Links tagged “lightning”

Princeton Alumni Weekly: "A panel titled “Climate Change is NOT an Emergency,” sponsored by the Conservative Princeton Association, featured speakers arguing that the media and policymakers are pushing a narrative laden with misinformation and fear. ... William Happer *64, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton, said you can’t “dial” the Earth’s temperature up and down using carbon dioxide levels. 

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While Happer was speaking, the panel was Zoom-bombed: The N-word and a doodle of male genitalia suddenly appeared on the screen over his slides. The technical staff immediately shut down the event on Zoom, and it continued in person only. 

"The frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes has been essentially unchanged since 1851, as seen in the following figure. The apparent heightened hurricane ac­tivity over the last 20 years, particularly in 2005 and 2020, simply reflects improvements in observational capabilities since 1970 and is unlikely to be a true climate trend, say a team of hurricane experts."

Ed Ring: What is actually beyond debate is not that we are in a climate crisis but that if we don’t stop destroying our conventional energy economy, we are going to be in a civilizational crisis. Energy is the foundation of everything—prosperity, freedom, upward mobility, national wealth, individual economic independence, functional water and transportation infrastructure, commercial-scale agriculture, mining, and industry. Without energy, it all goes dark. And “renewables” are not even remotely capable of replacing oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric power. It’s impossible. The only people who think renewables are capable of replacing conventional energy are either uninformed, innumerate, or corrupt. Period. ... 

Were America’s oil and gas companies simply supposed to believe all these nascent theories and shut down? What exactly should they have done, back in the mid-1960s, to cope with this allegedly looming climate emergency? Were solar panels and wind turbines ready for rapid deployment back then? Of course not, especially since solar panels from China, and wind turbines from Germany, are still not capable of providing more than a small fraction of the energy we need. The real crime, if you want to call it that, isn’t that oil and gas companies questioned climate change theories back in the 1960s or ’70s. It’s that they’re accepting them now.