GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Stefan Molyneux on “Climate Change”

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I find Molyneux’s video-enlarged, ranting bald head a bit creepy. But his content is often brilliant. I recently listened to this one from 2015.

Molyneux proposes the following thought experiment:

  1. Suppose stockbrokers (or bankers or politicians or oil company CEOs – whomever you view as corruptible) are in charge of calculating some important measure of the world.
  2. Let’s call it the Economy Rate (ER). It could go up or down. The stockbrokers fudge and massage the ER data, as they see fit.
  3. First, the stockbrokers say “The ER is so important! and it’s going DOWN! That’s bad! Give us tens of billions of taxpayer money, and we’ll watch it and figure out what to do.”
  4. But over the years, the ER rises. The stockbrokers say “The ER is so important! and it’s going UP! That’s bad! Give us tens of billions of taxpayer money, and we’ll watch it and figure out what to do.”
  5. But then the ER stops going up. The stockbrokers say “The ER is so important! and it could go UP OR DOWN! With unpredictable pauses! That’s bad! Give us tens of billions of taxpayer money, and we’ll watch it and figure out what to do.”

At what point do you begin to see that the stockbrokers are taking you, in a racket?

  • Point 1 is climate scientists – who are a huge, publicly-funded industry. Each scientist profits (as wage/salary payments, benefits, etc.) from the grants she receives.
  • Point 2 is the world average temperature, which climate scientists derive from data that they themselves fudge and massage.
  • Point 3 is the 1970s, when climate scientists gave alarming predictions of a New Ice Age.
  • Point 4 is the 1980s to the 2000s, when their monster was Global Warming. The famous “hockey stick” upward graph.
  • Point 5 is recent years, when the “hockey stick” graph failed and they switched it to Climate Change – in whatever direction.

Do you believe that climate scientists are less corruptible than stockbrokers (or bankers or politicians or oil company CEOs)? That they’re somehow more objective and noble?

I don’t. You who do (lefties) have a RELIGIOUS FAITH in climate scientists, that you’re not admitting. And it’s exactly what climate scientists want you to have.

Your delusional, gullible faith is how they keep their tens of billions of taxpayer dollars coming. And of course they would have a “consensus” that they are objective and noble and deserve it and should be listened to and those dollars should keep coming. Of course they would.

Happy Earth Day!

Climate change is real

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…It’s just probably not man-made.

Bruce re-tweeted this graphic from Sam Thiessen’s stream. I don’t necessarily agree with its exact argument about volcanism. But it is a nifty reminder that we’ve always had climate swings – and our latest swing is within the natural norms:

swings in global temperatures, 2500 BC to 2007 AD

From what I understand (feel free to update me/everyone in the comments), the man-made CO2 increases are insufficient to explain any of these swings, and recent atmospheric measurements show a distinct *lack* of effects or “signature” that should come from any CO2 Greenhouse effect.

Given that, and given the normality of global climate change, there is precious little reason to blame it on humankind. The major advocates of Blaming Man are people with axes to grind: they want to keep getting their multi-billions of research & conference grants, they want their companies to be given government subsidies, they want world socialism, etc.

Last Week in Global Warming

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In case you missed these (as I had):

1) Climate scientist Roy W. Spencer‘s takedown of the Global Warming ‘Nazis’:

On February 20th, the noted meteorologist, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, fed up with being called a “denier” of global warming, posted a commentary on his blog titled “Time to push back against the global warming Nazis.”

“When politicians and scientists started calling people like me ‘deniers’, they crossed the line. They are still doing it,” said Dr. Spencer. “They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.” The Holocaust happened, but global warming’s latest natural cycle ended about 17 years ago and, as a lot of people have noticed, it has been getting cold since then.

“Like the Nazis,” said Dr. Spencer, “they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism), which in turn supports their scientific research to support their cause…”

2) Greenpeace co-founder questions ‘Climate Change’ ideology. From Breitbart’s coverage:

Mr Moore, 67, told a U.S. Senate Committee: “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.”

“Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on Earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.”

…”I describe the climate change movement as a combination of an extreme political ideology and a religious cult all rolled into one. It’s a very, very dangerous social phenomenon. It causes them to think they have the right to dictate what we do.”

More from the Washington Times coverage: [Read more…]

The Perspective Gap and Fox News

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My long absence from GayPatriot, has been brought on by a few factors, chief among them that I’ve been taking some classes in the evenings and haven’t had much time for blogging, and what little time I have had to spare has been consumed by more going on socially than in the recent past.  But beyond that, there has been my general sense of what I wrote about in this post, and called either Obamalaise or Obamanomie, that feeling of depression and listlessness that comes when I consider the sad state of a country that elected Obama not once, but twice and seems more interested in bread and circuses than in seeking actual, workable solutions to the difficult problems that face our country.

Naturally the online leftist rag Salon can’t understand why anyone would feel upset or bothered by the direction of the country in the era of the glorious Obama, and so one of its contributors, Edwin Lyngar, has written a laughable piece about “elderly white rage” which places the blame on that favorite bogeyman of the contemporary left, Fox News.   I learned of the article when various liberals and leftists I know–including one I’ve taken to calling a MINO (a moderate in name only)–linked to it on social media.  I just glanced past it until one of them approvingly quoted one of the more ridiculous passages from the article.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I am not elderly, nor am I viewer of Fox News.   I mostly avoid the whole TV news genre, preferring to get my information from other sources.  The full title of the article reads: “I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria.”  The author, who describes himself as “overeducated in the humanities” with both an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University (not exactly a bastion of conservative thinkers) and an MA in Writing from the University of Nevada, Reno unwittingly demonstrates the way shallow generalizations count as somehow being deep thought by those who advocate a politically correct perspective.

As I don’t care to be guilty of the same intellectual offense, I’d like to highlight and  unpack a few of the article’s more ridiculous claims and observations.  Let’s start with the opening paragraph:

Old, white, wrinkled and angry, they are slipping from polite society in alarming numbers. We’re losing much of a generation.  They often sport hats or other clothing, some marking their status as veterans, Tea Partyers or “patriots” of some kind or another. They have yellow flags, bumper stickers and an unquenchable rage. They used to be the brave men and women who took on America’s challenges, tackling the ’60s, the Cold War and the Reagan years — but now many are terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare and a very moderate Democrat in the White House.

Of course GayPatriot readers can see what he’s doing there, but just for the sake of argument, let’s illustrate that he opens by offering a caricature and a generalization about elderly Fox News viewers, conflates Fox News viewers with the Tea Party, accuses them of being filled with “rage,” and then ends by trying to ridicule them as being “terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare and a very moderate Democrat in the White House.”  Say what?  That last clause is contains so many misrepresentations and non-sequiturs that it is really rather stunning.  Barack Obama is only a moderate Democrat if you are so far to the left already that you can’t see how far his administration has shifted the political status quo towards statist goals.  And just because Obamacare was given the Orwellian title “the Affordable Care Act,” doesn’t mean it has anything to do with making healthcare more affordable.  Far from it, just ask the many people dropped from insurance who find that their health insurance costs have gone up and their deductibles are now much higher than they were previously.  Even those who haven’t had to change insurance are getting less for more costs.

The article continues with an anecdote about the author’s father and an exchange where the writer tells him he shouldn’t watch Fox News:

I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.

When I finally pulled the handle for Obama in 2012, my father could not believe how far I’d fallen. I have avoided talking politics with him as much as possible ever since. Last week, I invited him to my house for dinner with the express purpose of talking about po

[Read more…]