climate change hysteria

Ethics Quote Of The Month: John W. Jenkins

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“The University defends the truth,” says the Harvard logo. ‘The emblem shows respect for science, using only verified facts within the University’s walls and a willingness to defend the truth.’ Yet as it relates to climate change, the University has set aside obvious truths and brought together its five professional schools supporting the new “Save the Planet” religious dogma of the past decade.”

—Harvard M.B.A John W. Jenkins, in a letter to the alumni magazine protesting the University’s complicity in promoting “imprudent policies perpetuated on our populations by Green environmental activists whose view of history is only 20 years deep.”

Jenkins, whom I have thus far not succeeded in contacting, has authored one of the clearest and most persuasive debunking of current climatic change cant, and perfectly chastised our mutual alma mater, Harvard, for its cowardly and irresponsible alliance with an unethical and destructive movement. The author appears to be in his late eighties, and more skilled in communication than graduates half, indeed a quarter his age.

Harvard Magazine published his letter, but I am trying hard to believe it was a coincidence that its second half was difficult to locate due to a pagination error. I hope Mr. Jenkins does not mind Ethics Alarms re-publishing his entire statement. It deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. The whole thing is an Ethics Quote of the Month. Here it is:

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“Dear April: No, Don’t Have Children. Your Letter Proves You Are Too Dumb To Be A Responsible Parent”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

That would be my entire response to this recent query from “April” to Kwame Anthony Appiah, the ethics scholar whom the New York Times dubs “The Ethicist”(hold on to your skull; it almost blew mine):

I have always loved babies and children. I babysat throughout high school and college, and do so even now as a full-time engineer. My fiancé was drawn to me because of how much he appreciated my talent with and love for children. We have many little nieces, nephews and cousins whom we love but don’t get to see often. We also have always been clear with each other that we would try to have biological children soon after getting married.

That being said, my fiancé and I, who are both Generation Z, care deeply about the planet and painfully watch as scientists predict that the earth will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the 2030s. Is it selfish to have children knowing full well that they will have to deal with a lower quality of life thanks to the climate crisis and its many cascading effects, like increased natural disasters, food shortages, greater societal inequity and unrest?

We realize that a child’s very existence adds to our carbon footprint, but as parents we would do our best to foster an environmentally friendly household and try to teach our children how to navigate life sustainably. My fiancé says that because we are privileged as two working engineers in the United States, we can provide enough financial support to keep our children from feeling the brunt of the damage from climate change. Is it OK to use this privilege?

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Ethics Dunce: Ireland

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Boy, if Ireland thought they had mad cows before….

Ireland’s government is reportedly seriously considering plans to destroy 200,000 cows to meet its mandatory climate change targets from the nutsy-cuckoo European Union. Farmers will be offered financial inducements participate in the bovine holocaust. Thus the collateral damage of net zero emissions insanity, a sub-category of The Great Stupid, is extending to cows, just as AOC wants it to in her “Green New Deal.”

There shouldn’t be a lot to argue about here: killing 200,000 Irish cows now will have exactly no effect on the climate even if the most apocalyptic and hysterical scientific models are correct. It’s like the Biden and Obama killing pipelines: it’s just climate change theater and virtue-signaling, except that the pipeline decisions just killed jobs and brain cells of rational people thinking about them.

And yes, in this case, just seriously considering such an obviously wasteful policy is sufficient to justify Ethics Dunce honors even if ultimately rationality prevails. Even pondering such idiocy is signature significance, as when grandpa says, “Yeah, I was thinking about flapping my arms and flying out the window to visit Neverland, but decided it was too far away.” You call the rest home and double quick, even if Gramps had seemed lucid before.

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More “Do Something!” Climate Change Hysteria!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The New York Times published a serious opinion piece that argues that one good way to save the planet from climate change is to shrink the human race. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Smaller people leave less of a carbon footprint. Brilliant! Thus, Mara Altman writes,

Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash)….Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked)….When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.

You can’t mock people like this enough. They don’t have any practical solutions for preventing what they fear, so instead, in a “We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!” frenzy, they propose nonsense and people actually take them seriously, because they are also in a state of media propaganda-induced terror. I ultimately decided that now was an ideal time for Sidney Wang to make his first Ethics Alarms appearance of 2023, but I was sorely tempted to use this (From “Dr. Cyclops”)…

or even this, from a comic fantasy about how women could finally take over the world… Continue reading →

Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #4: Imagine…If John Lennon Had Graduated From Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

If John Lennon had graduated from Harvard (and not been assassinated, of course) he might have written the ridiculous insufferable screed I just read in my anniversary report. I knew the author as a freshman, and did not enjoy the experience: the fact that he appears to be just as big a jerk today as he was when he was 18 confirms my long-held conclusion that maturity is a myth and most people don’t change as much as we would like to think.

Of course this guy is obsessed with climate change. He is downcast about the “prospects for the future of human civilization,” seeing “pending catastrophe” due to our “abuse of Mother Nature,” and there’s “very little time” to turn things around. No, Al Gore was not in my class.

Millions are going to die, “water wars” will rage, nuclear wars are inevitable, and hoards of climate-displaced refugees in the millions will roam the earth. Everyone must reduce their carbon footprint to zero–ZERO!—immediately, “not next year, not in five years, but now” or we are doomed. That means, this expert says (I can’t figure out what his real area of expertise is, but I don’t care, either), going cold turkey on fossil fuels and buying electric cars or, presumably, using bicycles and roller skates. Airplanes are right out, I guess.

He goes on to lecture on the need to abandon “tribalism,” self-interest, nations, success (“tribal dominance”) basic human aspirations and ambitions, all of it, because it is these maladies that have brought us to this perilous state. I’ll give him credit for one thing: at least he realizes that the kind of ascetic existence that he demands of humanity can’t possibly occur under the current governmental and societal structures, though he never has the guts to come right out and say what he’s advocating: world dictatorship by some body or individual who is wise and beneficent. For that would be the only way his formula for survival could ever be carried out, and that formula is exactly as absurd as Lennon’s lyrics in “Imagine.” It can’t happen, won’t happen, and most important of all, shouldn’t happen. Two and a half pages and 2,000 words of environmental, utopian virtue-signaling, all culminating in an urgent, indeed hysterical exhortation to not only do the impossible and impractical, but also do it without any reasonable assurance that such radical measures will work.

Good plan!

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Climate Change Media Hype, 2022

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The more I think about it, the more the Wuhan virus fiasco strikes me as a microcosm (not too micro, unfortunately) of the climate change hysteria. Both are “Do Something!” debacles; both have demonstrated that those who argue for lock-step compliance with ideologically driven “science” don’t understand the science they demand we bow to. And, as we have seen, the policies applied to both problems have proved to be irresponsible, reckless, expensive, and destructive. Nevertheless, a substantial portion of the population remains brainwashed by climate change hysteria, even those individuals with brains one would think are too substantial to wash, much like the once sane and competent Americans who wear masks alone in their automobiles and while walking their dogs. I am seeing this in my college reunion report, as I slog through hundreds of life stories. A majority of them express terror at the looming climate apocalypse. Their solution is massive “structural change”…you know, “one world” government, though few are bold or honest enough to say so clearly.

Aiding and abetting the hysteria that is so useful to those who find democracy an inconvenience is the mainstream media. Just as it hyped the risks of the pandemic, never clearly explaining that the virus was overwhelmingly a mortal threat only to the already sick, elderly or obese—all the better to justify shutting down schools, businesses, social interaction and the economy, the news media continued to exaggerate and misrepresent the effects of climate change in 2022. Continue reading →

WaPo’s Environment Scold Earns a “Jacques Brel” For Halloween!

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As the Ethics Alarms glossary explains, the Jacques Brel is a special Ethics Alarms award bestowed on those who evoke the late, great French troubadour’s observation, “If you leave it up to them, they’ll crochet the world the color of goose shit.” Seldom have I encountered a more deserving recipient than Washington Post environment reporter Allyson Chiu, who was allowed by apparently standard-less editors to inflict on the world her essay, “How you can make more socially conscious Halloween candy choices.”

To be fair, it isn’t quite as obnoxious and deranged as the article I encountered a while back that instructed climate change phobics to carefully divide the plies in each roll of toilet paper to double the utility of each roll (and save trees, see), but its headline is funnier. What has to happen to someone—indoctrination, a bad experience at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory—to think like this?

Here are what some of Allyson’s fellow travelers tell her to relay to readers:

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More Strange Tales Of The Great Stupid: Attack On The Mona Lisa

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Silly me. I thought actor James Cromwell (“Babe,” “The Queen”) super-gluing himself to a Starbucks counter to protest the high price of vegan milk was the dumbest protest I had heard about in years, and it turns out that it wasn’t even the dumbest protest this month.

At the Louvre last night, a man disguised as a handicapped woman was rolling past Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in a wheelchair when he leapt to his feet and threw a custard pie at the painting. Why? Can’t you guess? He attacked the lady with the ambiguous smile to protest climate change, of course!

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PM Ethics Shadows, 4/12/2022: Civil War Memories, Crazy Climate Change Terrorists, Someone Figures Out That BLM Is A Scam, And More [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The Civil War started on this date in 1861, as Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. That’s about all that needs to be said. All wars are ethics nightmares, but none has had more ethics ramifications for this country, from the lives sacrificed to end slavery, to the war crimes of Andersonville, and the total war tactics of Sherman, to the myriad instances of astounding courage, cruelty and incompetence on the battlefields and the ongoing debate about how best to glean the right ethics lessons from them. (Tearing down statues is not it, though.) The Civil War took away our greatest POTUS, Lincoln, and gave us Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and McKinley, Civil War veterans all. The one non-veteran in the sequence, Grover Cleveland, is an ethics controversy himself because of it: Grover paid someone else to take his place in the draft. And yet….try asking the nearest college grad to give you the dates of the Civil War. I asked a Cornell law grad and former associate of one of the most prestigious law firm in the nation once.
She guessed “Somewhere in the 1930s, right?”

1. I’ll take “Unethical environmental fanatic nutballs, Alex!” Adbusters, a self-described “international collective of artists, designers, writers, musicians, poets, punks, philosophers and wild hearts” posted instructions on how to deflate the tires of “rich people’s” gas-powered vehicles. [Pointer: JutGory] “Wedge gravel in the tire valves, leaflet the SUV to let them know the tires are flat and why it was done, and walk away. It’s that simple,” the group said in a tweet. The group cautioned “to avoid targeting vehicles with disabled stickers or hangers.” That’s considerate of them…

This is what climate change hysteria does to people who lack ethics alarms. Here’s what they want you to leave on the windshield when you disable a car:

2. Good. Now what took you so long? On the Huffington Post, progressive opinionater Stephen Crockett authored a rueful essay bemoaning the fact that Black Lives Matter is apparently a racket. (Please note that this space figured that out years ago, and it wasn’t hard.)

He writes, Continue reading →

“Don’t Look Up”: Insulting, Arrogant, Incompetent…But Revealing!

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Now we have an all-star movie to graphically illustrate the critical life-skill principle that bias makes you stupid. It is “Don’t Look Up,” the creation of once-clever writer-director Adam McKay, who was responsible for some of the funnier Will Farrell movies before he decided that woke politics was his destiny. He recruited a glittering list of outspoken Hollywood progressives (Leonardo Di Caprio, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, etc.) to mouth the script of his insufferably smug satirical allegory about “climate change denial.” Did anyone involved with this movie actually think anything in it was funny? I find that difficult to believe. It is so obvious from the start that we are in for a politically motivated rant by people who just aren’t anywhere near as smart as they think they are, including McKay.

The tell is that the main character is played by DiCaprio, is one of Tinseltown’s most prominent “We’re all going to die!” climate change hysterics, so you know what’s coming from the second you realize what he’s doing. See, Leonardo plays a scientist who figures out (with a crucial assist from graduate student Lawrence) that a big comet is hurtling toward a direct collision with the Earth, and that all life will be wiped out as a result. The certainty is 100%, and there is a little more than six months before it’s dinosaur time for the human race. Aha! The actor is joining McKay to make an analogy between an unequivocal existential threat, the familiar “huge space object is about to destroy the planet’ plot behind blockbuster films like “Sudden Impact” and “Armageddon,” and the materially different problem of global warming, which whatever happens is definitely not going to destroy life on Earth or human civilization. It is also a theoretical threat far, far from “100% certainty,” though people like McKay won’t accept that, and believe anyone who does is a moron determined to kill us all.

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