Marin goes all-in on climate change, wasting money and suing Big Oil

Even as evidence builds that climate change is a scam, hyper-educated Marin spends money to prevent it and starts a major shakedown against oil companies.

Climate Change post Marin County Tiburon shorelineScott Adams keeps saying America has two different movies playing, one that progressives watch and the other that conservatives watch. In the progressive movie, proliferating CO2 in the atmosphere is turning the earth into a giant sweat box from which no one will escape alive. Seas will rise and deserts proliferate. Ninety-seven percent of all scientists agree that, unless we turn our economy over to the United Nations, we’re doomed. Doomed, do you hear?!

In this particular movie, the fact that one prediction after another has consistently failed for the past twenty years is irrelevant. Too many hurricanes? Too few hurricanes? Doesn’t matter. Now that we’ve withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, the end is near no matter what.

Conservatives have a somewhat different notion of things. While the progressives watch a climate horror movie, conservatives focus on documentaries with real news, not fake. To that end, they keep harking back to stupid little things like actual data and (sadly) equally actual scientific fraud. For example, conservatives like to point out that — per a peer-reviewed study conducted by exceptionally qualified scientists — government temperature adjustments have been, in a word, fraudulent (my word, not theirs, probably because they don’t want Michael Mann to sue them):

“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published [global average surface temperature (GAST)] data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

[snip]

In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study’s authors.

“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”

Conservatives also make much of the fact that the claim that 97% of all scientists support global warming is also totally bogus:

In 2013, Australian blogger John Cook reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011, concluding that 97 percent of the authors who stated their position on the subject believed that human activity was responsible for some warming.

  • However, when University of Delaware geography professor David Legates reviewed Cook’s papers, he found that only 41 of them (0.3 percent of all of the abstracts, and just 1 percent of those that expressed an opinion) believed human activity was causing most current warming.

On the other hand, write Bast and Spencer, the Petition Project — a group of physicists and physical chemists in California — has collected more than 31,000 signatures from scientists agreeing that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of…carbon dioxide…or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

Another “inconvenient truth” conservatives keep harking back to is that, as even the most fraudulen… er, most fierce climate change advocates have had to admit, there has been no warming for the entirety of the 21st century (to date, of course):

The ‘Pause’ in global warming is real and the computer models predicting dramatically increased temperatures have failed.

This is the shocking admission of a paper published this week in Nature Geoscience. It’s shocking because the paper’s lead author is none other than Ben Santer – one of the more vociferous and energetic alarmists exposed in the Climategate emails.

According to the paper’s abstract:

In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble.

And:

We conclude that model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.

Translation: the real-world temperature increases were much smaller than our spiffy, expensive computer models predicted.

Ice is not vanishing, polar bears are not vanishing, Himalayan glaciers are not vanishing, and our withdrawal from the Paris Accords will change nothing. As to that last point, the reality is that the proper name for the Accords really ought to have been the “Destroy the American Economy Accords” because that was the unspoken goal behind Obama’s unconstitutional treaty. While other CO2-producing nations were essentially unhindered when it came to producing greenhouse gases, Obama bound American industry hand and foot and, at the same time, handed over vast chunks of American wealth to fund other countries’ expanding greenhouse-producing efforts.

And then there are the logical problems that keep cropping up when conservatives force themselves to view the progressive climate horror movie. If the oceans are rising because of warming, that means a wetter world. A wetter world, in turn, means a greener world. Contrary to the greenie nightmare scenario, there won’t be more deserts. Instead, there will be fewer starving or freezing people and, as was the case during the Medieval Warming period, humans will thrive.

Unfortunately, what the warmies haven’t paid attention to is the fact that our slightly warming temperatures at the end of the 20th century and our flat-lining temperatures in the 21st have perfectly tracked solar activity. That would be all for the good but for the fact that the less active the sun is, the colder the earth is — and our sun’s activity is heading into a possible cyclical slow-down. For humans, that’s bad, bad, bad. Going back again to the medieval era, the end of the Medieval Warming led to a period of intense famine which set the world up to be a perfect receptacle for the Black Plague. Please note that conservatives understand that we cannot affect the sun. If we’re wise, though, here on earth we’ll take steps to protect ourselves against possible lean years.

I could go on, but I won’t. Progressives believe in scary warming fairy tales; conservatives believe in data-driven documentaries.

Here in Marin, despite the plethora of advanced degrees, the majority of residents are progressives who have fallen deeply down the warming rabbit hole. This perfectly supports my theory that the more college degrees you have that post-date around 1975, the less knowledge, education, logic, and insight you will find in a population. That’s because, for the last forty years, colleges have been dedicated to indoctrination, not education.

Clutching their fancy sheepskins, Marinites are utterly immune to actual data, as opposed to failed predictions, even when those predictions cannot exist simultaneously in the real world (e.g., more water in earth’s atmosphere cannot mean more deserts on earth). They know, as surely as engineer Bill Nye and over-rated physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson do, that we’re all going to die.

Add this primitive certainty to Marin’s coastal location, and you will understand why they believe that their death won’t be because of Gozer or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but because of drowning as oceans rise by as much as five feet! (Yes, that’s Al Gore lunacy on parade. Saner people, even those who have sipped the climate change Kool-Aid, predict a rise of approximately 20 inches, or about one-and-a-half feet.)

And so we get to the story I read in yesterday’s Marin Independent Journal, our local paper. There we learn that Belvedere and Tiburon, two of the richest communities in America and, moreover, two communities heavily saturated with college degrees, are hard at work wastin… er, spending money (not all of it theirs) to push back the tides (emphasis mine):

Engineers are studying the best line of defense against flooding in Belvedere, where inevitable sea-level rise is threatening the city’s waterfront homes.

A project like this doesn’t cost mere chump change. Just doing the study sucks money out of people’s pockets:

The $1.08 million study is being paid for in part by a grant agreement with the state Department of Water Resources through the Local Levee Assistance Program. It has provided the city with $611,000, or 55 percent of the study cost.

But wait, as they say, there’s more! This kind of paranoid stupidit… er, caution isn’t limited to one fabulously wealthy Marin community. Instead, the whole of Marin has gone crazy. It just launched a massive lawsuit against various fossil fuel companies accusing them of failing to prevent climate change:

Marin County sued 37 oil, gas and coal companies Monday asserting the companies knew their fossil fuel products would cause sea level rise and coastal flooding but failed to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution.

The lawsuit was part of a coordinated litigation attack by Marin, San Mateo County and the city of Imperial Beach.

The Marin lawsuit, filed in Marin County Superior Court, alleges that “major corporate members of the fossil fuel industry, have known for nearly a half century that unrestricted production and use of their fossil fuel products create greenhouse gas pollution that warms the planet and changes our climate.”

The suit goes on to say that even though the fossil fuel companies knew there was a narrow window to take action before consequences would be irreversible, they engaged in a “coordinated, multi-front effort” to “discredit the growing body of publicly available scientific evidence and persistently create doubt.”

The suit asserts that the fossil fuel companies “have promoted and profited from a massive increase in the extraction and consumption of oil, coal and natural gas, which has in turn caused an enormous, foreseeable, and avoidable increase in global greenhouse gas pollution.”

And the suit states that this greenhouse gas pollution has “substantially contributed to a wide-range of dire climate-related effects including global warming, rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, melting polar ice caps and glaciers, more extreme and volatile weather and sea level rise.”

The defendants named in the suit include Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell.

In a perfect world, the crucible that is a courtroom would see the truth emerge about fraudulently manipulated climate data, heavily messaged hockey puck charts, endless failed predictions, etc. However, I know exactly how San Francisco Bay Area courts work. Any defendant going in can be expected to get bounced around like a kangaroo in a court of the same name. There will be no justice done. There will, instead, be a drawn out and painful shakedown litigation that either results in billion dollar verdicts or forced, but suicidal, settlements.

So, back to the movies. As best as I can tell, climate change fanatics in Marin as well as out of it are the embodiment of Dame Partington, whom the Rev. Sydney Smith described two hundred years ago doing battle with the Atlantic:

In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm [at Sidmouth], Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington’s spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal; the Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington.

Our self-styled elite worship at the climate change altar. No matter how they dress their faith in science, the fact that their doctrine is unfalsifiable, no matter how often proven wrong, tells us that their movie is a magical horror story, and one that is likely to cost the world dearly if brought to its full fruition.

On the other hand, conservatives are King Canutes, in that they fully understand man’s limitations when the tide rolls in (citations omitted):

Henry of Huntingdon tells the story as one of three examples of Canute’s “graceful and magnificent” behaviour (outside of his bravery in warfare)….

[snip]

In Huntingdon’s account, Canute set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the incoming tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet “continuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.'” He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again “to the honour of God the almighty King”.

Later historians repeated the story, most of them adjusting it to have Canute more clearly aware that the tides would not obey him, and staging the scene to rebuke the flattery of his courtiers.

It’s long past time for wealthy and theoretically-educated Lefties to leave the climate change horror show and join conservatives watching a real-world documentary, one that brings highlights legitimate concerns, none of which have anything to do with rising oceans or allegedly culpable Big Oil.

Image credits: Tiburon Classic Car Show 2012, Albedo20. Creative Commons; Some rights reserved.