The Guardian’s Relentless Climate Zigzaggerations
At first I thought I would merely compile a sequence of climateballs from the Guardian. But how about a bit of analysis too? So I offer, for your delectation, a new word, zigzaggeration.
Zigzaggeration, n. = a compound of zigzag and exaggeration.
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“The fossil-fuel industry cannot be allowed to continue making us sick, shortening our lives and destroying the planet.”
Would this be the life shortening Bernie is talking about?
The fossil fuel industry makes us comfortable.
The life shortening stuff comes from overengineered food products, over medication, stress caused in part by over taxation and over regulation which mean that as our societies get richer somehow it gets more and more difficult for a working man to buy a home drive a car or raise a family.
I think the ‘fossil fuel’ (I prefer the term ‘hydrocarbon’) industry does a lot more for us than keep us comfortable. It underpins huge swathes of other industry which makes us better fed, better protected and yes, better educated as we don’t need to send kids into the fields for barely-subsistence level farming.
Losing hydrocarbon industry will be a disaster if we let it happen. Fortunately many parts of the world say one thing and do another.
The term “fossil fuel” is a recent, deliberately pejorative term to undermine a long standing industry that has been, and still is, beneficial to us all. Anyway, hydrocarbon assets are nature’s way of long term storage of solar energy. While it’s useful to use more modern techniques to capture some of it in real time (light, wind, tidal flow), why not use some of the long term fuel in the bank as well?
Yes. Let’s not waste it but we should use it.
Thanks for these graphs. If you trace the life expectancy graph back to the 19th century, sanitation and piped water were the quantum leaps of the era.
Sanitation, mains electricity and hyrdrocarbons – the holy trinity of the modern world that societies merely take for granted (until whoops, the smarty pants meter’s cut out…).
Engineers, plumbers and electricians are the true guardians of modern civilisation.
And remember, these improvements in life quality have progressed even as the world’s human population has increased massively as well .
Cue honourable mention for chemistry – early 1900s Haber-Bosch process for manufacture of ammonia, provenance of fertiliser that’s fed a world populace quadrupled to 8 billion in the last hundred years.
Yes. Fertiliser producer’s plan to shut UK’s largest ammonia plant triggers agriculture and food security concerns so next we’ll have to import it. Genius.
The world’s money lenders refuse to lend for projects to exploit hydrocarbons. This hinders the progress of less well developed countries. It’s not ‘fossil fuel industry’ which is shortening lives, It’s Green activism which is preventing lives being extended.
Institutionalised and state-sponsored collective insanity. To mitigate against the imagined hobgoblin, governments and institutions enact policies that risk unleashing real-life demons.
Betrayal of unspoken hippocratic oath of government, in other words treason.
Old-school journalist H. L. Mencken summed it all up this time last century:
“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.”
The Guardian is merely the left’s flunkey. Dr Alexander’s namesake, physicist Dr Ralph Alexander, has collated newspaper reports of the extreme weather of that era…
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2024/03/History-Weather-Extremes.pdf
“…This report refutes the popular but mistaken belief that today’s weather extremes are more common and more intense because of climate change, by examining the history of extreme weather events over the past century or so.”
Obligatory reading for Guardian fans.
Many thanks for the link.
The Guardian used to be a serious investigative newspaper. It actually published several articles criticising NATO expansion particularly as regards Ukraine.
That stopped about 10 years ago when it upset TRPTB by publishing some Snowden files. Big mistake – the hard drives were destroyed due to threats from HMG.
Only the BBC can rival it for brainwashing propaganda.
It is now run by Head Girls and read only by teachers.
I used to buy printed ones thirty odd years ago (sometimes known as the Grauniad in Linotype days), but never read it at all now.
Just followed the link to the Rupert Read piece. 😂😂 It looks like he’s actually given up on his ‘decarbonised Utopia’ and decided to just do some sensible adaptation to the weather, while not giving up on his hair shirt just yet, cos it is still of course ‘all our fault’.
Well, I’d love to take some of the credit but I don’t think I can. Other people – ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ made it possible.
Rupert Read, founder of XR, has written a piece.
Ultimate as in ‘last ever’? Oh good.
Sadly, I don’t think he meant it that way.
If you really believed this then surely you would argue for other energy production methods? And since renewables are not reliable or sufficient you would expect arguments to ramp up nuclear power production. If not, why not?
In my opinion the Guardian is a comic for the Pearl Clutchers, but without the illustrations. Or possibly a Propaganda Pamphlet.
My interest in Climate Change began around 2013, trolling the comments section (below the line) on their daily climate-doom articles. Happy days, which only ended when they started censoring some of my comments.
Dana Nuccitelli was writing stuff at that time, moonlighting from a real job, now he is a full time propagandist for The Citizen Climate Lobby.
Zigzaggeration! That’s my word of the day!
Word to Guterres – there’s no deadly heat in my kitchen where the little temp indicator issued by the power company is telling me I am at risk of hypothermia. [Sarcasm alert] I am so grateful that the state told me how I could make things less unpleasant by wearing warm clothes blah blah blah. Pass the sick bucket…..
I hope those old ladies in Switzerland are not getting too hot, or they might take legal action!
” we emit 513 kg on Christmas Day.”
Maybe we can get Britain’s strongest man to see if he can Deadlift it.
I know this doesn’t prove things one way or another, but The Light Issue 51 do two whole pages listing geoengineering patents from 1891 — 2023. A huge list so I will just randomly select one as an example…..Fluidized Particle Dispenser cloud seeding. 4362271. Dec 7th 1982.
The Guardian’s Climate Whoppers
It’s been another grand week for climate scare hysteria in large parts of the media: massive heatwaves at both poles – what a coincidence – and another mass coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Where, we might ask, were the equally prominent reports on the recent news that the South Pole had its coldest six-month winter since records began, and coral at the GBR has been growing furiously in recent years, and could be at a near-100 year high?
Largely missing from the latest reports, however, are the important facts that the nearest weather station to the North Pole is 800 kilometres away, the suggested heatwave across eastern Antarctica was the product of a weather forecasting computer model, and the coral ‘mass bleaching’ was spotted from an aircraft.
I think this is the first time I have detected such passion in one of James’ usually sober pieces, but I was particularly struck by the Brosovic comment. That is indeed a lot of reading. Maybe its precision is because there’s a publication that actually lists all those references. Would that the COVID brigade had read – just one book (Cron and Behrens, “Cytokine Storm Syndrome”)!
I wonder whether the debunking of the climate change official narratives would have happened if the COVID crisis had not attracted such a depth of critical analysis. It was another case of computer modelling being passed off as real science. As James points out, you can very simply alter the conclusions to fit the hypothesis by tweaking the model. Let’s get back to real data based science.
Not for the first time, our resident Professor says that what we need is not fact-checking but criticism, by which he means — and has sometimes said — that superannuated old thing, literary criticism. And, by mentioning Dr Johnson, the great 18th century critic, he shows that that’s what he means again, today. Now, that shows him to have an interesting, not to say (something else he likes) complicated, relation to The Daily Sceptic, to which he so regularly contributes and which might, not unfairly, be thought of as, itself, a fact-checking organ, different from the Guardian or BBC only in being more truthful and more accurate. But criticism, of the sort he recommends, is no friendlier towards non-MSM factchecking organs like TDS than MSM ones like the Guardian. Its standard being not so much Free as Best Speech, it is marvellously neutral and, in principle, as ready to find fault with what appears in TDS as what appears anywhere else. Although I have not yet noticed the Professor himself being critical of anything here, I have come across a substack, Reactionary Essays, which does have a current article which not only expresses just our Professor’s preference for criticism over… Read more »