Editorial
Global warming anti-conservative solution
Yesterday (September 2, 2018) a YouTube channel owner calling himself Potholer54 published a video he thought would be provocative. Instead it repeats most (not all) of the same old canards about human beings blighting the planet with carbon dioxide. This paradigm goes by the name global warming. He promises a “conservative solution” to the alleged problem. In fact he does not establish the problem. Moreover his solution is incomplete and would pave the way for the solution the global left truly desires.
Potholer54’s global warming thesis
First, if you wish, take twenty minutes and play the video.
He promises to “address all sides of the political spectrum.” Yet he accepts uncritically the anthropogenic global warming paradigm. His grounds for so accepting are:
- The paradigm began in 1896, long before anyone ever conceived of “The United Nations.”
- Baroness Margaret Thatcher herself endorsed it, indeed in 1985.
- The burning of fossil fuels releases actual toxic substances. So why not believe as well that it has pumped excess carbon dioxide into the air?
- The overwhelming majority of “climate scientists” accept global warming as real.
Logical fallacies
With each point he makes, he commits a logical fallacy. Specifically, he commits:
- Argumentum a tempore – argument from time. Anatomists long believed humans had an open circulation, like those of insects. William Harvey proved them wrong. And: that an idea began almost a century before men of bad heart would use it to their advantage, makes it no less a mistake.
- Argumentum ab auctoritate – argument from authority – or to translate the Latin word exactly, clout. In this case he cites the clout of Margaret Thatcher. Surely we would listen to her! Not when she gets it wrong and approaches science with a naivete comparable to that of Potholer54.
- Delictum, ergo cetera delicta. Who commits one crime, therefore has committed others. Western criminal justice abominates that assumption. Let that suffice.
- Argumentum a populo – argument from “the people.” One does not do science “by the numbers.”
The Climate-gate drama
Furthermore Potholer54 totally ignores the evidence that the chief promoters of the global warming paradigm, have lied and continue to lie.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick…to hide the decline.
Phil Jones, Director, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK.
We cannot account for the lack of a warming trend and it is a travesty that we can’t.
Kevin Trenberth, a colleague of his.
Add to it that the Michael Mann Hockey Stick never described an accurate illustration of the past, or prophecy, either. Richard Muller, writing in MIT Technology Review, demolished it. “An artifact of poor mathematics,” Muller charged. No matter. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relied on it. So did candidate and “President” Barack Obama. But Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick called Mann out on his poor math. Mann’s math deliberately produced a Hockey Stick from the data he had.
This doubtless led McIntyre to ask Phil Jones’ group, who relied so on the Hockey Stick, for their data. Jones refused, even to refusing a Freedom of Information request. And then someone took the UK Freedom of Information Act into his own hands. He copied out a 63-million-character archive, placed it on an FTP server in Tomsk, Siberia, and shopped it to various commentators. A correspondent alerted your editor to this. Your editor then downloaded, extracted, and published key excerpts from this archive.
The rest is the history of “Climate-gate.”
By the way: the globe is cooling. Play these videos now, before YouTube takes them down as they did InfoWars.
An incomplete solution
Potholer54 goes on to say a solution to global warming, consistent with free markets, does exist. But he cites a mainland Chinese public-private partnership head. Understand: the People’s Republic of China does not have private businesses within the American meaning. All businesses are public-private partnerships. And anyone who partners with a ruling Communist party is asking for expropriation at any moment.
More broadly, Potholer54 confidently touts ground-based solar and wind power. This combination, he says, would suffice totally to replace fossil fuels. To address the intermittency common to both power generating modes, he recommends better batteries. But he fails to address the land-use problem. Each of these modes of electrical generation takes up more land per megawatt. Land one uses for these applications, one cannot use as well, if at all, for other purposes.
Global warming: where does the truth fall?
If all sides cannot agree on the facts, the sides can discuss nothing. So what facts actually exist?
- Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Repeat: carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. If one takes nothing else away from this article, let the reader memorize that fact.
- The sun does not shine brightly enough, nor the wind blow hard enough, to replace totally the use of fossil fuels in the world’s economy. Batteries can solve the intermittency problem but not the insufficiency problem. Let any engineer calculate how much energy one can actually derive from the sun and wind. Count only the rays of the sun that reach the ground, and the wind that actually blows.
- The sun is losing its spots—literally. Which means the globe will cool to temperatures we last saw during the Regency and Victorian Era.
Bear in mind also what the United Nations really wants. Review the Christiana Figueres Climate Manifesto.
To be sure, Potholer54 promised a “Part 2” video replying to those who call for an end to capitalism to save the planet. But we don’t have that video yet. And having given away the store, Potholer54 can no longer defend it.
More credible alternatives
Potholer54 relies totally on ground solar and wind. If he had relied also on nuclear energy, one might have been more inclined to believe his thesis. But of course the Germans abandoned nuclear energy completely, using the Fukushima disaster as their excuse. And indeed the same people who scream,
LEAVE IT IN THE GROUND!
also scream,
NO NUKES!
Why, in addition, doesn’t Potholer54 or anyone else discuss space-based solar energy? The space in geostationary Earth orbit has room enough for thousands of gigantic orbiting solar batteries. Each could deliver power to the Earth in amounts rivaling any nuclear reactor.
Why not, indeed? One can understand with minimal effort why the United Nations doesn’t talk about such things. They want to control, not to solve a problem. The best means of control is rationing. The insufficient “alternatives” Potholer54 proposes, would leave a deficit. And only iron rationing of energy use would close that deficit. That’s why the political activists scream, “NO NUKES!” That’s why they also belittle or ignore the building of solar batteries in space. These things promise abundant energy. And abundance negates control. To assume the UN knows this, is elementary games theory. If Niccolo Macchiavelli were alive today, he would write “Concerning rationing as a method of popular control.” He would, furthermore, recognize at once how useful the global warming paradigm would be to that end.
Your editor will await Part 2. But he will not await it with much hope for logical fidelity or fruitfulness.
Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
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Regarding your three facts at the end –
1) What is your definition of a pollutant, such that carbon dioxide does not fit it? A standard definition is a substance or energy that has undesired effects when released into the environment. Do you have a different definition, or do you deny that carbon dioxide has any undesired effects in the environment?
2) What numbers/methods are you using to state that the total Earth supply of solar/wind energy is insufficient to provide for total energy demand? Compare your claim to claims such as those made here: link to sciencedirect.com which states that world energy demands could be provided with solar and wind alone through at least 2070 with a world population of 10 billion, using up to 3.5% of total non-ice covered land area. Or here: link to sciencedirect.com which states that 100% solar energy scenarios in Europe would be impracticable given that they would require up to 50% of land not already used for human activity be turned over to solar production. Impracticable, yes, for a single technology, but it does demonstrate that there is more than enough sunlight reaching the ground.
3) Whose temperature measurements do you consider accurate, and over what time span do you expect to see cooling to Regency/Victorian levels?
1. A pollutant, to be worthy of the name, must be directly toxic to life – all life. Carbon dioxide does not qualify. The nitrogen oxides, in contrast, are toxic. And yes, I deny the effect people impute to carbon dioxide. I deny it because I know positively that the “climate scientific community” have lied – yes, lied – about that and many other things. Behold the evidence of the mendacity of the climate-change community.
link to youtube.com
2. Considering what else the AGW alarmist faction had lied and are lying about, you will readily see that I remain skeptical of your source, and why. Even the source admits: “the single factor with the greatest uncertainty is the available share of land.” Translation: we’re going to kick you out of your wide-open spaces and cram you into dingbat dorms (“mixed-use dwellings”) to have more space to build the windmills at which we tilt.
Your other source admits on the front-end. Required: cram people into a smaller geographical footprint to make it work. Cue the pack-em, stack-em dingbat dorms. Cue the Protected Wildlife Corridors, as we saw in the motion picture The Hunger Games (with Jennifer Lawrence and Donald Sutherland; Lions Gate Pictures, 2012). And as boastfully presented in the materials of the United Nations Division of Sustainable Development.
3. Whose temperature measurements do I consider accurate? Well, I’ll tell you whom I don’t trust. I don’t trust any of the rogues in Tony Heller’s gallery (see the video above). Liars, liars, smocks on fire. And over what time span do I expect cooling to Regency/Victorian levels? Ten years. Twelve, tops. See the “Adapt 2030” YouTube channel while it still remains. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! Cue the sound of teeth chattering. If I were you I would invest in ski resort stocks.
If James E. Hansen could openly speculate about the West Side Highway lying underwater within a definite timespan, I can and will speculate about a return of bone-chilling cold winters within ten to twelve years. The AGW alarmist faction seems to respect nothing but dogmatic pronouncements which they like to offer as guarantees. Only when their predictions fail do they fudge.
In any case, I know that Michael E. Mann erased not only any mention of the Medieval Warm Period and of the hot years of the Thirties, but also all evidence of the cold winters of 1977-8 and 1993-4. With regard to that last: well do I remember chiding a letter carrier: “What was it that that Greek historian – wait, don’t tell me his name – ah, yes, Herodotus! ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.'” James E. Hansen confidently predicted that I would never have a problem with failure of mail delivery. Never. I have him, Mike “Nature trick” Mann, Kevin “Travesty” Trenberth, and Phil “Hide the Decline” Jones nailed to the wall, dead-to-rights. I charge them with manipulation, falsification, and fabrication of data. “An offense of such gravity that it warrants excommunication from the community of scientists!” Yale University Student Handbook, 1976-9. Except that when one acts in the service of total control of the activities of daily living of all of humanity, anything goes.
1) Your definition of pollutant is oddly limiting. Nutrient pollution of waterways, in which there is excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the water due to runoff of fertilizer, is not directly toxic to all life in the water – far from it. It is food for algae, and overgrowth of algae has serious adverse effects on water quality and other life in the water. Chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, are essentially nontoxic but are quite stable in the atmosphere and lead to ozone breakdown. Amounts of lead or mercury in water that would be quite toxic to humans would be shrugged off by most plant life. Throwing corpses into our reservoirs would render the water undrinkable but wouldn’t bother the catfish, etc. And you know full well that carbon dioxide is directly toxic to animals at higher concentrations; so your argument there is simply one about dosage. If you disbelieve that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, like methane or water vapor or nitrous oxide or ozone, then I don’t know what to tell you.
2)Well, I provided you a source and asked to see the source you were using. If you recall, you stated that there was not enough light striking the Earth and wind over its surface to replace current energy demands. The sources I provided show their work, and argue the opposite. Even the second source, which states that 50% of land _not already used by humans_ would be needed in Europe if we were using solar _alone_, disproves that claim. So humans could stay right where they already are, and expand into half the remaining space, and still have room to supply all needs with solar. And that source doesn’t consider putting solar collectors on top of extant human structures, either. I haven’t seen your calculation or citation to the contrary.
3) If there’s no source of temperature data that you consider trustworthy, on what basis will you claim that temperatures are colder in ten to twelve years time? Observations like Lake Michigan or the Mississippi freezing over at Cairo, that sort of thing? How much of a drop in temperature will be needed to confirm your prediction?
I don’t understand your reference to mail delivery.
If you, sir, do not understand the reality, and the motives, of the lies, and the lying liars that tell them, concerning “anthropogenic global warming,” then I do not know what to tell you. Except: those who tell lies, do so because they want something, and fear the truth will not get it for them. And what the funders of AGW alarmism want is control. Control over every aspect of your life, and mine, and that of every other living, breathing human person.
Now concerning energy demands, I said ALL such demands. I do not limit myself, as do you and your sources, to the current budget of stationary electric power. I refer to absolutely every use of energy for any purpose in the economy. I refer to all our transportation applications, from the heaviest trainload down to a single person taking a joy ride. I refer to the heavy-duty trucks that haul our garbage, lift men to great heights to perform repairs on electrical or other catenary lines, or haul goods from one city to another. (For even the railways cannot absorb that entire load.) I refer to the carrying of passengers and freight by air.
Do you, or indeed does anyone, seriously imagine that ground-based solar and wind energy ALONE will carry that entire load? Not without iron rationing! Not without GROUNDING all air transport. Not without FORBIDDING any person, save a law-enforcement officer, an active-duty military service member, a Very Important Person, or his chauffeur, to own, or so much as come near, a private automobile. Not without a TIGHT SCHEDULE that permits NO RECREATIONAL TRAVEL OF ANY KIND. The Cedar Fair properties, including the King’s Dominion property local to me, would be SHUT DOWN. And that is only one class of examples.
Your calculations, and those of your sources, DO NOT TAKE ANY OF THAT INTO ACCOUNT. Nor do they allow any room for the economy to expand.
And that is the point of this discussion. Shall we be a rationed economy, or a free one? For no economy can be both!
Indeed the aim of the controllers is darker still. Combine that with John Holdren’s call for developing “sterilants” to add to the water supply, and their aim becomes quite clear: depopulation of the planet, except for themselves. MURDER, sir. MASS MURDER.
Now if you want illustrations of a drop in temperature, I give you Valley Forge when the Continental Army wintered there. I give you the winters of 1861-2, 1862-3, 1863-4, and 1864-5. (As to the Mississippi, I assume you mean Cairo, Illinois, not Cairo, Egypt. For if you mean the latter, then I answer: wrong river. Nile, not Mississippi.)
And here is my reference to mail delivery: New Jersey in 1994 endured no fewer than eighteen winter storms. In at least one of these, MAIL DELIVERY ITSELF STOPPED. So that snow DID stay the couriers of the United States mail from any completion of their appointed rounds, in any time frame. James E. Hansen confidently predicted eight years earlier that THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. And it did. And his response to such events consists of three words: Uh, Uh, and Ulp.
The promises of energy abundance are as empty as were the promises of superabundant goods and services that came under the rubric of True Communism in the last century. At least James E. Hansen called for the expansion of nuclear energy. User Potholer54 does NOT. I therefore place him in the category of those who scream, NO NUKES.
Don’t talk to me about 2070. The rhetoric of the UN-worthies clearly indicates that they demand the CESSATION of the use of fossil fuels NOW. TODAY. THIS INSTANT. AT THE VERY MOMENT I TYPE THIS REPLY TO YOU. They do not allow TIME for the development of this super-abundance you claim. Why, hark ye, sir: Michael E. Mann, in a recent interview, THREW UP HIS HANDS AND SIGHED TO HIS INTERVIEWER, CRYING, “WE’RE DOOMED! WE’RE DOOMED!” He reminded me of Actor Jonathan Harris, as Col. Zachary Smith, USAMC, in Irwin Allen’s signature television program, Lost in Space. According to Mann, IT IS ALREADY TOO LATE. NOTHING WILL AVAIL.
And Michael Mann, and James Hansen, and Phil Jones, and Kevin Trenberth, and Keith Briffa, et al., are all I have left with. Where is Potholer54’s Part Two video? NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. Tell that d____d slowpoke to get a move on. I will continue to carp at him until he does.
If any of those hypocrites were serious, they would never have held their Twenty-first Conference of Parties in Paris. They would have held it in a virtual world, using Skype or OpenSim, as I said in my main article. Or perhaps they would have held it in Tel Aviv. Which, let me remind you, is the aviation centroid of the world. They would have forbidden any conferee to travel to the venue except on one of a limited number of flights, which they would have to reach by rail or on foot, horseback, etc.
SET AN EXAMPLE, that’s what I demand. SET AN EXAMPLE to the world of the kind of iron rationing you must inevitably demand, especially if you want all use of fossil fuels to cease NOW, TODAY, AND THIS INSTANT.
Ben Gurion airport is not the travel centroid of the world, Jersualem is not the geographic centroid of the world, and neither of them is the population centroid. The geographic centroid is in Turkey somewhere near Ankora or Çorum – even ICR says as much. The population center of the world is in Kazakhstan or somewhere nearby in northern South Asia. The travel centroid is in the Czech Republic if you’re going by the shortest average distance from one international airport to all others. I mention it only because you keep bringing it up.
Well, you have your opinion, your sources have theirs…and I have mine.
It seems odd to describe what is basically a math problem as a matter of opinion, but perhaps you mean that the people calculating these results are using different definitions. So to be clear, Andrew J Woods was working for the Institute of Creation Research in 1973, and trying to find the center of the surface area of Earth in order to support Scripture. He used a least-sum-of-distances to all other land points method based on a digital world map. His monograph is still available on Amazon, at link to amazon.com I don’t know of an online source, but he still has the support of the ICR: link to icr.org
The same technique was used by Holger Isenberg in 2003 using the higher-resolution ETOPO2 map with 2′ resolution; he put the center of the Earth’s land surface at 40°52’0″N 34°34’0″E. The ETOPO2 map has now been superseded by the ETOPO1 map, with a resolution of 1′, so I suppose you could repeat the process a third time and find a third value. If you do that and find that it’s in Jerusalem, let us know. Or if you think the calculation should have been done some other way, like a least-sum-of-squares approach, or you think only the above-water-level Antarctic land mass should be counted, not the ice sheet, or some other objection, this would be your opportunity to explain.
The population centroid has been calculated in different ways based on data sets of different granularity – at approximately the 1000km level, it gets put in the China-India-Pakistan-Tajikistan neighborhood, with no further resolution possible. Using a list of world cities with population greater than 100,000 (>4000 cities) as proxy for population distribution, the lowest average population-weighted distance to all other cities gives Almaty, Kazakhstan as _the city of >1 million population that is closest to all other people on Earth_, with an average distance of ~5800 km. Not sure why they put the threshhold at 1M rather than one of the cities of >100,000, but at least they state their method. It may be that there are multiple smaller cities with essentially identical values.
City level study: link to cityextremes.com
1000km level study: link to ined.fr
As far as the travel centroid, from a list of >1200 international airports (available on request, drawn from link to flightservicebureau.org ), it is possible to determine the single international airport with the smallest sum-of-distances to all other international airports, and that is the airport at Ostrava, Czech Republic, with an average distance of 5728 km to all other world airports (note the parallel to world population distances!) The top ten airports for lowest average distance are all in the Czech Republic-Poland-Slovakia-Austria region, and are pretty close together for average distance; their averages are all within about 5 km of each other. Ben-Gurion isn’t even in the top 400 by this analysis. I can send you the database if you’d like to repeat the calculations yourself.
What is the source or for your position? Or the method they used to arrive at that position? My prediction: 1) something your tour guide said when you landed in Tel Aviv, and 2) no method stated.
The problem is that I can’t check any of those sources out. I don’t have the kind of money to throw around to buy every linked monograph at Amazon.com. So that leaves us with you say, I say.
The population centroid would not be at issue. The travel centroid would be. Conferences of Parties meet as delegations of equal numbers from the “parties.” Such a Conference, then, is more like a Senate than a popular representative assembly.
I should add that the international airport that has the shortest distance to its farthest partner – the international airport that is centered on the smallest circle you can draw from an airport on the surface of Earth and encircle all international airports – is Strigino Airport in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. That’s based on the same data set of 1200 airports, and represents a different kind of ‘centermost’. Other airports have more distant outliers, but smaller average distances. Still not Jerusalem.
“So that leaves us with you say, I say.”
Well, not really, since I provided links to sources and explanations of their methods and results, and offered to share a data set upon which you can perform your own calculations. Your unwillingness to investigate further is on you; I’d still be interested in evaluating your sources except you haven’t provided any.
Strangely enough none of those videos mention the travel centroid of the world as being Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, or any other spot as far as I can tell. Did you mean to put in some other source for your claim?
That would be relevant only to the matter of AGW alarmists failing to set an example to fit the alarm they take. What’s relevant here is that they are turning in a false alarm.
Yes, it’s clear that you feel it’s a false alarm. But this discussion was about your continued insistence that Ben Gurion airport, or Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, is the travel centroid of the world to which all these alarmists should travel. Regardless of whether AGW is true or false, your travel centroid belief is false, and yet you have repeated the claim over and over.
At one point it was because “Noah’s Ark was probably at the travel centroid of the world, the one place to which the sum of all travel distances would be the shortest. That travel centroid persists today—at Jerusalem.”
It was also because “…Israel is important for the future of the world, as well as its present and past. Israel—and more particularly its capital city of Jerusalem—is the travel centroid of the world. That is, the sum of all the travel distances to all other land areas of the world is shorter for Jerusalem than for any other city.”
And: “Tel Aviv is the aviation centroid of the world. Flights to and from Tel Aviv would, in aggregate, be shorter than flights to and from any other airport.”
And: “If you fear AGW as much as you want me to, do you not book your conference in the aviation centroid of the world, which happens to be Tel Aviv, Israel?”
And: “Turns out that all roads do not lead to Rome. The shortest aggregate air routes lead to Israel. Which is the travel centroid of the civilized world…The sum of the distances (as the crow flies) from Jerusalem to every other point in the world is less than the sum of the distances from any other point in the world. If you want a central location for a conference, or for a seat of government, you can do no better than Jerusalem. (The only reason why Israel’s main airport lies in the suburb of Lod, near Tel Aviv, is that the lie of the land prohibits building an airport any nearer to Jerusalem.)”
Interestingly, you also once said “I doubt that anyone in Tel Aviv even knows about the calculations I have seen. I figured this out for myself.” Which implies that you either came up with this on your own, or were looking at something done by someone else and drew a novel conclusion yourself. So did you calculate this yourself? How? Or if you had this realization looking at someone else’s work, whose work was it?
Like I said earlier, I’ll share with you a database of 1200 international airports with lat/long coordinates, and even share a program that calculates the sum of distances from each individual airport to all other airports. You can inspect both the database and the program, and run the program, which shows that the centralmost airport is in the Czech Republic, which would make it the aviation centroid.
The Institute for Creation Research, no friend to secular science, states to this day that the geometric center of the land mass of Earth is in Turkey, and their results have been published for all to review, if they care to. So, again, where is the support for your claim that Jerusalem/Tel Aviv/Ben Gurion is the travel centroid/aviation centroid/whatever of the world?
[…] fossil fuels now. Today. This instant. These same activists do not want nuclear energy. They will permit only three sources of energy in the new “green future”: ground-based solar, wind, and […]
[…] borne fruit. User potholer54 on YouTube at last released his “Part Two” follow-up to his “conservative solution” global warming. Sadly, more than half of it consists of the same pitch as in Part One. The rest […]