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In a discussion about climate, I was told this by a person who had a previous consensus argument taken apart:
- “… I have lived on earth long enough to have personally witnessed phenomenal change caused by man. I’m sorry you have not seen it.”
To which I responded:
- “… please, name one ‘phenomenon’ that has happened in your lifetime that was caused by man.”
Another person joined in with the following:
The Chernobyl Nuclear Explosion, The Bhopal Disaster, The Shrinking of the Aral Sea, E-waste in Guiyu, China, The Love Canal, Deep water horizon (BP) oil spill, Eccocide in Vietnam, Libby, Montana Asbestos Contamination. Do those count?
I do not have the time to go through all of the above but will respond quickly to two of them to make a point. One being that people generally work from front-page headlines of news sources and not the updates to them typically buried in B12. And my response to the question at the end of the list:
To which I say, “No, these do not count.” I am looking for man-caused actions that changed climate, like the stated IPCC claims of the impact of man on weather. (There really is nothing… everything we hear are mainly from computer models, and not observations.)
Okay, let us start first with the…
Gulf (BP Spill)
We know there was corruption both on the government side as well as BP’s side, via the New York Times:
…Numerous Congressional and internal investigations have called the oversight agency badly mismanaged and at times corrupt. It has been rocked by regular scandals, including disclosures in 2008 that agency officials took bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials. And its own scientists have said that senior agency officials in recent years revised staff reports to eliminate environmental concerns that might have complicated oil-company drilling applications for offshore sites in waters near Alaska.
“Problems at M.M.S. did not originate in this administration or its predecessor,” said Representative Darrell Issa of California, the senior Republican of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “There is a bureaucracy and dysfunctional culture that has to be held accountable.”
Mr. Issa and other members of Congress are now asking why repeated warnings about potentially faulty safety equipment like the blowout preventers apparently went unheeded by the industry and unaddressed by the government.
Questions about the blowout preventers — which BP executives have said are at least partly to blame for the April 20 accident — date at least to February 2000, when a rig in the Gulf of Mexico spilled oil into the sea after a crew member accidentally pushed the wrong button, severing the connection between the rig and its blowout prevention device, known as a BOP.
“The rig was not equipped with a secondary system capable of securing the well in the absence of the primary BOP controls,” said a federal report on the accident.
To combat this serious safety flaw, the agency warned oil companies in 2000 and again in June 2009, after yet more problems emerged with a blowout preventer, reminding them that they needed to have “a reliable backup system in place.” But the agency never tried to write regulations that would detail the requirements for the backup systems….
THAT being said, do you know that a study by 35 environmentalists [scientists or specialists in their field] shows that as of early 2011 the health of the Gulf was almost back to normal. I will post an audio about this, followed by the description of the three segments in the audio, followed by a portion of an AP article mentioned in the Los Angeles Daily News.
1) Segment one is of course starts at the beginning and is the pre-good news of what nature was already doing in the Gulf area;
2) Segment two starts at the 5:45 mark, and talks about a few dozen scientists grading the health of the Gulf area after and before the spill;
3) Segment three starts at the 11:25 mark and recaps just a few varying examples of how the media filters news (they do not lie remember).
Here is the Story via the AP picked up by major newspapers.
HEALTH OF THE GULF
(Daily News) Scientists judge the overall health of the Gulf of Mexico as nearly back to normal one year after the BP oil spill, but with glaring blemishes that restrain their optimism about nature’s resiliency, an Associated Press survey of researchers shows.
More than three dozen scientists grade the Gulf’s big picture health a 68 on average, using a 1-to-100 scale. What’s remarkable is that that’s just a few points below the 71 the same researchers gave last summer when asked what grade they would give the ecosystem before the spill. And it’s an improvement from the 65 given back in October….
So the Gulf is doing fine. Many of the scares of the left or pop-culture have been shown to be baseless… or overblown: vaccines, silicone breast implants, second-hand smoke, the vanishing American forest, overpopulation, DDT, heterosexual AIDS, H1N1, on-and-on.
Chernobyl
I highly recommend to anyone reading this get the documentary “Pandora’s Promise,” from which the following clip is from. It is done by activist leaders who led the marches against nuclear power in the 1970’s/80’s, but now reject their old activism based on evidence.
Here is the portion on Chernobyl preceded by radiation levels from around the world ~ I loved this historical road-trip, and it responds to the urban-legend I was even thinking was true… until this documentary:
- There have been more than 20 nuclear and radiation accidents involving fatalities. These involved nuclear power plant accidents, nuclear submarine accidents, radiotherapy accidents and other mishaps….. 56 direct deaths (47 accident workers and nine children with thyroid cancer) resulted from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and it is estimated that there may eventually be 4,000 extra cancer deaths among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed people. (WIKI)
What concerns many specialists who are still studying and have studied the effects of Chernobyl, is the false reporting about it:
…According to findings of the Chernobyl Forum, released in April 2005, misinformation has been the most significant problem for people affected by the accident. A group of more than 100 scientists representing eight United Nations agencies and the governments of Belarus, Ukraine, and the Federation of Russia, the Forum found that most predictions about the accident have been exaggerated. While many had forecast tens and hundreds of thousands of fatalities, it reports a better estimate from among the population of emergency workers and those in the most contaminated areas is around 4,000. The most noticeable effect has been an increase in thyroid cancers among children, with survival rates fortunately greater than 98%. Otherwise, group concludes, there have been no detectable effects of the accident among the general population: no increase in infant mortality, no increase in birth defects, no increase in cancers, and no effects on immune system function that could be linked to radiation from Chernobyl.
The Chernobyl Forum’s greater concerns, however, relate to the impacts on the population caused by distorted reporting. Pointedly it concludes: “the mental health impact of Chernobyl is largest public health problem unleashed by the accident to date.” Because of the steady flow of misinformation, “misconceptions and myths about the threat of radiation persist, promoting a paralyzing fatalism among residents.”
[….]
One graphic claims: “infant mortality is 300% higher in Belarus than the rest of Europe.” True, but it was true before the accident as well. More importantly, rates have been declining since the accident in both contaminated and non-contaminated areas. The problem here is not Chernobyl but differences in health care, diet and lifestyles. Another states: “birth defects have increased 250% since the Chernobyl accident.” This is flatly contradicted by the Chernobyl Forum’s Expert Group on Health which concurred with earlier reports that “so far, no increase in birth defects, congenital malformations, stillbirths, or premature births could be linked to radiation exposures caused by (Chernobyl).” As with heart defects, the repeated pictures of horribly deformed children involve conditions which would have occurred with or without the accident.
[….]
Perhaps the most dramatic graphic states: “The people of Chernobyl were exposed to 90 times greater radiation than that from the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.” This somewhat startling claim is also false. In fact, there were some 20,000 human casualties from radiation exposures at Hiroshima and Nagasaki within the first two to four months due to radiation exposures, compared with 28 during a similar period at Chernobyl. The claim arises from a comparison of radioactive fallout between the two events, but fallout was not the primary source of radiation exposure at Hiroshima. The primary source was the direct burst of gamma and neutron radiation from fissioning within the bomb itself. It is both callous and irresponsible to even suggest the two events are comparable….
Fukushima
Above video description:
Not only does Prager respond well to the caller, I also add an excerpt from a video entitled, “Fukushima and Chernobyl: Myth versus Reality“. THAT graphic — BTW — is of a chart purportedly showing radioactive water seeping into the ocean from the Fukushima nuclear plant. One of the many false news internet scares SNOPES debunked.
So, the next question is….
What Is The Safest Power Source?
Deaths per TW/h of power produced
Total Count (and note that that nuclear number includes: nuclear power plant accidents, nuclear submarine accidents, radiotherapy accidents and other mishaps):
So we are clear here… coal in the source for the above, is split up more than the graph shows:
- Coal ~ 100,000 (41% global electricity)
- Coal ~ China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity)
- Coal ~ U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)
(FORBES)
By contrast of more deadly jobs:
For more, see my page, CLIMATE MANTRAS.
