Tell Your Children: 'sustainable development' means 'suppressed development'. Resist it.

One of the wretchedly successful eco-themes of the past few decades is the notion of 'sustainable development'., and it has been boosted by the CO2 Scare.  It may be even more insidious since it is superficially so appealing, and it has received widespread promotion or even adoption in universities, schools, and in businesses and governments.  Yet it is, like the CO2 Scare itself, a destructive, ill-thought-out, over-hyped, over-emoted piece of propagandising which boils down to wanting to deliberately damage, weaken, or even destroy our advanced civilisation, and deny something like to the developing world.

Paul Driessen, author of the excellent study 'Green Power, Black Death', has just published a new essay on WUWT pointing out many absurdities and harms associated with 'sustainability'.  An extract is given below, but see the original for a great deal more.  Anyone concerned with protecting children from the excesses of eco-fanatics ought to read it.  Some may choose to specialise in this area.  I hope.

"As President Trump downgrades the relevance of Obama era climate change and anti-fossil fuel policies, many environmentalists are directing attention to “sustainable development.”

Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” sustainability reflects poor understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction and manufacturing principles – and a tendency to emphasize tautologies and theoretical models as an alternative to readily observable evidence in the Real World. It also involves well-intended but ill-informed people being led by ill-intended but well-informed activists who use the concept to gain greater government control over people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards.

The most common definition is that we may meet the needs of current generations only to the extent that doing so will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainability thus reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources, and must reduce current needs and wants so as to save raw materials for future generations.

At first blush, it sounds logical and even ethical. But it requires impossible clairvoyance.

In 1887, when the Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit via hydroelectric power, no one did or could foresee that electricity would dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it does today. Decades later, no one anticipated pure silica fiber optic cables replacing copper wires.

No one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and more computing power than a 1990 desktop computer or 3-D printing or thousands of wind turbines across our fruited plains – or cadmium, rare earth metals and other raw materials suddenly required to manufacture these technological wonders.

Mankind advanced at a snail’s pace for thousands of years. As the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up at an increasingly breathtaking pace. Today, change is exponential. As we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint, copper, tin and so on. We did it because we innovated – invented something better, more efficient or practical. Each advance required different raw materials.

Who today can foresee what technologies future generations will have 25, 50 or 200 years from now? What raw materials they will need? How we are supposed to ensure that those families meet their needs?

Why then would we even think of empowering government to regulate today’s activities today based on the wholly unpredictable technologies, lifestyles, needs, and resource demands of distant generations? Why would we ignore or compromise the needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs – including the needs of today’s most impoverished, energy-deprived, malnourished people, who desperately want to improve their lives?

Moreover, we are not going to run out of resources anytime soon. A 1-kilometer fiber optic cable made from 45 pounds of silica (Earth’s most abundant element) carries thousands of times more information than an equally long RG-6 cable made from 3,600 pounds of copper, reducing demand for copper.

In 1947, the world’s proven oil reserves totaled 47 billion barrels. Over the next 70 years, we consumed hundreds of billions of barrels – and yet, in 2016 we still had at least 2,800 billion barrels of oil reserves, including oil sands, oil shales and other unconventional deposits: at least a century’s worth, plus abundant natural gas. Constantly improving technologies now let us find and produce oil and natural gas from deposits that we could not even detect, much less tap into, just a couple decades ago.

Sustainability dogma also revolves around hatred of fossil fuels, and a determination to rid the world of them, regardless of any social, economic or environmental costs of doing so. And we frequently find that supposedly green, eco-friendly and sustainable alternatives are frequently anything but."

Additional reading here on Climate Lessons:  http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/sacrificing-children-for-better-climate.html

CO2 Frightens Children and Adults thanks to Propaganda - why not help resist it?

The decades of propaganda about a modest, beneficial increase in estimated global mean temperature portrayed as a threat, sometimes as a catastrophic one, has taken its toll of politicians, teachers, and children.  The associated assertion that this increase is mainly due to our emissions of CO2 has allowed campaigners to threaten not just our mental health, but also our physical well-being.

Yet the case for alarm is a flimsy one.

A long road lies ahead of us who want to help the victims of the scaremongering, and help them and those who exploit them gain a more reasonable, calmer view of climate variation and its multiple causes.  Anyone who wants to do this needs to get well-informed about the climate system, and no doubt this seems like an impossible task to many.  But non-specialists can get informed enough to raise good questions, recognise decent replies, and discuss policy implications.

Just published on WUWT is an excellent essay triggered by yet another book on the climate scare written by victims of it.  The essay has many valuable insights and many useful links to help the reader investigate further.  I commend it to all those who come this way and want to get better informed.  Here are a couple of extracts from the essay to whet your appetites:

(Extract 1) "I served in the Air Force as a weather officer from 1953–1957, earned my Ph.D. in meteorology from Florida State University, joined the National Hurricane Center in 1961, where I served for 25 years and was Director from 1974–1987 (the longest term of any Director), then served as chief meteorologist for the CBS TV affiliate in Houston until my retirement in 2008—a retirement during which I have continued and even expanded my studies of global climate change.

I have been following the global warming debate for almost 25 years. During that time I have metamorphosed from a mild believer in the 1980s and 1990s to a very strong skeptic. My journey is typical of a number of skeptics."

(Extract 2) "What can we conclude? The relationship between CO2 and the earth’s temperature is poor on all time scales from ice ages (100,000 years) to interglacial periods (10,000 years) to short periods of a few centuries or even decades.

Another way we can evaluate the impact CO2 has on the earth’s temperature is to examine the forecasts produced by climate models. All of the climate models have a built-in relation between CO2 and the earth’s temperature that was determined by the observations made in the 1980s–1990s. During that time, the earth’s temperature was rising and the CO2 levels were accelerating upward. Since the CO2 levels were correctly projected to continue upward in the future (see the table above), and since the modelers’ underlying theory was that the rise in CO2 had driven the rise in temperature, it is not surprising that the models forecast continued warming.

If the CO2/temperature relation built into the models is correct, then the models should make accurate forecasts. Numerous tests of the models have been conducted. In one test of over 100 model runs, every one failed. In every case the temperatures forecast by the models were much too warm. Dr. John Christy (who in addition to being a prominent climate scientist is, like Paul Douglas, an evangelical Christian), testified on Feb. 2, 2015, before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and technology that on average “the models overwarm by a factor of 2.5.” "

(Extract 3) "Those promoting manmade global warming:

1. Controlled the meteorology and climatology journals in the U.S.;
2. Controlled non-meteorological science publication (Nature, Science, etc.);
3. Controlled Wikipedia;
4. Manipulated data;
5. Demonized skeptics.

Papers by skeptics were blackballed and not published in U.S. professional journals. In contrast, Kenneth Richard has documented over 1,000 peer-reviewed papers published in Europe and Asia in 2014, 2015, and 2016 that challenge the hypothesis that CO2 has been the primary driver of recent global warming (and other aspects of the bogus “consensus”) and support solar, oceanic, and other natural cycles as the primary causes of global warming, but they are not found in the U.S. publications.

Let me introduce you to a number of credible skeptics. In 2013 Forbes Magazine surveyedover 1077 earth scientists and found 64% believed global warming was from natural causes.

In 2013, 49 retired astronauts and senior NASA scientists wrote a scathing letter to the Administrator of NASA challenging NASA’s position on global warming.

In recent years a growing number of global warming believers have become skeptics."

Not long after pressing the Publish button for the above, I came across another highly accessible, and brief, essay about the climate system and CO2: https://defyccc.com/brief-summary-of-science-for-the-climate-debate/

I hope readers will study the essays at these links, and conclude that they too can, if they so wish, begin to get to grips with this issue, and thereby become less vulnerable to CO2-alarm propaganda themselves, and feel able to get to a position where they can help those who are victims of it.

Note added 09 Feb 2017.  Yesterday I came across yet another accessible and powerful essay by a Dutch science writer who has been studying the climate scene for many years.  This essay is another 'keeper', wide-ranging and full of penetrating insights and supporting links.  One key conclusion of his: 'Keep a cool head – there is time to think.'

http://notrickszone.com/2017/02/08/dutch-expert-with-trump-in-office-now-safe-to-expose-the-many-myths-of-climate-alarmism/