- In case you were nostalgic for, say, 8 years to save the planet as announced by then-Prince Charles in, oops, 2009, now-King Charles and the mayor of London launched a “Climate Clock” that will count down the years, days, hours, minutes and yes seconds to 2030 in case your calendar, watch and computer are all broken. (There are 150 of them around the UK in case the problem is widespread.) The idea is that it’s how long we have to limit warming to an arbitrary 1.5°C because if we don’t nothing will happen. Except someone will start another countdown.
- In the UK it’s cloudy with a chance of controversy, as a chart of temperature there since 1933 (a decade old, but just brought to our attention) shows that it correlates almost exactly with… what’s this?... cloud cover not CO2. Wonder why people aren’t rushing to research this exciting possibility? Oh right. Government funding. (Which also went into changing past temperatures there because they weren’t conforming to the narrative.)
- For fans of statistical analysis (hey, where’d everybody go?) we want to share with you a website “Spurious correlations“ that shows, for instance, how tightly swimming pool drownings correlate with Nicolas Cage movies, or the divorce rate in Maine with margarine consumption. Not because real correlations don’t matter, but because you have to be careful about assuming that, say, not serving your partner margarine will improve your marriage. Hey, wait a minute.
- From the complete lack of fun file, by contrast, Statista warns us of “The Hidden Carbon Footprint of the Fashion Industry”. Though to be fair the main complaint is all the people flying around to endless fashion shows, and since most of them are probably trendily alarmist on climate it does hit its target.
- When we read that “Owning tropical fish ‘as bad for the climate as riding a motorbike’” we have a strong impulse to ride a motorcycle to a pet store and buy a goldfish. Must they spoil everything?
- If it were gasoline cars there’d be complaints. But while The Atlantic’s “Weekly Planet” concedes that “E-bikes Are Going to Keep Exploding” and that “For the foreseeable future, more e-bikes will explode, and more people may die”, especially in crowded New York City but in many other places as well, the problem will probably get better within about 50 years. And presumably we’re doing it for the children… or would be if they weren’t often the ones performing slave labour in faraway countries to produce these carbon-saving, life-taking vehicles.
- We have a winner. We quoted real weather forecaster Joe Bastardi on June 19 that it should take about 15 days for media to switch from calling rain relief from drought to blaming flooding on climate especially in the eastern U.S. where he predicted a rainy second half to summer. And on July 12 David Leonhardt of the New York Times’s “The Morning” wrote, particularly of Vermont, that “As climate change has intensified rainstorms, more parts of the U.S. are vulnerable to flooding.”
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19 Jul 2023 | News Roundup
Its as though they don't care that they look like clowns. Circus, 24/7
Not for the first time, I wonder how people can fall for this rubbish. "This rubbish" being the whole sorry mess of data manipulation, outright lies, misrepresentation and hype. By "people" I mean journalists, who, incredibly, seem to have lost the wherewithal to do what journalists are paid to do - get to the truth. So much of the narrative, if not all of it, relies upon a fanatical adherence to voluntary blindness. Why? Given the possibility of even a slight possibility that none of this hype is true, wouldn't a journalist strive to be the first to expose the whole lie? And politicians- how could an otherwise sane individual believe information that is credibly tainted? Have we reached the end of the line? I sometimes think so. So much arrant nonsense is promulgated nowadays, it seems we are failing as a civilisation, quickly.