs, we build factories to meet demand. Moreover, as productivity has increased (he managed to get one thing right), workers have moved into the service sector and work in other industries, such as health care. On the other hand, technological development, while increasing productivity, also reduced pollution.  There’s a reason why the developing nations have much worse environments than developed nations, and that reason is prosperity. Wealth is cleaner than poverty.

“And why do you people want so much crap, anyway?” wonders the man with the multi-million dollar mansion. Hey Tom, Al Gore’s calling, and he wants his hypocrisy back.

Friday

11

March 2011

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 34

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Tragic earthquake edition:

Hours after a massive earthquake rattled Japan, environmental advocates connected the natural disaster to global warming.  The president of the European Economic and Social Committee, Staffan Nilsson, issued a statement calling for solidarity in tackling the global warming problem.

“Some islands affected by climate change have been hit,” said Nilsson. “Has not the time come to demonstrate on solidarity – not least solidarity in combating and adapting to climate change and global warming?”

“Mother Nature has again given us a sign that that is what we need to do,” he added.

The Global Warming faithful were quick to point to this latest natural disaster as evidence of their deity.

Today’s tsunami: This is what climate change looks like

It’s often difficult to visualize what climate change-related disasters might look like, but the images pouring out of Japan are yet another reminder of the specter of storm surges supercharged by more powerful weather and rising seas, and even climate-change caused tsunamis.

Nature sends a grim warning

What these events prove is that climate change is real.

And then there’s the twitter commentary:

AliceTMBFan said “2 hours of geography earlier talking about Japan has left me thinking…maybe global warming is way more serious then we thought…”

Arbiterofwords tweeted “I’m worried that Japan earthquake, on top of other recent natural ‘disasters’, is a sign we’ve passed point of no return for climate change.”

MrVikas said “Events like the #Japan #earthquake and #tsunami MUST keep #climate change at forefront of policy thought: http://bit.ly/cZe8To #environment

Tayyclayy noted her frustration by tweeting “An earthquake with an 8.9 magnitude struck Japan.. And some say climate change isn’t real?!”

DanFranklin postulated “Never really believed all this global warming talk, but after the earthquake in NZ and today in Japan. Maybe we’ve ruined the world.”

And TeamIanHarding tweeted “While Japan witnessed an earthquake we were talking about the problems that global warming leads to in school. Think. Pray. And change.”

Tuesday

18

January 2011

0

COMMENTS

We’re All Gonna Die! Pt. 33

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

If Global Warming doesn’t wipe out all life on this miserable little planet first, it might still bring down our great civilization, just like it did Rome:

Climate change seems a factor in the rise and fall of the Roman empire, according to a study of ancient tree growth that urges greater awareness of the risks of global warming in the 21st century.

…Periods of climate instability overlapped with political turmoil, such as during the decline of the Roman empire, and might even have made Europeans vulnerable to the Black Death or help explain migration to America during the chill 17th century.

If only the Romans had listened to Al Gore and abandoned their oil-based economy for a life of low carbon footprints.

Saturday

18

December 2010

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 32

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

According to two doom-mongering M.D.’s writing at HuffPo, we’re all going to die…of everything!

…[T]he urgency for solutions is rapidly increasing and leading medical and public health groups across the country agree: climate change is hazardous to our health.

…Heat waves can cause illness and death from heart disease, diabetes, stroke, respiratory disease and even accidents, homicide and suicide.

At the same time, increased evaporation arising from warming seas is generating heavier downpours. …  This year, sudden, heavy downpours — some lasting several days — caused lethal flashfloods in Rhode Island, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Rains two inches a day and above are associated with water-borne disease outbreaks, when flooding overwhelms sewer systems and contaminates drinking water.

…With warming, more winter precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow, increasing the chance of ice storms when temperatures do drop. …And such conditions — along with heavier, wetter snowstorms — can be treacherous for travel and ambulation.

…[W]armer winters favor insect migration. In the past decade case reports of tick-borne Lyme disease rose ten-fold in Maine and northern counties are experiencing Lyme for the first time. In Alaska, especially warm winters have ushered in swarms of allergy-inducing, stinging insects, along with mosquitoes and devastating pine bark beetle infestations. The spread of forest and crop pests — requiring chemicals for control — pose additional long term health and environmental risks.

There’s more….

More? MORE? How can there be more when everyone has clearly died already!

Hat-tip: Yid- With LID

Sunday

12

December 2010

0

COMMENTS

Not Exactly Confidence Inspiring

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Just in case we needed more reason to doubt the so-called climate authorities, we have it (via John Stossel):

Some people will sign anything that includes phrases like, ”global effort,” “international community,” and “planetary.” Such was the case at COP 16, this year’s United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico.

…It was euphemistically entitled “Petition to Ban the Use of Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO)” (translation water). It was designed to show that if official U.N. delegates could be duped by college students into banning water, that they could essentially fall for anything, including pseudo-scientific studies which claim to show that global warming is man-caused.

Despite the apparently not-so-obvious reference to H2O, almost every delegate that collegian students approached signed their petition to ban that all too dangerous substance, which contributes to the greenhouse effect, is the major substance in acid rain, and is fatal if inhaled.

Perhaps together, the footage associated with these two projects will illustrate to mainstream America the radical lengths many current U.N. delegates are willing to go to carry out an agenda no more ethical, plausible or practical than the banning water.

Friday

22

October 2010

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 30

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Just because I don’t talk about it as much anymore doesn’t mean our collective lives are no longer in danger. The ongoing series highlighting our impending dooooooooooooooooooooooooooom continues:

Of all the questionable lessons our schools are imparting to young kids, the idea that Legos are destroying the planet might just be the most absurd.

“Riding in the car one day with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., Rafael de la Torre Batker, 9, was worried about whether it would be bad for the planet if he got a new set of Legos,” reported The New York Times in May. Where once we dispensed practical advice to children about children about consumerism, “waste not, want not” is being supplanted by the lesson that want (sic) a new toy makes children part of an apocalyptic death cult.

…the Environmental Protection Agency, in conjunction with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is now paying Leonard to produce more propaganda.

Leonard describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” and isn’t shy about painting hyperbolic doomsday scenarios for children where corporations and consumerism end up destroying life as we know it. Such anti-capitalist radicalism doesn’t seem to concern many educators.

In Leonard’s 20 minute Story of Stuff documentary, she explains the production of consumer goods by starting with natural resources. “Extraction which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planets,” she says.

As if that weren’t bad enough, she embraces a largely discredited and radical Malthusian view regarding resource development. Leonard intones darkly that “we are running out of resources and we are using too much stuff … In the past three decades, one third of the planets natural resource base has been consumed – gone.”

Don’t let the children forget: “Doooooooooooooooooooooooomed!”

Saturday

12

December 2009

0

COMMENTS

Wired: Global Warming Heretics Suffer Mental Illness

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Those who react with skepticism to the proclamations from the high priests of global warming are not really skeptical.  Listen up, because maybe you can learn something about yourself.  Your reaction is not based on the shoddy and misleading “science” behind so-called climate change.  You actually believe it, but are just too scared to admit it to yourself:

Norgaard: Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant.

It’s a paradox. Awareness has increased. There’s been a lot more information available. This is much more in our face. And this is where the psychological defense mechanisms are relevant, especially when coupled with the fact that other people, as we’ve lately seen with the e-mail attacks, are systematically trying to create the sense that there’s doubt.If I don’t want to believe that climate change is true, that my lifestyle and high carbon emissions are causing devastation, then it’s convenient to say that it doesn’t.

This continues a long standing pattern from the left, where they choose not to argue on the basis of ideas, but seek to marginal opponents as either industry lackeys or mentally unfit.  NPR also tried to sell the same bilge from Norgaard.  It is simply inconceivable to them that anyway could honestly weigh the facts and reach a different conclusion.

It’s pathetic and debasing to intellectualism that these people pretend to be thoughtful participants in the realm of ideas.  They are nothing more than quacks.

Thursday

10

December 2009

0

COMMENTS

Tuesday

8

December 2009

0

COMMENTS

Maybe We’re Not All Going To Die

Written by , Posted in Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements

Not from the dreaded H1N1, anyway.  It turns out that it’s no more deadly than regular flu.  All the hysteria was unwarranted:

With the second wave of H1N1 infections having crested in the United States, leading epidemiologists are predicting that the pandemic could end up ranking as the mildest since modern medicine began documenting influenza outbreaks.

Experts warn that the flu is notoriously unpredictable, but several recent analyses, including one released late Monday, indicate that the death toll is likely to be far lower than the number of fatalities caused by past pandemics.

The so-called authorities seem to have a penchant for over-hyping dangers.  Hmm, I wonder what other issue areas exist in which that knowledge might come in handy.

Monday

30

November 2009

0

COMMENTS

We’re All Gonna Die! Pt. 28

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Just in case you didn’t think I was serious about the propaganda push leading up to Copenhagen, we now get a new level of hysterics even for the chicken little crowd:

Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only around 10 per cent of the planet’s population – around half a billion people – will survive if global temperatures rise by 4C.

Anderson’s warning comes just eight days before global leaders meet in Copenhagen for the most crucial talks on climate change reversal since the Rio summit in 1992. Current Met Office projections reveal that the lack of action in the intervening 17 years – in which emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide have soared – has set the world on a path towards potential 4C rises as early as 2060, and 6C rises by the end of the century.

Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were “terrifying”.

“For humanity it’s a matter of life or death,” he said. “We will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive.

When I began the “we’re all gonna die!” series, it was at least somewhat of an exaggeration.  Now it’s just a plain ol’ factual description of what they alarmists are saying day in, day out.