The Climate Apocalypse is Near!

Look, the climate certainly is changing --- for example, with the record-setting temperatures in California's Death Valley a few days ago. But I always ask people: How do you know it's carbon emissions or some other factor or phenomenon that's causing changes in climate, etc? It's simple science: One has to definitively rule out other possible causal factors for the changes. The Earth's axis wobbles a bit as it travel its orbit around the sun, or the sun itself has extreme periods fire-blast flareups off its surface, sending down more radiation than it normally would. Fact is, the Earth's climate is always --- and has been --- changing, for eons.

And we know much of the climate phenomena happening in this era has happened before, especially fires and floods on a biblical scales. And never forget that we had a warming pause for about 20-25 years starting around 1990, a period when more carbon emissions were spewed into the atmosphere ever in history. No one can explain why temperature remained flat during that time, when there should have been --- according the climate "experts" --- a significant increase of heat on the surface of the Earth. I didn't happen. 

So, always remain skeptical of stories that cite anthropological climate change. 

In any case, at the New York Times, "‘No One Is Safe’: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World":

Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.

Only days before in the Northwestern United States, a region famed for its cool, foggy weather, hundreds had died of heat. In Canada, wildfire had burned a village off the map. Moscow reeled from record temperatures. And this weekend the northern Rocky Mountains were bracing for yet another heat wave, as wildfires spread across 12 states in the American West.

The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it. The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.

“I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. “There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save peoples lives.”

The floods in Europe have killed at least 165 people, most of them in Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy. Across Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, hundreds have been reported as missing, which suggests the death toll could rise. Questions are now being raised about whether the authorities adequately warned the public about risks.

The bigger question is whether the mounting disasters in the developed world will have a bearing on what the world’s most influential countries and companies will do to reduce their own emissions of planet-warming gases. They come a few months ahead of United Nations-led climate negotiations in Glasgow in November, effectively a moment of reckoning for whether the nations of the world will be able to agree on ways to rein in emissions enough to avert the worst effects of climate change...

Reining in global warming emissions, blah, blah, blah...

Developing countries will not forego the use of fossil fuels to power their development. Even China, which is an economic powerhouse these days --- is in many respects still a developing country, and its leaders won't sign on to a global pact to cut the use carbons, lest they halt their upward economic trajectory, and consign hundreds of millions of their people to perpetual poverty. 

These are truth claim, not scientific hokus pocus. *Shrugs.*

Still more here.