Monday 23 September 2019

"Greta Thunberg's use of the words 'don't act' is very misleading. What she is actually urging is not action, but government action intended to stop private action." Bonus #QotD


"[Greta Thunberg's] use of the words 'don't act' is very misleading. What [s]he is urging when [s]he speaks of 'action' is a mass of laws and decrees — i.e., government action. This government action will forcibly prevent hundreds of millions, indeed, billions of individual human beings from engaging in their, personal and business private action — that is, from acting in ways that they judge to serve their own self-interests. Thus, what [s]he is actually urging is not action, but government action intended to stop private action."
~ George Reisman, paraphrased from his 2006 post on 'Britain's Stern Review on Global Warming'
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UPDATE 1: School climate strikers should answer these two questions:
Any headteacher who values his or her pupils’ education will not turn a blind eye to today’s absences, still less join the kids for a march, as some are reported to be doing.
They will keep them behind after school and set them two essays to research and write. The first should answer the question: “Does scientific evidence support the notion that ‘the Earth is dying’?” As for resources to answer that question, I point them towards the latest IPCC report as well as the data sources which feed into it. That would include Nasa data on sea ice in the Arctic, which shows a sharp retreat in recent decades, as well as satellite data from the same organisation on wildfires – which shows a fall in the acreages burned in recent decades. They might also like to look at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organisation’s report on hurricanes which last month concluded: “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human activity–and particularly greenhouse warming–has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity”.
    Essay number two should be on the question: “What would it mean for the global economy if governments really did eliminate all carbon emissions by 2025?” Given that this is the central demand of many of the climate strikers, this is a rather pertinent question...

UPDATE 2: A helpful reality check appeared at Bjorn Lomborg's Facebook page, using data from the International Disasters Database:

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1 comment:

paul scott said...

I can imagine many people are like me, in that we now never read the Global warming hoax junk at all, and who object to being lectured at by stupid children.