Joe Biden must declare a climate emergency.
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
We’ve passed into a ferocious new phase of global heating with much worse to come. Biden must declare a climate emergency.
I’m terrified by what’s being done to our planet. I’m also fighting to stop it. You, too, should be afraid while also taking the strongest action you can take. There has never been a summer like this in recorded history: shocking ocean heat, deadly land heat, unprecedented fires and smoke, sea ice melting faster than we’ve ever seen or thought possible. I’ve dreaded this depth of Earth breakdown for almost two decades, and, like many of my colleagues, I’ve been trying to warn you. As hard as I could. Now it’s here.
And mark my words: it’s all still just getting started. So long as we burn fossil fuels, far, far worse is on the way; and I take zero satisfaction in knowing that this will be proven right, too, with a certainty as non-negotiable and merciless as the physics behind fossil-fueled global heating. Instead, I only feel fury at those in power, and bottomless grief for all that I love. We are losing Earth on our watch. The Amazon rainforest may already be past its tipping point. Coral reefs as we know them will be gone from our planet by mid-century, and possibly much earlier given this surge in sea-surface temperatures. These are cosmic losses. And as a father, I grieve for my children.
Fossil fuels are causing this damage. Therefore, the only way out of this heat nightmare is to end them. No amount of tree planting, recycling, carbon offsetting, or wishful carbon-capture thinking will ever change this. The longer we allow the fossil fuel industry to exist, the more irreversible damage to Earth the people who profit from it will continue to knowingly cause. We are careening toward fossil-fueled heatwaves that will kill over a million people in single events. And it will not plateau there: more fossil fuels, more heat, more death. The only way out is to end fossil fuels.
Biden’s refusal to declare a climate emergency and his eagerness to push new pipelines and new drilling – at an even faster pace than Trump – goes against science, goes against common sense, goes against life on Earth. In the world of politics-as-usual, with its short-term goals and calculus of “safer to follow than to lead”, I suppose there are reasons and rationalizations for this planet-destroying choice. But speaking as a scientist, it seems ignorant and short-sighted. It’s certainly a form of climate denial. And I have no doubt that fossil fuel executives and lobbyists – and those who chose to stand with them – will, in the future, be considered criminals.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/27/joe-biden-climate-emergency-peter-kalmus
How morons like Kalmus can call themselves scientists is beyond me.
And, I notice, there is not a single mention of China!
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Is anyone telling him he’s a moron in the Guardian comments, I wonder?
I did on his twitter feed.
I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with Kalmus on Twitter, but I’m blocked. Such a snowflake!!
They wouldn’t be allowed to.
Well, he’s a maroon – with a flare for stupidity.
A family trait, it seems.
Wonderful comment on the Grauniad to the effect that Biden must declare a Global State of Emergency and send the US military to destroy every fossil fuel burning plant on Earth…
What is it with these people?
Now that really would lead to the end of the world.
This fella needs a bottle or two of Valium and an appointment with a Clinical Psychiatrist – at the very least!
Yes, poor chap has spent the last two decades dreading “this depth of Earth breakdown…”
Paul should surely have marked that this piece was satirical. It can’t possibly be a serious piece.
It is dead serious, as K has been writing nonsense like this for two decades. Much on him here:
The scary thing is the horrific actions that this madness would justify. And he is by no means alone.
Oh Tipping points are back! Have you noticed how empty the klymutt kult shop window is in spite of the hundreds of billions now of tax payer dollars they have siphoned of which could have been spent on “less important projects” like cancer research or Alzheimer’s research or third world infrastructure or heaven’s above projects to mitigate for a continuously changing climate? Who or whatever this guy is, science is just an excuse. Real scientist do not sound like stroppy gated teens.
The warn out old debunked talking points are all they have. IF their science is so settled as the arts graduates who hyperventilate over this all, then WHY the need to be so selective and more to the point, why the need to abuse science and when all else fails, to lie?
I think I will stick around for his nonsensical empty prophesy about coral reefs. Polar Bears, Coral Reefs, sea level rise, fluctuations in the level of ice at the poles. have they got NOTHING ELSE?
If the science is so settled…. why do spend more billions on it every year? Why not shut down university climate departments and build more wind farms instead?
I suppose the Guardian might be doing all of us a service by publishing such stuff. The more extreme these people sound the better, they lose any argument by default. Of course there will be a segment of the population will take it as gospel, I am thinking younger people ,mainly females. But the vast majority will look at this and wonder when the men in white coats are going to take him away.
The goal for all of this is chaos. Pretend solutions are not solutions at all. They are pacifiers to get the cowardly liquid brained majority to fall into step and accept a dismantling of what until yesterday were societal norms. Like equity and fictitious rights claims for tiny minorities are not about fairness. They are not an end but a beginning. They are all just trojan horses to let the marxist virus in. 100 million people murdered in the 20th century, not in war but because they did not conform and here we have the clear fingerprints of marxism all over the place and the useful idiots cheer!
You should take this more seriously. I live next to the sea and in the last 3 hours it has risen 5 feet. If that isn’t terrifying sea level rise due to our melting glaciers aided by global boiling raising sea temperatures i don’t know what is.
That’s 40 feet per day which means you’re in for 14,000 feet of sea level rise just in the next year.
Maybe Peter Kalmus is onto something after all?
What worries me is that the sea is boiling according to studies. The last thing we need is people using the sea as a giant kettle and dunking their tea bags in it, then leaving the results on the beach.
And when the tide went out, Climatereason….? 😉
Harry Passmore asks:
And when the tide went out, Climatereason….?
The sea level dropped because of the boiling. Steam you know, m’boy! Steam.
5 feet is nothing. I used to live on the Wirral. The tidal range of the Mersey Estuary can be over 9 metres. We eventually had to live in a houseboat 🙂
“Of course there will be a segment of the population will take it as gospel, I am thinking younger people ,mainly females.“
Yes, but the complication is that many young (heterosexual) men (and there are some clear examples of some older men particularly politicians) will go along with what a (younger) women thinks without question to some some extent especially if they are sexually aroused as in men sexual arousal uses a much, evolutionary speaking, older part of the brain and the different parts of the male brain become disconnected from each other so they are less likely to analyse the situation properly – evolutionary speaking I suspect this is the case as if sexual arousal in men worked the same way as in women they would get less women pregnant unintentional.
This is an issue because women are more likerly to join cults and social contagion (e.g. eating disorder, self harming, body image issues) due to difference in the way the female brain works which likely exist in part due to the fact humans are altricial mammals.
I think a big problem we have in society is there has being a concerted attempt to ignore & cover up male and female biological difference particularly in difference in how our brains work but other senses are interesting as well like smell as men and women would get on so much better if we acknowledged this.
A good book everyone should read is Why Gender Matters : What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences Paperback by Leonard Sax.
Oh he wants the criminal Biden to do his bidding. Biden a man who mounting evidence shows is selling his country and by inference the world down the river and this guy sees klumutt as a bigger threat than WWIII coming out of a suddenly destabilized world as a consequence of that feeble corrupt idiots machinations?
A scientist is supposed to be curious and look for other data which supports a theory not rely on tertiary and quaternary non uniqueness.
I like to see a “scientist” with a sense of proportionality. To look at history and importantly geological history. Strange for a physicist not to know there is no empirical data supporting the claims against CO2. Strange for a physicist not to know there is no geological evidence for the claims against CO2. Strange for a physicist not to know about the problems with the electromagnetic signature of CO2 when compared to that for water vapour. Strange strange strange then history is full of cowards who kowtow to the orthodoxy in return for 30 pieces of silver and for his name in the media.
I bet Oppenheimer might have been ‘terrified’ when he contemplated what he was doing but being a rational scientist understood more about science than Peter Kalmus. Kalmus is an hysterics who needs to get – I assume – his Chinese paymaster to repatriate him.
We need to declare an Energy Crisis. What we have is unaffordable and will lead to the impoverishment of the British people.
PETER KALMUS WHO?
M’kay. So now, it’s ‘Earth breakdown.’
And ocean heat is up to ‘shocking,’ land heat has made it to ‘deadly,’ fires and smoke are ‘unprecedented.’ That last one doesn’t seem scary enough.
‘Sea ice melting faster than we’ve ever seen or thought possible.’
We, kemo sabe? Don’t project your ignorance on us, creep.
BTW, Biden has no authority to ‘declare a climate emergency.’ So STFU.
With boiling oceans why are no Hurricanes developing?
Hold the front page!
Not
Kalmus is a ‘jet propulsion’ expert at NASA. Whatever that is.
He clearly needs help.
Says in the Grauniad article he’s a “climate scientist”.
“And as a father, I grieve for my children.”
Indeed, they are to be pitied….
What, like Hunter?
Indeed like Hunter, sent out as the Biden Crime Family’s bag man without the intelligence or mental and intestinal fortitude for that line of work.
Pitied? Or pardoned?
On day release from an asylum?
Paul,
There is a sinister side to calls for Biden to declare a climate emergency, as I pointed out here:
Have a look at his Wikipedia entry he got the sack from Oak Ridge!
Surely the war between Ukraine and Russia, the poverty and hunger in Africa (Greenpeace against “Golden Rice” for Vitamin A), the deranged leaders of North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran, together with Malaria, Cholera and Typhoid are more important than worrying about a 1.5C rise in temperature, together with the consequences of not using fossil fuels, which would cause much more deaths than the heatwaves that he predicts.
P.S
Do you think these eco loons realise that in the Southern Hemisphere it is Winter and it is rather cold and snowy?
He is supposed to be a physicist, but he obviously learnt nothing about radiation, heat transfer, thermodynamics or fluid mechanics.
Especially6 as that 1.5 degrees is measured from the middle of the “Little Ice Age”!!!
Used to be. They moved it on to 1880:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/98/9/bams-d-16-0007.1.xml 01 Sep 2017
“The basis for international negotiations on climate change has been to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” using the words in Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC; United Nations 1992). The 2015 Paris COP21 Agreement (United Nations 2015) aims to maintain global average temperature “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” .
However, there is no formal definition of what is meant by “pre-industrial” in the UNFCCC or the Paris Agreement. Neither did the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) use the term when discussing when global average temperature might cross various levels because of the lack of a robust definition (Kirtman et al. 2013).
In the absence of a formal definition for preindustrial, the IPCC AR5 made a pragmatic choice to reference global temperature to the mean of 1850–1900 when assessing the time at which particular temperature levels would be crossed (Kirtman et al. 2013). In the final draft, 1850–1900 was referred to as preindustrial, but at the IPCC AR5 plenary approval session, “a contact group developed a proposal, in which reference to ‘pre-industrial’ is deleted, and this was adopted [by the governments]” (IISD 2013).
However, the term preindustrial was used in AR5, often inconsistently, in other contexts—for example, when discussing atmospheric composition, radiative forcing (the year 1750 is used as a zero-forcing baseline), sea level rise, and paleoclimate information.
…some anthropogenic warming is estimated to have already occurred by 1850 (Hegerl et al. 2007; Schurer et al. 2013; Abram et al. 2016) as greenhouse gas concentrations had started increasing around a century earlier. On the other hand, the 1880s and 1890s were cooler than the preceding decades because of the radiative impact of aerosols from several volcanic eruptions, which may have compensated for the earlier anthropogenic influence.
It is therefore plausible that a “true” pre-industrial temperature could be warmer or cooler than 1850–1900, depending on the balance of these two factors. A key question which we will consider is how representative the 1850–1900 period is for preindustrial global average temperature.”
It couldn’t get more fundamental than this, we are “preventing” a rise in temperature from a figure that we don’t know. Without a known baseline parameter, the whole AGW paradigm is on shifting sands, but “the science is settled”. The UK is “leading the fight to save the planet”, but from what?
So the stam engine circa 1660 wasn’t the start of the Industrial revolution (ka age) As usual changing the facts to suit the narrative!
He better be quick as I would wager that Dementia Joe will be gone by year end as the evidence piles up in preparation for his impeachment. It has got so bad even the rabid DemoTwat media can’t avoid talking about his sleazebag son. His puppet masters will not permit impeachment so he will be removed on grounds of medical problems. Then the US will have its first female president – oh, how mad Shrillary will be – in word salad expert Kommie Kamala, who makes Stanley Unwin[one for older readers] look like a world class orator.
Oh gezza, I can’t pass on a mention like that! Here is a party political broadcast in Unwinese for our younger readers. Classic brilliance.
Brilliant! Thanks, Ray. And to think that makes more sense than a Kamala Harris speech.
‘Tipping points’ about an ‘assumed equilibrium’ are the result of the work of some 18th century French mathematicians, who faced with the valid problems raised by Newton in his ‘Principia Mathematica’; rather than solve them, substituted a form of mathematics in which they considered the problems did not occur. This was small perturbations around an assumed, ‘steady state’ in a system of linear algebra. Such a ‘closed system’ based on a set of a priori assumptions is merely ‘software’ with all the deficiencies inherent in such a formulation. While this worked well for problems in which no extrapolation with respect to time was necessary, it was rapidly discovered that in longterm physical problems, the real world data ofted diverged from the algorithmic solution. A previous such model, generated by Claudius Ptolemy to codify the motions of the planets and based on no physics, only on observed data, had soon diverged from reality and required a dramatic rethink of the undelying physics.
The concept of an equilibrium system and a corresponding ‘steady state’ does not exist in the ‘Principia’ – Newton was too good a physicist to engage in such an unlikely state of affairs. Much of the mathematics in the ‘Principia’ is non-linear and closed solutions of the form found in modern textbooks are absent.
We accept that weather is ‘non-linear’ and that prediction above a short number of days is practically impossible, because of the turbulent nature of energy exchanges in non-linear systems. The idea that we can ‘average’ the short term climate results and from that make a definitive prediction of the long term future is a nonsense and as Paul’s careful analysis of data shows, there is little evidence to support that singular hypothesis in the data we have for the last 300 years and very little in long term geological data to support it either.
The current tipping point beloved by IPCC and its followers it is entirely a fabrication made up by one Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. It is not a magical limit but serves simply as a political target and as such has become remarkably effective in motivating political action.
So, with no scientific basis a climate catastrophe had to be invented. That this was the case is made quite clear by Hans von Storch, another leading climate specialist, who said, “Unfortunately, some of my colleagues behave like pastors …… it’s certainly no coincidence that all the mistakes that become public always tended in the direction of exaggeration and alarmism”.
Schellnhuber has a new job:
https://iiasa.ac.at/news/jul-2023/hans-joachim-john-schellnhuber-appointed-as-iiasa-director-general
“John Schellnhuber will bring a wealth of experience gained in both leadership and academic positions to IIASA. He served as the founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) from 1992 until 2018, and from 2001 to 2005, he held the position of research director at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK.
His expertise in climate change has earned him worldwide recognition, leading to memberships in prestigious learned societies such as the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy Leopoldina, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the Academy of Athens.”
Kalmus is an absolute eco-loon.
I used to follow him on Twitter to keep ‘informed’ and all it did was confirm him as a genuine extremist.
Every post is hysterically stupid, none of his posts make any rational sense at all. Context is MIA. This article is a perfect example of fearmongering bed-wetting.
Needless to say he blocked me!
I believe people pushing this tripe in schools are guilty of psychological child abuse.
The dictionary should re-define what the word ‘scientist’ means, and should exclude the description for self opinionated nutters like Kalmus.
Pure hyperbowl (h/t Julia Gillard)
A fucking nutter
The hyperbowl would be some sort of galactic American football competition I assume. Not sure we puny carbon based life forms would stand much of a chance.
Does the Guardian have a car-park, or do all staff walk or cycle to work?
the Guardian’s editorial staff are based at Kings Cross, so only a short walk from Islington, Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Hackney etc …. i.e. all the inner city areas where the bohemian middle class hipsters that comprise the Guardian’s employees live….. Even those that can only afford to live “sarf of the river” are only 4 or 5 stops away on the northern line
Biden couldn’t declare what day of the week it is!
As you sit in an overcoat (because you can’t afford to put the heating on) in the middle of a cold UK July, you may have missed …
The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, July 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHuxbr2PWTc 1 min
But, before that we had …
‘Boiling the Oceans’ at the Jan 2023 Davos World Economic Forum Meeting.
Al Gore went on an unhinged fire & brimstone rant, claiming …
“boiling oceans, nuclear bombs, rising sea levels”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfAYLSQIxTI 40 seconds
And the evidence of global boiling see … https://youtu.be/iNhnJDWi-wQ 7 mins.
‘Al Gore went on an unhinged fire & brimstone rant, claiming …
“boiling oceans, nuclear bombs, rising sea levels”’
In fairness, I’ve have done that . . . after missing a short putt.
Other explanations are available.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01568-2
So, at last they’ve had to admit H2O is the major GHG; well knock me down with a feather !!!
I think it’s much worse than the authors are allowed to say.
The climate models used in the study are tuned to CO2 not H2O.
But it wouldn’t be allowed for the authors to say that the volcanoes effect far outweighs AGW, that would not get into print.
In my view this unprecedented cataclysmic marine volcanic eruption is the cause of the heatwaves and record sea surface temperature anomalies.
C52, you need to remember you are dealing with “climate scientists” with lots of “qualifications” who seriously argue that the Sun has no effect on the climate.
We must stop listening to these alarmists who would not know the truth if it bit them. They will not discuss alternative views because of their vested interests
Have a look at ‘Are we smoothing our way to global warming?’ at the TCW Defending Freedom blog.
JF
I went on to the Guardian website to view the comments section. I read about 50 of them and most were even more extreme than the article, ranging from blocking out the sun, cancelling democracy and more or less giving up anything that makes our lives comfortable. We are wicked people have no doubt. I was going to leave a comment but I don’t think they would have allowed it as they have a contents policy. You can guess what that is.
I got barred from the Guardian after commenting rather negatively on a Monbiot article…Made my day! Strangely I discovered that I can now comment, it was on another article about shipping our plastic waste to the far east by Monbiot. I actually agreed with him.
Someone should remind Mr. Kalmus that Joe Biden almost depleted the US strategic oil reserves to make transportation fuels more available at lower costs. So much for his pledge in Glasgow to lower US emissions. Clear evidence that the climate emergency is not one.
There are lies, damned lies and computer weather models.
All promoted by “Intellectuals”, those second hand dealers of other’s ideas, who question none of it. The same ones who will not vaccinate their children because they read something on the internet.
Real scientists question everything not amplify it.
‘Biden had the last opportunity of any president to keep the world under 1.5C of heating.’
How many ‘lasts’ do they get? When Biden doesn’t act on some silly Guardian reporter’s assertion, who will be the next ‘last?’
King Charles?
Rishi Sunak?
In truth, Xi.
Actually, Harry, I suspect Xi is far too busy rolling around the floor, gasping for breath and laughing his socks off as the West destroys itself.
Every morning and I look outside my window, and nothing has changed (well maybe a little bit colder & wetter this month, but nothing significant)
But who is that guy in the mirror?
Everyone
icymi
We are having that pushed dozens of times a day & large numbers think it’s all real not CGI … hats off to the advertising industry.
This advert should be banned there are not enough BAME people in it.
Black Asian and Minority Ethnic.
The BBC wanting as is usual not to be trailing…
Special July heatwave edition:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-bcea7bff-641f-4cbf-b091-26491409fbdc
It might be exciting, dwelling in a world of false information and panicky response, but it is still just playacting and not reality. The “record temperatures” claim is bogus and the “data” being used to lend it credibility is either not factual or out of context. There is no truth to the story of coral disappearance. The reefs, worldwide, are in great shape. The rainforest is growing greenly, along with ocean plankton, thanks primarily to the tiny increase in CO2 we have seen in recent time. The levels of CO2 have been much higher in the past and have fluctuated over time. There are no “record numbers” of forest or grassland fires. Desertification is not increasing in rate over historical time. Human population does pose certain difficulties, mostly due to a thorough lack of government planning, which, in bureaucratic culture, is natural. We do need to overhaul our waste handling practices. Most of all, we need to stop looking at the world as a problem to be solved and to be profited from by various “us” and “them” groups with their private agendas and public pretense. Professional “experts” are not interested in providing processes which operate well; consultants would have no clientele without dis or mis functions. “Fossil” fuels (which are not fossil based) are not the end of mankind, but green weenies and their frantic “do something without rational thought or consideration of consequences” tantrums just may cause the worst suffering and misgovernance “since records have been kept”.
“And, I notice, there is not a single mention of China!”
Yes, this is proof that Mr. Kalmus’ activism against fossil fuels has absolutely nothng to do with lowering CO2 emissions to save the planet. The other giveaway is that he wants to replace fossil fuels with renewables which as a scientist he must know will not work. If he really believed CO2 was a problem he would be advocating that nuclear replaces fossil fuels. He clearly has some other agenda for his activism.
Yet the satellite record still shows nothing happening.
I used to wonder whether the religious nutters who burnt people to death in the Middle Ages really believed. Now it’s clear they did and were just fantasists.
The Salem witch trials came to a rapid close when the elite of the colony started to be included in the accusations. Blair’s recent comments indicate that he has spotted that risk in the insanity.
A puff piece to go alongside the hysterical nonsense in the Telegraph this week by ex-Guardian scribe Suzanne Moore.
Loony lefties end up eating each other…. Moore is a case in point
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/why-suzanne-moore-resigned-from-guardian/
That said if you are wondering what she spewed into the DT:
https://archive.li/PkC0Q#selection-4031.0-4031.43
We are both a bit better but still have a bug of some sort. We didn’t hear you at all, in fact I said to Kyra perhaps you cancelled again. So sorry to let you down. Hope you all enjoyed yourselves and we didn’t spoil things. Cheers Frank.
Take a chill-pill, goofy. We have all heard these ridiculous claims for the last thirty years and NONE have come true. We already have an Al Gore and a John Kerry, and a Brandon Biden. But Brandon is a little busy right now, something about heading up an international crime family. Like I suggested–relax.