Pole-Shifting and Shifty Alarmists

Earth's magnetic poles are never stable; they move constantly -- and sometimes they flip altogether.  Which is understandable, because the earth's core is actually a giant spinning magnet.

Some scientists who study the earth's internal magnet have noticed that the magnetic poles have moved a lot over the last few years.  There is some speculation that the increased speed of their wandering means they are about to flip.

Check out this article about emerging science on pole shifts.  It's fascinating stuff.

A complete flip from N to S is actually about 500,000 years overdue.

Shifting magnetic poles can change the climate immensely -- particularly, the amount of cloud cover (water vapor).  After the sun, more or less water vapor is the main determinant of temperature.

Which brings us to the politicization of the pole movement by the alarmist environmentalist left.

One would think that the climate models -- the ones the alarmist Left uses to blather up panic about the climate (and the taxpayer grants and book deals for their adherents) -- would have in included adjusting those models for the effect of magnetic pole shift .

So have they?  Have alarmists added the effect of moving magnetic poles into their models?

Not exactly.

They did the reverse: Now that acceleration of magnetic pole movement has become a topic of discussion, alarmist scientists have latched on and are suddenly claiming that melting glaciers and warmer temperatures on the surface are the drivers of the pole movement activity.

So someone else brings it up, whereupon it is adopted to mangle cause-and-effect into further support for their alarmist model -- even though there has been no connection yet proven.

Climate scientists -- at least the mainstream alarmist ones -- are inexcusably sloppy about their work.

Many of the earliest of the alarmists' models relied on data supplied by poorly-maintained weather stations, or stations where development, addition of a large parking lot, etc would rather obviously have had a significant effect on what data was recorded (see http://www.SurfaceStations.org/ ).  For years, the alarmist industry flat-out denied that those surface station assumptions needed to be tested or that the data they were supplying was unreliable.

It took a skeptic to start an audit movement.  Volunteers did all of the auditing because the multi-billion dollar alarmist-industrial complex couldn't be bothered to fund such an audit itself. 

Even gas stations have to get their measuring systems assessed and certified every few months -- but an alarmist industry that depends on the measuring instruments doesn't?

Come on.

Alarmist pseudoscience really got rolling in the late eighties and early nineties. Scientists looked at their data tables and saw that temperatures appeared to be climbing, and then they published, and started the cycle of alarm.

They forgot something major, however: The disappearance from the dataset of stations in more remote regions of Russia / USSR as the state collapsed and stopped maintaining, operating, and checking them, was not in any way accounted for.  Many of the abandoned stations were in Siberia.

If you have 1,000 stations all over the planet and 50 stations in some of the bitterest-cold areas on earth steadily drop out of the calculation, 5th grade math says the temperature average of the remaining stations will go up.

But alarmists glossed over it.

Alarmist scientists have also directly diddled with directly changing data tables they use in their models without either explaining the reasons for doing so or adjusting the assumptions the model builds on that data as a result -- and they pass off their diddled data and the conclusions they derive from it as "science" and claim anyone questioning it is just an apish knuckle-dragging throwback who has no place to talk.  Fudging data is in itself an academic and scientific crime for which none have been called to account.

But the real problem with alarmism is that the alarmist-industrial complex (a multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-funded white elephant), is that everything it "produces" is designed to affect government policy.

If you convince vote-happy politicians that the sky is falling, your budget for the following year will get a lot more lard slathered on it.  "Green" corporations and compliant scientists and other hangers-on get huge new government contracts and grants, while more efficient corporations using traditional energy sources or methods in their production, and skeptical scientists, are ignored.

I'm as concerned about the environment as anyone.  The biggest skeptic thinker I know is completely off-grid, uses solar for all of his home and business energy needs, and otherwise is completely self-sufficient.  Even his personal transportation is the ultimate in re-use: He buys ancient 50 mpg Geo Metros and fixes them up.  Compare the resources that went into his 1990 Metro to the local watermelon's brand-new 2018 Prius. The Prius can't quite beat the Metro on MPG, and its curb weight is roughly twice that of the Metro (twice the curb weight means at minimum twice the resources went into it).

I don't know a single watermelon writer or thinker who has as small a footprint.  I'm sure they exist.  But the mainstream watermelon is usually just the latest snob who moved into the local neighborhood of McMansions and wants to slam the door against anyone trying to follow him into that shiny new neighborhood -- as if taking a few plastic bottles to the curb once every two weeks makes up for the McMansion and the Prius.

All governments should abandon all funding of science and limit their activities to their legitimate role of protecting individual rights (and with them, property rights).

Libertarians suggest that only freedom and a lack of government meddling will bring about the lasting change in individual behavior that is necessary to protect our environment.  Private individuals should be left free to engage in education and persuasion activities for better, more efficient practices.

Using the sledgehammer of government policy to get the compliance you want only breeds waste -- and, eventually, backlash.  Abolition of government spending, including that which goes towards so-called 'science', would actually do much to improve environmental health.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, August, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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The Left's National Forest Reichstag Fires

Regarding the big wildfires in the American West this year:

A number of them are attributed to "pyroterrorism".  It's actually a real thing: USFS and other federal agencies have been holding training sessions and meetings about pyroterrorism at a more & more feverish pace the past few years...

Why?

Because jihadi groups have discovered that American forests have become supremely vulnerable -- and as a consequence, they can cost the US lives and billions -- for the price of a cellphone, a few ounces of gasoline, and a few matches.
 
The idea is not new: Hamas has been torching Israeli farm fields and nature reserves for many years in similar ways; and there is mounting evidence that the disastrous fires in Greece this year were largely a result of Turk and Muslim pyroterrorists who snuck into Greece alongside refugees & immigrants.

What's new, though, is that these extremists in America have begun training in remote-activated incendiary devices designed to ignite fires in fire-prone areas (think IED's for Smokey Bear).

Plus, stupid people are always around.

So why are American forest and grasslands are increasingly vulnerable?

One reason is that federal land policy has gotten trapped by lawsuits (many of which are funded by the forced "investment" by American taxpayers via the EAJA -- in other words a wholesale wealth transfer from taxpayers to the lawyer-industrial complex) which have done much to shut down logging on forests “managed” by the federal government, together with environmental activist political pressure to stop forest "management".   Land managers are increasingly restricted from setting up prescribed / controlled burns to eliminate fuel.  Nor can they contract out to resource (eg logging) companies to clear overgrown areas.

Besides the external pressure towards ignoring management, there is internal inertia trending in the same direction: older forest managers who understood that American forests and open land were supposed to be for a balance of uses, including recreation, wild areas, logging, mining, and drilling, and so on, are gradually being replaced by a newer generation of land managers who are increasingly opposed to any uses other than recreation -- or, better yet: human-prohibited wild space.

So a perfect storm is building bigger and bigger every year -- with increasingly devastating wildland fires as the predictable result.

Common sense says global warming isn't global if it's local.  However, environmentalists and their leftist brethren are now peddling the idea that global warming can occur in one small region, which is absurd.  Nevertheless it is the "logic" behind claims that local heat records are evidence of global warming.  This is how environmentalists play their game.

Suppose those of us who are not alarmists do the same?  Let's try it:

"Arsonist forest fires are definitely a sign that Man’s activities has increased local temperatures – as much as 800-1000 degrees C. If environmentalists' opposition to sensible forest management contributes to this 800 degree rise in the local temperature, they should pay for the damages they've caused."

That’s the way, right?

If, by your actions, you create conditions that result in the destruction of property, which includes causing "local" ... er... "global" warming by 800 degrees, then you can expect to bear the consequences in law and liberty:

Pay up, y'all.

But the real solution is to get politics out of the environment (and insurance), and thenceforth to protect property rights.

The fed should sell off the millions of acres it owns to the highest bidder, and from that point on, allow property owners to provide for the protection and management of their property.  How they do so will be managed by their insurers.  Such a regime will encourage proper management of forest resources and the mitigation of harmful practices.

Libertarians have called for the abolition of the BLM, USFS, NPS, and other alphabet-soup bureaucracies, and the wholesale privatization of government property.  We also call for the abolition of welfare for lawyers and political activists who profit endlessly by suing government.  If governments didn't own property, taxpayers wouldn't be left holding the bag on both sides of every argument over the environment.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, August, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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