-Rex Murphy, National Post Editor: We are placing this article here because it is a great source for aspiring journalists or even just readers to learn a style of writing for educational/entertainment purposes. No profit is made by placing this article that was not written by us.
This is one of the best, if not the best article written with tongue firmly implanted in both cheeks, of course one at a time and taking care of the social distance from one cheek to the other, just in case! An ounce of protection (or metric equivalent) is worth a pound (or metric equivalent) of cure!
And now back to the article by Rex Murphy
Like so many others who are consumed by the threat of global warming, the imminent extinction of all life on the planet, a fate pursued with such fury by the oil cartels, I fear I have been a little slack, even lapsed, in my Greenitude this year. Stalwart warmist that I am, I believe all must play their part to put a stay to that dread event. Alas — this is confessional — I haven’t lived up to my own sultry beliefs.
Take Earth Hour almost a month ago.
Naturally I followed the available protocols for that precious 60 minutes. I turned the toaster down to the dim “5” setting (I like a bit of toast in the evening, usually much darker). For recreation I watched a “rerun” instead of a new TV show, thus reducing my “carbon eyeprint.” And, more seriously (lights off in the living room as per usual) I tried a new trick with the candles, lighting them, after the first one, off each other rather than, as in more abandoned years, with one match for each taper.
I turned the toaster down to the dim “5” setting
Now doubters may think this was a precious little effort, and maybe so. But by my calculation my regimen may have added another 20 whole seconds to the life of this Earth, before it inevitably perspires into oblivion from global warming. Holding off on the matches alone probably added 15 seconds. I had a lot of candles.
Still, I know I should have done better; maybe told the boat builders in the basement to lay down their electric tools, and turned off the second generator I use to warm the backyard pool. And, truth to tell, I still feel a little sheepish — if that’s the word here — about streaking off to New Zealand on a monstrous 767 airplane the very next morning.
It was the same three weeks later with the even more solemn observances of Earth Day, for us believers the most precious 24 hours in our planet’s 365-day orbit around Father Sun.
Members of the Asian Citizen’s Center for Environment and Health perform during an Earth Day event in Seoul on April 22, 2020.Jung Yeon-je/AFP via Getty Images
Most times I try my best to Live the Liturgy. This year in the morning I went out and had coffee and a chat with a couple of weeping willows. Tried to cheer ’em up. No go. Genuflected every time a Tesla swished by. Went by the vegan market and picked up some dried kelp. Mixed with a little grass (not that grass, from the lawn) it makes a great incense for meditation sessions, and offers an aromatherapeutic remedy for my many allergies and the onset of what I fear may be Climate PTSD. I did my yoga routine in front of a privately sculpted icon of the blessed David Attenborough, to the calming moans of a CD of whale music.
I paced around the apartment, solitary as all are during this terrible plague (thought by some to be a punishment for Mother Earth), muttering invocations to Father Nye, Bishop Suzuki, Cardinal Monbiot and Pope Gore, and in between chanting versicles from the latest psalter of the Viridian Church — Cows and Flatulence: their Expulsions, our Extinction. One of the great tracts of our time. Spiritually I was in tune with the day, but in my heart I knew it was less than I should be doing.
I contemplated the long, deep and mysterious traditions of Earth Day, how it was first celebrated. Not by the girlfriend-murdering Ira Einhorn in Philadelphia in 1970. A modern heresy. But long ago in the mists of time.
Most times I try my best to Live the Liturgy
It was hooded priests in the order of the Druids at the temple we know as Stonehenge on the great plain of Salisbury who put this marker on the calendar. It was the Druids who drew up the first carbon tax. It was they who gave us Earth Day’s Green Scriptures. They were the prophets who entered upon the parchment scrolls the first 100 Tips for Greener Living for the busy Hunter-Gather.
“Does your family need two bison this winter?” “That sheep pen out back? Is it just ‘status seeking’ because you heard the London crowd had them?” Just two of their clever notions.
Other great innovations emerged from the circle of giant stones and the priestly class who worshipped within its sacred circumference. Was Stonehenge a megalithic climate model? Certainly it was Stonehenge, with the co-operation of The Viking Long Boat Tour Agency (Oar and Sail, not Oil), that convened the first ever Conference of the Parties to Save our Warming Earth. Over 5,000 delegates (population was low in those days, but the gathering would swell) and half as many scribes attended, coming away with pledges from all tribes to cut their carbon emissions by 30 per cent by the year 1150 BC.
The ancient neolithic monument of Stonehenge is viewed from a hot air balloon on Sept. 7, 2016, in Wiltshire, England.Matt Cardy/Getty Images
It was also, and this is important, the very first set of carbon-emissions targets that everybody knew were never to be met, setting the pattern for centuries of IPCC conferences yet to come.
Only one note of controversy. The delegation from the famous Thunberg clan all travelled haughtily, each one by his or her own private ox. One youngling, yclept Greta, was even said to have a spare ox. How dare they, said the head Druid.
The Druids as warrior warmists faced two great challenges: fire and the wheel.
The first came from the early industrialists, ravening capitalists the horde of them. They invented the stone grate. The planet was on the threshold of the age when people started thinking it was a good thing, maybe lord forbid a right, to keep warm, and a right (gasp) to cook.
Druids, pagans and revellers gather in the centre of Stonehenge as they take part in a winter solstice ceremony at the neolithic monument on Dec. 21, 2016.Matt Cardy/Getty Images
And who would supply the fuel? Why the exploiters and deniers, the peat cartels and the bogland syndicates, Earth-haters and denialists the pack of them.
Then came the wheel. It would take people off their feet. Opponents determined to stop the menace in its not-yet-formed tracks. The anti-wheel movement, championed by paleolithic activists, made a big thing of it.
Stop the Wheel was very big in its day. A proleptic version of the great Ban the Pipeline debate of our times. Raised a lot of chickens too, for the environmental cause.
But this is another story. If I can rev up my slacker’s commitment to the cause of causes, maybe it can be told next Earth Day.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not carbon – and the difference is more than just a matter of knowing enough chemistry to distinguish an element from a compound. It's a matter of distinguishing a black solid that, in the form of fine soot particles, can cause respiratory diseases from an odorless, colorless gas that is non-toxic at any concentration and non-dangerous at concentrations 20 times the current 400 parts per million (ppm) in our atmosphere.
To call CO2 "carbon pollution" is not only bad chemistry and toxicology but also bad biology.
As thousands of empirical studies have found, on average, every doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere causes about a 35 percent increase in plant growth efficiency. Plants grow better in wetter and drier soils and in warmer and colder temperatures, widening their ranges and increasing their adaptability to climate changes, reducing the risk of biodiversity loss. They make better use of soil nutrients, resist diseases and pests better, and improve the ratio of fruit to fiber.
The consequence is more food for people and animals. Most important, it means more affordable food for the poor.
A review of refereed literature on the subject found the "monetary value of this benefit amount[ed] to a total sum of $3.2 trillion over the 50-year period 1961–2011. Projecting the monetary value … forward … reveals it will likely bestow an additional $9.8 trillion on crop production between now and 2050."
So any argument to reduce CO2 emissions must offset the fact that increasing CO2's concentration in the atmosphere enhances food production.
Advocates have their answer. It's all the negative "impacts" (note the pejorative) of the warming rising CO2 will cause. That takes us to the nub of the controversy: How much does added CO2 warm the atmosphere?
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests "climate sensitivity" (atmospheric warming in response to doubled CO2 concentration) of 1.5 C to 4.5 C.
That estimate of rests solely on the output of computer climate models. Their output is not data (raw observations of the external world) but hypotheses. So climate models' simulations aren't evidence of anything, they're guesses to be tested. And they fail.
On average, they simulate twice the warming observed over the relevant period. Over 95 percent simulate more warming than observed, so their errors are not random (evenly distributed above and below observations) but driven, intentionally or not, by bias. And none simulated the complete absence of warming over the last 18 years and 8 months.
Not surprisingly, top climate scientists have, as Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry has tracked on her blog, been reassessing "climate sensitivity," basing their estimates not on models but on empirical observation. They're tending, as the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation reported last year, toward estimates in the range of 0.3 C to 1.0 C (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change) or 1.25 C to 3.0 C with a best estimate of 1.75˚ (Lewis and Crok). With those lower ranges, the "impacts" of "climate change" dwindle, and benefits might well outweigh costs.
So the models are wrong. Therefore they provide no rational basis for predicting future "global average temperature," or for calculating the "social cost of 'carbon' [dioxide]," or for any policy.
Reducing CO2 emissions would require less dependence on fossil fuels, which now provide over 85 percent of all the energy humans consume and are likely to continue to do so through probably the end of this century. But they are our best source for the abundant, affordable, reliable energy indispensable to any society's growing and staying out of poverty. Forcing the substitution of wind, solar and biofuels means raising the cost and reducing both the quantity and the reliability of energy available, which means slowing, stopping or reversing mankind's growth out of poverty.
It follows that we shouldn't embrace any such policy.
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
Founder and National Spokesman
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
Ancient Trees
“They studied giant redwoods, the tallest trees on earth in Humboldt County California to reach these conclusions. They hypothesized and verified experimentally that as trees reached the height of 425 they could pump less and less water and nutrients up to new growth at that level. No current tree in the world has reached this height.
In effect, maximum tree growth is limited by gravity and friction.
Scientist George Koch and colleagues believe that they have established the upper limit for tree height. In an article entitled “Study Limits Maximum Tree Height”, by Jonathan Amos, which appeared in the BBC News Online in April 2004, that maximum tree height is about 425 feet.
Back in 1938, some scientists were speculating that the earth was shrinking and gravity along with it because of a huge petrified pine tree, well over three hundred feet tall found in the Rainbow Petrified Forest in Arizona.
In article sub-titled “Recent Discoveries in Petrified Forest Leads to Belief This Old Globe Is Gradually Contracting” (The Ogden Standard-Examiner, February 13. 1938) various scientists discussed the idea that at the time this petrified tree with its huge root system lived on the earth, its circumference was approximately 30,000 miles rather than the current 25,000. The larger earth would have exerted an attenuated (weaker) gravitational force on the trees and animals of that time.
According to the scientists quoted in the article,
“Since the newly discovered petrified tree Is of the Araucarias species, a form of pine which, when its sap is running, is of considerable weight, it probably weighed per lineal foot as much as modern-day smaller trees, and therefore seems to indicate that the magnetism and force of gravity of the earth at the’ time it grew were more dissipated, an indication that the earth itself possessed a greater diameter.”
These petrified trees had been transformed into onyx, jasper, agate, carnelian and chalcedony. Today, the giant redwoods are the growth champions. The various varieties of Araucarias would not have been expected to reach the same exalted heights.
The discovery that caused this scientific introspection occurred in 1938.
What the authors had overlooked in finding a petrified 300 foot plus tree of the Araucarias variety and finding themselves perplexed by it, is that a much larger tree had already been discovered in —Texas by federal geologists.
had been discovered in a petrified forest in Texas. According to an article in the Sunday, January 23, 1927 Port Arthur News, a petrified tree of the
Based on common sense, experience and the scientific article quoted herein establishing 425 feet as the upper limit for tree height, clearly something anomalous was going on in the distant past. Perhaps, more properly the earth’s current gravity is the anomaly.
According to the article, the forest is situated in a virtually inaccessible region in a valley of the Big Bend, nearly 100 miles from the nearest railroad spur at that time.
The forest was immodestly referred to as the greatest Petrified Forest known to man.
Mere stumps of trees rose 100 to 150 feet into the air. A thick covering of volcanic ash and pumice stone is said to have covered the trees and it is thought by the geologists/discoverers to have come from a volcano in the nearby Chisos mountains.
“One tree trunk measured 896 feet in length and the upright trunks are so large that they appear from a distance to be great symmetrical columns of natural rock. These federal geologists tell the -story. They have visited this distant valley, which is split by a deep arroyo leading into the Rio Grande.”
Clearly, if what this 1927 story reports is true, that 900 foot tree is more than twice that was projected by some scientists working in that field, as the maximum tree size obtainable in today’s gravity conditions. This means that gravity was somehow attenuated in the “distant” past.”
(I won’t rest until all of the greater-ancestors are found. Side Note: I was given a short list by an evolutionist during a debate and Redwood trees was on his list, previously it was on my difficulty-list along with rabbits, blue whales, as well as animals with giant in front of their name.) Chris L Lesley
Ooparts & Ancient High Technology website: http://s8int.com/-
by Greater Ancestors World Museum on Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 10:35pm
