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And set like cement

23 Oct 2024 | OP ED Watch

There’s an old jibe about how some people’s minds are like concrete: all mixed up and permanently set. Which we thought of when we read in Heatmap about the supposed dilemma of Microsoft, committed to “sustainability” including “low-carbon building materials” but cranking out data centres at a massive pace. Alas those centres are made of concrete and apparently there is such a thing as “zero-emissions concrete” which costs more and is moreover unavailable, yet it is “a product that must become the standard if we are to stop climate change.” So boo Microsoft and a fat lot of good all their virtue-signalling did them. But the point is, do these people really think if Microsoft made cement out of um, uh, whatever has no emissions the weather would no longer vary? Is “stop climate change” a coherent aspiration, however improbable? What can it possibly mean? No decade warmer than another? Or wetter? In one place or everywhere? Or are they just using random words without caring whether they convey any coherent, identifiable idea?

There is much that we could say about the specifics here and little of it is good. For instance you might think that the enterprise must be hopeless if:

“Last year, the company’s indirect emissions rose 31%, primarily due to the construction of new data centers.”

Also, a phrase like “indirect emissions” ought to be a red flag about measurement techniques, including that if they’re Microsoft’s “indirect” emissions they must be someone else’s direct ones. Possibly including the CO2 we exhale while drafting this item using Word. And we wouldn’t want to double-count, now would we?

Then there’s the remedy:

“The tech giant has signed a memorandum of understanding with Sublime Systems, a Massachusetts-based cement startup, saying that it will buy ‘environmental attribute certificates’ from Sublime’s first commercial cement plants. Microsoft will ‘book’ the environmental attributes – the greenness, for lack of a better word – of Sublime’s cement, and ‘claim’ those attributes in its own emissions accounting.”

It is very hard to think of any real-world thing that you can achieve by purchasing someone else’s attribute certificates, from fitness to romance to military success. What can it all even mean?

Which brings us back to the phrase that stopped us like a set of concrete galoshes. “Stop climate change”. And to the lethal words of George Orwell in Politics and the English Language:

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy...”

We have raised before the question of what alarmists think would be the ideal level of atmospheric CO2 and global temperature and how they know. And a follow-on: why do they very much like the weather of, say, 1850 or 1450 or a million BC or the Cretaceous? Now we have to add: Do they think that before “climate change” the weather did not change?

If so they are strikingly ignorant of the history of the planet Earth, which has seen dramatic rises and falls in temperature as well as conditions of every sort for reasons ranging from Milankovitch cycles driven by eccentricities in the Earth’s motion to continental drift. But even taking fairly short periods of time, a century or two, in which those factors are not significant, do they think that it never got stormier or less so, wetter or drier, warmer or colder?

If not then to speak of an aspiration to “stop climate change” is gibberish. The only way to salvage it, or try to, would be to pledge to eliminate human influence on weather, or reduce it to an imperceptible level, on the theory that somehow doing so would mean that it only changed in good ways from now on. But again what would such a thing mean?

That there would be roughly the same number of Atlantic hurricanes every season instead of the wide variability observed over… oh dear. What’s this? The last century and a half? That it would always rain the right amount or at least the same amount each year, facilitating the task of farmers who’ve been dealing not just with the unpredictability but with the variability of precipitation since... oh dear. What’s this? The invention of farming.

If we “stop climate change” will it be impossible for the Holocene to wind down and the glaciers to return? Or will it just be impossible to know what it’s meant to mean, or to get people to use words to communicate ideas on this topic?

6 comments on “And set like cement”

  1. Interestingly, this climate nonsense has potentially created a valuable new technology which is liquid ceramic coatings to seal concrete, in this case the ceramic and the name of the company are the same, both are called zirconia, the coating forms a mechanical bond by intermingling with the concrete so that you have a region of pure ceramic which is impervious to chemical corrosion, a region of concrete and ceramic blend then finally the concrete and steel structure. The primary cause of failure in concrete structures is corrosion as in the Miami condo collapse, this coating is also waterproof (concrete is not) and very, very hard so it will not wear out on road surfaces or other abrasive wear environments. It is expensive when compared to substances like epoxy but it is much, much more durable! Of course this would seriously impact the revenue of public utility contractors!

  2. A modern form of "indulgences" ..... payments in return for forgiveness of sin.
    "However, in the later Middle Ages growth of considerable abuses occurred. Some commissaries sought to extract the maximum amount of money for each indulgence.[45] Professional "pardoners"[5] (quaestores in Latin) – who were sent to collect alms for a specific project – practiced the unrestricted sale of indulgences. Many of these quaestores exceeded official church doctrine, and promised rewards such as salvation from eternal damnation in return for money. With the permission of the church, indulgences also became a way for Catholic rulers to fund expensive projects, such as Crusades and cathedrals, by keeping a significant portion of the money raised from indulgences in their lands.[42] There was a tendency to forge documents declaring that indulgences had been granted.[42] Indulgences grew to extraordinary magnitude, in terms of longevity and breadth of forgiveness." Wikipedia

  3. "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
    H L.Mencken

  4. CDN; Your opening paragraph was totally hilarious, and so true. Concrete brain: mixed up
    and permanently set! ( awesome) I've talked to people who mix-up the facts in their heads, and when you point out the total inconsistencies in their thinking, they refuse to talk to you further.
    (Their minds are permanently set.)
    The questions at the end, just as awesome.
    The rest was just as good.
    "Stop Climate Change "! Ok, , Oommm how do they propose we all do that??? Again, loved some of your comments here too.
    John, you and your staff make some of the BEST
    arguments and statements in these readouts I can't help but smile and at times laugh out loud at the obsurdity of climate alarmist.
    Thanks for the work you all do!

  5. Tom, you are not the only one who not only enjoy the logic, facts, and the statements of scientific reasoning, but also enjoy the sense of humour, irony, and playfulness of these reports as they educate and skewer those concrete minds who are intent on wasting the world‘s resources to the tune of US$275 trillion in a futile attempt to meet the Net Zero by 2050 policy goal. I look forward to my Wednesday morning email from CDN announcing another series of revealing truth in a catchy, playful way.

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