Signs Along the Path to Climate Clarity

Looking west towards Positano on the south cost of the Amalfi Peninsula on the trail, "The Path of the Gods." — The Path of the Gods

So…, this week Texans have seen first-hand the effect of the stupidity of trying to replace carbon-based fuels with so-called “green” and “sustainable” sources, such as wind mills. I guess they never read about the failures of green/sustainable energy in Spain. And now, ChinaJoeBiden, is pushing the so-called climate crisis as a top priority and allowing China to have access once again to our power grid. Will we ever learn?

This is the story of my journey along the “Path to Climate Clarity.” Along the way there were many signs, which eventually lead me to the conclusion and realization that this entire issue, along with several other related ones, is a bunch of malarkey. Grab some coffee or a glass of your favorite adult beverage, I recommend a double shot of The Macallan, neat, as I recount that journey and point out the signs I found along the way.

The Folly of Youth…

Coming of age in the late 70s and early 80s, I was more than aware of the public anxiety concerning any number of supposed environmental concerns and impending disasters – over population, pollution, deforestation, etc. ad nauseum. Those my age will no doubt remember this commercial:

Omni Magazine published its debut issue in the fall of my sophomore year in high school. I was all into Star Trek, Star Wars, physics, and science fiction in general. I vividly recall the premier of Omni, which had an interview with Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock in the in the second issue. My uncle had a copy of it on his book shelve and I recall thumbing thru it, if not reading a fair share of it, during summers spent with him.

Essentially, prior 1998 I basically bought into the narratives. Fossil fuels are bad. We’re killing the environment. People are bad for the planet. Don’t have big families, just replace yourself, if that. Anthropogenic, man-made, CO2 emissions are causing the planet to heat up. A dystopian inferno akin to Venus awaited us if we didn’t DO SOMETHING!

The reader will be aware of my affinity for the band Rush, which released Grace Under Pressure a few months before I graduated from college. Neil’s words in in the first verse of Distant Early Warning resonated with me for the better part of the next decade and a half:

An ill wind comes arising

Across the cities of the plain

There’s no swimming in the heavy water —

No singing in the acid rain

Red alert

So, here’s the sign I saw on this path as graduated college and headed off to find my fortune, which I never actually found… 😕

Silicon Valley

After college, I took a job as a Field Service Engineer with Applied Material, Inc., working on some of the equipment used at the front end of the manufacturing process of integrated circuits (ICs) - computer chips. It was exciting; the tech industry was just taking off and I was out there on the leading edge - in Silicon Valley!

The machines used a production process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), operated at 1100°C, on 480V 3Φ AC power, using hydrogen and all sorts of nasty gases, arsine among others. Anyone who believes making semiconductors, computers and other electronics is an environmentally friendly process is sadly mistaken. The engineers who designed them did a good job, but the reactors were far from perfect. There were often rather inaccessible areas of plumbing that had to serviced and cleaned periodically. Clearances were tight. A central piece, the “bell jar,” was made of quartz, about 36” tall by 18” wide, and cost $50K then, if memory serves correct, and often ended up cracked, broken, and useless by customer technicians. I submitted numerous engineering change requests. Sometimes the relays didn’t work causing catastrophic failures. I literally had a customer melt a machine down, which took me the better part of two weeks to rebuild. Tuning in the process on a new rector was usually a method of trial and error rather than anything specific. But once it was tuned in, it better stay repeatable as each batch of wafers, which the ICs are built on, that went thru could be as much as $100K.

At first blush, none of this has anything to do with climate change, global warming, and all that. However, as I left Silicon Valley, I saw this sign at the edge of the path:

The Weather Guessers

One thing you learn as a pilot is to pay attention to the weather. It is the environment wherein you earn your pay; ignoring it or misreading it can have deadly consequences. Prior to every flight, the Navy requires pilots to obtain a weather brief for the route and destination from an AG, who are the Navy’s trained weather forecasters. As professional as these sailors are, and as much pride as they take in their service, they are, after all only human, and far from perfect. Here’s but one example when their forecast was way off the mark.

I was still in training with VT-19 at NAS Meridian, flying the T-2C Buckeye and was scheduled to fly as solo in a four-plane formation during the middle of the summer. My classmates and I had been waiting around all day due to maintenance issues with some of the jets. The mechs apparently got the squadron back on schedule, sort of, for the OpsO came busting into the ready room, shouting at me and the three other students, that we had to launch ASAP as they weather was moving in.

We gathered our things, headed to the weather office, where we were assured that we would have enough time to find sufficient working space in the operating area, complete the X, and get back before things got really ugly. Young and unafraid, we suited up in our G-suits and ejection harnesses, headed to maintenance control to sign for our jets, then out to the ramp to preflight and mount up. I still remember vividly looking to the west, where the working area was, and shouting across to Pete, one of the other students in the flight, to look at the black wall of death. Summer time in Meridian, MS brings some hellacious thunderstorms. Just as I was about to climb into the plane, an instructor (IP) came running up telling me that the OpsO had decided to shotgun all the solo students. This meant that an IP would ride in the back seat, not to instruct, but to be a safety of flight observer / backstop. “Roger that,” I acknowledged as we mounted our trusty Buckeye.

Well, the AGs were wrong and the thunderboomers were building up far more rapidly than anticipated. The IP in the lead aircraft had his student continually maneuvering to find sufficient space for the four aircraft to complete a series of “Breakups and Rendezvous” but to no avail. The other three of us stayed with him until we were blocked in. The formation went right into a thunderstorm cell! The aircraft got kicked about mightily as I fought to keep her under control and I could no longer see the aircraft I was flying formation on. The four IPs were coordinating on the radio for lost sight procedures. In the end, when we got back, all the aircraft had significant damage to the fiberglass engine intakes, with those of the lead aircraft totally ripped to sheds!

Over the next eight years, there were a few other instances where the forecasters missed there mark, none quite as dramatic, but all of which gave me a few more gray hairs. As I headed off to grad school in the middle of my Naval career, I saw a yet another sign along the side of the path, which read:

The Ill Wind Settles

Toward the end of my tour at VQ-1, I had the good fortune to receive orders to Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA and began my MSEE matriculation in the summer of ’97. I had to take a few extra classes to round out my BSEET (Electronics Engineering Technology) degree from DeVry, Columbus to the equivalent of a full EE (Electrical Engineering) degree. These included probability, thermodynamics, chemistry, which I had to take at MPC, and two other basic science classes. One was Quantum Physics for Engineers, the other was Introduction to Space Environment, i.e. space weather.

It was during the class on space weather, studying the Van Allen radiation belts, ring current, sun spot, and other solar activity, that I began to seriously question the narrative on what the media then called “Global Warming.” The signs on the road became more specific:

My thesis dealt with a technique to improve the performance in a radiation environment, as experienced in space, for a specific type of transistor used in high-speed networks, e.g., those found in communications satellites. Due to proprietary data, the full paper is not available publicly; however, the abstract is on page 93 (PDF page 98) of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Summary of Research, 2000.

I modeled a very narrow slice of a specific transistor in software designed for device modeling. Then, within the model, I built a buffer layer beneath the transistor, a sponge if you will. The goal of the buffer layer was to soak up excess radiation and prevent the device from erroneously changing state. We then used the model to determine the validity of the of the buffer concept. However, I had to get the base model and its responses matched correctly, well within +/- 2σ, of an actual device, before I could insert the buffer layer. This endeavor taught me an extremely important lesson about computer-based modeling.

As I left to go back to flying, the sign along the trail had a very specific message:

Barry Made it Personal

For the decade after I graduated from NPS, my readings on global warming/climate change and energy politics consisted mostly of articles in scientific periodicals, principally Scientific American, which I used to have a subscription to.

In 2008, Barry Hussein (Obama) was running for president and the rhetoric on these subjects was heating up. “Cap & Trade,” a Ponzi scheme for wealth transfer, which demonizes CO2, was a hot topic. I had retired from the Navy and was flying for NetJets. Shortly after his inauguration, Barry began targeting business aviation, directly attacking my livelihood. Two of the arguments against private aviation are the “carbon footprint” BS and its relation to energy consumption. So, during 2008 and spring of 2009, I revisited the subjects, reading the following three books:

The Deep Hot Biosphere : The Myth of Fossil Fuels, which is a good discussion of the actual origins of carbon based fuel, which is not from fossil decomposition. Heard about methane on Titian? The chemistry the author discusses is very interesting. Also, this is a great discussion on the origins of life and the fact that most people cannot get their brains around numbers with lots of zeros on either side of the decimal point.

Black Gold Stranglehold, which is about petroleum politics.

Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies That Hurt the Poor. The subtitle is self-explanatory.

I also researched websites that might have data that was counter to the mainstream narrative. Among these were:

Armed with knowledge and discussion points, over the spring and summer of 2009, I wrote a series of letters to the federal politicians – POTUS, NC senators, and my congressman – on climate change, business aviation, and health care. In the letters concerning climate change, I often enclosed this excellent list of points by Jay Lehr, Ph.D.

Below is a summary of the points on that topic, which I made in those letters, but the most important point is this:

Climate Modeling Fails

And there was this sign, hidden along the side of the road:

When discussing climate projections, and the impact that anthropogenic CO2 has on future climate, it is important to keep in mind that most of the discussion stems from International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, an evil UN agency) General Circulation Models (GCMs), which have not been particularly successful in forecasting actual temperature records between 1990 and 2007. Nor likely thru 2020; I haven’t checked in some time, although given the current state of the last 12 months, no reason to suspect that the UN has changed its tune on this subject.

One must also realize that most computer programs do not accurately model solar output or cloud behavior, two functions which have far more effect on the climate than CO2 levels. From a personal perspective I can tell you that as good as the forecasters are, in nearly three decades of professional flying, I have never received a weather brief for a flight that was 100% accurate at the time of arrival. There is a reason pilots call the forecasters “weather guessers.” To expect that IPCC GCMs will accurately predict global temperatures 30 to 100 years or more in the future, is to put far too much faith in something that has little direct representation of the real world.

Carbo Dioxide (CO2)

Efforts to regulate CO2 emissions put the country at a disadvantage. CO2 is a normal product from the combustion of carbon-based fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas. We should not confuse “green energy production” with a lack of CO2 emissions. Genuine pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, CO, and nitrogen oxides, NOx, are the results of an incomplete combustion process, and are of legitimate concern. They can properly be addressed in certain legislation, as well as with industrial techniques to scrub them out.

The problem with carbon cap and trade schemes, the EPA’s and UN’s efforts to regulate CO2 emissions is that they attempt to regulate a non-pollutant. However, any such laws or regulations have no place attempting to regulate, cap, or capture the non-polluting carbon dioxide.

Some facts that contradict the popular theory that mankind’s industrial affairs, particularly CO2 emissions, are affecting the planet’s climate to our detriment are:

CO2 is a trace gas that accounts for less than 400 parts per million of atmospheric gases.`
Water vapor is the predominate greenhouse gas and accounts for 95% of greenhouse effect.
Man made CO2 accounts for an insignificant 0.117% of greenhouse effect.
CO2 is a necessary ingredient in photosynthesis, the basic formula for which is:

6CO2 + 6H2O (+ light energy) -> C6H12O6 + 6O2

Carbon Dioxde + Water + Light -> Glucose + Oxygen

Energy

As an energy source other than nuclear, carbon-based fuels are the best there are:

Oil is the primary source in the transportation industry.
Over 50% of the electrical production in the U.S. is from coal.
Natural gas is a resource we have in abundance.

As much as we might hope, there are no reasonable alternatives to carbon-based fuels for the foreseeable future. Wind and solar, as we have seen this week, just can not compete. And hydroelectric has a host of challenges all its own.

Also, because of the deterioration in education of both basic science and critical thinking, far too many people fail to understand the concept of energy density. Uranium-235 has five orders of magnitude more energy density than carbon-based fuels! See the first table here: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_density

This sign was rather straight forward... 😏

Kandahar with Time to Burn

By the end of 2009, I had done enough reading on the topic to understand that the entire issue of global warming/climate change was a farce. Had I stopped reading and investigating on the subject there, I would have had sufficient knowledge to feel confident in my conclusions. Yes, the climate changes, but there is not all that much we can do about it, and to think so is not only arrogant, but foolish.

However, at the beginning of 2010, I found myself furloughed from NetJets, but fortunate enough that a DoD contractor hired me to fly reconnaissance missions in Kandahar. The schedule was nominally two months in theater, aka “The Sandbox,” and two months at home. So even when “at work,” when we often flew well more than 120 hours per month, crews still had a significant amount of free time. For the next four years, I plowed thru an average of 21 books a year, 84 in total, covering a wide range of topics. But on the subject at hand the following are apropos…

Climategate

In November of 2012, I turned my attention to Andrew Montford's most excellent analysis of Climategate, which only cemented my conclusions on the subject.

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science exposes the whole farce, fake science, and data manipulation. If I were to suggest a single book to read on the subject it would be this one. From the Amazon summary:

Here is the definitive exposé of the distorted science behind the iconic global warming graph centrally responsible for the global panic about climate change.

From Steve McIntyre's earliest attempts to reproduce Michael Mann's Hockey Stick graph, to the explosive publication of his work and the launch of a congressional inquiry, The Hockey Stick Illusion is a remarkable tale of scientific misconduct and amateur sleuthing. It explains the complex science of this most controversial of temperature reconstructions in layperson's language and lays bare the remarkable extent to which climatologists have been willing to break their own rules in order to defend climate science's most famous finding.

The book also covers the recent leak of the email archives of the Climatic Research Unit which has led to the resignation of its Director, Professor Phil Jones, and exposed the degree to which climate scientists on both sides of the Atlantic have hidden and manipulated data to support their claims.

To be fair, I did buy and tried to start Michael Mann’s justification for his data manipulation and the resultant “hockey stick” graph, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. However, knowing the fraud behind the entire deal, try as I might, I just never got further than about the first chapter.

More Trouble with the Science Tribbles

One of my favorite science authors is Lee Somlin, who in 2007 published the most excellent The Trouble with Physics, although I did not read it until 3 years later, actually reading it a few years before Hockey Stick Illusion. It is by no means climate related, and is very heavy on string theory, but Somlin gets to the issue of academic stagnation and funding issues, both of which are important to keep in mind when talking about climate science and indeed academia.

All the free time in between missions meant time was spent working out, reading, sleeping, or binge watching a slew of TV series. One of those was The Secret Diary of London Call Girl, which has absolutely nothing to do with climate science, but stay with me. When I learned the series was based on the real life experiences of Brooke Magnanti, who has Ph.D. in Forensic Pathology, I looked up her book. Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong is an excellent treaty on understanding how media, academia, and the political class manipulate data and statistics to paint their desired image or support a desired point, according to the agenda at hand.

Yet another sign as I trekked along...

The Science is Settled… NOT!

The statements “the consensus says” and “the science is settled” should make anyone’s head spin and spew vomit. Neither have anything to do with science. Science is about observing the natural world and trying to make sense of it, to understand it. The scientific method is about repeatability; if an experiment can’t be repeated with consistent results, then something is wrong with the hypothesis. Data analysis is not really science, per se, although it could be considered “scientific.” And the body of knowledge usually advances in fits and starts, never, ever by consensus as Thomas Kuhn explains in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

But then there’s that oft heard phrase, “peer reviewed.” All peer reviewed means is that someone looked at the draft of an article or study before publication and gave it a thumbs up. It does not mean that the reviewer conducted an independent verification of the study, ran their own version, did an in-depth examination of the study’s data, or really even that they actually read the draft. Peer Review: Why Skepticism is Essential is an excellent 40-page report, which discusses the problems with peer reviewed articles and why they are not necessarily a valid or reliable source of data and information. Basically, the way the system is now, “peer reviewed” isn’t worth the ‘trons it takes to display the words on the screen.

Nearing the end of the trail, was:

At the End of the Path to Climate Clarity and the Fork in the Road…

So if the reader has stuck with me this far, first, thank you, for we find ourselves at the point of Climate Clarity, i.e., what is really going on.

For starters, as stated above, the reader must realize and understand that everyone has an agenda. My agenda in writing this mini tome is to provide a primer on the topic, offering some references, and illustrating my path from manipulated fear to clarity. My hope is that readers who may be inclined to believe the screeching of Al Gore, AOC, or poor little Greta Thunberg, that this might incline them to reconsider and dig deep on the subject. In turn, perhaps this will be spread it around, and bit by bit we can start to avoid the insidious disaster that awaits us otherwise.

But what of the agenda of those spouting all this nonsense? For people in power, and those with wealth, that agenda almost always, revolves around maintaining that power and wealth.

The discussion of “green energy,” energy usage in particular, and “global warming” (now climate change) are all intertwined with each other as well as with the UN, The Club of Rome, the Tri-Lateral Commission, and a globalist, elite, UNELECTED, Cabal who think they know better than the rest of us, and want to do an end-runaround of sovereign governments, merge all into a single world government, without consent of the people, keep their thumbs on the levers of power and dictate to all of us how to live.

The list of names in this mess includes many the reader will no doubt be familiar with: Bill Gates (although his role has more to do with vaccines than “clean energy”), George Soros (evil to the core), Jeff Bezos (sadly, I haven’t figured out how to entirely ween from Amazon yet), Mark Zuckerberg (manipulative to the core), as well as a slew you’ve not heard of, but you can find them on the Club of Rome (CoR) website.

And the UN doesn’t hide its agenda, they just haven’t made it terribly public until recently. Agenda 21: An Expose of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Initiative and the Forfeiture of American Sovereignty and Liberties is a treatise on the original UN “sustainability” plan. Agenda 2030 is the UN source page for the follow-up to Agenda 21.

It really is that simple. The UN is a corrupt, hateful organization. When you look at the stated objectives on CoR website, you might think they are noble on the surface, but when you dig into them, they all come down to that statement in bold above. Keep in mind that neither the UN nor the self-sanctimonious CoR, nor a slew of other so-called Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) were elected by anyone within the USA, nor any other country, to represent them at a local, state, or federal level. This point is vitally important to bear in mind.

To quote from Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future,

bitter, self-hating misanthropy lies at the very heart of the green movement.

This book does a good job of getting at the core maleficence from the climate change/global warming aspect. This would be the second book recommendation out of all these.

Finally, to tie it all together, not only the climate stuff, but everything else, see: Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order. This would be the third recommendation I would make. If reader chose only three to read on the subject at hand, make them Hockey Stick Illusion, Watermelons, and Technocracy.

Last point. ANY time the word “sustainability” is tossed about, that is code for “technocracy," which is what the Cabal wants to implement – the technocrats get to tell you how to live, what to buy, what to drive, etc., etc. What the Cabal wants is to depopulate the planet, leaving it for themselves and the few of us left as AI-enhanced transhuman borg slaves. Pure evil. These people who want to implement technocracy are pure evil. Oh, and none of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are remotely achievable. Read through the details, they are pure rubbish.

Properly harnessed, the Human Mind (the naturally evolved Human organism connected to the Divine) is the greatest creative instrument ever, and that’s at using only 4% of our brains...

So at the end of the trail were two signs...

Well, that's all the time we have for the subject, and to quote Wayne at the end of Wayne’s World, I hope that you found this

entertaining, whimsical yet relevant, with an underlying revisionist conceit that belied its emotional attachments to the subject matter… I just hope you didn't think it sucked!

Excellent ending!

Namaste,

Mark Stansell

February, 22 2021

Additional Bibliography and References