Early this week, America celebrated National Margarita Day, a joyous occasion marked by a headline in CNN that ran, ‘Why the climate crisis might be coming for your Margarita.’ Of course, this intelligence-insulting story was some made-up scare about the weather affecting ingredients that went into tequila. Welcome to the Heartland climate conference in Orlando, where debunking this kind of nonsense is the order of the day. Introducing the conference, Heartland president James Taylor noted that since 1995, tequila production had increased six-fold, and since 2018 it had doubled.
James Taylor had earlier set the tone for the conference in ‘freedom-loving’ Florida by noting that climate extremists sought a costly and catastrophic transformation of society, justified under the guise of a so-called existential climate crisis. In the name of fighting climate change, activists are driving critically endangered whales to extinction – a major concern in the North Atlantic and blamed on the activities of offshore wind farms, slicing millions of birds and bats each year to death in mid-flight, and blanketing thousands of square miles of pristine lands and shorelines with solar panels and industrial wind farms.
In addition, he drew attention to “sending children of colour to deadly and environmentally devastating rare-earth mining pits, spurring skyrocketing energy costs, taking away gas stoves and other basic household goods, all while surrendering American energy sovereignty to China, Venezuela and rogue regimes in the Middle East”.
The Margarita theme ran throughout the day. “The world’s gone crazy. They saying things I don’t know how,” said Dr. Patrick Moore, the noted ecologist and one of the founders of Greenpeace. Moore left Greenpeace when it became, in his own words, the enemy of civilisation, “and they started peddling junk science for donations”. Moore noted that the Earth had spent the last 500 million years taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. In large parts of the paleoclimate record, when CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were much higher, there was no link between the gas and rising or cooling temperatures. During the last three interglacial periods over 300,000 years, temperature change preceded CO2 rise by 8,000 years. “Every molecule the Earth puts into the atmosphere, it took out in the first place,” he added.
The Australian geologist Dr. Ian Plimer is another big fan of the life-giving properties of CO2. He suggested that you could count on the hand of a sawmill worker the number of geologists who believe in human-caused climate change. Plimer takes the long view and notes that we are living in boring climatic times. “Climate change is very normal, most of the time it has been warmer and sea levels have been higher,” he added. Over time, the planet’s atmospheric CO2 level has been declining. “It is not a climate crisis, it is a crisis of common sense.” We need more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less, he argued. Life on Earth is expanding, he continued, and we are gaining more species than we are losing. We are not in an extinction event, rather a period of normal species turnover.
Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen looks to ‘polar amplification’ to provide many of the answers to natural climate change. This involves heat transfers from the tropics, where temperatures remain relatively stable, to the polar regions which show large gains over time. His work leads him to conclude that greenhouse gas warming past certain levels,“remains largely irrelevant”. Lindzen asks how a small change in temperature can imply major climate change? Every aspect of the warming narrative is “faulty”. Alarmists control the budget and provide a simple narrative. “Simplicity is a source of comfort to the scientifically illiterate,” he observes. Activists have learnt from Joseph Goebbels, he says, that a big enough lie becomes the truth.
In the climate activist world, inconsistency does not matter, he continued. The Boston Globe recently reported that a number of local hospitals had broken iced pipes, leading the newspaper to conclude that climate change was affecting health care. Lindzen observed that stupidity seemed to affect the best educated, quoting George Orwell’s famous quote about “some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual believes in them”.
Marc Morano is a well known American broadcaster and author and has recently written a book titled The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown, a title he noted could be changed to The Great Resist. To Morano, the world changed in March 2020 when democracy was brushed aside in the interest of tackling the Covid pandemic. The Left and climate activists were very impressed, says Morano, as to how much could be done by declaring an emergency. He suggests that the climate debate is no longer in the democratic realm, quoting the World Economic Forum assertion, since deleted, that “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy”, along with the claim that meat will be a “treat”, not a staple.
Anything Covid can do, the activists decided, they could do better. In fact, both parties learnt from each other, with the climate experience providing valuable lessons for virus fanatics. Cancelling climate scientists was replicated during the pandemic, with scientists who challenged the pandemic response being cancelled. NASA’s chief scientist Gavin Schmidt called climate sceptics “sociopaths” – dissenting voices over Covid were similarly smeared. Both climate and Covid activists follow ‘the Science’, which of course is ‘settled’ at any point in time according to the approved version du jour. Both climate and lockdown and vaccine enthusiasts cherry pick data to suit the prepared narrative. Both use models, of course, with Professor Neil Ferguson’s spreadsheet even more hopeless than climate crystal balls. But models spread fear, and both sets of scientists/activists want you to panic. In both cases, restrictions on movement, rationing, along with a billionaire-bought mainstream media peddling the only source of ‘truth’, are all good things.
Another seminal date for Morano was 2016, with the game-changing election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency. Noted Morano, Big Government, Big Tech and Big Media decided that such a thing could not happen again. Weaponising Covid and the weather installs a permanent crisis, and such narratives help secure “complete control”.
Watch this space for more conference reporting. Keen readers can live stream here.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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