Category Archives: Climate

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Every year, environmental czars and ministers and activists, together with a gaggle of lobbyists and politicians from around the world, mount their private jets and (leaving a haze of contrails behind them) converge on a posh Middle Eastern spa to sip champagne, nibble on caviar and talk about what a good job they are doing saving the environment. The latest United-Nations-sponsored conference called COP28 — because it is the 28th consecutive successful year of the War on Climate Change — convened in Dubai in November. Continue reading →

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They have named this year’s “El Nino” the “Godzilla El Nino” and one publication used this illustration to emphasize how scary it is. But is it as scary as what’s really behind it?

When I was little, and got upset because the thunder was too loud or too close, my mother would reassure me by saying the noise was made by the gods bowling in their celestial floating bowling alley. I don’t know how this was supposed to reassure me. The idea of a bunch of drunks — I had watched people bowling — heaving cannonballs at enormous tenpins over my head was anything but reassuring. But by then I had tagged my mother as a congenital liar who had filled my head with nonsense about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and on and on practically my whole life. So I went to my Dad, who had studied meteorology, and asked him for the real story. He sat me down and for half an hour explained the whole thing to me. I didn’t understand a word. Something about electrons. Discover an amazing selection of Womens Costumes for any occasion. Continue reading →

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These international environmental conferences are hard work, but somebody has to do it, right?

London, Paris, and Dubai — locations in October and November of 2023 of international conferences on global climate change. Signs that at long last, serious attention is being paid to this existential threat to humanity? Not hardly.

 First out of the gate was the gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London in the last week of October. Hosted by the right-wing Canadian psychologist, self-help guru and provocateur Jordan Peterson, the ARC’s inaugural  conference featured a parade of speakers telling a sympathetic audience (including the former speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy) to stop worrying about climate change and learn to love fossil fuels and industrial growth. Continue reading →

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It is nothing less than surreal for those of us who expect an imminent collapse of industrial civilization to see the American public and its political leaders either studiously ignore the rapidly mounting evidence of multiple existential threats, or to react in increasingly lunatic ways. A few examples:

James Hansen — one of the first and most strident alarmists about global warming — has participated in a new study that shows the earth is warming faster than anyone predicted. Earlier studies had projected that the earth would warm by 1.5 degrees Celsius in another decade or so. The new study says it will blow through that level, causing widespread crop failures and severe droughts — in a few years.

Breaking news: psychedelic therapies are proving to be effective in treating acute climate anxiety, a “new and growing area” in psychiatry and psychology. Continue reading →

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[A beach house in Rodanthe, North Carolina succumbs to risings seas. Unthinkable?]

We are faced today with any number of situations that are at first glance incomprehensible, that are so far outside our experience and prior knowledge that they are, in a word, unthinkable. For example:

A recent study examined what would happen in three large Southern cities if a multi-day power blackout occurred during a multi-day heat wave. Such blackouts have doubled in number in the U.S. since 2015, while the number and severity of heat waves has been steadily increasing. If the concurrence occurred in Phoenix, according to the study, half the city’s population, nearly 800,000 people,  would need emergency-room care for heat stroke and heat-related illness. Phoenix has 3,000 emergency-room beds. The study estimates that 12,800 residents of the city would die.

This would be a mass casualty event worse than the deadliest weather event in U.S. history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, in which about 8,000 people died.

12,000 dead in a single city from hot weather? Unthinkable. Continue reading →

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Hurricane Ian, which savaged south Florida last year, was the nation’s second most costly hurricane in history, exceeded only by Katrina. There’s more where that came from.

It’s not just Florida that is being submerged by rising water due to climate change — the entire property-insurance industry in the Gulf Coast states is going under too. Because hurricanes have for years been increasing in number and power, damage claims are overwhelming insurance companies. More than a dozen large regional insurance companies in Florida and Louisiana alone  have recently become insolvent, leaving tens of thousands of people without protection from future damage.  

Most people with claims against bankrupt insurance companies get paid — eventually — because insurance companies have two kinds of insurance against financial failure. One is reinsurance, a policy taken out by an insurance company to cover extraordinarily large claims. The cost of that kind of insurance has been skyrocketing worldwide because of climate change, and is expected to double in Florida this year alone. Continue reading →

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This is not your granddaddy’s Dust Bowl. This is the other day, in the Texas Panhandle.

On Tuesday, the leader of the free world will mount the dais in the U.S. House of Representatives to describe the state of the Union. He will speak of a country recovering from a pandemic, an economy roaring back from near-recession, and he will assure us all that it will soon be 1950 again in America.

Meanwhile, more and more thinkers and writers — and fewer and fewer political “leaders” — are pointing out, often with barely restrained panic, the multitude of growing existential threats rising against not only this country, but the industrialized world. Continue reading →

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She wailed the question to a passing TV helicopter as she struggled down a street in New Orleans, chest-deep in the filthy floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. The memory has stuck to my conscience like a burr to a saddle blanket for all these seventeen years, not only because of the depth of human misery and desperation the question expressed, but because of the assumption behind it: that someone, somewhere, knows what we are supposed to do, and if we could only find out what it is, and do it, or have done it, everything would be all right again.  Continue reading →

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Protesters at an Amsterdam airport attempt to prevent the departure of a fleet of private jets bound for COP27, the annual UN meeting to discuss how to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

COP27 — the United Nations’ celebration of the 27th consecutive successful year in the war on climate change — is wrapping up its second successful week. Some one hundred heads of state and 45,000 delegates from 200 countries flocked (in, among other conveyances, 400 private jet aircraft) to the largest and most luxurious resort and conference center in all of Africa and the Middle East, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (where hotel rooms go for $300 a night and sandwiches for $15). There they lapped up cocktails, feasted, and carped about the wretched state of the world’s climate. 

 This COP has been quite different from the preceding 26. There are so far no ringing resolutions about reducing fossil fuel use, or meeting previously declared goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “The participants,” according to Perspective “are barely trying to give the impression that they are doing anything about the climate catastrophe.” They have apparently abandoned the goal set by the 2015 Paris Treaty on Climate Change — to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And they are reluctant to talk about the fallback position, a limit of 2 degrees C. 

Even Greta Thunberg has given up on the COP shindig, calling it a forum for “greenwashing”. Continue reading →

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he aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers, Florida.

Florida and Hurricane Ian offer yet another example of the truism that profound misunderstanding of how things work, a.k.a. ignorance, can be deadly. The same people who often complain after a hurricane that the forecasters hyped the danger while nothing much bad happened are now caterwauling that the forecasters and the media and the government did not warn them soon enough or strongly enough about Ian. 

Horsefeathers. The National Weather Service issued warnings five days before the storm hit that it posed severe danger to all of southern and central Florida. 

Now here’s the first thing one must understand if one is subject to weather: it is not possible to predict exactly where and when it will rain, or the wind will blow, or the tornado will spin up. When you are trying to predict what will happen in a global cauldron of hot and cold air, constantly rising and sinking, forming huge lateral currents, migrating poleward then toward the equator, absorbing and then shedding moisture, all on a spinning earth, what you get is not an accurate forecast of what is going to happen in any specific place, but an estimate. That is the best you are ever going to get, ever, no matter what new technology appears.  Continue reading →