Climate nags are trying to ruin Christmas.
For the religious among us, or at least those professing to be Christians, Christmas is a time of reflection on the birth of the Savior, signified by love and wishes of peace and goodwill towards people worldwide, and sometimes on lawns and rooftops by manger scenes and large illuminated stars.
Under the best conditions, for Christians and non-Christians alike, the Christmas season is a time of peace, love, and of sharing home, hearth, and meals with family and friends.
For some, it is a time to give back to the community, to help the homeless and provide blankets, coats, and food to those in need, and toys for poor families with children and for the families of our veterans who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice or who are serving far from home.
Since the latter part of the twentieth century, Christmas has also become a time of gifts, gifts, gifts and toys, toys, toys—the rampant consumerism that generation after generation complains has come to overshadow the holiday’s true meaning. Despite the complaining, most people seem to participate—some to a joyous degree—in the purchase and exchange-fest Christmas has become. Both givers’ and recipients’ faces light up when the gifts are unwrapped, and we all know retailers love Christmas.
Another Christmas tradition, since televisions have populated nearly every home, is the watching of Christmas specials. Christmas, like no other time of year, is a time to experience love, joy, and nostalgia through the shared watching of television shows viewed year after year. One of the most beloved shared Christmas viewing experiences is How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
The story is actually mistitled, because although it details humorous machinations the Grinch goes through to steal Christmas joy from all the Whos in Whoville, Christmas is not stolen. In the end, The Grinch is a tale of redemption, with a message of the healing power of love and salvation, gained through a true understanding of the holiday.
Sadly, climate scolds are attempting to rob people of the joy and hope inherent in Christmas. They are playing the role of the unredeemed Grinch, telling everyone that unless they turn off their Christmas lights, give up their Christmas sweaters, and stop buying and exchanging gifts, the world will end. Climate Grinches proclaim celebrating Christmas is bad for the planet.
It all began on the much feared and anticipated “Black Friday,” when around the world climate protestors attempted to block the entrances of retailers opening their doors to what is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Based on sales figures, it is safe to assume most holiday shoppers ignored the protestors.
In Germany, after years of indoctrination by the cult of climate alarmism, a recent survey revealed 57 percent of households that celebrate Christmas expect to reduce their use of Christmas lights, with 11 percent reporting they will not use Christmas lights at all this year and another 10 percent who expect to not use Christmas lights in future years.
Claiming, “We’re in a climate emergency,” various climate websites and institutes admonish Christmas shoppers to consider their “carbon footprint” when travelling and making purchases, directing people to change their holiday behavior to save the planet. Their directives include using public transit or shared rides and to stop online shopping altogether. “[A]ll the packaging and transportation that goes into delivering that gift (next day!) to your doorstep leaves a way bigger carbon footprint than just going to the store yourself,” EarthDay.org reported.
And in the United Kingdom, the charity Hubbub warns people to stop buying new Christmas sweaters, ugly or otherwise, as their analysis shows 95 percent of them are made using plastics (most likely plastics made using fossil fuels), with microparticles of these plastics winding up in our oceans and streams as they breakdown in the wash.
It’s time to tell climate nannies to relax, share the love, and have a cup of good cheer—and most importantly, if they can’t be happy, to leave the rest of us alone, at least for the duration of the Christmas season, so that we can dream our little dreams of hope and love for everyone!
— H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: Breitbart; CNN; Breitbart; Hot Air
IN THIS ISSUE …
COP25 ended with a whimper, not a bang … Volcanic activity can cause climate change … Greta’s handlers mislead on train trip
COP25 ENDED WITH A WHIMPER, NOT A BANG
“We have achieved nothing,” said Greta Thunberg in a recent YouTube video. Although I rarely agree with Thunberg on climate, as numerous headlines attest, her statement accurately describes the lack of accomplishments at COP25. After being extended for two days, the largest annual gathering of climate alarmists ended—as so many such meetings have in the past—with a whimper, not a bang.
COP25 was supposed to be a 12-day summit at which the rules to account for and cut emissions under the 2015 Paris Climate agreement were supposed to finally be agreed to. In addition, firm commitments, including timelines and mechanisms, to pay developing countries compensation for climate-related losses and adaptation were supposed to be delivered at COP25. Neither goal was met.
“Negotiators in Madrid worked through the night to salvage a rulebook for cutting greenhouse gas emissions before 2020, when signatories must start meeting those targets,” said CNN in its initial post COP25 analysis. “Yet even after extending overtime, many observers, scientists, and climate activists called the resulting agreement a monumental failure, strewn with watered-down language that kicks urgent items down the road to COP26 in 2020.”
Epoch Times reports numerous COP25 delegates blamed resistance from a few major countries, primarily, Australia, Brazil, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United States for scuttling progress on a new agreement.
Carolina Schmidt, Chile’s environment minister, who served as president of the talks, called for consensus on a new agreement with hard targets and timetables, but no consensus developed.
“I am disappointed with the results,” tweeted António Guterres, U.N. Secretary-General at the conclusion of COP25. “The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation & finance to tackle the climate crisis.”
COP25 changed nothing. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, as tens of thousands of climate bureaucrats bloviated on about the need for change, while flying around the world, being housed at first rate hotels, and dining on five star meals, all at taxpayer expense, spewing thousands of tons of carbon dioxide all along the route.
SOURCES: Youtube; Youtube; CNN; Epoch Times
VOLCANIC ACTIVITY CAN CAUSE CLIMATE CHANGE
New research published in Nature Communications describes a factor not accounted for in climate models or by most climate scientists that can have a profound climate impact: Greenhouse gas emissions released directly from the movement of volcanic rocks beneath the surface of the earth.
Geologists at the University of Birmingham modeled the changes in carbon dioxide levels during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)—a short interval of maximum temperature lasting around lasting 20,000 to 100,000 years approximately 55 million years ago, when global average temperatures were estimated to have increased by 4 to 5 degrees Celsius. They discovered the best explanation for the spike in temperatures was carbon dioxide released by large scale movements of magma below the earth’s surface. This produced the greatest temporary increase in temperatures during the past 65 million years.
The carbon dioxide was emitted from or seeped out of Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs), extremely large accumulations of igneous rocks that occur when magma travels through the crust toward the surface. During the PETM, the North Atlantic Igneous Province (NAIP)—one of Earth’s largest LIPs spanning Britain, Ireland, Norway and Greenland—expelled huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which the Birmingham research indicates precipitated the temperature spike, among other climate changes.
PETM was the largest natural climate change event of Cenozoic time, and shows that LIP activity can instigate large global climate changes lasting tens of thousands of years.
“Large Igneous Provinces are linked to spikes of change in global climate, ecosystems, and the carbon cycle throughout Mesozoic time—coinciding with the Earth’s most devastating mass extinctions and oceans becoming strongly depleted of oxygen,” said Stephen Jones, Ph.D. lead author of the study.
Add the subsurface movement of volcanic rocks to the list of factors contributing to climate change the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fails to account for entirely.
SOURCES: PHYS.org; Nature Communications
GRETA’S HANDLERS MISLED ON TRAIN TRIP
Greta Thunberg, or at least her adult handlers and promoters, goofed again as she departed the COP25 talks full of disappointment and rage.
Greta tweeted about the awful overcrowding on Germany’s trains. The tweet came with a photo attached, shot by someone in her entourage, showing a seemingly forlorn Thunberg sitting on the floor of the train car surrounded by luggage. Of course, the impression the image and tweet were supposed to leave on readers’ minds was, “there’s Greta sacrificing for her climate beliefs once again, sitting on a crowded train’s floor in a struggle to get home.”
The problem is, neither Greta nor her entourage were forced to sit on the floor in an overcrowded train. The train wasn’t overcrowded, and Thunberg and entourage were given first class tickets by the rail company Deutsche Bahn. This means she, or more likely those advising and guiding her in her “not-so-hair shirt climate crisis tour,” saw this as yet another opportunity to rail against greedy capitalists and governments—in this case, for not investing enough in public transit.
Demonstrating the power of her scowl, Duetsche Bahn apologized to Greta for the conditions of her travel, before realizing they’d actually treated her and her pals to first class accommodations. They rescinded the apology. While complimenting Thunberg for riding the train, they stated, “It would have been even nicer if you had also reported how friendly and competently our team served you at your seat in first class.”
To avoid using fossil fuels, Greta sailed across the oceans on luxury, specialty sailing yachts, costing millions of dollars. Along the way she dined on first world vegan meals, raised and shipped by Western farmers at great expense, while thousands around the world went malnourished due to a lack of protein in their diets, lacking access to meat and unable to afford the expensive roundabout way of satisfying peoples’ needs for complex proteins via the kind of mixed all-vegan diet Greta is served.
I don’t blame young Greta for these mistakes, or the ill-informed views she espouses, I blame the adults in her life who, instead of responsibly providing for her well-being and education, are using her as a pawn to push government-imposed austerity and socialism under the guise of fighting climate change. The fact Thunberg is a pawn in other peoples’ designs is something about which she is almost certainly unaware. She probably genuinely believes she has generated all the media attention and legions of fawning sycophants all on her own, but she hasn’t. Unfortunately, these goofs only hurt Greta and not those pulling her strings.
SOURCE: New York Post
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H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
