The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Doom, Gloom and Bad Weather

Posted on | February 3, 2019 | Comments Off on Doom, Gloom and Bad Weather

 

For some reason, I was researching Hannah Gold, who writes for the feminist blog Jezebel, one of the surviving vestiges of the Gawker empire. I say “for some reason,” because I’m not certain what made me start Googling her, although it was probably her Jan. 17 column about Louis CK’s return to live stand-up comedy performances. And by the way, I have decided I am sick and tired of the fifth-grade hall-monitor tattletale mentality that the #MeToo movement has produced. While I’m not a fan of Louis CK, it seems to me that if people are willing to pay money to watch his act, even after the godawful revelations, well, OK.

Why should a social-media mob or squadrons of feminist outrage-peddlers be able to gin up a boycott that prevents Louis CK from performing for audiences who don’t mind his astonishingly creepy sexual behavior? It’s like, I don’t go watch Woody Allen movies — he stopped being funny 40 years ago — but at the same time, I’m not organizing picket lines outside theaters, either. There is something to be said in favor of not giving a damn about every controversy that makes headlines. The problem is that once people get their heads stuck inside the social-media outrage machine, they’re always angry about something, and act like you’re a bad person if you don’t share their anger. But I digress . . .

It was probably Hannah Gold’s column about Louis CK that made me start Googling her on my phone a couple weeks ago, and when I was out to dinner with my podcasting comrade John Hoge last night, I happened to notice that I had 18 tabs open on the phone’s web browser. Three or four of these tabs were about Hannah Gold — her Twitter account, etc. — and I was like, “Why?” So after I got home, I kept looking and came across a blog post Hannah Gold wrote in December: “Happy Friday, the Environment Is Headed ‘Towards the Edge of a Cliff’.”

That was her reaction to a story published in the Guardian:

Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points, according to a study that shows 45% of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another.
The authors said their paper, published in the journal Science, highlights how overstressed and overlapping natural systems are combining to throw up a growing number of unwelcome surprises.
“The risks are greater than assumed because the interactions are more dynamic,” said Juan Rocha of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “The important message is to recognise the wickedness of the problem that humanity faces.” . . .
Co-author Garry Peterson said the tipping of the west Antarctic ice shelf was not on the radar of many scientists 10 years ago, but now there was overwhelming evidence of the risks — including losses of chunks of ice the size of New York — and some studies now suggest the tipping point may have already been passed by the southern ice sheet, which may now be releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
“We’re surprised at the rate of change in the Earth system. So much is happening at the same time and at a faster speed than we would have thought 20 years ago. That’s a real concern,” said Peterson. “We’re heading ever faster towards the edge of a cliff.”

Who is this Garry Peterson fellow?

Garry Peterson is Professor in Environmental Sciences at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. . . .
Garry Peterson has a degree in Systems Design Engineering for the University of Waterloo, Canada and received a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida in 1999. Following post-doctoral positions at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara and the Centre for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, he has been an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of Geography and the McGill School of the Environment at McGill University in Canada since 2003, where he held a Canada Research Chair.

He’s a full-time professional environmental fear-monger, a diligent laborer in the Catastrophic Predictions Factory, whose entire career is based on the premise that we’re hopelessly doomed, and who periodically issues new scientific “proof” of this conclusion. And he’s one of thousands employed in this climate-change apocalypse racket, all of them tirelessly working to manufacture prophecies of ecological disaster. This racket is funded by taxpayers and also by grants from billionaires and tax-exempt foundations, and if you show the slightest skepticism toward their dire warnings — “We’re heading ever faster towards the edge of a cliff” — that makes you an anti-science “climate denialist.”

How could you begin to explain to someone like Hannah Gold why they should stop publicizing this doom-and-gloom nonsense? If you’re my age, you understand that the global warming scare emerged rather suddenly in the 1990s, and that this timing is significant. During the 1980s, the Left had devoted enormous effort to convincing us that Ronald Reagan was a dangerous right-wing warmonger whose policies would lead to the annihilation of human life in a thermonuclear holocaust. That was the not-too-subtle message of War Games (1983), and the Hollywood Left was protesting at Diablo Canyon and also enthusiastically supporting the so-called “Nuclear Freeze” movement:

On Veterans Day in 1981, the Union of Concerned Scientists held teach-ins in 150 schools, and in April of that year, Ground Zero mobilized a million Americans in high schools and colleges to circulate petitions, listen to debates, or watch films. . . .
On June 12, 1982, the largest peace rally in U.S. history was held concurrently with the Second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, with approximately a million participants. . . .
In March 1982, a plan to introduce a Freeze resolution in Congress was announced by Senators Kennedy and Hatfield. The following May, the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives passed a Freeze resolution by a vote of 278 to 149. In 1984, the Freeze was backed by all the major candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination and became part of the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign platform.

Guess how that turned out? Ronald Reagan was re-elected in a landslide in 1984, the Berlin Wall came down five years later, and by 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed into “the ash heap of history.”

Well, what next to justify the Left’s gloom-and-doom hysteria? In 1992, at the so-called U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, global warming theory obtained official sanction as the basis for international “development” planning, and for the past 25 years, they’ve been ratcheting up the fear. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) became part of the curriculum in many schools, so that millennials like Hannah Gold have been indoctrinated in this apocalyptic cult since high school. Academia and basically the entire media establishment are devoted to propagating this fear-based worldview, and dismissing skeptics as anti-science bigots, so that when someone like Garry Peterson issues a new warning — the sky is falling! the end is near! we’re losing “chunks of ice the size of New York”! — this confirms the quasi-religious faith of the climate-change True Believers. You are a bad person is you don’t share their fear, in quite the same way that you’re a bad person if you’re not outraged that people are buying tickets to see Louis CK.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on [Jan. 21] said she thinks that there is an urgency needed in addressing man-made climate change, warning that it will “destroy the planet” in a dozen years if humans do not address the issue, no matter the cost.
During an interview at the MLK Now event in New York City honoring Martin Luther King Jr., Ocasio-Cortez told interviewer Ta-Nehisi Coates that younger Americans are looking for bold solutions to climate change, and are not concerned about the cost.
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’ ” Ocasio-Cortez asked Coates.

Translation: “Economics be damned, we must save the planet!”

If you want to understand why idiots like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez flourish in our current political environment, it’s because there is a sort of Greek chorus constantly applauding their idiot ideas. Everything is now political, including the weather and stand-up comedy. Young women like Hannah Gold are part of the vast communications apparatus that amplifies these messages — #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter and the entire constellation of hashtagged identity-politics themes that reinforce the worldview in which the greatest threats to human survival are perverted comedians and bad weather. However, if you point out the madness of this belief system, you’re a rape apologist and a climate-denialist, who hates women and science (not necessarily in that order).

Anyway, I spent time figuring out who Hannah Gold is, so you don’t have to, and you should be grateful for that, I guess.

 

Category: Feminism, Global Warming

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