Edward Morrison Morley: Disasters, climate change madness, and taking 'action'

www.thornwalker.com/ditch/morley_disasters.htm

August 10, 2021

Disasters, climate-change madness, and taking “action”

By EDWARD MORRISON MORLEY

Editor’s note: Edward Morrison Morley is a noted climate expert, having occasionally ventured out of doors, even during the COVID-19 lockdown. He was a weapons instructor in Afghanistan (though he refuses to say for which side), has conducted cyberwarfare seminars in China, Russia, and Belarus, and is a specialist on Hindu logic and the lifestyles of the 17th-century Flemish painters. He is currently working on a biography of the legendary 19th-century know-it-all Charles Babbage from a soon-to-be undisclosed location. — Nicholas Strakon

SEVERAL WEEKS AGO — July 14 and after for those of you taking notes — the legacy media went gaga over climate change and flooding in Western Europe, especially in Germany. A piece in the Wall Street Journal, “In Europe, Flood Deaths Top 120” by Bojan Pancevski (July 17-18, 2021), is a bit more nuanced than other accounts, but surprisingly relies mostly on the pronouncements of politicians (four of them) rather than scientists except for a brief qualifier toward the end, and none by name.
The article starts out referring to “the region’s worst flooding in decades” though no data is given to support that one way or another. Pancevski quotes German Chancellor Angela Merkel as saying, “If we look down the decades, there have always been storms and floods, but the frequency is simply worrying and it requires us to act.” (Gotta love the new cant word “worrying” here.) Pancevski contradicts that in a subsequent paragraph — without noting it — when he writes, “Germany and its neighbors regularly have been hit by severe floods in the past, most recently in 2013....” It would seem doubtful that “the frequency is simply worrying” if the last one was eight years ago. That didn’t prevent German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer from calling for (surprise!) “more political action to lower emissions in the future.” Pancevski discreetly follows that with “[b]ut scientists said events such as this week’s flooding have more complex causes that make it hard to blame on global warming alone.” The reader is left to guess what those complexities and causes might be.
As if to illustrate what “following the science” means to so-called progressives (AKA regressives), the New York Times on July 18 chimed in with “‘No One Is Safe’: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World” by the noted climatologist Somini Sengupta. For the information-challenged, Sengupta is an English and Developmental Studies graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. That’s right, nary a sign of the study of climate science there, but in many respects that might be considered a plus. However, she seems to think like an alleged climate scientist despite her lack of formal training.
Frustrated in her plans to become an English professor (there’s a switch: usually English professors are frustrated journalists who would rather be teaching politics than English), she subsequently was a cocktail waitress, radio producer, community organizer, and finally, landed a gig with the Times, where she is the international climate reporter. Her remit, according to the Times’s website, is to tell the stories of communities and landscapes most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. To this end, she has reported from a Congo River ferry, a Himalayan glacier, the streets of Baghdad and Mumbai, and many places in between. When she was the Times’s United Nations correspondent, she reported on global challenges from war to women’s rights. As a modern polymath (AKA journalist), she obviously puts to shame such dilettantes as Leonardo da Vinci and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Anyway, she opines, with the kind of instant analysis and expertise we have all come to love and appreciate from the legacy media, that “[f]loods swept Germany, fires ravaged the American West and another heat wave loomed, driving home the reality that the world’s richest nations remain unprepared for the intensifying consequences of climate change.” The author merely assumes the “intensifying consequences of climate change,” but like Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War or Sleepy Joe Biden’s plan to spend an additional 5 or 6 or whatever trillion dollars on “infrastructure” (AKA pork-barrel projects) while balancing the budget, those consequences are probably a state secret. (N.B.: Please redact the previous sentence. Thank you.)
Discerning readers (such as readers of The Last Ditch) will note that while politicians are clueless about what might or might not cause global warming, they are united behind the idea that “action” is called for, even if we don’t know what might be efficacious or whether said actions might make the situation worse. And, of course, “the public” allegedly likes politicians to “take action.” Only later do they bother to ask how it was paid for or for a cost-benefit analysis of any kind, but by then it’s much too late.

Fortunately, Bjørn Lomborg provides a needed corrective in his “Climate Change Doesn’t Cause All Disasters,” in the Wall Street Journal, July 17-18, 2021. He points out that a study of “more than 10,000 rivers around the world shows that most rivers now flood less. What used to be a 50-year flood in the 1970s happens every 152 years today.” In fact, the River Ahr, which was the epicenter for last month’s flood in Germany, was lower in 2021 than in 1804 and in 1910. (Remember that Merkel claimed, “If we look down the decades, there have always been storms and floods, but the frequency is simply worrying and it requires us to act.”) Lomborg notes that the increased fatalities owe to “more people building settlements on flood plains, leaving the water no place to go,” and writes, “Instead of more solar panels and wind turbines to combat climate change, riverside communities need better water management. And foremost, they need a well-functioning warning system so they can evacuate before disaster strikes.”
Though Germany built an extensive warning system following the floods of 2002, a test in September 2020 failed spectacularly. (Spoiler Alert: a governmental protection system failing? Spectacularly? Say it ain’t so, Angela.) This time, Lomborg points out, the floods were predicted by the European Flood Awareness System, which “formally warned the German government four days in advance, yet most people on the ground were left unaware.” But vague statements blaming climate change are more convenient and certainly cheaper to utter.
As for climate change being blamed in the United States for wildfires, Lomborg credits poor forest management, especially “allowing houses to be built in fire-prone areas.” Despite that, the “area that burned” in 2020 was “the fourth-lowest of the past 11 years” and only 11 percent of the area that was burned in the early 1900s. The data for global deaths from all forms of climate-related causes shows that while half a million such deaths per year was average in the 1920s, the average deaths have declined in a century to fewer than 20,000 a year ... even though the population has gone up by 400 percent since 1920. For 2021, which is being dubbed “The Year of Climate Catastrophes,” the current adjusted rate for the whole year will be about 6,000.
No indication from Google, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter “fact checkers” that stories blaming climate change for the flooding or for wildfires are indeed “fake news.” Or for that matter, that Google, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter “fact checkers” should have banned themselves for disseminating this fake news. So how about joining me in urging that, at least, these guys accurately describe themselves as “opinion checkers”?
Lomborg is no climate-change “denier” since he believes that “[c]limate change is a real problem we should fix.” Ironically, however, he demonstrates that “one of the few well-documented effects of climate change” is that it “also reduces cold waves, which kill many more people globally than heat waves.... Temperature increases over the past two decades in the U.S. and Canada cause about 7,200 more heat deaths a year. But ... warming prevents about 21,000 cold deaths a year. Globally ... climate change annually causes almost 120,000 additional heat deaths a year, but avoids nearly 300,000 cold deaths.”
I would be willing to wager that most people — particularly people who give up plastic grocery bags or drive expensive Teslas to save the planet — don’t know any of this. Lomborg has a new book out, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, that might be worth a look.

And, now, as a reward to our loyal readers, here is another TLD promotion: “Take Edward Morrison Morley’s Money.” If you can prove that most people actually do know all of what is mentioned above, then you can cash in. Write your proof on a reasonably flat stone and send it to “Instant Riches,” c/o The Last Ditch. Management reserves all rights. TLD employees, family members of TLD employees, any other relatives of TLD employees or friends and/or acquaintances of same, members of the Russian Duma and their dependents, the commissioner of the National Football League, anyone who deliberately or unconsciously labels himself as a “progressive,” and/or people who are literate are ineligible to participate, cannot pass go, and cannot collect $200. In case of ties, the issue will be resolved through armed combat following the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules of fencing. Duplicate prizes may also be awarded. The judgments and rulings of the official TLD judges are final and no appeals may be considered. Any threats of violence, implied or actual, are expressly proscribed. Void where prohibited by law. Offer not valid in Washington, D.C., California, New York, and Oklahoma. Ω

August 10, 2021
Published in 2021 by WTM Enterprises.
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