Worth reading.. aving opined on the climate change saga on several pages over the last couple days I am opting to not spend the rest of the week repeating myself and am just sticking to my own page. If youre interested in the topic read on, if not there are cat pics and laughing babies galore so scroll on. To sidestep the narrative I dont watch Fox News, I have never voted for a republican, and I have written propaganda on occasion and so am not easily swayed by that produced by others. I have however been in the prediction business for almost 20 years. Not easy, and I dont call myself an expert because there is no such thing as a prediction expert. For years I was among a very few surveyed by Bloomberg for analyst estimates on US crop production, where my opinion averaged with the others would form the consensus estimate used by the industry. They had no problem calling me an expert, among the many thousands of colleagues in the field they chose me among them so I am at least an authority on modeling and macro analysis. In 2000 and 2001 I was involved with carbon credit trading and specifically with Cantor Fitzgerald, at the time the largest environmental brokerage service in the world. So to start there, rest assured there is an obscene amount of profit in the climate change business. Its about equal to the oil company side of the debate because at the time, as now, the objective was to reallocate as much of their revenue to carbon trading as possible. Cantors lobbyists were writing the legislation to have the US sign the Kyoto Protocol and were making headway in congress to that end. The people I dealt with at Cantor were killed when the first plane went straight into their offices on 9/11. Carlton Bartels and his staff. All interest in the carbon neutral world dissipated overnight and war mobilization took over, and has more or less been so ever since. This engendered some conspiracy theories of my own at the time. One of the scientists in their employ whom I wont name because he is still at it, testified before congress that year. I had the opportunity to sit down with him in his office. We went over charts and data for hours, the wintertime spike in northern hemisphere co2 emissions, the models and projections. His testimony boiled down to the fact that if carbon sequestration didnt begin immediately at 100% of fossil fuel combustion, the earth would be virtually unrecognizable in ten years. Cantor estimated revenues from carbon credit trading in the trillions of dollars back then, if they could get the US to commit to a long term carbon offset program. This is all profit, as a carbon credit can be issued against a standing forest or a swamp in a third world country. Its monetizing nature. You certify the credit and sell it to a fossil fuel user. Something I was not against at the time and am not necessarily against now if its done right. The profits derived from the fossil fuel industry are equally obscene but they have to produce something and deliver it to consumers. Not so with the carbon market. I doubt 1 in 100 climate change advocates understand the carbon market, or the money involved. That the oil profits are trotted out routinely with the absence of reference to carbon trading is proof positive of this. It is not insignificant, it is trillions. It is trillions that will mostly be allocated to companies who can secure insider deals on manufacturing and trading carbon credits. Having this background, and having paid more attention to global trends in agriculture, geopolitics, and macroeconomics than most people alive ever since, I am neither asleep nor unaware, nor hoodwinked by anyone on this issue. For the science is settled crowd. Here is how science works. A hypothesis is formed. That hypothesis is tested. Invariably one forms predictions in the process of testing a hypothesis. If the predictions are validated, it is strong evidence of a valid hypothesis. If the predictions do not occur, it is strong evidence that your hypothesis is flawed. To date, more than 20 years into the hypothesis with endless dire warnings of apocalyptic doom from politicians who own carbon trading businesses and have sold their constituency on the notion they are saving the world, NONE of their predictions have come true. The predictions that have come true, those by deniers predicting this would amount to nothing, have proven correct. Yes, only for about twenty of the hundred years the scientists have allocated themselves to be correct. This does not negate the wrongness of their shorter term predictions. Thus science is not on the side of climate change. Prediction is not a science. And scientists should know this. Its in the basic lesson material. As a professional analyst who must predict many things using many models, this is the end of the debate for me. The rest is self serving politics and greed, on both sides of the fence. If the next twenty years of predictions prove more accurate it still fails, because if their models were legit they would not have been entirely wrong for the last twenty. Science were it being intellectually honest would acknowledge this as well. Instead they fabricate something called scientific consensus. This is an oxymoron. Copernicus didnt need a consensus, nor Einstein. There is no such thing as a scientific consensus. Truth does not require your belief to remain true. Thats what makes it truth. There is what I did for Bloomberg- which is analyst consensus estimates. This is what a scientific consensus, is if you rebrand it. But this is not science nor could any serious minded person declare it as such. I usually know about 80% of the way towards the stated estimate being realized if I was close or dead on or dead wrong. All three happen. Because there are always unknown variables in the future. There is no way I could say with a shred of legitimacy that my model of the future has a 95% chance of being correct. Not unless I had maybe a thousand samples to have tested it against with that rate of accuracy, and even this is nothing like casino odds where the probability is already known. Such odds are the only place that such a statement has any scientific validity at all. Its just a sort-of-clever lie. Nonetheless we have a 95% scientific consensus trotted out by the media to shame the unbelievers. This comes from the IPCC. This is statistically conjured horse shit, predicated on the false position that prediction is science. It also assumes somehow that if the 95% probability of AGW is in fact true, then all the ramifications predicted are also true. More horse shit. There is no such equation in science. There are better names for it than horse shit, logical fallacy is a good place to start. Science is not capable of making such predictions. They cant predict the stock market next week, or hurricane season this year, or earthquakes or weather two weeks from now. The polar icecaps are not melting. Research it. Antarctic Ice is the highest it has ever been for the short time we have records for. 2014 extant minimum for the arctic is relatively low, but much higher than the 2012 minimum. The maximum has barely budged. Good data goes back to 1981, this year will be the sixth smallest extant, as trends go this data set is meaningless but what is clear is nothing dire is occurring. By global warming science the polar ice caps should already be gone. Look it up. The sea levels are maybe rising if you rely on the data available, this is not anomalous to history. It would be anomalous to history if the sea level werent changing. Most of history it has changed much more rapidly than it has since civilization began. 120,000 years ago it was twenty feet higher than today. Absent humans there is no reason at all to expect this level not to be reached again. Extreme weather has not materialized. We have had abnormally low hurricane activity in the Atlantic for most of the last ten years. With a month to go in 2014 we have had one of the quietest on record. There is now an unpredicted 19 year pause in temperature rise, and the settled science that failed to predict this is now furiously making new settled science to explain it and assure you it is temporary. Spend some time learning about the pacific decadal oscillation and how that lines up with the previous warming, cooling, and pause if you want to know more about that. The northern hemisphere just concluded its most abundant growing season ever. Global grain supplies are higher than they have been since 1988, with 2 billion more people at the trough. Farmer bins across the country are literally overflowing. Increased co2 may be responsible for this to a small degree as it is plant food. This is not discussed outside of my arcane circles because its not negative and doomish. Instead the focus is shifted to a tiny part of the world called California where its hot and dry and this is held up as obvious proof to anyone not brainwashed by right wing oil interests or whatever that its all over but the frying. Never mind that California has had 100+ year droughts in recent history, that this is why those reservoirs now half empty, those artificial man-made reservoirs created to serve water to places where it has historically not been available, look the way they do. Because it has mostly been a desert for most of ever. Am I 100% sure that man made climate change is bunk? Nope. I wont be sure of that for about 80 more years. By which time all fossil fuels except coal and the remnants of the natural gas will have been burned up by 7,8,10 billion consumers. A fact that will drastically reduce annual carbon emissions by the way. All I can say is Ive been listening to the science for about two decades and none of it has panned out. The changes we have seen are normal, as far as we have data for. Above all the fact we have about 130 years of half decent data in which to base 100 years of prediction on is as sketchy as it gets to begin with. Science is useful but it is not omniscient. The only reason this whole schtick hasnt been tossed is people have very short memories, a general ignorance of history, and there is a political agenda to push. What I end up with beyond that is the often raised challenge turned meme of what if it turns out that none if this true and we go ahead with fixing it and it turns out we clean up the world and make everything better for no good reason? Its obviously still a good thing, right? No. Not unless youre okay with murdering a lot of people. And destroying societies and rendering widespread poverty and shifting the ecological damage without really doing anything useful. Because that is what is on the table now. That is the big idea for big picture climate change mitigation. Your intentions are great. Your solutions are profoundly stupid and murderous on grand scale. I was a grain analyst in 2005 when Bush passed the energy policy act that mandated gradual increase in biofuels in the national fleet. Ethanol for every gas tank. More every year. At the time corn was $1.80 a bushel. It went to $7 a bushel and if not for *perfect* weather in the northern hemisphere this year and most of last year it would probably be that high still or higher. Corn is the largest crop in America. About 95 million acres planted this year. Vastly more arable land allocated here than any other crop, or most other crops combined, with soybeans a very distant second. As of now around 40% of the corn crop is distilled into ethanol and set ablaze in your gas tank. Consequences... $5 ground beef. Livestock is grain fed. Record high food prices despite record high production as tens of millions of the acres of the worlds best farmland are not producing food but fuel. Cant afford it? Get food stamps, plenty of taxpayer money to go around. Cant afford it and you live in Haiti? Tough shit. Starve or eat sand, we have kids to get to soccer practice in our 10% Green fueled suburbans. Its for the environment, that youre priced out of eating food. So its good! But it isnt just garden variety corn. Its stover, Monsantos finest GMO handcrafted in the frankenlab for better use as a fuel. Pretty much every ounce of it. Irony being a Venn diagram of those pretending to be opposed to Monsanto and those who march for climate change is just one perfect circle. A major reason so many Monsanto execs end up in the federal government is to maintain their biofuel subsidies. Inconvenient truth, Monsanto is in your gas tank. Remember that next time youre filling up on the way to a march. And the sand eating Haitian kids. Because its 10% green! Last note on the corn, most of it is not irrigated but as huge as the crop is, what is irrigated comes out of aquifers in the Midwest. These and nearly every other aquifer in the country will bleed dry in the next 50 years. At least 25% of sea level rise is attributed directly to underground aquifers being pumped out into the ocean. Per USGS data. Nothing about that on the carbon agenda, strangely. Add irreplaceable water to the oil based fertilizer to the Monsanto corn seed trucked in and the corn trucked out, the herbicides and pesticides and loss of food production, and it is really obscene. Because climate change though. Thats what youre backing. What you have been backing for ten years. Genius. Shutting all the coal fired power plants is a lot less opaque, that will just double or triple the electricity bills for everyone, as will cap and trade eventually. Everyone can afford that though. Or freeze to death in the dark. Tough shut, Its for a good cause. Carbon and we have this model you know. So, why I care. Because I am an environmentalist. Because I know we are trashing the planet. Because I know our version of civilization is in the twilight hours for lack of resources left to plunder and there is no alternative but to bag the whole globalization scheme and go back to the wilderness, but with wi-fi. Or something like that. You arent being environmentally conscious supporting climate change action, because you have no cognizance of what the actions to be taken actually do. You are being duped, conned into demanding the tripling of your food costs, the revocation of food to the worlds desperately poor, quadrupling your gas and power costs, impoverishing your own communities, redistributing all of that extra money to a few giant companies in bed with bureaucrats and politicians, while the actual massive problems we face as a civilization are entirely ignored and the illusion that status quo globalization can be sustained as long as we price ration the basic staples required to subsist, and pretending we are doing good while impoverishing billions and killing millions, all the while conspicuously not creating sustainable communities and getting off the global grid. Theres no profit in that. So yeah I said it. This emperor wears no clothes. I know, cognitive dissonance will set in, who wants John Stewart calling you an idiot three times a week. Forgetting or ignoring any truth to what I have said here about climate change, assuming it is all real and the science is actually right but just wrong by 30 or 40 years. Carbon is the least of our problems. It is a canard to avoid the hard decisions, overpopulation, the eventual failure of industrial farming, and globally sourced energy and food and thing dependence, and the absolute necessity of reorganizing to a sustainable existence. This starts in your neighborhood and your house. Have a place to go before you set fire to the bridge you are standing on. If you think Al Gore and the big thinkers have a plan for that you have only yourself to blame when the lights go out. Their plans dont include you. And now heres Terence with the weather... ~Jonah Ford
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 18:36:38 +0000
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