Coronavirus and Credibility

We have 70k dead as of 3/6/2020 and it's already slowing. The flu kills between 290,000 and 650,000 worldwide yearly, according to the WHO.

The actual "damage" this virus has "caused", which the flu doesn't, is the economic shock of everyone being forced at once to not go out and spend. We have rightly done this to save the weaker among us, at the great expense of the masses' financial future.

It's time to drive a stake through the heart of this climate change alarmism, to kill off this dangerous monster forever. We can do a good job just in this little post.

Everything here is from just common sense or good references.

Overview

There is:

>ALARMIST CLAIM: Extra CO2 from current human activities will soon cause significant extra warming and, thus, climate change, a climate crisis, etc.

In one word, this claim is nonsense.

In simple terms:

(A) There is no serious evidence that CO2 from human activities at anything like probable concentrations will have any significant effect on the temperature or climate of the earth.

(B) The warming of maybe 0.9 F since year 1900 cannot have been caused by CO2.

(C) Human life was long burdened with nonsense from bad information, superstition, ignorance, and fear, but slowly science provided high quality information and means to reject the nonsense. The ALARMIST CLAIM is taking us back to the nonsense.

(D) Proposed efforts to respond to the ALARMIST CLAIM by reducing CO2 are from massively wasteful, strongly destructive, a shot in the gut of standards of living, economic contraction, and maybe to disasterous world wide economic depression and global nuclear WWIII.

There is some very good news:

>To respond to the ALARMIST CLAIM, there is NOTHING to do. NOTHING.

In music, the easiest note to play is just the rest -- make no sound. For responding to the ALARMIST CLAIM, the situation is similar: Do NOTHING and because there is nothing good to do.

The rest of this note is in three parts:

(I) Debunking

(II) Additional Points

(III) Alarmist Threats

(I) Debunking

Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it is a long logical path from there to any claims of a significant effect.

We can debunk the ALARMIST CLAIM in just two easy steps, (I.1) from the historical data and (I.2) from the physics, next:

(I.1) Data from History

There is NOTHING in the climate history from the present back to about 1 million years ago that supports the ALARMIST CLAIM; there is NOTHING in that history that can support a claim that anything like realistic concentrations of CO2 from human activities will have any significant effect on temperatures. NOTHING. Here we give details in (i) -- (iii):

(i) For the ice core records going back ~1 million years, yes, both temperatures and CO2 concentrations went both up and down.

BUT, if we just look carefully at the big graph of that ice core record in Al Gore's movie (I assume the graph is essentially correct) and other graphs of that ice core data elsewhere, with high irony that graph totally destroys the ALARMIST CLAIM and Gore's claim from that graph: Gore badly misread the graph. The main point is that in the graph there is an 800 year delay; CO2 concentrations changed 800 years AFTER the temperature changes, from whatever cause.

Specifically: (a) When temperatures started increasing, from whatever cause, CO2 concentrations were LOW, not high. (b) About 800 years later CO2 concentrations were HIGH, from increased biological activity from the higher temperatures. (c) When temperatures started to fall, from whatever cause, CO2 concentrations were still HIGH, not low. (d) The HIGH CO2 concentrations did not keep the temperatures from falling. (e) Once the temperatures fell, about 800 years later so did CO2 concentrations. Net, CO2 did not cause the higher temperatures or keep the higher temperatures from falling.

(ii) In the last 2000 years we had the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, and there is not even a suggestion that CO2 concentration changes caused either.

(iii) Starting in the 1940s and through about 1970, we actually had some significant cooling, but in those years CO2 from human activities -- WWII, pulling out of the Great Depression, and the economic boom after WWII -- increased. So, with the additional CO2 from human activities, we got COOLING, not warming.

Net, there is NO data from the historical record that supports the claim that higher concentrations of CO2 will cause higher temperatures.

(I.2) Theory from Physics

Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The absorption spectrum is at

https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?Spec=C124389&Index=0&...

So, CO2 absorbs in three narrow bands, one for each of bending, stretching, and twisting of the molecule, out in the infrared.

No, Tom Friedman of the NYT: CO2 does not absorb sunlight, and anyone can confirm this by looking at a source of CO2, e.g., exhaling or the bubbles from soda pop, and simply observing that the CO2 is not visible and does not cast a shadow.

Since the historical record can't support the ALARMIST CLAIM, to support the claim we would have to rely on the theory from physics, the absorption spectrum of CO2, and computation.

Well, the computations were done by dozens of teams, and the results are summarized in

http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg

Net, as in this graph, nearly all the results predicted rapid, significant increases in temperatures soon. Well, the time of predicted increases came and went years ago with no sign of anything like the predicted increases.

In science, when predictions are made and found to be false, we junk the science.

No doubt, the failures in that graph are some of the worst in all the history of science. GOOD science, e.g., the hunt for and finding the Higgs boson at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), the observations that confirmed the predictions of black holes, many other confirmed predictions of special and general relativity, the A-bomb, the H-bomb, the design of the Hubble telescope, to the quantum mechanics in semi-conductors that are the core of current digital electronics, the science was just rock solid.

We are just awash in super solid science, and the global warming computations in that graph are just a humiliation as anything scientific and just sick.

In summary of (I.1) -- (I.2):

> For the ALARMIST CLAIM, there is no scientific support.

(II) Additional Points

There is the video documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg

(II.1) Big Changes Since 2000 Years Ago

That documentary argues that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were caused by variations in the rates of sun spots. More sun spots increase the solar wind which, from more links in a causal chain, in the end slows cloud formation and has a net warming effect.

Similarly, fewer sun spots can cause cooling.

(II.2) Warming Since Year 1900

In the video we can see the remarks of MIT Professor R. Lindzen that from "good theoretical reasons" any warming we might be getting now, e.g., maybe an increase in temperature of 0.9 F from year 1900 to the present, cannot be from CO2.

(II.3) Too Many Climate Scientists

Professor Lindzen also explains that there was suddenly an increase in funding for climate science from a hundred or so million dollars a year to over one billion dollars a year, funding that didn't just buy off the climate scientists but HIRED climate alarmists pretending to be climate scientists, maybe 10 times more alarmists than real scientists.

What? No, there's not a single credible model that predicts that this virus could have wiped out half the population, even with 0 mitigation efforts. Such a virus is a possibility, but it certainly wasn't this one.

That's what I kept seeing from the experts.

(III) Alarmist Threats

The alarmists are proposing actions that are severe threats:

(III.1) Big Mistakes

For the issue of the ALARMIST CLAIM and quite generally, if we are willing to go forward with big disruptive, risky changes without good evidence, then we are leaving ourselves open to nonsense from bad information, superstition, ignorance, and fear and neglecting the science that provided high quality information and means to reject the nonsense, leaving ourselves open to some of the biggest mistakes in all of civilization.

Here we mention two such mistakes:

(III.1.1) Chinese Medicine

A current example of such mistakes is killing off the rhinoceroses to get their horns for use in Chinese medicine.

(III.1.2) Bloody Mayan Charlatans

Another such mistake is from page 76 of

Susan Milbrath, Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies), ISBN-13 978-0292752269, University of Texas Press, 2000.

with

> Indeed, blood sacrifice is required for the sun to move, according to Aztec cosmology (Durian 1971:179; Sahaguin 1950 - 1982, 7:8).

That is, the Mayan charlatans killed people to pour their blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across the sky. No doubt the sun actually did keep moving across the sky.

If from the ALARMIST CLAIM we go forward with the alarmist proposals (see below), then we will be making a mistake as big, dangerous, and irrational as in (III.1.1) the Chinese medicine and (III.1.2) the Mayans.

(III.2) Costs

(III.2.1) Replacing Current Fossil Fueled Equipment

The climate alarmists would force us to replace fossil fueled vehicles and to replace building heating with electric powered equipment.

The vehicles they would force us to replace include cars, trucks, farm tractors, big earth moving equipment, locomotives, and ships.

The climate alarmists would force us to replace fossil fueled electric power generation with wind, solar, etc.

Emergency electric generators are most easily powered with fossil fuels -- natural gas, gasoline, or Diesel oil -- and would be difficult and expensive to replace with anything that would please the climate alarmists.

(III.2.2) Unreliable Renewables

Electric power from wind and solar needs huge, expensive batteries and can still be unreliable and cause power instabilities on an electric grid. The instabilities and protecting against them would be expensive. Electric rates would stand to go up significantly.

(III.2.3) Green New Deal

As in

https://cei.org/blog/how-much-will-green-new-deal-cost-your-...

the Green New Deal is estimated to cost $90+ trillion.

That much spending would massively disrupt the whole US economy and, indirectly but significantly, nearly all the economies of the world.

(III.3) Standard of Living

The costs of the proposals of the climate alarmists would devastate the standard of living in the US.

As in the video documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, the effects on poor countries, e.g., essentially all of Africa trying to develop their economies, would stop their progress and push them back in time.

(III.4) World Economic Stability

The proposals of the climate alarmists would so disrupt the economies of the world so strongly that the world economy could go unstable leading to WWIII and, then, global nuclear war.

Warning

It appears that now the sun is entering the part of the 11 year or so sunspot cycle with fewer sun spots. So, we are in line for a few years of cooling. So, don't believe a claim of the global warming alarmists that their efforts caused the cooling.

Main Conclusion

At this point, continuing with entertaining the ALARMIST CLAIM is just nonsense, expensive, destructive, dangerous nonsense.