Pirate's Cove

I hadn’t actually heard the term “climate porn”, so it must be a good day, I learned something new! Anyhow, this editorial from the Richmond Times Dispatch is interesting in that it tends to take a moderate view, rather than the typical unhinged doom and gloom we typically hear/read from Warmists

Editorial: Block the porn

Climate-change deniers might be the worst enemies of sound science — we accept the scientific consensus regarding man-made global warming — but climate-change alarmists are quickly catching up. By making unsupportable claims that deniers and skeptics can easily knock down, the alarmists undermine their own case.

Well, you can’t expect Warmists to do away entirely with their “anti-science” meme, can you?

Seemingly every major weather event — hurricane, heat wave, snow storm, flood, or drought — is accompanied by overwrought suggestions that global warming is to blame, or might be, or that it probably will be in the future because climate change “loads the dice,” or because — well, just look at these pictures of the devastation. Do you really need any more proof?

The actual picture is far more nuanced. While hurricane intensity has increased (WT-no, not really, it hasn’t), there has been no global increase in hurricane frequency. Last year’s drought in the U.S. was considerably milder than the droughts of the 1930s and 1950s. As for temperature extremes, science writer Bjorn Lomborg says global warming “will mean . . . more heat waves. . . . But it also causes fewer cold waves — less extreme weather. Many more people die from excessive cold than excessive heat, so fewer people will die from cold and heat in the future. By mid-century, researchers estimated in 2006, that means about 1.4 million fewer deaths per year.”

One thing that’s missing amongst the reality is proof of anthropogenic causation. Most “skeptics” understand that the current warm period is mostly/solely caused by nature. Most anthropogenic causes are from agriculture and landfills on a global scale, while the urban heat island effect (UHI) and land usage play the biggest roles in giving the appearance of massive warming.

The editorial goes on to note that the 15 year pause does great damage to the prognostications and computer models of Warmists

It isn’t proof at all. It — or at least the publicity surrounding it — is, rather, what skeptics call “climate porn.” The quintessential example of climate porn is a picture of a polar bear balanced precariously on a shrinking hunk of ice. The image is supposed to provoke an emotional reaction — save the polar bears, stop global warming! — but it conveys little information.

In fact, conservatives sometimes claim the population of polar bears has increased in recent decades. Those claims are unprovable, because polar bear counts from earlier decades were just wild guesses. Asked if polar bear numbers are rising or falling, an honest scientist will say he doesn’t know — and neither does anyone else.

If we can’t claim that numbers are improving (which they actually are during the study times), Warmists can’t claim that they dropped. Warmists use “climate porn” to get that emotional response. They turn the dial to 11, go way beyond sanity and science, all in an attempt to push their narrow, cult like Progressive dogma.

I’d like to assign good motives to those who wrote the editorial, but, color my skeptical. I’ve spent many years watching, reading, and listening to Progressives/Lefties. I would suspect the editorial is telling Warmists to cool it with the bat guano crazy talk, writings, and visual material, because it hurts their efforts to use “climate change” to push for bigger and bigger government with more and more control over citizens and businesses while enacting redistributive programs, making people more and more reliant on Government.