Apocalypse Deferred

by Mark Steyn
The Mark Steyn Show
November 26, 2019

https://www.steynonline.com/9874/apocalypse-deferred

Yesterday there was a rare development in the sclerotic adjudication of the Mann vs Steyn case: the US Supreme Court declined to hear my co-defendants' interlocutory appeal (a six-year waste of everyone's time), so we will now be proceeding to the trial I asked the court to order way back in 2013, before several of our witnesses had died.

So, with climate alarmism on my mind, I thought this would make for a timely edition of The Mark Steyn Show: a full-length climate-change forum before an audience of Mark Steyn Cruisers from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere (such as the Czech Republic).

Joining me for the discussion were three people at the forefront of pushing back against Michael E Mann and his fellow warm-mongers: Anthony Watts, proprietor of the world's Number One climate website, WattsUpWithThat; and the dynamic duo that broke Mann's hockey stick, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.

[Side-note: If you watch this on YouTube, the ever more insecure reducation-camp commissars at Google-YouTube-Global Thought Control Inc have put up a Planetary Public-Service Health Warning under the video. (Why is it only Elizabeth Warren who wants to break up the Facebook/Google uni-cartel?) Have a good giggle at it, and then reflect that at least their book-cooking is getting more inept: An hour after this video was posted, it had 55 likes, yet only 1 view. Hmm...]

Click below to watch:

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26 Reader Comments

George Pazin • Nov 27, 2019 at 16:57

What a wonderful show, thanks for sharing it.

I rarely debate people about politics in my personal life, as so few can do so without getting overly emotional. But on those rare occasions I've discussed "climate change" or "global warming" with someone, I prefer to ask simple questions. I usually start with, what's the temperature of the earth today? What about yesterday? Tomorrow? A month from now? Then, what is the ideal temp for earth? How do you know this? Why do you think today's climate is the ideal for the planet? Have you ever watched a discovery channel or nat geo channel show about the geological history of our planet? Do you know how much the climate has changed over the life of the planet? Why do you want to freeze today's climate?

That usually shuts people up pretty quickly, even though that's not really my goal.

George Pazin

George Pazin • Nov 27, 2019 at 21:45

Just to clarify, my intent in my approach is not to stop debate. Rather, it is to try to illustrate in simple terms how silly the other side's position is.

In fact, I'd argue that today's climate orthodoxy is analogous to the Catholic Church's efforts to silence Galileo, which makes sense, as environmentalism today is a religion for many of its followers.

Reed Coray • Nov 27, 2019 at 11:12

To the layperson, I believe the selling point that AGW is real is the claim: "CO2 is a heat-trapping gas." This is particularly interesting to me because when I studied physics back in the 60s, we were taught that heat can't be trapped. Specifically, we were taught that if a higher temperature object is placed in a lower temperature environment, no known substance could stop the transfer of thermal energy from the hot object to the cooler environment--i.e., no known substance could "trap" the heat in the higher temperature object. I guess my teachers were unaware of CO2 gas.

Brian from Minneapolis • Nov 27, 2019 at 02:41

When you think about it, it all makes sense. We must forego all fossil fuels because the planet can only handle the carbon emissions China puts out continuously. China is essentially the chosen industrial district for the globalists and it's perfect. No emission regulations, no labor laws, cheap products, and you get to witness the wonder of how a single nation can produce the biggest carbon footprint on earth and yet the planet is able to handle it while the western world has to go back to the stone age.

On top of that, you'd think that with the progress that was made in green energy that the outlook would be better. By what is shown in Mann's crap graph, it shows no improvement what so ever. According to one Dem candidate, we should be heading for the hills right now. If that's the case, how do these "scientists" plan to cool the earth if it's too late to go all green?

Laura Rosen Cohen

Brian from Minneapolis • Nov 27, 2019 at 09:43

Mark had a great line about this on a recent Rush guest-hosting segment. A liberal eco-warrior called in to chastise America about carbon and pollution and whatnot and Mark helpfully suggested he speak truth to Third World power (can't remember the country) because those are the actual polluting culprits. Memory fails me at the moment but perhaps someone from SteynOnline HQ will intercede with the exact quote because it was delish!

Kate Smyth

Laura Rosen Cohen • Nov 27, 2019 at 20:42

Bangladeshi! Mark was particularly fired-up during that exchange!

Laura Rosen Cohen

Kate Smyth • Nov 27, 2019 at 20:56

YES!

Cottesloe dreaming • Nov 27, 2019 at 00:35

No wonder the feudal era lasted so long, it must have been like Hawaii on the Humber.
If I would have submitted the upper graph in high school , I'd still be picking up litter.

Sol • Nov 26, 2019 at 20:40

Climate change is the solid-rocket booster of self-esteem. It cries out for a musical of the erstwhile disaffected springing into posture as superheroes plugging in to save the world, whether it be flying backward in time to undo a burst dam or lifting the ocean floor to prevent it sinking under the weight of melted glacier water. A perpetual motion machine, there's no end to what imaginary cataclysms you can stop with your intergalactic virtue-signaling phaser.

Fran Lavery • Nov 26, 2019 at 19:24

It sounds as if the AGW climate change hoax is here to stay. The "scientists" have been paid to be swayed. I was depressed to hear Mr. Watts even has an electric car and solar panels. Well, I do understand why as we have a daughter out in LA and some of their friends love talking about their electric cars. They have charging stations everywhere around the city and it's so handy they're mapped on their phones for easy access. So are the gas stations. It wouldn't work in New Mexico where the next big city is 280 miles away with one charging station a third the way to point B. What happens when everyone heads to the lake with their boats in tow. There's probably not enough charge for everyone to make it to their holiday destination. What do you do when you're forty miles from Albuquerque and out of charge? Hail a migrating duck?

Raymond Swenson

Fran Lavery • Nov 26, 2019 at 20:53

I just retired. My former supervisor bought a Tesla Model S when they first came out, when the car had just enough charge to make it from Seattle to the Tri-Cities in eastern Washington, and there were no charging stations in between. He has periodically traded up so he now has an all-wheel drive model with a range of over 300 miles, and there are fast charge stations every hundred miles along the interstates. The cost of electricity here in the Pacific Northwest, supplied by many dams along the Columbia and Snake Rivers and our local nuclear power plant, makes his cost per mile of driving about like getting 100 miles per gallon. The car has tremendous acceleration, equivalent to a 400 horsepower engine. The computer system that controls the car is able to drive from his home to the office without any action on his part.

There are only three things I don't like about the Tesla. First, the door height is so low that I have a hard time bending to get in, even though I am only 5 feet 8 inches tall. Second, there is no spare tire. If you have a flat, you are going to have to be towed into a city where you can wait for Tesla to drive out with a replacement car and tow your car back to the dealership. Third, his current model costs about $100,000.

Raymond Swenson

Fran Lavery • Nov 26, 2019 at 21:30

The political funding of science at high levels requires being able to persuade Congress and the Federal agencies that bestow research grants and contracts (Defense, Energy, NOAA, NASA, etc.) that there is a threat of national importance that justifies the Federal government spending money collected from taxpayers.

Starting with the Soviet Union's explosion of Atomic and hydrogen bombs, and the launching of Sputnik and then Yuri Gagarin into earth orbit, the threat of being overtaken by the USSR technologically and militarily was that primary motivator for lavishing Federal funds on scientific research. With the end of the Cold War circa 1989, a new threat was needed by the scientific research establishment to justify major Federal funding of research. That arrived in the form of Global Warming, which was the theme of Al Gore's 1992 book Earth in the Balance, which was adopted as an official government objective when he became vice president in 1993. However, the Senate was still so skeptical of Global Warming that it passed a resolution by 98 to 0 that it would not ratify any treaty on control of carbon dioxide emissions unless China and India were required to stop the further growth of their emissions, which was already adding the equivalent of a major coal fired power plant every month in China. Gore attended the international conference in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, but he and Bill Clinton knew that they could not persuade the Senate to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, so the treaty just sat on Gore's desk for the next three years. He did not think it was important enough to make it a focus of his presidential campaign in 2000. When Bush won the presidency in 2000, Gore began a new career as self-appointed apostle of global warming, a new career that finally took off when he declared that the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was caused by Global Warming, winning him an Academy Award. Of course, it was all bushwah. It was years before another major hurricane hit the US, meaning either that warming did not take place, or that warming did not exacerbate the natural phenomenon of hurricanes. But the imprimatur of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was sufficient to make the threat of Global Warming into the conventional wisdom of popular culture. And it was a convenient club that Democrats could use against President Bush.

Global Warming is the ideal Progressive threat to humanity. It is catastrophic, so as Gore suggested in his book in 1992, it is "the moral equivalent of war", requiring sacrifice and NO cost/benefit analysis allowed. And it is a "moral" imperative, so people who oppose or criticize it are by definition "immoral" and evil. The predicted consequence is so far off in time that it will NEVER be solved, so it will ALWAYS perform its function as a justification for taking control of EVERY activity that requires energy, including food production and storage, lighting, heating, air conditioning, manufacturing, transportation, communication, health care, etc. The problem is so amorphous in nature that there is no specific goal or benchmark that anyone can accuse progressives of failing to meet.

The fact that actual temperatures have stayed level for the past 20 years could have been pointed to by Progressives as an achievement that they should be given credit for, but the fact is that they have done NOTHING in the past 20 years that can account for stopping global warming. Carbon Dioxide levels have continued to rise from 350 to 400 parts per million. Yet the temperatures do not follow suit. Winters in Idaho still get to minus 20 for two weeks of each February. The winter of 2018-2019 in Washington State was the COLDEST in 100 years. And weather was just as bad during the 20 th century as it was in the past 20 years.
But the Progressives in the US and Europe are determined to establish Watermelon communism--green on the outside, red on the inside--even as the last major communist government, in China, is now generating more greenhouse gases than the US and Europe combined.

Democrats have institutionalized Big Lies as the foundation of their election campaigns. Every two years they claim that Republicans are intent on slashing Social Security and Medicare. And now they have added Global Warming to the arsenal of big lies.

Fran Lavery

Raymond Swenson • Nov 26, 2019 at 22:48

Raymond, It's fine and good if someone has this amount to spend on a car but how many people can afford something like a $100K auto? Also, how practical is this kind of vehicle for those who travel outside their state? Say I want to take a drive up to visit my daughter in your neck of the woods in my new electric car. Will I get out of New Mexico without a hitch? As far as I know the only charging station outside my town before Albuquerque is in Truth Or Consequences. For the next 200 miles with one small town exception, there's a desert moonscape between there and Albuquerque! The other problem with electric cars i wonder about is whether most people are aware that they're not really running on renewable batteries. What infrastructure is required to set up charging stations? What kinds of rare minerals are needed to be extracted from the ground that are required to produce the batteries; the electricity has to be created originally from somewhere and it's not a wind turbine or a solar panel out in a field of dandelions behind the charging station powering your next charge up. I'm no expert nor am I a scientist but people are foolish to think they're saving the planet with electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels. Do you know why they are fighting natural gas now? I thought natural gas was one of the cleanest kinds of natural fuels and cheap, too? They use to have busses in Santa Monica, I think, run by natural gas and I heard they got rid of them. What's up with that, do you know? There are so many things we're not being told and as one gentleman on the panel asked, "when did we vote on all of these changes"?

David Coats

Raymond Swenson • Nov 27, 2019 at 03:00

We Federal taxpayers chipped in $7,500 in tax credits toward his Tesla purchase and the Washington state taxpayers chipped in an additional $1,000-$2,000 in tax incentives and rebates toward the purchase. Thankfully, the Federal tax credit for EVs ends at the end of this year.

Reed Coray

Fran Lavery • Nov 27, 2019 at 14:21

I am a dyed-in-the-wool AGW skeptic. However, I have solar panels and a hybrid car. I do not own the solar panels nor did I/will I pay for their installation/maintenance/repair costs. I just pay for the electricity produced by the panels. With the high electrical energy prices in California, it turns out that solar panels have reduced my electric bill by about one quarter. Maybe Mr. Watts has a similar solar panel arrangement.

I'm not sure a hybrid car can be called an electric car; but the electrical motor in a hybrid car does not draw electricity from an external source. The electric motor in the hybrid car I own has extremely limited range (although I've never tested it, I believe it is somewhere in the 10 mile range). The hybrid does get better gas mileage than the same model car without the electric motor. The improvement in gas mileage arises because the hybrid car (1) turns off the gasoline engine when the car is not in motion (e.g. idling at a stop light), and (2) during braking recovers some of the car's kinetic energy where it is stored in the battery that runs the electric motor. Using current prices for gasoline in California (somewhere around $4 per gallon), I computed it would take about five years to recover the purchase price differential between my hybrid and its non-hybrid equivalent. Maybe Mr. Watts' "electric" car is a hybrid and not a car that runs only on electricity supplied by an external source.

Fran Lavery

Reed Coray • Nov 27, 2019 at 14:54

I have to double check on something and I'll get back, something that I heard Rush talking about the other day. It was something about how solar panels have a limited life expectancy and they have something toxic inside. There's also some maintenance required and there's a question of where will these be dumped, not to mention the dead huge wind turbine bird choppers.

Kate Smyth

Raymond Swenson • Nov 27, 2019 at 20:40

Your second comment here is a cut-out-and-keep summary of the political dimension... a very useful supplement to the excellent panel discussion (which Big Tech is evidently trying to censor).

Fran Lavery

Raymond Swenson • Nov 29, 2019 at 07:56

Raymond, have you had a look at the documentary film, "The Great Global Climate Swindle"? There are some additional nuggets of the seeds of this movement there as well.

Paul Courtney

Fran Lavery • Nov 29, 2019 at 08:24

Seems obvious to me that ecars are not yet practical, or else FedEx or Amazon would be switching over yesterday. Even Obama could not get the post office to get an ecar fleet. Think about it, many postal trucks travel within a few miles of a base, could charge overnight, plenty of room for batteries- yet there are no fleets of ev's. If the tech were any good, we'd see electric boats. The tech is clearly not here, but americans are free to try things. Subsidizing ev's is big mistake, it helps wealthy people act like they want Greta to like them.

Fran Lavery

Paul Courtney • Nov 29, 2019 at 09:39

Sure, they're free to try them and maybe if I had a $100K I would purchase one of those Raymond mentioned, and maybe even love to think as I'm driving that I'm helping the environment, but would I be? We can't really pretend they are operating on renewables, can we? Do you know why they got rid of the vehicles in California running on natural gas? I heard a friend of my daughter's discussing one he had owned briefly and he also reminded me that Santa Monica had public transit vehicles running on them, maybe trolleys, maybe, busses, as well. I used to ride them into Santa Monica from LAX after hopping the Flyaway bus to Westwood. The bus rides were smooth. Recently, I heard the city of Berkeley banned new buildings from running gas lines to them. That makes no sense to me as natural gas is clean and cheap. Cooking with natural gas is a great way to finely control the temperatures in one's food prep. Our governments aren't into keeping our costs down, are they. They want to punish us. It'll come back to bite us with a vengeance this putting forth of energy policies when they have not been thought out completely.

Fran Lavery

Reed Coray • Nov 29, 2019 at 10:18

Yes, Anthony Watts did mention exactly this extra charge he would be billed if he didn't add on the panels. The government is going to get us to do what they think is good for us but look at what's happening in Europe. The people in Germany and other countries can't afford to heat their homes and are resorting to but UK big wood again and that is putting the air. See the little video at no tricks zone from six days ago about the experts risk taking causing a catastrophe playing out now in some EU countries.

Fran Lavery

Fran Lavery • Nov 29, 2019 at 11:16

Meant to say "burning wood again ... and that is polluting the air."

Walt Trimmer • Nov 26, 2019 at 16:34

I would pick the winner of your Graph Battle above as the lower one representing European temperatures over time simply on the basis that is a graph that names what it is supposed to represent.

The Hockey Stick contains one feature that always makes me cringe. Namely the ordinate (y-axis) labeled Anomaly. Anomaly has the connotation that something is wrong. Compounding the problem is that the anomalous differences are to an unspecified global mean temperature which was a apparently arbitrarily selected as a temperature in the late 1940's. The Stick never specifies it is Global BTW.

As a lay viewer of the Stick you would never know that the line is comprised of at least three different (and unrelated as far as random error goes) data sets as there is no difference in line weight, color, etc. shown. There is no footnote or legend that tells you the data sets were fused together with fudge. So regardless of the merit of the data presented I would grade the Stick as a D for poor presentation. I would use the Stick as an example in the class unit covering How To Lie With Statistics except it is so deceptive you that might confuse the class into thinking the data was real.

Walt Trimmer

Walt Trimmer • Nov 26, 2019 at 17:12

Notice how the Hockey Stick shows the global mean temperature as being below average for over 90% of history? Perhaps they didn't use enough fudge.

RAC • Nov 26, 2019 at 15:52

Since it has little to nothing at all to do with actual climate issues it's pretty much a waste of time to attempt to reason with this crowd though I do admire the effort. It's as futile as trying to debate the 'Bern' on economic issues. Once they succeed in taking over our energy policy and the health care industry they'll have a clean sweep of just about every industry and government entities that matter. Given that the right has simply stepped aside while they have seized the education of our children along with 95% of the national media, the entire entertainment industry and if this weren't disturbing enough the ongoing hearings in the house have proved beyond doubt the depth of their control of our intelligence agencies and the state dept. Chuck Schumer wasn't kidding when he warned Trump not to cross these agencies.

Joseph Dornisch • Nov 26, 2019 at 13:14

They seemed to have changed the warning to just a definition of global warming. I thought it was just climate change now? (In order that they can blame snowfall in New York in January on evil nasty carbon fuels.)