Donald Trump - The Low-IQ President

I think it's time for everyone to admit that Donald Trump simply is not very intelligent. There's an old saying that people usually get the government they deserve. It's certainly true in this case. We allowed two horribly despicable people to be the main party candidates. We were bound to get a corrupt and unqualified president. Take your pick.

So, how do we get out of this mess? The first thing is to admit we screwed up. Between the two of them, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were nominated by only 11% of the eligible electorate. And, despite the frequent claims, Clinton did NOT win the popular vote. Where I come from, the term 'won the popular vote' means that you got the majority of the votes. Getting MORE votes does not qualify. The truth is, Clinton was REJECTED by 52% of the voters and Trump was REJECTED by 54%. Meaning, the two main candidates were both rejected by the people, but we got stuck. Someone had to win.

Maybe if a few more people had voted in the primaries things would be different. I plead guilty to this charge. I'm a devoted independent and refuse to be a member of any political party. Both the Democrats and the Republicans clearly demonstrated they are not worthy of my allegiance. But, what if a bunch of us 89% had showed up and voted in the primaries for someone else?

People get the government they deserve.

And, now we have the latest manifestation of this low-IQ individual being in the driver's seat. I'm sure you've read or heard about Trump tweeting that climate change is a good thing and we need more of it because the eastern US is gripped by record cold. This means we have a president who doesn't even know the difference between weather and climate making the key decisions on the matter. Plenty of sources rushed to try and educate him, but to no avail. Quite simply, Trump is not intelligent enough to understand the science, so he rejects it. Oh, by the way, what ever happened to climate change being a hoax? How can climate change be a good thing when he's already declared it's a hoax?

And, of course, the are of the country experiencing the cold is actually a small area on the planetary scale. Take a look at this plot of temperature anomalies in the western part of the northern hemisphere, including the US. The red areas are warmer than normal, the blue ones are colder than normal.

Source: CCI

The red areas are clearly more extensive than the blue ones.

What was that about a hoax?

Fossil fuel shills cannot be trusted

The only people who work against the reality of manmade global warming and climate change are people who have financial ties to the fossil fuel industry. They are paid shills. The only response these shills can make is that being paid by the industry doesn't affect their credibility. In a nutshell - Yes, it does. The comic below captures the reality of this perfectly. In short, there's a reason why the only people undermining the science are paid by the fossil fuel industry - there is no valid science to support their claims.

Credit: On The Fastrack

Charles Dickens Was Right

“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?”

“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Dickens wrote those words in 1843 - 174 years ago. Things haven't changed much. Ignorance and Want are still our children and roam the land. And, Doom is still written on the brow of Ignorance.  It is a fight we must not lose. In particular, I'm speaking of the anti-science people who are undermining all efforts to address global warming and climate change. Truly, Doom is written on their foreheads.

But, A Christmas Carol was a tale of redemption. Even the the worst among us, he told us, is capable of changing their ways.

Let us hope.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

Chris

Corporations are about to pummel anti-science deniers

There is a movement underway where corporations are pledging to report on the effects of climate change in a standardized way, much the same way they report earnings. Currently, about 240 corporations have signed a pledge to do so.

The importance of this is this information will now become input for investors and shareholders. What that means is the corporations are bound by law to report accurately how climate change is affecting their operations and to provide reliable forecasts of future effects. Failure to do so will be fraud and will not only subject the corporation to fines, but the executives involved would also be facing prison time.

ExxonMobil is an example of this. They failed to reveal to share holders and investors that they knew the hazards of climate change. Instead, they were busy funding anti-science organizations in order to undermine the science and prevent preventative actions from being taken. Now, they are under investigation. ExxonMobil has recently vowed to reveal the risks it faces from climate change. Hopefully, this will be too little, too late and Exxon will face severe repercussions for its actions.

Now that many corporations, with more to come, will be legally required to accurately report the risks they face as a result of climate change, it will be interesting to see just how thoroughly their reports rebuke claims made by the anti-science crowd.

Stay tuned and watch the financial sections.

Alarmist Tom Harris Demonstrates Desperation of Science Haters

Tom Harris, the paid fossil fuel shill, has a long history of hating science. Remember? This is the guy who says science is only an opinion. According to him, gravity is only an opinion. I guess we should immediately ground all aircraft. According to Harris the Bernoulli principle is merely an opinion. And, don't bother with brakes on your car. According to Harris, friction is nothing more than someone's opinion.

If the paid science-hating shills hadn't sufficiently demonstrated their desperation with this bizarre line of reasoning, they have now doubled-down with the bizarreness. According to them, reducing CO2 pollution will lead to massive famines in just a few decades. Really. In his December 3, 2017 letter to the editor of the Regina Leader-Post, science-hater Harris stated,

Efforts to reduce CO2 emissions will result in “reduced agricultural yields, higher food prices and growing food insecurity that will disproportionately burden the poor,” said Idso. This would cause “undernourishment and potential starvation of hundreds of millions of persons just a few short decades from now,” Idso warned.

Harris was quoting Craig Idso who spoke at the highly ignored America First Energy Conference in Houston, Texas on November 9. The only people who attended were anti-science people and it was not even covered in the press. Do you wonder why after reading the above statement? Notice the "America First" in the name, clearly aligning with Trump's "America First" policies.

If you aren't familiar with him, Craig Idso is a former employee of Peabody Energy with strong ties to the Western Fuels Association. He has also received large amounts of funding from the Heartland Institute. Heartland is the group that compared climate scientists to Charles Manson (may he rest in Hell) and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and has nominated for appointment to the EPA a man who was arrested for raping his children and convicted of attempted sodomy on his own under-age daughter. This is a lovely group of people and now they want to tell you that pollution is good for you. And they want you to believe it!

Note to the science-haters: crops and plants grew just fine before we started polluting the atmosphere. And, even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, it would take at least many centuries to remove the CO2 we have already put into the atmosphere.

This demonstrates that the science-haters are growing increasingly desperate. They are resorting to more and more extreme claims. What is particularly interesting is the way they have denigrated climate scientists by referring to them as 'alarmists' for discussing the effects of global warming and climate change. Now, we find them predicting massive famines if we don't continue to pollute the atmosphere.

Really?

Who's the alarmist now, Tom?