One primary method of being stupid is to do things that bring you to a state opposite of your intentions. Like wanting higher crop yields so you kill all the birds that eat seeds, and discover that they also eat the bugs that consume the crops so in the end your yields plummet. Then doing it again the next year. Brought to you by the idiots running of Maoist China.
We have the same thing happening in the climate change crowd.
IPCC AR6 WG2 FAQ16.5.1
This is a "burning ember" diagram. Nothing about it is based on observation. It's all speculation, with colors chosen to scare you. This particular working group has five "reasons for concern." Four of them presumably affect the quality of life for humans, by killing them. And the recommendation for mitigating these events? Restrict energy production and availability.
Here's the problem: if quality of life is the goal, we know well how to accomplish that: cheap and available energy. We've known that since the mid-1800s as the driver of the industrial revolution. So why destroy a guaranteed huge driver of quality of life to avoid the low-confidence possibility of bad events? Because climatists are stupid. From the best intentions they will hurt you and themselves, and keep doing it.
Climatists are the followers of an ideology that the weather of the late 1800s was perfect, even though they can't tell you what that weather actually was, and that it must be attained at any cost.
Here is my list of the three most important things that affect the quality of life, some not so proven:
- Having two parents of opposite gender, so there is enough care for the kids and examples of both male and female behaviors to emulate. This is very visible in social surveys.
- Having available and inexpensive energy.
- Having a robust capitalist economy with little regulation.
Missing from the list: giving power to idiots who have it backwards. For example, NOAA, tracking the weather, finds that heat kills 134 people a year, while cold kills 30. But the CDC, who track deaths, not storms, has cold killing 1300 a year, while heat kills 670. So if lower weather-related mortality is the goal, higher temperatures are desired over lower. But what else would you expect from the people who said, "Hey, let's not use thermometers which have been in place for 150 years to measure the temperature, let's measure it from 200 miles away, from space!" Keep them away from policy!
Vikek Ramaswami is right, "Burn, baby, burn!"
EDIT (Feb 2024):
I found a quote from Ross McKitrick on the topic:
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading. Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world's poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that's how the west developed.
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/earth-hour.html