PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM! (this time it's real)

Being breathlessly reported in today's news:

Extreme CO2 Levels Could Trigger Clouds' Tipping Point and 8º C of Global Warming

Go ahead and take time to read the article. It's not a long read.

This particular "study" is being ballyhooed all over the media right now. Its purpose, of course, is to frighten us -- stampede us, really -- into some sort of unspecified "action" to "do something" about rising CO₂ in the atmosphere. Since the only way to stop CO₂ emissions is to completely undo the Industrial Revolution and return to a stone-age existence of "grunting sub-animals" (Ayn Rand), the "solution" that is universally accepted is: worldwide Central Economic Planning. In other words, the entire world under Marxist rule.

Now let's examine what we can of the "study" itself, which is behind a paywall. There are a few things we know:

1. It is entirely based on computer simulations. No field or lab work involving the study of actual clouds in the Real World is evident from either the abstract or "news" reports.
2. It assumes a "feedback loop" that has long been assumed to exist, but has never been found to exist in nature.

In short, yet another bogus "study" consisting of massive number-crunching based on assumptions. No connection to the Real World.

Preaching Doom and The End Of The World As We Know It has been a very popular -- and lucrative -- enterprise for thousands of years. The Bible is full of that stuff, and newspapers have been pushing Impending Doom ever since Gutenberg invented the printing press. Just as Al Gore has been telling us for more than thirty years that "We only have ten years left to save the planet," here is a brief compilation of "Climate Tipping Point" stories that I was able to find with a simple DuckDuckGo search:

2018: A Tipping Point for Climate Change
-- Forbes, Dec 2018

Greenland's Coastal Ice Passed a Climate Tipping Point 20 Years Ago, Study Says
-- Inside Climate News, May 2017

Have We Passed the Climate Change Tipping Point?
-- Forbes, March 2017

18 Signs That Show We've Reached the Tipping Point
- EcoWatch, Dec. 2016

Earth warming to climate tipping point, warns study
-- BBC, Nov. 2016

Climate change tipping point crossed: What is to be done?
-- Liberation, Oct. 2016

Global warming milestone as scientists warn Earth has passed carbon tipping point 'for good'
-- Daily Mail, Sep. 2016

2015 a 'tipping point' for climate change: experts
-- Phys.org, Jan. 2016

The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here
-- Rolling Stone, Aug. 2015

6 climate tipping points: How worried should we be?
-- EDF (Environmental Defense Fund), May 2015

Report warns of climate change ‘tipping points’ within our lifetime
-- UC Berkeley News, Dec. 2013

Climate 'tipping point' warning
-- Politico, Dec. 2013

An unrecognizable Arctic: Climate Tipping Points
-- NASA, July 2013

The Climate Change Tipping Point
-- New York Times, July 2012

Is Earth Nearing an Environmental "Tipping Point"?
-- Scientific American, June 2012

Point of no return for climate is 2017: IEA
-- A Change In The Wind dot com, Nov. 2011

Climate Change at a Tipping Point
-- Western City, May 2007

Warming hits 'tipping point'
-- The Guardian, Aug. 2005

I see no point in going back farther, but Mark Morano over at Climate Depot did, and found prophecies of Climate Doomsday going all the way back to 1982:

Earth ‘Serially Doomed’: UN Issues New 15 Year Climate Tipping Point – But UN Issued Tipping Points in 1982 & Another 10-Year Tipping Point in 1989!

And Tony Heller recently noted on his Real Climate Science blog:

Climate experts said 350 PPM CO2 is the tipping point, beyond which we were doomed. That was passed in 1988.
Then they said 400 PPM was the tipping point, beyond which we were doomed. We passed that a couple of years ago.
Now they say 450 PPM is the tipping point, beyond which we are doomed.

Doomsday prophecies have always been a lucrative business. Just look at all the generators that were sold in 1999, all the water filters that Alex Jones has sold, and all the churches full of congregants.

So be sure you get those overdue library books and video rentals returned.  The end is near!

Forgive me...

This is another "boilerplate" post that I'm writing because I'm going to need it over and over as I argue with certain people online.  Tired of people who post multiple links to anti-science sites who then complain that I didn't even look at them, this is my response.

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Well, forgive me. But after fifty years of dealing with the environmental movement's lies and FUD, my experience with these Marxists has taught me that the only safe default position is one of extreme skepticism.

The Global Warming hoax began about thirty years ago when a Senator who tried to major in science but had to change his major to religion because he was flunking science, got himself a chairmanship on the Senate science committee and proceeded to hold a hearing on the historical hottest day of the year after his colleague tampered with the air conditioning to disable it. His star witness was a NASA crank with a hypothesis that had already been falsified fifty years earlier that had never been submitted to a scientific journal before his "publication by press release" -- an infallible symptom of junk science.

This was after twenty years of lies and junk science in the environmental community, whose actual goal is political -- America under Marxist rule -- and having nothing to do with science.  Ever since the first Earth Day (also known as Comrade Lenin's 100th birthday), in which I participated as a member of the Movement, environmentalists have done nothing but lie.

They lied about nuclear power, claiming that the cooling water can be made radioactive.  They lied about DDT causing raptor's eggshells to break in the nest, causing about a million deaths in Africa every year, most of them children and all of them black.  They lied about refrigerants affecting the ozone layer, causing commercial refrigeration units to use more power, and raising the prices of home units.  They lied about Alar, and destroyed a few small farmers in Washington in the process.  They lied about Spotted Owls in the Pacific Northwest, wiping out entire towns as working families found their lifetime investment in their homes suddenly worthless.  They started the lie about mass extinction, which is still with us today.  And then they began the Biggest Lie of them all:  Global Warming.

Now, after thirty years of the Global Warming fraud, every prediction made by the Carbon Dioxide / Global Warming hypothesis has failed, and yet the extremely well-funded CAGW lobby continues cranking out "study" after "study" that in each case, takes weeks to months to refute, by which time the alarmists have segued to another Apocalypse Scare Story du jour.

We've been through debunked "hockey sticks," proof of data-tampering by NASA, a scandalously fraudulent "study" claiming a "97% consensus," false claims of sea level rise, false claims of "ocean acidification" which is impossible, false claims of corals dying, false claims of declining polar bear populations that are actually increasing, false claims of "the hottest year evah" when there are people still alive who can remember the 1930s when Earth was hotter than it is today, and on and on and on ad infinitum and ad nauseum.

And now that public interest in the Global Warming hoax is fading, the environmentalist extremist Left is pivoting back to a relentless barrage of Junk Science and disinformation on other supposedly environmental disasters that are going to kill us all if we don't immediately adopt a Marxist economic system: fracking, so-called "endocrine disruptors," cell phone cancers, glyphosate, pesticides, GMOs, acid rain (rain is always acidic), sea levels which have been rising at the same rate for hundreds of years, the myth of "fragile ecosystems," modern farming methods without which billions would starve, and the myth that we're running out of landfill space.

Note, if you will, that every one of these is a product or technology that has vastly improved the quality of life for mankind.  Note also that every one of them is a cause célèbre of the political Far Left.  Neither is a coincidence.

So forgive me if I'm showing extreme skepticism for yet another "study" by the extremely-well-financed "scientists" being paid to promote the Climate Change or other Apocalyptic narrative while the few skeptics working in the field have to scrape and scratch just to put up a blog, let alone do real research.  And forgive me if I don't immediately drop everything in my life and read the half-dozen links you posted, two of which I've already seen (because I used to believe in that stuff myself), two more are from known far-Left journalist sites who have no knowledge of actual science or how it works, and the remainder from known cranks and quacks.  Junk Science is very well funded these days -- because there is no end of money for people who crank this stuff out day and night -- and it takes time to read through and debunk it all.  And I have other things to do.

So forgive me if your whining plea that I'm "not interested in ideas that contradict my own" is falling on deaf ears.  First of all, I've probably already heard it because I used to believe in that rot myself.  It's just that after fifty years of dealing with these people, I already know that I'm going to be dealing with a pack of lies before I even click on one of your links.

Real Men don't raise troubled sons

There was a time when I was young that I was a devout church member.  I worked in the refrigeration trade, and there was an older man in my church who was a union pipefitter.  So while we didn't do exactly the same thing, we had a lot in common and became friends.

He had spent his life working on some of the biggest projects in the West.  He'd helped build parts of the Hanford nuclear complex in southeast Washington, various coal-fired power plants, etc.  His work kept him moving every few years as one project finished and another opened.  He spent inordinate amounts of time away from home.

He had two sons.

One of them I knew well, as one of my "charges," you might say, in my unofficial position as a youth leader in the church.  The other had already left home and was doing time in Cedar City, Utah, which was rumored at the time to be one of the rougher state prisons in the country.  Hopefully I've painted enough of a picture of where these boys were heading without being explicit.

Suffice it to say that my friend was supremely disappointed in both of his sons.  I remember a conversation we had once, one of those rare moments when men fully open up to each other, in which he wondered what went wrong.  He ran through three or four different possible theories, such as "Maybe it's the Devil," and I don't remember the others except for the last one:  "Maybe it's just the times we live in."

His sons were the only disappointment in a life that was otherwise well lived.  But that one disappointment was so big, that it wasn't a life well lived.  He felt empty.

One day I was driving two or three of the boys from my church to an event a hundred miles away.  The route follows the Clark Fork River most of the way.  As we were whizzing along the highway, one of the boys started pointing out places along the river:  "Me and my dad went fishing there."  A few miles later, "Me and my dad camped there."  At about the third one of those "Me and my dad did X there," the younger son of my friend exploded.

"I WISH I COULD SAY THAT!!!"

We all went, "Whaaaaaat???  You wish you could say what?"

"Me and my Dad did this.  Me and my Dad did that."  He was so angry that he was throwing spittle.

The last time I saw him, he had gotten into drugs.  A quick Internet search on his name just now returned a somber result:  "Deceased at 25 and lived in [the only city in the list of search results that was anywhere near where we lived]."

That one line, spoken by a kid who is now surely dead from his bad choices, hit me hard.  I've never been able to forget it, and the seething rage with which he spit it out.

I never told his father.  The man was hopelessly clueless, blaming everything in and out of this world -- except himself.  But I never forgot that moment, and it shaped the way I raised my own sons.

Men:  If you want to be a Real Man, take your son(s) fishing.  Or camping.  Or hunting.  Teach them to shoot a gun.  Build something together.  Whatever "manly things" means to you.  Because it really does make a difference.