Clearing up the Mess produced by Climate Alarmism: watch out for Nolans and Baizuos.

The damage done to children and other vulnerable groups by the climate alarmists has yet to be quantified and assessed, but seems likely to be deep and extensive.  Here is one recent example: young women, whose entire education could have been contaminated with climate alarmism, are agonising over whether or not to have children:  http://wgntv.com/2018/01/31/climate-change-is-impacting-some-womens-decisions-to-have-children/

This blog will continue to report on people and materials that can help those who wish to repair such damage over the coming decades.

Here are a couple of types of people who will get in the way of such efforts: nolans and baizuos.

NOLAN /di’khe’d/ A bigoted blowhard, someone unwilling to listen to other points of view, someone who thinks they have licence to cast moral judgement upon others, someone who makes a show of being independently minded, intellectually rigorous and scrupulously impartial but is in fact someone who toes the party line and is in reality no more than a PC ‘bot’ churning out the Liberal Establishment orthodoxy whilst suppressing inconvenient facts. Alternate /J.O’Brien/

Hat-tip: Biased-BBC, https://biasedbbc.org/blog/2018/02/19/start-the-week-open-thread-161/

BAIZUO.  'The word 'baizuo' is, according to political scientist Zhang Chenchen, a Chinese word that ridicules Western “liberal elites”. He further defined the word “baizuo” with the definition “People who only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”. The term has also been used to refer to perceived double standards of the Western media, such as the alleged bias on reporting about Islamist attacks in Xinjiang.  The use of the word “Baizuo” could be an insult on the Chinese Internet.'

• Wikipedia

'Baizuo' is apparently pronounced 'buy-tshwaah'

Hat-tip: Samizdata,  https://www.samizdata.net/2018/02/samizdata-er-chinese-word-of-the-day-baizuo/

Repairing the Damage to Children Caused by Climate Alarmists: letters from Ross McKitrick and Richard Lindzen

It seems the high school students mentioned in the previous post sent their 5 questions to other distinguished climate authorities, not least to Ross McKitrick and to Richard Lindzen.  Both have made their replies public.  Here is the one from McKitrick:

Five questions from students about climate change
Ross McKitrick January 2018

'In late 2017 I was contacted by a group of students at a high school in Europe asking if I would answer some questions on climate change for a project they were working on. Here are the questions they asked, and the answers I gave them.

1. What is behind global warming? Over the last 150 years there have been influences due to strengthening solar output, land-use changes, increased greenhouse gases and natural variability, among other things. The dominant school of thought in climatology is that rising greenhouse gas levels explain most of the overall warming trend since the 1950s. There are good reasons to support this, although the climate system is too complex to assume the matter is settled. The mechanisms by which the sun affects the climate are not well understood, nor are the mechanisms behind clouds, ocean-atmosphere interactions and other basic processes. The relative lack of warming in the tropical troposphere and over the South Pole are not easily explained under the theory that greenhouse gas levels dominate the climate system.

2. What can we do to prevent global warming? If it is a natural process, nothing. If it is mainly due to rising greenhouse gas levels we need to ask instead whether we would want to prevent it. It would require complete cessation of fossil fuel use, which would cause intolerable economic and social costs and would only yield small changes in the time path of global warming for the next century or more. Even large-scale emission reductions (such as under the Paris and Kyoto treaties) would only cause a small slowdown in the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100, so any benefits from such policies are likewise tiny, yet the costs would be enormous. The small warming that took place since the early 20th century was largely beneficial, and the astonishing social and economic benefits associated with cheap fossil energy far outweighed any problems it might have created. It is likely that this will be true over the next century as well.

3. If we don't do anything about it, how does it affect us and our descendants? Humans flourish in every climate on earth from the tropics to the polar regions. We are very adaptable. The only issue is whether changes take place so quickly that we cannot adapt, but history shows this to be a rare situation. Climate processes are slow, and if the climate models are correct, the changes are gradual and predictable. People can adapt to warming conditions more easily than to cooling conditions. The IPCC predicted that over the next hundred years, changes in economies and technology will have a much larger effect on peoples' lives than changes in climate.

4. What will happen in the future, and what are the alternatives for us, if the Earth becomes unlivable? There is no chance that greenhouse gases will make the Earth unlivable. If an asteroid hits, or another ice age begins, or something like that, then we face catastrophe. But the question essentially asks, what happens if we all die? The answer is, we all die.

5. How can we save Earth if it isn't too late? To ask the question is to reveal that you greatly overestimate your size in relation to the Earth. We could not ruin the Earth even if we tried, nor could we save it if it faced ruin. Our planet is a remarkably adaptable and robust home. We don't live in a giant china shop where everything is fragile and breakable, it's more like a playground where everything is made to withstand considerable wear and tear. Over the Earth's history the amount of CO2 in the air has typically been 2-10 times higher than at present yet the plants, animals and oceans flourished. Much of the past half million years have been ice age conditions which wiped out life on the northern continents, yet it always came back as soon as the ice retreated. If you take the view that the ordinary human pursuit of prosperity and happiness will somehow destroy the planet you will end up adopting an anti-human outlook. This is both a scientific and an ethical error. Set your sights on a more modest scale, by trying to be a good citizen and be helpful to the people around you, and you will make much better decisions than if you are thinking in terms of faraway abstract categories like saving the Earth.

Good luck with your studies.'

Downloadable from here:   https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/5questions.pdf

Unfortunately, the Lindzen reply is behind a paywall, here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12129-017-9669-x

Hat-tip for both to SEPP: http://www.sepp.org/twtwfiles/2018/TWTW%201-6-18.pdf