It’s the time of the year when the climate alarmists are out in force, blaming the severity of every heat wave or heat dome on … man-made global warming. I sometimes comment on the dire posts with the simple point: stop whining and turn on the air conditioner, or add a mist machine to your most precious outdoor space.

I heard stories from my father about how, prior to A/C, his parents used to buy blocks of ice that were then placed in front of an electric fan to produced conditioned air. Cool!  No whining, but action. Adaptation and, going forward, resiliency.

I was reminded of this when I read a recent recent post at LinkedIn by Frederick Ruehr, most recently with the Georgetown University Law Center, on seven ways our ancestors coped with the heat of summer.…

“Rob, your question makes zero sense & and I don’t have the patience to deal with people like you. Please crawl back under the rock you emerged from or I’ll ban you from my substack. Seriously: your next comment that displeases me is your last, so make sure it’s a doozy.” (Andrew Dessler, below)

Climatologist Andrew Dessler, a leading figure on the alarmist side of the debate, is a piece of work–extremely smart and knowledgeable but biased and short-tempered. His personality is akin to that of Joe Romm of yesterday and Michael Mann today–arrogant, condescending, petty. Dessler is certain that he knows what is to be known about all things climate and energy. But, really, he does not know what he does not know. (Yes, climate science is highly uncertain, and climate models are a mess.)…

“Are humans like frogs in a simmering pot, unaware that temperatures have reached the boiling point? Or has global warming been spun into an ‘alarmist gale,’ as Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at M.I.T. wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed article?” (Revkin 2006, below)

——————

Seventeen years ago, and eighteen years after James Hansen yelled Fire in his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee (tomorrow’s post), New York Times climate columnist Andrew C. Revkin published “Yelling ‘Fire’ on a Hot Planet.” The media propaganda machine was out in force, and the alarmist side was debating what to do to ‘wake up’ the public. One idea was to emphasize adaptation instead of mitigation, a controversial strategy as Revkin reports below.

The article questions whether polar bear drownings were due to climate change.…

Ed Note: This week is the 35th anniversary of the exaggerated climate alarm, which began with James Hansen’s June 1988 testimony before the Senate. Meanwhile, far-too-many scientists remain quiet about the climate model problem and psuedo-scientific attribution studies, while the campaigners link all extreme weather events to mankind’s consumption and energy habits.

“In a paper being published in the March-April [2009] edition of the journal Environment, Matthew C. Nisbet … said Mr. Gore’s approach, focusing on language of crisis and catastrophe, could actually be serving the other side in the fight … ‘as global-warming alarmism….’” – Andrew Revkin, NYT (2009).

“There has to be a lot of shrillness taken out of our language. In the environmental community, we have to be more humble. We can’t take the attitude that we have all the answers.”