Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Climate Blasphemy! Jordan Peterson, whose podcasts have had over 285 million views, and famous Actor / Comedian Joe Rogan who hosts the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience, have triggered the entire alarmist community by explaining why they think climate predictions are unreliable.

Their broadcast got so much attention, singer Neil Young is boycotting world leading podcast host Spotify for carrying such material.

Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve

The big boys had a big thinky about climate change.

By Molly TaftYesterday 1:20PM

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Rogan and Peterson waxed on about climate for a good 30 minutes at the beginning of the four-hour-plus (!) episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, which was released Tuesday. I listened to the whole thing and it made me want to self-immolate. I’ll spare you all the bulk of the exchange because I would like you to continue to exist in a less flammable state, but I feel obligated to share the stupidest parts here, so you can share in my pain.

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PETERSON: Well, that’s ‘cause there’s no such thing as climate. Right? “Climate” and “everything” are the same word, and that’s what bothers me about the climate change types. It’s like, this is something that bothers me about it, technically. It’s like, climate is about everything. Okay. But your models aren’t based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you’ve reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation, if it’s about everything? That’s not just a criticism, that’s like, if it’s about everything, your models aren’t right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything.

ROGAN: What do you mean by everything?

PETERSON: That’s what people who talk about the climate apocalypse claim, in some sense. We have to change everything! It’s like, everything, eh? The same with the word environment. That word means so much that it doesn’t mean anything. … What’s the difference between the environment and everything? There’s no difference.

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Read more: https://gizmodo.com/jordan-peterson-joe-rogan-climate-denial-1848425540

It gets funnier;

‘Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models

Speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Peterson claimed the climate was too complex to be modelled accurately, which was quickly shot down by scientists

Graham Readfearn
Thu 27 Jan 2022 18.05 AEDT

Leading climate scientists have ridiculed and criticised comments made by controversial Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson during an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

During a new four-hour interview on Spotify’s most popular podcast, Peterson – who is not an expert on climate change – claimed that models used to forecast the future state of the climate couldn’t be relied on.

Peterson told Rogan that because the climate was so complex, it couldn’t be accurately modelled.

He said: “Another problem that bedevils climate modelling, too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically. And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model is in error.

“And that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.”

Peterson said that if the climate was “about everything” then “your models aren’t right” because they couldn’t include everything.

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Prof Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Penn State University, said Peterson’s comments – and Rogan’s facilitation of them – was an “almost comedic type of nihilism” that would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

Peterson’s claim that the climate was too complicated showed “a total lack of understanding of how science works” and could be used to dismiss physics, chemistry, biology, “and every other field of science where one formulates conceptual models”, according to Mann.

“Every great discovery in science – including the physics that allowed Peterson and Rogan to record and broadcast their ridiculous conversation – has arisen through that process,” he said.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/27/word-salad-of-nonsense-scientists-denounce-jordan-petersons-comments-on-climate-models

Gavin Schmidt freaking out;

What is upsetting the climate community is between them Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson command a gigantic listening audience.

I haven’t listened to the full podcast, but it dives into climate prediction, EV problems and renewable energy vs nuclear right from the start, so it has me hooked.

“why are the left wing types in particular so willing to sacrifice the poor”?

The climate community overreaction may end up being more damaging to the cause of climate alarmism than the original podcast.

All those publicity hungry Youtube and TikTok personalities out there right now who are watching and taking notes have just learned, if you want a gigantic deluge of free publicity from a wide range of outraged liberal media outlets, all you need to do is shoot a few sacred climate cows.

Update (EW): Cancel campaign on – Newly appointed Biden Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in my opinion has come close to asking Silicon Valley to censor Joe Rogan – he stated that silicon valley has “an important role to play” suppressing the spread of Covid misinformation, in an interview which mentions Joe Rogan.

Radiocarbon dating from a prehistoric cemetery in Northern Russia reveals human stress caused by a global cooling event 8,200 years ago Early hunter gatherers developed more complex social systems and, unusually, a large cemetery when faced by climate

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

University of Oxford news release

16:00 (GMT), Thursday 27 January 2022

Climate change in the Early Holocene

• Radiocarbon dating from a prehistoric cemetery in Northern Russia reveals human stress caused by a global cooling event 8,200 years ago
• Early hunter gatherers developed more complex social systems and, unusually, a large cemetery when faced by climate change

New insight into how our early ancestors dealt with major shifts in climate is revealed in research,  published today [27 Jan] in Nature Ecology & Evolution, by an international team, led by Professor Rick Schulting from Oxford University’s School of Archaeology.

It reveals, new radiocarbon dates show the large Early Holocene cemetery of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, at Lake Onega, some 500 miles north of Moscow, previously thought to have been in use for many centuries, was, in fact, used for only one to two centuries. Moreover, this seems to be in response to a period of climate stress.

The team believes the creation of the cemetery reveals a social response to the stresses caused by regional resource depression. At a time of climate change, Lake Onega, as the second largest lake in Europe, had its own ecologically resilient microclimate. This would have attracted game, including elk, to its shores while the lake itself would have provided a productive fishery. Because of the fall in temperature, many of the region’s shallower lakes could have been susceptible to the well-known phenomenon of winter fish kills, caused by depleted oxygen levels under the ice.

The creation of the cemetery at the site would have helped define group membership for what would have been previously dispersed bands of hunter-gatherers – mitigating potential conflict over access to the lake’s resources.

But when the climate improved, the team found, the cemetery largely went out of use, as the people presumably returned to a more mobile way of life and the lake became less central.

The behavioural changes – to what could be seen as a more ‘complex’ social system, with abundant grave offerings – were situation-dependent. But they suggest the presence of important decision makers and, say the team, the findings also imply that early hunting and gathering communities were highly flexible and resilient.

The results have implications for understanding the context for the emergence and dissolution of socioeconomic inequality and territoriality under conditions of socio-ecological stress.

Radiocarbon dating of the human remains and associated animal remains at the site reveals that the main use of the cemetery spanned between 100-300 years, centring on ca. 8250 to 8,000 BP. This coincides remarkably closely with the 8.2 ka dramatic cooling event, so this site could provide evidence for how these humans responded to a climate-driven environmental change.

The Holocene (the current geological epoch which began approximately 11,700 years before present) has been relatively stable in comparison to current events. But there are a number of climate fluctuations recorded in the Greenland ice cores. The best known of these is the 8,200 years ago cooling event, the largest climatic downturn in the Holocene, lasting lasted one to two centuries. But there is little evidence that the hunter-gatherers, who occupied most of Europe at this time, were much affected, and if they were, in what specific ways.

From EurekAlert!

Earlier today on Radio 4’s PM, Evan Davies interviewed the Greens’ sole MP about nuclear power. Your correspondent was sufficiently horrified to listen twice, the second time with a goodly number of pauses. Transcript follows, with my inline snark:

Evan Davies: So what role does nuclear power play in helping the UK reach its Net Zero target? You’ve heard the government’s position there. Let’s talk to Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Green Party, MP. Caroline [sic] thanks so much for joining us. Summarise for us where you are on nuclear now.

[We already know where they are on nuclear, which is nowhere. However, let’s hear what the reasons for that are.]

Caroline Lucas: Well that’s easy. We think that nuclear is eye-wateringly expensive. It is as you said painfully slow, and frankly it’s unnecessary. Look, this £100 million cash injection is an admission by the government that nuclear isn’t commercially viable and that new nuclear projects require enormous levels of subsidy even to get them to the point where they get the green light. Renewables, by contrast, have costs that are plummetting in recent years, so in a sense, if we’re concerned as we should be about costs for consumers it is far cheaper for them if we were to invest properly in renewable energy, in energy efficiency, rather than being fixated by a twentieth century technology which doesn’t have a place right now in terms of the green transition which is incredibly slow. I think it’s worth pointing out that the EDF plant in France, the so-called Flamanville 3 reactor is going to cost 300 million Euros more than was forecast and it is already running more than a decade late. Even if this went to plan –

[Yes, it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor. That makes the strategy of opposing one so much more effective. The story of Sizewell B is salutary. First announced in 1969, it was synchronized with the grid in 1995. At the time, I was employed as a grunt planting sheep’s bit and thrift etc on the seaward dunes. Friends were doing things like padlocking themselves to the gates. According to Wiki,

“Before construction commenced, the design of Sizewell B was subjected to a detailed safety review by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), and a lengthy public inquiry. The Pre-Construction Safety Case was submitted to the NII in August 1981. The public inquiry was held between 1982 and 1985, and took over 16 million words of evidence, a record at the time.”

In case anyone is unaware, we haven’t plugged in a nuke since Sizewell B, 27 years ago. This followed on from the pioneering Calder Hall which was the first nuke plugged into a grid anywhere in 1956. We managed to hook up 17 more in the next 32 years, about 1 every 2 years. Then there was a 7 year hiatus until Sizewell B. Then nothing for a long time. Most of those are gone now, even with 40 year lifespans not being uncommon.

She speaks of twentieth-century energy and finds that proposing to replace it with seventeenth-century energy does not jar.]

Davies: A lot to discuss there.

Lucas: A lot.

Davies: Obviously renewables got a lot of subsidy before the costs fell so there was a learning experience as we went through but talk to me about this because what you’ve seen in Germany where they have said we don’t like our nuclear power stations, where they’ve really gone with the strategy you’ve outlined, they have just found themselves burning enormous amounts of the dirtiest kinds of coal to keep their power stations going.

Lucas: Well there are two things there. First of all, just to be clear about the amount of subsidy that goes to nuclear versus renewables you’re quite right that renewables in their early stages needed subsidy but for example onshore wind hardly needs any subsidy at all now and all of them are coming off subsidies so they are commercially viable, renewable energies are commercially viable after a few years. Nuclear after – how many years have we been doing it? Decades – is still costing us an arm and a leg. And I would like to come back to the fact that this new funding model that the government’s proposing actually means that consumers have to pay twice. They have to pay first for a plant’s construction through their energy bills long before any electricity is generated, then they have to pay again in more expensive energy bills. In Germany they didn’t invest in the kind of um panoply of different renewables that we could be doing right now. What we need to be doing now is solar, it’s wind, it’s storage, it’s demand management, it’s electric vehicles –

[This seems to come from the land of unicorns and rainbows. How could Lucas not be aware that there is a £10 billion per year subsidy for renewables admitted to by the OBR? There is also the little matter of a bill or so for juggling the erratic grid. Then someone has to pay for the standby reserve when it isn’t working.

Demand management is what we need to be doing just after we use our right hand to nail our left hand to our temple. Unless anyone knows different, demand management means making electricity more expensive. That makes life harder for everyone, and it makes the cost of everything go up. Electric vehicles she tosses into the salad, seemingly unaware that such vehicles require electricity, whereas the disgusting diesels do not.]

Davies: And what is Germany’s plan when they’ve arrived at the final destination for their energy future, what is their plan for when the wind drops? And it’s actually – last year was a very windless year – it was difficult for the grid because all over Europe we just had less wind. What is their plan? Is it to buy French nuclear?

Lucas: Well, I can – I don’t know the German plan is but I can tell what our –

Davies: I think it’s in connectors – interconnectors with the rest of Europe which will end up inevitably being fossil fuels from elsewhere or end up being nuclear from elsewhere, won’t it?

Lucas: No, not ne – not at all. The kind of interconnectors that we’re talking about would absolutely be taking wind from some of the Nordic countries for example so when the wind’s blowing there, we can have interconnectors that would allow us to import that energy, similarly, you know, we can be exporting when we’ve got an excess. That is the way forward, and the idea that we need baseload is just from another century, we don’t need that nuclear baseload any more. Even the head of the grid has said that we need a smart grid and that instead can supply us with the kind of security of supply that we need. People are talking about the fact that the wind doesn’t blow from time to time. That is certainly true. But don’t forget the fact that one of the reasons that we’ve been hit so hard by the current gas crisis is also because a nuclear power stations [sic] went offline in an unpredictable way and for a long time.

[In the land of rainbows and unicorns, it is always windy somewhere, windy enough for the inhabitants and for an excess to be piped to their distant friends where the air is still. All I can say is, thank the stars that the role of the Greens is only to propose utterly asinine solutions, thereby making the mainstream stupid solutions of the incumbent party and its loyal opposition seem like strokes of genius.

Yes, you probably need a smart grid. Just as you need someone on hand to correct the steering every millisecond when pushing a poorly-designed trolley.

The term she uses there – “gas crisis” – seems to indicate to me a shortage of gas. If we had a “food crisis” we would not be planning to reduce food production.]

[Incoming Skype call]

Davies: Well they do go off indeed so. I’m tempted to say take that Skype call but thankfully it’s stopped. Just one last one for you though. The green movement, I don’t know about the Green Party, the green movement has been somewhat split on this issue of nuclear because many I think in the green movement think credibility of a strategy towards Net Zero probably does involve, not massive amounts of nuclear, but maybe 15 or 20 percent of that baseload.

Lucas: I disagree with you. I don’t think you would find a majority, or even most, or even a large part of the movement –

Davies: People like George Monbiot, George Monbiot, you know, great writers on the environmental side of this have been turned around to the idea that somewhere in the system you might want some nuclear. Maybe not Hinckley Point or Sizewell, but something nuclear.

Lucas: Well, you’d need to have him on to explain that point. But what I can tell you is that the big environmental NGOs, the GreenPeaces, the Friends of the Earths, and those big organisations that have been working on this for years have not changed their position and neither has the Green Party. If we were to go down the nuclear route, it would be slow, as I said, it’s going to take at least ten years even if there weren’t any overruns to get this new nuclear power station up and running, it is eye-wateringly expensive, why, at a time when people are rightly concerned about their energy bills would we be deliberately going down a route that requires more costly energy. What we should be doing is making the transition to renewables which is must faster, much cheaper, and much more secure.

Davies: Caroline Lucas, thanks for making that argument.

[Renewables are more secure? They’re spread out over vast areas in far-flung places that used to be fairly wild before we industrialised them, and the offshore ones at least are connected by vulnerable cables. The onshore ones are hardly secure either. And if Lucas thinks the cost of nuclear is eye-wateringly expensive, perhaps she should be advocating gas power stations. Of course not, because everything Green now revolves around a single axis, carbon dioxide. Nothing else – not poverty, not security of supply, not birds swatted from the sky – matters.

Nuclear is an obvious solution because it is the one energy source that sceptics and alarmists alike can agree to.]

Message ends.

PS. the Green logo that I have rudely mutilated with a brassica is actually the Earth, haloed by the nuclear fires of armageddon. Or the designer might have intended a sunflower. It’s unclear which.