Fifty Years of Apocalyptic Global Warming Predictions and Why People Believe Them, Part 2

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Go to Part 1.

Scientists have known for some time that their predictive models of global warming were at increasing odds with the data. More recently, they have begun to pinpoint some of the faulty assumptions in the models used to make projections (not observations) of global warming. One example of this type of correction is a 2018 article published in the prestigious journal, Science.

Nitrogen availability is a central controller of terrestrial plant growth and, thereby, of the carbon cycle and global climate change. It has been widely assumed that the atmosphere is the main source of terrestrial nitrogen input. Surprisingly, Houlton et al. now show that bedrock is just as large a nitrogen source across major sectors of the global terrestrial environment.

Climate scientists have long known that plants offset some of the effects of climate change by absorbing and storing CO2. But they assumed that the ability to plants to perform this function was limited because the availability of nitrogen in the atmosphere was limited. As an earlier 2003 study published in Science stated, “there will not be enough nitrogen available to sustain the high carbon uptake scenarios.”

But this idea that the only source of nitrogen for plant life came from the air has been refuted in a more recent article, also in Science. Now we know that there are vast storehouses of nitrogen in the planet’s bedrock that plants can also feed on. In light of these findings, Ronald Amundson, a soil biogeochemist at the University of California at Berkeley, told Chemical and Engineering News that “If there is more nitrogen there than expected, then the constraints on plant growth in a high-CO2 world may not be as great as we think.”

With more nitrogen available, plant life might be able to absorb more CO2 than climate scientists have been estimating. This  “has the potential to change all projections related to climate change,” because there could be more carbon storage on land and less in the atmosphere than the models assume.

For interested readers, a series of articles on this topic reveal other evidence of weaknesses in climate models used to predict future warming. These models failed to predict a decade-long pause in global temperatures. Nor have various calamities that were supposed to have occurred by now materialized. And a recent paper published in another prestigious scientific journal, Nature, has also concluded that the planet is less sensitive to increases in CO2 than the computer models assume.

Of course the sky is falling, but maybe not as fast as is being predicted by the left-wing media. Beware of self-serving socialist projections based on outdated computer models, or sometimes just nothing at all. The notorious AOC and her ilk can get away with unprecedented levels of ignorance given the current state of American journalism as long as the errors are in the left direction. But any curious citizen can look back at what previous “experts” claimed was supposed to happen over the past half century and confirm just how erroneous and exaggerated their claims have been all along. Read more

Earth Day, 2019: Fifty Years of Apocalyptic Global Warming Predictions and Why People Believe Them, Part 1

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Two of the most important problems that the so-called Green New Deal will attempt to solve at the cost of incalculable trillions are global warming and its consequences, including drought, famine, floods and massive starvation. You may recall that Obama in his 2015 State of the Union speech declared that the greatest threat facing us was neither terrorism nor ISIS. It wasn’t nuclear weapons in rogue states either. “No challenge  poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” said Obama.

His entire administration including Vice President Joe Biden, and Secretary of State John Kerry, frequently repeated the claim that climate change was the greatest threat facing the world. It was a sentiment Obama stressed again during an Earth Day trip to the Florida Everglades where he said, “This is not a problem for another generation. It has serious implications for the way we live right now”.

More recently, presidential hopefuls like Beto O’Rourke, along with most Democrat candidates, declared their zealous support for the Green New Deal in forecasting that the world will end in 12 years if nothing is done. “This is the final chance, the scientists are absolutely unanimous on this — that we have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis. Not to be melodramatic, but the future of the world depends on us right now here where we are.”

This leads to the question I pose in this brief, data-driven, essay: What kind of track record do the politicians and their experts have in their climate predictions? After all, some of these predictions were made 10, 20 or even 50 years ago. Can’t we now look back at their predictions and begin to hold them accountable?

As others have done, I have chosen to begin with the first Earth Day “Celebration” in 1970. Now who can be against Earth Day? It’s a charming idea, and I have been an enthusiastic supporter since my college days in Ann Arbor, when we celebrated the event on the campus of the University of Michigan.

Here’s what the experts were saying almost a half century ago on Earth Day, 1970:

  1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
    — Harvard biologist George Wald
  1. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,”
    — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
  1. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human
    abitation.”
    — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
  1. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100–200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years. … Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. … [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
    — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
  1. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions …. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
    — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
  1. “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
    — Life magazine
  2. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable. … By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate … that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any. … The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
    — Kenneth Watt

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Black Crime and Its Jewish Apologists

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The English county of Kent has a proud history when it comes to invasions. It’s said that the people of Kent adopted the motto Invicta (“Undefeated”) following the Norman invasion of England, because the spirited resistance of its Anglo-Saxon peasantry deterred the Normans from attempting to gain full control over the east of the county. Once London was reached, the Normans ignored most of East Kent, due mainly to the fact this cohesive community of peasants attacked them at every opportunity. Kent then became a semi-autonomous County Palatine under William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Odo of Bayeux, with special powers otherwise reserved for the unruly counties bordering Wales and Scotland. It’s now almost one thousand years since the brave resistance of the Kentish peasants and, in the interval, something rotten, something deeply diseased, seems to have entered the psyche and culture of this most traditional English county. Just a few days ago, the area once described by Henry VIII as the “Garden of England” became the Mogadishu of England as scores of whooping Africans clashed in vehicles, and poured through the streets with machetes. The fact that blade-wielding Africans now stalk where the all-conquering Normans once feared to tread is just a lesser symptom of the general decline of modern Britain under multiculturalism, and the nation’s ongoing descent into a maelstrom of Black violence and Muslim sexual sadism.

The Garden of England, 2019

According to Merriam-Webster, the phrase “a stab in the dark” refers to “a guess that is based on very little or no information or evidence.” The British mainstream media is currently stabbing in the dark about why there have recently been so many literal stabs in the dark – because England, and London in particular, is currently experiencing another of its spasmodic outbreaks of what has been euphemistically called “knife crime.” “Knife crime” in Britain, like “gun crime” in the United States, is a phrase loaded with a racial meaning that everyone strenuously avoids admitting the existence of. According to the BBC, out of 44 British police forces that have submitted statistics, 42 have recorded a rise in knife crime since 2011. In London, the national “knife crime” capital, it was found that “young black and minority ethnic teenage boys and men were disproportionately affected, as both victims and perpetrators.” In one of the most horrific incidents of recent weeks, a crazed Ugandan, Jason Kakaire, went on a vicious stabbing spree that saw four apparently random and unprovoked stabbings in 14 hours, including one attack that severed the spinal column of one on the victims, resulting in permanent paralysis. You will search in vain for an image of Kakaire, who has been described by the media merely as having “short dark hair, light facial hair, and a grey tracksuit.” Only his last name, almost exclusive to Uganda, gives away the fact these crimes are part of the broader pattern of African violence in the new, vibrant, England.

The media-government-academic rhetorical “stab in the dark” about the causes behind this pattern is multifaceted. Each proposed guess about the causes of Black criminality is linked to the others only via mutual avoidance of “knife crime’s” biological, racial imperatives. Superficial discussions about “Black culture,” gangsta rap, and absent fathers feature to some extent at the fringes of the mainstream, but never in a way that asks why, wherever Blacks come to live, and no matter how much money and support they are given, they invariably and repeatedly regress to the same pattern of broken families, violent crime laced with extreme brutality, primitive gang cultures, dismissal from schools, unemployment, and extremely low socio-economic achievement. Read more

A Philosopher Falls: How Roger Scruton Was Toppled by the Usual Suspects

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This is an anti-Semitic sentence. And so is this. And this one too. How do I know? Because they’re written in English, the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens. Those stale pale males were all anti-Semites, therefore English is an anti-Semitic language and all sentences written in English are implicitly seething with bigotry and hate. QED.

Combatting Corbyn

The logic couldn’t be clearer and many people look forward to the day when it can be deployed against anyone whom the Jewish community disapproves of. For example, Jews in Britain have been trying to topple the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for years. They want a decent politician to take his place, someone who will, like Tony Blair and Theresa May, obey Jewish orders without question and support Israel without limit.

But so far Jews haven’t managed to topple Corbyn. Again and again they’ve produced what is, to them, incontrovertible proof of his anti-Semitism. Dismayingly, ordinary Labour members have refused to accept it. Imagine how much easier it will be when English is declared an inherently anti-Semitic language. Corbyn will instantly be guilty of spewing anti-Jewish hate in countless speeches, media interviews and newspaper columns during his entire political career. He won’t simply be toppled as Labour leader: he’ll be locked up for life as a fully certified anti-Semite.

Defining anti-Semitism as they please

And let’s have no nonsense about Jews and their allies using English themselves. That’s completely irrelevant. As the contrite and humbled leftist Billy Bragg pointed out after he fell from grace with Jews: “I failed to recognise the right of the Jewish community to decide for themselves what does and doesn’t constitute racism [against them]. It’s the Macpherson principle, and I made a very insensitive response to someone’s question that implied that I knew better than the Jewish community about what is and isn’t [anti-Semitic]. … It denied them the right to decide what is a racist attack on their community, and that’s wrong and I apologise for it.”

By “Macpherson principle,” Bragg means the principle set out by the judge Sir William Macpherson in the enquiry into the martyrdom of the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence: “The definition of a ‘racist incident’ will now include incidents categorised in policing terms both as crimes and non-crimes. It will now encompass ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’.” Accordingly, if Jews say something is anti-Semitic, it is anti-Semitic – no ifs, ands or buts. And if Jews choose to say that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic because he speaks English, then no-one should argue with them. If anyone does argue, then that person too is anti-Semitic. It couldn’t be simpler: Jews can define anti-Semitism however they please and against whomsoever they please.

A classic anti-Semitic trope

This brings me to the right-wing philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. In “The Value of Victimhood,” I described how he had been condemned as an anti-Semite in November 2018. After he was appointed as an advisor on architecture to the Conservative government, his leftist enemies went digging for dirt to use against him and uncovered a speech he had made in Hungary some years before. He had criticized George Soros and said that “Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros empire.” Labour MPs like Luciana Berger, a heroine of the Jewish community, declared that Scruton was obviously an anti-Semite. George Soros is Jewish and Scruton had criticized Soros for being powerful and influential. Such criticism is a classic “anti-Semitic trope,” therefore Scruton is an anti-Semite and the truth of Soros’s power and influence is irrelevant. Having deployed this logic, Berger and her allies demanded that Scruton be dismissed from his role serving the Conservative government.

Luciana Berger is denouncing you!

Jews in Britain “overwhelmingly back” that government, but did any Conservative-supporting Jews spring to Scruton’s defence and denounce Berger for her dishonesty? Of course not. Fake accusations of anti-Semitism are standard practice in Jewish culture and no-one wanted to weaken their effect by criticizing Berger. Nor did Scruton criticize her or condemn other Jews for accepting her dishonesty. Instead, he indignantly denied that he was anti-Semitic in any way, thereby accepting the general legitimacy of the charge and merely rejecting its particular application to him. This denial was enough and he managed to maintain his role as advisor. Read more

Thoughts on the Protected Race

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“Know that we have taken into our hand, custody, and protection Leo the Jew our goldsmith and all his affairs. And therefore we command that you keep ward and defend the said Leo and all his affairs, doing no hurt or injury to him.”
 Proclamation of King John of England, 10 Nov. 1199

“My office was created by law and designed to protect the Jewish people throughout the world. Think about that. The world’s greatest power is focused, by law and design, on protecting the Jews.”
 Elan Carr, U.S. State Department Envoy on Anti-Semitism, February 2019

By almost every metric, Jews are the most protected ethnic group on earth. At the frontline of this protection, Jewish institutional security is heavily subsidised by taxpayers throughout the West. In Germany, the government provides an annual stipend of $15 million to the Central Council of Jews. In the UK, the government spends around $20 million annually on both security for Jewish institutions and “Holocaust education” designed to combat “anti-Semitic ideas.” This is in addition to the UK pledging almost $70 million for a new Holocaust memorial designed to achieve the same ends. Hungary has promised $3.4 million to “fight anti-Semitism in Europe,” and Sweden has handed over 2 million kronor for increasing security at Jewish institutions. France has invested $107 million in “fighting anti-Semitism” since 2015. This brings us to a grand total of over $215 million in “protecting Jews” and “fighting anti-Semitism,” and doesn’t even take into account spending in the United States (somewhere between $20 million and $50 million annually for frontline security at Jewish institutions), or the spending of Jews on their own defense (the ADL’s annual budget alone is in the region of $58 million). One gets the distinct and remarkable impression that, globally, diaspora Judaism probably requires something approaching $1 billion simply in order to feel safe.

Jews are protected in other ways. Since mid-2018, resolutions and other legal measures against anti-Semitism have been gathering in pace and increasing in spread. In May 2018, South Carolina became the first US state to pass the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which effectively shuts down speech against Israel on college campuses by requiring  South Carolina’s public institutions of higher education to “take into consideration the [State Department’s] definition of anti-Semitism for purposes of determining whether the alleged practice was motivated by anti-Semitic intent” when “investigating, or deciding whether there has been a violation of a college or university policy prohibiting discriminatory practices on the basis of religion.” In February 2019, President Macron of France announced a “crackdown on anti-Semitism” that would involve dissolving three pro-White organizations, defining anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism, and introducing new laws against “hate speech” targeting Jews on social media. Just a few weeks ago, Florida passed legislation defining anti-Semitism and making it illegal under state law. Tennessee has attempted to pass an Anti-Semitism Awareness Bill, and recently passed a resolution “fighting anti-Semitism” by declaring unequivocal support for Israel. This, of course, follows hot on the heels of the House resolution “condemning anti-Semitism” in the aftermath of Ilhan Omar’s now notorious remarks on the Israel lobby.

There simply isn’t another ethnic group elsewhere on earth that enjoys the same level of financial and legal protections enjoyed by Jews. Of course, the uninformed, when confronted with such a fact, might reply that this level of support is both needed and deserved. According to the received narrative, recent history suggests that Jews are the West’s most vulnerable and victimised group. All of these laws, and all of this funding, is therefore merely a response to an acute need. But recent history has nothing to do with Jewish protection, and nor are these measures responsive to any real immediate threat. In order to gain a full appreciation for what exactly is going on, we need to go much further back in time. Read more

Dragged Across Concrete (2019) and the Art of Cinematic Trolling

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The author writes at Logical Meme and @Logicalmeme.
9125 words

Since the 1960s, there have been sporadic reactions in film against emergent liberal hegemonies in culture. In the early 1970s, when the social changes borne of the countercultural 1960s were, in very short order, becoming the mainstream culture and translating into the disastrous social policies of that era, there were occasional sympathetic depictions from Hollywood which channeled White discontent and a growing White male anxiety — for example, Dirty Harry (1971), The French Connection (1971), Death Wish (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976) — but by the 1990s, articulation of this anxiety (which, as a sociological phenomenon became hardened, not softened, through decades of collective experience) was largely expressed, ironically, through unsympathetically depicted characters — for example, Falling Down (1993) and American History X (1998)[1].

Since this time, the Hollywood filmmaking pipeline has become thematically constricted by a radical surge of political correctness and leftwing, agenda-driven depictions of race and racial conflict. Unspoken rules ensure that any film dealing with race ultimately settles on the side of predictable, leftwing, social justice platitudes. (Various Oscar-winning films of recent years attest to this.) As such, when it comes to subjects such as racial conflict, the effects of mass immigration, or the plight of Whites in America, there is simply no diversity of opinion coming out of Tinseltown. Creatively, this has led to a metastasizing sameness, a bland and boring creative funk, to mainstream films that touch upon such subjects.

In terms of the sociology of filmmaking, the significance of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) was to demonstrate — in stark, jaw-dropping, financial terms — the profound imbalance between the demand for ‘conservative’ films and the sparse supply of such films coming out of a leftwing, Jewish-dominated Hollywood system. Passion was independently produced and distributed by Gibson’s Icon Productions, going on to earn over $600 million worldwide, and currently stands as the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history. (The film also confronted strong rebuke and charges of anti-Semitism from prominent Jewish individuals and organizations.) Gibson’s next film Apocalypto (2006), also produced by Icon Productions, depicted violent, genocidal, tribal conflict in sixteenth century Mexico, and alluded to the eclipse and decline of Mayan civilization, emphasized in the film’s penultimate scene of Spanish Christian conquistadors arriving by ship to the jungle’s coast, with the indigenous locals looking on in awe. (Not surprisingly, Apocalypto was castigated in some quarters for harboring racist and colonialist apologetics.) Read more

When is the final decadence coming? from Sallust and Juvenal to the present (Part 2)

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Juvenal (55 – 138 AD)  

Interpretations of any text, on any social subject and at any time, including the interpretation of the verses by the Roman poet Juvenal, are also the mirror image of the dominant political ideas — the dominant zeitgeist. But who will control the interpreter if many Western dissident thinkers today are forced to follow the pedagogical ukases set up by politicians after the end of World War II? In this respect one could cite Juvenal and his famous verse in the Sixth satire: “Quis custodet ipsos custodes.” Who will guard the guardians?, or better yet who will control the architects of today’s newspeak which is raging in the Western universities and in the mass media?

More or less the same principle of intellectual censorship and self-censorship reigns today in the study and research on different races. Given the liberal-communist dogma of progress and the belief that races are solely a social construct and not a biological fact, and in view of the climate of self-censorship running rampant in high education and in the media, it must not come as a surprise that scholars who analyze differences between human races are often accused of using “ethnic stereotypes.”

Now, the term “stereotype” has become yet another buzzword today among scores of speech sanitizers in Europe. The same procedure of lexical hygienics is taking

place when a biologist tries to explain the role of genetic differences in affecting the trait distributions of races. A geneticist, should he venture into the demystification of egalitarian dogmas about race and heredity is certain to be demonized as racist, fascist, xenophobe or a proverbial  White supremacist. The newspeak used by the media against the evil-thinking intellectuals  has spread by now in all chancelleries and in all European and American universities.

Admittedly, ideas, in this case false ideas, dominate intellectual discourse in the West and not the other way around. In the same vein, the dominant ideas which lie at the System’s foundations, will be a decisive factor in the interpretation of some new genetic discovery, and not the other way around. Recently we saw a witch hunt of the Nobel Prize winner James Watson, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. He was attacked in the mainstream media for his allegedly racist remarks made about ten years ago about Africans, stating that “our social policies are based on the fact that their [Black Africans’] intelligence is the same as ours — where all the testing says not really”[1]. What Watson said is shared by thousands of biologists and geneticists, but for reasons already mentioned, they remain silent. Read more