Headline quoted by Mark Steyn:

Former British P.M. Tony Blair Rips Biden Afghanistan Withdrawal: Gives ‘Our Opponents A Belief Our Time Is Over’

On which Mark Steyn comments:

Well, our opponents aren’t wrong about that, are they? In fact … it’s not just “our opponents” who believe “our time is over”, but a significant percentage of the west’s ruling class. For why else would they have gone over to the other side? Our randomly selected Shill of the Day, Joe Biden’s jetsetting climate honcho:

John Kerry echoes China’s argument that human rights sanctions threaten climate talks

So many global A-listers are “echoing China’s argument” these days, don’t you find? Fauci and the public health gang, the stars and administrators of those crappy unwatchable corporate sports, Justin Trudeau, Hollywood, the WHO…

It suits China that climate change is the only Big Picture non-subterranean conversation we are permitted to have. Every minute we spend worrying about whether the Maldives will be washed away by rising sea levels in the twenty-second century makes it less likely we’ll notice that America is being washed away by China right now.

This Saturday [9/11] will provide, one would have thought, a rare glimpse of that subterranean reality. But tens of millions of Americans are so content being spectators in their nation’s eclipse that it may well be that the traditional cringe-makingly passive candle-in-the-windiness of 9/11 observances will for a few moments work its usual magic, and on its twentieth anniversary they won’t notice that the war on terror is over and America lost. The guys who toppled the Twin Towers have just been rewarded for their pains with a bazillion Humvees, Black Hawks, and more territory than they ever held back in the Nineties.

If by “us” we mean Western civilization, is our time over?

… and validation for “catastrophic climate change deniers”:

They admit they got it wrong. The earth is not warming at the rate they said it  was, and they still haven’t proved that human activity contributes significantly to such warming as there is.

But they still want the nugatory Paris Agreement to lay its tyrannical restrictions on an obedient world.

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:

Climate alarmists have finally admitted that they’ve got it wrong on global warming.

This is the inescapable conclusion of a landmark paper, published in Nature Geoscience, which finally admits that the computer models have overstated the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and that the planet is warming more slowly than predicted. The paper – titled Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C –  concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true. In order for that to happen, temperatures would have to rise by a massive 0.5 degrees C in five years.

Since global mean temperatures rarely rise by even as much as 0.25 degrees C in a decade, that would mean the planet would have to do 20 years’ worth of extreme warming in the space of the next five years. This, the scientists admit, is next to impossible. Which means their “carbon budget” – the amount of CO2 they say is needed to increase global warming by a certain degree – is wrong. This in turn means that the computer models they’ve been using to scare the world with tales of man-made climate doom are wrong too.

One researcher – from the alarmist side of the argument, not the skeptical one – has described the paper’s conclusion as “breathtaking” in its implications. He’s right. The scientists who’ve written this paper aren’t climate skeptics. They’re longstanding warmists, implacable foes of climate skeptics, and they’re also actually the people responsible for producing the IPCC’s carbon budget. …

In other words, this represents the most massive climbdown from the alarmist camp. …

We have known for several years that the climate models have been running far too hot. This rather belated admission is welcome, but a cynic would wonder why it was not made before Paris. I suspect part of the motivation is to keep [the] Paris [Agreement] on track.  [Although] most observers … have realized that it was not worth the paper it was written on.

Yet, amazingly –

This new study is designed to restore the belief that the original climate targets can be achieved, via Paris and beyond. …

We would guess that is so because the real objective of the Paris Agreement is political.

However, the study does prove that the skeptics have been right.

We climate skeptics have been proved right yet again, that’s the main thing. Oh, and by the way, snooty alarmist scumbags: that word you were looking for to describe the current state of global warming science is: “Sorry.”

American voters show little or no interest in climate alarmism.

When the Left is out of power (come 2017,  we hope and expect), and government stops feeding “dangerous global warming” nonsense to the public through gullible and conniving media, the issue may fade out of everybody’s attention before long – except of course for the fanatics who will rave on about their pet doomsday theory the way madmen do.

This is from an article by Paul Driessen at Townhall:

Rising ocean tides will bring “waves of climate refugees” to America and Europe, President Obama has declared. “Environmental migrants” are already fleeing shrinking islands in the Pacific, and it is a “dereliction of duty” for military officers to “deny the reality” of dangerous manmade climate change.

Even if we act in accord with the Paris climate “accords” (none dare call it a treaty) and “can stem the increase” in global temperatures, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell insists, “very rapid” climate changes “are expected to force the relocation of hundreds of Alaskans from their homes”.

Manmade climate change is a “threat multiplier”, a Pentagon report asserts. It will “exacerbate” many of the challenges the United States faces today, including infectious diseases and terrorism, destructive extreme weather events, disputes over who has rights to dwindling land areas and basic resources like water and food, and intense disagreements over how to absorb millions of climate refugees.

Echo-chamber journalists disagree only over the identity of America’s first climate refugees: Alaskan Natives in Newtok being inundated by rising seas and melting ice and tundra – or 25 Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw families whose little island in the Mississippi Delta has been eroding away since 1950?

Not to be outdone, ultra-liberal radio talk show host Thom Hartmann told me, “You’ve got five million climate change refugees fleeing into Europe right now because of droughts in Syria.” When I called this nonsense and said they are trying to escape war and ISIS butchers who are beheading little children, for the tenth time in a ten-minute interview, he railed that I “should be in jail” as a “climate denier”. …

The writer answers this vicious hysteria with facts of history:

Throughout Earth and human history, climate change has ranged from regional to hemispheric, from beneficial to harmful to destructive. It has included Roman and medieval warm periods, little ice ages, and five “mammoth” glacial epochs that buried continents under mile-high walls of ice. Natural climate change inflicted a Dust Bowl that sent millions of Americans scurrying in search of better lives, and decades- or centuries-long droughts that brought entire civilizations to their knees.

Roman, Mayan, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese and other cities and cultures prospered in warm periods and collapsed in cold and drought eras, climate historian Dennis Avery observes. This happened “over and over, in a centuries-long rhythm of affluence followed by long success, followed by long and utter failure”. Entire cities in the eastern Mediterranean were abandoned for centuries.

Storm activity rose by 85% in the second half of the 16th century, during the Maunder Sunspot Minimum, while the incidence of severe storms increased four-fold, writes historian Brian Fagan. British Navy logbooks show more than twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes during the cold decades of the 1700’s as during the warm years of 1950–2000.

Little ice ages and extended droughts brought crop failures and mass starvation, Avery notes. Rome shrank from a million inhabitants in its heyday to barely 30,000 a century later. The Mayan civilization plunged from perhaps 15 million to one million, as its cities were abandoned in a century-long drought.

Climate mood swings in the past 50 years have been far less dramatic than in previous millennia. …

The Climate Crisis Consortium ignores these eons, millennia and centuries of natural climate change. It wants us to believe Earth’s climate was stable and benign until the Industrial Age – and humans can now control climate and weather merely by controlling carbon dioxide levels.It’s all Hollywood nonsense.

Oceans have risen 400 feet since the last ice age glaciers melted. Pacific islands rose with them, as corals expanded their habitats with every new inch of sea water. Seas are now rising at seven inches per century – and EPA’s anti-coal Clean Power Plan would prevent barely 0.01 inches of rise over the next 100 years.

Greenland’s icecap is shrinking because of subterranean magmatic activity – not global warming. Arctic regions have long experienced warming and cooling cycles, as recorded by Francis McClintock and other whalers and explorers, dating back some 300 years. Polar bear populations are at an all-time high: 25,000.

Antarctic ice masses continue to grow, and the continent’s average annual temperature of minus-55 F means it would have to warm by 88 degrees year-round for that ice to melt. Even Al Gore in his wildest rants doesn’t say that is likely. So his beachfront home is safe from the 20-foot sea rise he has predicted.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts concludes that the only reliable long-term surface record comes from 400 official US rural thermometer stations that were never corrupted by location changes, airport heat or urban growth. Those stations show no significant warming for the past 80 years. The “record warming” we keep hearing about comes from data that have been “adjusted” or “homogenized” (ie, manipulated) upward to conform to computer model projections, IPCC proclamations and White House press releases.

Other studies have concluded there has been no increase in the severity or frequency of thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes or winter blizzards for decades. Indeed, no Category 3-5 hurricane has struck the United States since October 2005 – a record lull that exceeds any hurricane hiatus since at least 1900. …

The notion that a warmer world with more atmospheric CO2 will bring crop failures and famines is sheer delusion. Higher carbon dioxide levels are actually “greening” the planet and making crops, forests and grasslands grow faster and better. New hybrid and biotech seeds, combined with modern fertilizers and farming practices, are yielding bigger harvests, even during droughts, as India is proving right now.

There is no manmade climate crisis. Solar, galactic and oceanic cycles rule – not carbon dioxide. The biggest threat to agriculture and humans would come from another little ice age, not moderate warming.

He explains why we must go on burning fossil fuels:

In reality, the enormous amounts of energy packed into coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear fuels create the wealth, and power the wondrous technologies, that give us the greatest advantages mankind has ever enjoyed – to survive, adapt to and deal with climate changes and weather events.

The worst thing we could do is lock up that reliable, affordable, compact energy – and switch to expensive, heavily subsidized, wildly unpredictable wind and solar energy … and to biofuels that require millions of acres of land and billions of gallons of precious water.

Those who control energy control lives, livelihoods and living standards. Allowing climate alarmists and anti-energy zealots to dictate what energy sources we can use, and how much each of us is “permitted” to have, would put all of us at the mercy of their unaccountable whims, ideologies and fraudulent science.

Their callous policies are already killing millions of people every year in impoverished nations, by depriving them of the energy and technologies that we take for granted. Do we really want to be next? Shouldn’t we be helping the world’s poor take their rightful places among the healthy and prosperous?

The only “evidence” the alarmists have for a looming climate cataclysm are Al Gore movies, Mike Mann hockey sticks, computer “scenarios” that bear no resemblance to Real World events, and more spin and scare stories from White House novelist Ben Rhodes.

Richard Lindzen, MIT professor emeritus of Atmospheric Physics, denies that the burning of fossil fuels is dangerously warming the planet.

(Video published April 18, 2016)

The human race is approaching a possible turning point in its history.

If America is not saved from the Left’s agenda by the election of a Republican in November 2016, there will be no country anywhere in the world where the citizens will be safe from tyranny.

The Democratic Party is now a party of the far left. Obama has taken it there, and a Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would keep it there and complete the “transformation of America” into a collectivist despotism – a Union of Socialist Republics, on which the ghosts of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong will smile.

Leftism is an international creed. If the mightiest nation in the world goes full socialist, it will bring the Leftist movement for world government to fruition.

The road to global serfdom has been made ready by the high priests of Environmentalism.

We quote an Investor’s Business Daily editorial:

While the global warming alarmists have done a good job of spreading fright, they haven’t been so good at hiding their real motivation. …

We have been told now for almost three decades that man has to change his ways or his fossil-fuel emissions will scorch Earth with catastrophic warming. Scientists, politicians and activists have maintained the narrative that their concern is only about caring for our planet and its inhabitants. But this is simply not true. The narrative is a ruse. They are after something entirely different.

If they were honest, the climate alarmists would [all] admit that they are not working feverishly to hold down global temperatures — they would acknowledge that they are instead consumed with the goal of holding down capitalism and establishing a global welfare state.

Have doubts? Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.

For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”

Mad as they are, Edenhofer’s comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement’s dirty secret. Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit.

“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

The plan is to allow Third World countries to emit as much carbon dioxide [ie. burn fossil fuels for cheap energy – ed] as they wish — because, as Edenhofer said, “in order to get rich one has to burn coal, oil or gas” — while at the same time restricting emissions in advanced nations. This will, of course, choke economic growth in developed nations, but they deserve that fate as they “have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community,” he said. The fanaticism runs so deep that one professor has even suggested that we need to plunge ourselves into a depression to fight global warming. …

This is how the global warming alarmist community thinks. It wants to frighten, intimidate and then assume command. It needs a “crisis” to take advantage of, a hobgoblin to menace the people, so that they will beg for protection from the imaginary threat. The alarmists’ “better world” is one in which they rule a global welfare state. They’ve admitted this themselves.

Politicians of the Left press on with their fear-mongering:

“No challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” – President Obama in his State of the Union address, January 20, 2015.

“Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism and if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re going to see countries all over the world … struggling over limited amounts of water and land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of conflict.” – Bernie Sanders, campaigning for nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, in a debate on November 14, 2015.

“President Obama remains committed to making the United States the global leader in the fight against climate change—and so do I.” – Hillary Clinton, December 1, 2015.

There is, of course, nothing human beings can do to affect the changing climates of the earth. But if people can be made to fear that they will suffer drought and famine if they don’t obey The Ones Who Know What Must Be Done, they can be brought to obedience in all things.

And there’s no end to the restrictions Leftists governments – national or international – can and will put on what their subjects may say and do. The result before very long will be poverty. Famine.

To catch a glimpse of how crippling restrictions on speech will be, one has only to look at those the universities are now imposing on teachers and students. There the reign of the Authoritarian Stupid has well begun. (And for Pew research discovering that 40% of the student generation think that government enforced curbs on free speech would be a good thing, go here.)

And summers will still be hot and winters will still be cold.

Since the US has a military force, Obama feels he may as well put it to good use. Not fighting in rough wars with other armies, or with terrorists. Heaven forfend!

Fighting what then?

Climate change. That’s what.

The Pentagon has ordered commanders to prioritize fighting climate change.

Rules of engagement for US combatants make it hard for them to fight an armed enemy even if they are directed to do so.

But this enemy they can fight tooth and nail. No holds barred.

The Washington Times reports:

The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.

A new directive’s theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show “resilience” and beat back the threat based on “actionable science”.

It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed. It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy — a wide array of “climate change boards, councils and working groups” to infuse climate change into “programs, plans and  policies”. 

The Pentagon defines resilience to climate change as: “Ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions.”

To four-star generals and admirals, among them the regional combatant commanders who plan and fight the nation’s wars, the directive tells them:

Incorporate climate change impacts into plans and operations and integrate DoD guidance and analysis in Combatant Command planning to address climate change-related risks and opportunities across the full range of military operations, including steady-state campaign planning and operations and contingency planning.

The directive, Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience, is in line with President Obama’s view that global warming is the country’s foremost national security threat, or close to it. Mr. Obama says there is no debate on the existence of man-made global warming and its ensuing climate change. Supporters of this viewpoint label as “deniers” any scientists who disagree.

The directive originated in the office of Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. Final approval came from Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work.

The directive is loaded with orders to civilian leaders and officers on specifically how counter-climate change strategy is to permeate planning.

“This involves deliberate preparation, close cooperation, and coordinated planing by DoD to provide for the continuity of DoD operations, services and programs,” it states. “The DoD must be able to adapt current and future operations to address the impacts of climate change in order to maintain an effective and efficient U.S. military. Mission planning and execution must include anticipating and managing any risks that develop as a result of climate change to build resilience.”

Whatever that means.

To our surprise, a self-identified Jesuit – AndresAlejandro SJ – was interested enough in what we have to say to visit our Facebook page. He commented under our post on this subject:

“What’s the DOD gonna do about climate change anyway? Drone the Sun? Nuke the clouds? Send an aircraft carrier to a hurricane?”

From the annals of the Settled Science, here are just some of the vast number of disaster predictions by Coolists and Warmists none of which came true:

Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada, Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out”. – Chicago Tribune August 9, 1923

The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age. – Time Magazine 9/10/1923

After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder. – New York Times, January 30, 1961

Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age. – Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1962

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. – Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968)

It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content [in the atmosphere] will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter. – Presidential adviser Daniel Moynihan, 1969 (later Sen. [D] from New York 1976-2000)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. – Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor “… the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” – Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.

New Ice Age Coming—It’s Already Getting Colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of  Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes – Los Angles Times, Oct 24, 1971

“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” – Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971

Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000. – Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1972

U.N. OFFICIAL PREDICTS DISASTER SAYS GREENHOUSE EFFECT COULD WIPE SOME NATIONS OFF MAP – entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees”, threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect. – Associated Press, June 30, 1989

Ha! ha! ha!

On Tuesday December 8, 2015, Mark Steyn appeared at a US Senate hearing on “climate change”, called by Senator Ted Cruz’s Sub-Committee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. (Read his article about it here.)

This was his opening statement:

His words recall Jillian’s Rule:

Any idea that needs a law to defend it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.

Here is a very informative, very gratifying video of a great physicist demonstrating that there is no global warming, no unusual climate change, no extreme weather …

Norwegian Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever’s speech at a Nobel Laureates Meeting, July 1, 2015:

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter, Patrick Pulley.)