Interestingly enough, today’s article got caught in my feed for who knows why, but I found it interesting. It touches on the relationship between weather and climate change. I found it interesting because it is not a part of the usual media frenzy about all things climate related, AND the person they talk about in the article is Steven Koonin, who was an energy tzar under Obama, of all people. When the Left starts saying that climate change and weather are not as fragile as the media says, we might be making headway.
I am a firm believer in the idea that we should not shit in our own nests. This means we ought to stop tossing garbage everywhere, and we should continue to find new and better ways to package stuff that doesn’t leave behind a floating garbage patch the size of Texas in our oceans. We should stop putting microbeads of plastic into facial cleansers, because we’re starting to find them in commerical fish. We should be considering what’s going on with Splenda, if only because it seems to be entering our waterways in much the same way it entered us, which means we’re peeing it out in the same formulation it went in.
There is a lot of stuff we can all agree on is Bad. The garbage patch in the ocean. Overfishing or overhunting to the point where we no longer get to enjoy our foods. Working on eliminating food deserts. We ought to be focusing on the things everyone (or the vast majority) agrees on, and that we can make progress on. The Left can argue until it’s blue in the face that oceans are warming, and there will be people who deny it, others who support it, and a group in the middle who are confused over why it matters. Whatever the facts are, that argument is going nowhere, so let’s walk away from it and actually get something done.
I have seen this happen successfully. There was a neighborhood that was falling into ruin, with garbage, falling down homes, gangs, etc. I wish I could remember the article so I could find it again, because I loved the outcome. A handful of people with a bit of money organized a clean-up week, and worked with the locals to get all the garbage and crap out of the place. These were hard working conservative individuals who got their hands dirty moving stuff. They walked their talk, and I have huge respect for that.
I volunteer every year at a local fair, because the fair is a charity. All the money they take in as entrance fees and such, goes to the food bank and the local meals on wheels that delivers to vets and shut ins. I am proud of the fact that I’m an integral part of a group that gave $64,000.00 to the food bank this year. We gave almost that much to meals on wheels. It’s a ton of work, and I volunteer rather than get paid (even though the position I’m in would nominally be a paid one because of the amount of work associated with it). For me, it’s important to give back to my neighborhood. I know so many people who do that. And it’s that sense of “a hand up rather than a hand out” that makes conservatives stand out to me as examplars.
So maybe the right thing to do (the Right thing? hehehe) is to just start working on this stuff. I start at home. I try to use less packaging. I have reusable tupperware type stuff for food, rather than throw-away plastic baggies. The family tries to limit how much we drive, not only because of the price of gas, but because we want to do our part.
But it’s going down to 41*F tonight… and I can either turn on the oil heater, or I can toss some wood into the wood stove. According to some, that wood stove is an abomination, belching toxins into the sky. To me, it’s a renewable fuel source (or the place to use a renewable fuel source) that doesn’t require machinery to mine it and transport it. I get the fuel out of my own backyard, and I pay for it with sweat equity as my family cuts, bucks, and splits it for use.
So what’s my point in all this? Just that we can do better, if we focus on what WE can do, individually. Yes, we can look at companies and ask them to work at making less trash or whatever, and that’s not a bad thing, but we cannot expect America to single handedly carry the lowering of world pollution. We can’t affect what those in India and the Middle East and China are doing. We can only do so much… and I think we do a ton already.
Re: the community cleanups.
You might be thinking about Scott Presler @ScottPresler on Twitter. He organized community cleanups in Baltimore and Los Angeles amongst others a few years ago. Seemed pretty successful from what I read. Collected tons of trash in the most blighted areas.
That is correct, I was thinking about Scott Presler. 🙂 Thank you, I knew the hive mind would come up with it. And yeah, it was very successful. I have found that local, small initiatives seem to get the most “bang for the buck.”
Another good article. Thank you Hagar.
Environmental Engineering and Sciences has always been at the top of my agenda since the early 70s. I have read Steve Koonin’s work along with John Clauser, Robert Laughlin and Ivar Giaever. And I agree with Hagar that ‘Personal Responsibility” is paramount to a cleaner environment. I’ve always said, ‘Today, we are one person away from a cleaner planet, so who will be the next volunteer to do more than their fair share in this cleaning effort?”
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But setting aside the personal responsibility factor, which needs to expand and grow every day, what also needs to be ‘cleaned up’ is today’s junk science touted as settled-science, namely that the earth is warming due to human causes.
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Few people are aware that the computer climate models omit completely ‘cloud-cover’ and thus natural weather patterns, both in seasonal shifts and period shifts. In fact, the climate change models are all based on a cloudless earth setting, where cloud cover is never factored in. And the reason for this omission is that there is no way with any reliable percentage of accuracy that a man-made climate algorithm, can prove any of the theories that mankind caused any changes in weather, and weather is what drives climates and not the other way around.
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True Science always excludes what absolutely does not work (what is not true) so that what works, at any degree, remains, providing a framework and therefore usefulness for further experimentation and research to build upon, a basis of facts already proven true.
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Link – https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/nobel-winner-refutes-climate-change-narrative-points-out-ignored-factor-5486267
Link – https://www.globalresearch.ca/corruption-of-climate-science-nobel-laureate-john-clauser-speaks-out/5826884
I will say that I do, indeed, see human causes behind some of the climate change going on. However, having done some (albeit very amateur) sleuthing, it seems to me that in order to reverse that change, we’d have to go back to pre-industrial times. That’s just not going to happen. No Leftist is going to give up their mocha non fat oat milk latte. 🙂
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When I was a kid, there was talk about how we ought to seed the clouds in order to make it warmer, because an ice age was overdue. The belief at that time was that human beings would not survive an ice age. I’m not sure where that belief comes from, because we survived a couple of them just fine, with a lot less in the way of resources than we have now. People panic over a few degrees of temperature change, and I just don’t get it. Does it change the weather and/or climate? Sure… but we’re humans. We adapt. It’s literally What We Do. Human beings can live in -100F or 100F, and everywhere in between.
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I have always had a garden. Some years it’s bigger than others. One very dry year, a decade or so ago, people were having hissy fits over climate change and global warming, and how we were all going to starve to death because food wouldn’t grow. Me, I dug holes and put ollas in. They’re clay jars that have the lips above ground, and the rest of it below. You fill the olla with water, and it seeps out slowly, keeping the ground around your plants from drying out. It’s much more efficient and water-saving than sprinklers or even ground soakers. It keeps the water where it’s needed: at the plant’s roots. I learned the technique by watching what Mexican farmers do to keep their crops going.
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There are indeed many problems with the computer models right now. I will start to believe the computer models when they can predict tomorrow’s weather more accurately. 🙂
“The garbage patch in the ocean.”
Nuke China it is, then…
JMHO- everyone talks about the floating plastic island in the ocean- any photos??.. like the giant oil slick in the gulf that no one could find.. I used to keep track of the weather at my home. I had several years worth of notes in a book specifically designed for weather. Daily Rain and sun , high and low temperatures were really close year to year. Usually if it rained July 10th two years ago the next two years it would rain the 9th or the 11th. There were anomalies-first 2 weeks of December 2018 it was 18 BELOW ZERO for 2 weeks… we have had almost 100 degrees here in summer time. Weather is cyclical in every season. I like how “global warming “ became “climate change” because every time they had a climate summit in some exotic tropical location it fukkin SNOWED there.. nice to see that REAL science is making headway. Good article!
That “floating garbage patch” is an estimate of the total amount of plastics in the ocean. There is no massive patch of garbage the size of Texas or any other geographic region.
Is there too much trash in the ocean? Yep, let’s do what we can to reduce. Is it worth implementing sweeping government policies that will harm the economy? Nope.
If there actually were a garbage patch the size of Texas in the South Pacific, it would show up on Google Earth — and Google would be more than happy to show it to you!
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It doesn’t. Q.E.D.
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I wonder if that “estimate of the total amount of plastics in the ocean” is scientifically valid. Or if this is another situation like when they banned plastic drinking straws based on the hypothesis that they choke sea turtles to death, the whole foundation of which was a classroom assignment written by a 3rd grader.
Besides, if it was really one large patch, it would be relatively easy to clean it up.
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Yet, no environmentalists are calling for that to happen.
Feel free to check out the images I posted below. It’s there. It’s real. As I said in another comment, I used it as an example BECAUSE it’s a real thing people can see and touch, rather than something vacuous like climate change or global warming. I am stunned at how many people think it isn’t real.
I just posted a bunch of links to images. Have a look. You can Google it yourself. It is there.
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So here’s the thing. I mentioned that garbage patch BECAUSE it’s a real thing. It’s a fact. There are photographs. People can go there and touch it. It isn’t up for debate, because it’s a real thing. Climate change, that’s not so easy to point at. There’s no one thing, no photos, no physical THING. But the garbage patch is there. I find it interesting that you say it isn’t.
Photos:
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-pacific-garbage-patch/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottsnowden/2019/05/30/300-mile-swim-through-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch-will-collect-data-on-plastic-pollution/?sh=2afb7625489f
https://mkquill.com/976/world-news/cleaning-of-the-pacific-garbage-patch/
https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2020/11/27/great-pacific-garbage-patch
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Feel free to Google “pacific garbage patch” for literally a zillion more images. As to why Google Maps doesn’t show it, it’s because it moves. Google Maps has static photos. *shrug*
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But yes, I agree whole heartedly that climate change is not the bugaboo that the media wants us to believe in. As I mentioned in another comment, we’re human; we’ll adapt. We always do.
Koonin is an interesting guy. I’m currently trying to read his book “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters”. Unfortunately, to actually understand and comprehend what he’s talking about, I have to be in a very awake state, and sadly, the only time I get to really read lately is late at night when I’m tired.
I know he’s pointed out in that book how bad the media is in reporting the actual reports. Essentially, the media focuses on the absolute worst cases possible, when the reports say those worst cases are the least likely possibility and becoming even less likely as time goes on.
I agree totally. Do what you can as an individual. Wasting resources is bad, whether there is a climate crisis or not.
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What I disagree totally with is sweeping government action based on questionable science. For every scientist that says man is contributing to climate change, there is another that says the opposite. But, for whatever reason, the politicians only listen to one side of that debate. (Curiously, it always seems to be the side the gives more power to the government. Weird.)
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My community recently instituted a “single use plastic grocery bag” ban. No stores, regardless of type are allowed to provide “T-shirt” bags to their customers. They are doing this to reduce the plastics that are found in our oceans.
I took a look around my local grocery store. Everything I get from the deli counter is in a single use plastic bag, every bit of produce is placed in a single use plastic bag. Most ever dry item on shelves are in single use plastic bags, including the boxed stuff. (the product is typically inside a plastic liner bag.) The dairy section is plastic cartons, or the cardboard cartons are plastic lined. And, the meat section is all plastic bagged or wrapped. But, we are going to save the planet by forcing everyone to use a re-usable plastic/canvas bag.
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Is there a word in the dictionary for an action that is so meaningless and futile? Or does ‘stupid’ suffice?
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I really do not see any other widespread sweeping government policy they are trying to implement that is much more logically thought out.
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One good thing that is coming out of this climate change cultism is that people are becoming more aware of waste, and doing stuff to minimize it. I can support that.
Here in maine and probably in other area’s back in the 90s it was “use this plastic bag for your grocery purchase instead of paper bags so we can SAVE THE TREES”… now its ZOMG PLASTIC IS KILLING EVERYTHING!!! Use this paper bag or reuseable bags cause eeewww plastic icky!! And some ares give you a paper straw in your 36 oz PLASTIC iced coffee…
Stupid is alive and growing….
I am reminded of the story, unconfirmed by me, of the “Environmental Group” that took several victory laps over forcing McDonald’s to change from their foam containers to paper.
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The foam containers were collected and recycled. McDonald’s had some of the best recycling programs at the time. Much of the plastic they used for other products came from the plastics and foam they recycled.
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The “new” containers were of a waxed paper type. Turns out that they last a very long time, don’t biodegrade well and are nearly impossible to recycle.
Funny thing about those “single-use plastic grocery bags”: They are designed and formulated to be used TWICE. Once as a grocery bag, and again as a trash bin liner. If left outside and exposed to the elements, they break down to nothing faster than a discarded banana peel.
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And the re-usable grocery bags? The amount of cotton that goes into them, the heavy machinery (and attendant CO2 emissions) required to harvest and refine that cotton, and the fact that they have to be used hundreds or thousands of times to make up for that added cost of production — and they simply don’t last that long — you can actually make a solid argument that the “single-use” plastic bags are the better choice, both for the economic AND environmental impacts.
Don’t forget you need to wash them occasionally. Or, depending on how much of what you buy leaks, seeps, spills or evanesces, more than occasionally.
If/when you wash them, wash by hand. They tend to fall apart in the spin cycle.
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Ask me how I know. 😉
Just adding to the “futile and meaningless” factor.
Unfortunately, all too much of the “green” movement is futile and meaningless. But, it makes them feel good.
Don’t get me started on the grocery bag thing. If every other product in the store is in plastic, the bags are the least of our worries. Now, I admit I like paper bags in the winter, because I use them as fire starter, but I use plastic grocery bags for a number of things. Each one gets used several times before going into the garbage itself. Bah.
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On the other hand, AWA and I were talking about the 80s when they started recycling soda cans. They made it worth people’s while to return them by giving people a nickel or dime for each one. Some people fought it, but in the end, it turned out to be a pretty good thing. Not only did it help clean up the roadways and streets, it also cost less, because places didn’t have to pay for crews to clean up as much. Soda cans are one of the things we actually do a pretty good job of recycling (plastics, not so much, but that’s for another day).
At one point there was “global warming”. That had some slight resemblance to science because it’s falsifyable: if it doesn’t get warmer subsequently, the theory is disproven (falsified). So the high priests switched to “climate change”. That’s not science because it isn’t falsifyable; there is no scenario that can be described in which “climate change” is shown to be false. Well, not unless the atmosphere disappears entirely and climate no longer exists. :-() In other words, “climate change” is a religion — a cult — because it demands belief without proof.
A more concrete comment: when you see warmists talk about the need to keep the world from warming up, the wording generally is “n degrees compared to pre-industrial levels”. That sounds nice but it’s a misleading wording. When you dig deeper, the definition of “pre-industrial” generally is “1850”. And that is significant.
There is a nice data set, published by NOAA, called GISP2 — a record of temperature in central Greenland going back 50,000 years. It’s on the net. Or at least was; I haven’t checked if it has been canceled yet. A key thing it shows is continuous variation throughout that period. Yes, there is the ice age from the start of the data until about 8000 BC, then a sudden warming to roughly present-day levels. But in both sections, there is a lot of fluctuation, a bit more during the ice age than after. And in particular, 1850 is the coldest level since 6000 BC, essentially tied with 1760. So it’s not surprising that outlier would be the reference chosen by the warmism high shamans. By contrast, 1000 AD (the era of Viking settlement on Greenland) was about a half degree warmer than today, and in the days of Julius Caesar it was another half degree warmer still. And warmer still around 1200 BC.
Climate change? Meh. Climate change has existed, and will exist, as long as climate exists. Ask any dinosaur.
Roman vineyards in Britain? Hmm.
I largely agree, individual action is the only way to actually do anything and see any tangible results. Unfortunately many of our recycling and green systems are simply NIMBY proxies where the material is shipped off to a third world hell hole to be disposed of as cheaply as possible with not care for the local people, animals, or environment at large. That is one area where there is potential for a structural and governmental solution can help. Unfortunately I don’t have any faith it won’t be fucked up by said gov. Biggest change we can make is get people out of the NIMBY mindset so they can actually shame these limousine liberals with some substance behind them. Actually holding corporations, gov entities, and other systems would go quite the ways as well.
Climate change and global warming has truly had an affect of the entire globe. The promise in the following passage gives me hope… Isaiah 35:1
The wilderness and the parched land will exult,a
And the desert plain will be joyful and blossom as the saffron.