Stephen Moore |  Nov 13, 2024 | Townhall

My cmnt: Click on the Climate Change category on this website to see numerous articles on this subject. First, the climate changes naturally and endlessly all the time. There is no “normal” climate. There is only what is. Second, destroying our economy and freedoms in the name of what may or may not happen 30, 50 or 100 years from now is absurd. Humans can and have adapted to various climate extremes and will do so in the future. Third, there is no such thing as settled science. Aside from our four, great, mathematical and miraculous physical theories (i.e., Newtonian Mechanics, Maxwell’s Theory of Electromagnetism, Special and General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics) most of what we call science is really just advanced and very sophisticated applied technology (i.e., trial and error, hunt and peck, see what works based upon what already works). Fourth, Co2 is NOT a pollutant, it is in fact plant food and has contributed to our record crop production and the greening of the earth. Fifth, the entire climate crisis industry is just another shill to rake in billions of taxpayer/government dollars for worthless, unnecessary “research”. And finally, limiting energy to the wealthy and denying it to the masses is a devious communist/Marxist plot to destroy the middle class and elevate the elites.

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Re-creation and Revelation – by David Berlinski in The Devil’s Delusion

Sometime in the 17th century, the dry tinder of discovery, struck profitlessly throughout so many long centuries, blazed suddenly into life. The physical sciences came into creation. That is the common view, and it is completely correct. Before the 17th century there was nothing, and afterward, everything.

Myth places the miracle at the moment Isaac Newton conceived the idea that gravity might control both the fall of objects toward the center of the earth and the movement of the planets in the night sky. But the miracle was in fact divided, one half physical, the other mathematical, and it was the mathematical miracle that struck the deeper. Before the laws of nature could be revealed and then recorded, the real world had to be re-created in terms of the real numbers.

The real numbers—not only the natural, or counting, numbers but zero, the negative numbers, the fractions, and the irrational numbers as well—entered the Western imagination in the 16th and 17th centuries, the creation of ebullient Italian geometers and mathematicians. Creation is the right word, signifying as it does a spontaneous intellectual act, one that brings something into being. But whatever their origins, the real numbers also have a workaday identity, one that is expressible in terms of their infinite decimal expansion. The square root of two may thus be expressed as 1.41421356 . . . , with the dots indicating a continuously evolving identity as ever more numbers are added to the list. With these strange rich numbers in place, the number system is in a certain sense complete. The thing is contained in itself. It is whole. There are no gaps where the numbers simply lapse.

The introduction of the real numbers allowed the landscape of mathematical analysis to be suffused with a thrilling light, one akin in its own way to the light that may be seen or sensed in the great Renaissance paintings. In that lit-up landscape, the infinite was, for the first time in history, charmed into compliance. Men gained the eerie power to ask of certain processes: suppose they go on forever, what then?

Within the scheme of thought known as the calculus, discovered almost simultaneously by Gottfried Leibniz and Newton, they found an entirely comprehensible answer. Relationships between and among numbers could be expressed by the flexible and finely geared instrument of a function, an invention that permitted mathematicians to describe numerical patterns as if they were living processes. The concept of a limit made its first appearance on the mathematical stage, denoting the place where certain things tend and then accumulate. (As the fractions get smaller and smaller, for example, they tend inexorably toward a limit at zero.) Sequences were given voice, and strange series contemplated; hidden for centuries from human sight, an array of mathematical operations and processes became for the first time visible.

The creation of the real number system and its perfection in the calculus represented an inward explosion, one that took place against the backdrop of a larger, outward explosion: the realization by the great natural philosophers of the 17th century that these same real numbers might be assigned to physical magnitudes such as force, mass, and distance, thus creating an essentially quantitative representation of the world. To be sure, human beings since time immemorial had used the numbers to count and to measure and to reckon. As the animals trooped aboard the ark, Noah, no doubt, ticked them off on his fingertips, two by two. But the representation of the real world in terms of the real numbers was different. It was a richer and more compelling representation, one that for the very first time allowed some ineffable abstract aspect of things to be localized on a computational canvas.

It was change under the aspect of continuity, the very mutability of matter, that was captured on that canvas. Continuity is a manifestation of seamlessness: continuous processes do not break, or snap, or interrupt themselves. And continuity is a physical as well as a mathematical property. It lights up the night sky as the stars crawl solemnly across the heavens. The undulating quantum wave occupying all portions of an infinite dimensional Hilbert space is continuous, and so is the great worm of time that humps and slithers its way through the theory of relativity.

The calculus is humanity’s great meditation on the theme of continuity, and the concentration on continuous change is what mysteriously lends to the calculus its diamond-hard edge, its uncanny powers of specificity.

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The Representation that mathematics affords of the real world is not complete—no symbolic instrument is ever fully adequate to reality—but it is larger and more spacious and more commanding than any before discovered. Still, a representation can only do so much, namely, re-convey an aspect of reality, the familiar world finding itself peeping from an unfamiliar mirror. The larger promise of the physical sciences has always been that some striking revelation lies behind the new, the odd and unfamiliar representation, some way of coordinating appearances and enforcing a sense of order on the vagaries of things.

The world, the physical sciences affirm, is not merely depictable, but comprehensible. It has a rational structure. It is animated by a great plan. The catalogue of its facts may be compressed into a few infinitely pregnant laws. There is a form of words adequate to the complexity of experience.

These words mathematics does not in itself provide. They arise when the detritus of experience is sifted by a profound physical imagination—Newton, for example, discovering that all objects in the material universe attract one another in proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. In the tide of time, there have been only four absolutely fundamental physical theories: Newtonian mechanics; Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism; Einstein’s theory of relativity; and quantum mechanics. They stand in history like the staring stone statues on Easter Island, blank-eyed and monumental.

Each theory is embedded in a continuous mathematical representation of the world; each succeeds in amalgamating far-flung processes and properties into a single, remarkably compressed affirmation, a tight intellectual knot. The supreme expression of each theory is a single mathematical law, one expressed as an equation: a statement in which something that is unknown is specified by contingencies arranged in a certain way. And each of the great theories contains far more than it states, the laws of nature fantastically compressed, as if they were quite literally messages from a timeless intellect.

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A few days before last week’s election, Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters: “If Donald Trump is elected, the struggle against climate change is over.”

He had that right.

Climate change fanaticism was effectively on the ballot last week. The green energy agenda was decisively defeated.

It turns out that the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who voted for Trump weren’t much interested in the temperature of the planet 50 years from now. They’re too busy trying to pay the bills.

That result shouldn’t be too surprising. Every poll in recent years has shown climate change ranks near the bottom of voter concerns. Jobs, inflation and illegal immigration register much higher on the scale of concerns.

But if you asked the elite of America in the top 1% of income, climate change is seen as an immediate and existential threat to the planet. Our poll at Unleash Prosperity earlier this year found that the cultural elites were so hyper-obsessed with climate issues, they were in favor of banning air conditioning, nonessential air travel and many modern home appliances to stop global warming. Our study showed that not many of the other 99% agree.

Wake up, Bernie and Al Gore.

Climate change has become the ultimate luxury good: the richer you are, the more you fret about it.

Among the elite, obsessing about climate change has become a favorite form of virtue signaling at the country club and in the faculty lounges. There is almost no cross the green elites — the people who donate six figures or more to groups like the Sierra Club — aren’t willing to make lower-income Americans bear to stop global warming.

Herein lies the political curse of the climate issue. A millionaire doesn’t care much if the price of gas rises by $1 a gallon or if they have to pay another $100 a month in utility bills. But the middle class hates paying more.

It wasn’t just economic concerns that turned voters against climate crusaders like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Workers weren’t too thrilled with the heavy fist of government commanding them to buy an electric vehicle — whether they wanted one or not.

It hasn’t helped the greens’ cause that the same progressives out to save the planet with grandiose transformations and global government seem to have no problem with the garbage polluting the streets of our major cities, or the graffiti or the feces and urine smell on the street corners of San Francisco and New York City. That’s real pollution. And it’s affecting us here and now.

The good news is, this year’s voter revolt against the radical green agenda isn’t a vote for dirtier air or water. The air we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner than ever — a point that Trump correctly made. We will continue to make progress against pollution.

But the nonsense of “net zero” use of fossil fuels is a bridge way too far. The destruction of jobs historically held by blue-collar union workers ripped right into the heart of the Democratic Party’s traditional voting base.

In their zeal to save the planet, Democrats forgot to visit the steel mills, construction sites and auto plants to ask those workers what they thought.

Well, now we know. Americans recognize their shrinking paychecks and the higher price of gas they pay at the pump is the real clear and present danger to their way of life. If Democrats don’t start to get that, they too will go to bed worrying about their jobs.