JBG
Liberal democrat
The New York Times is finally having to walk back, a teensy bit, from climate alarmism. See an article in a recent the New York Times, regarding the Maldives, a collection of atolls in the tropical , doomsday has been postponed. See The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish (link) in June 26, 2024 issue of the New York Times. Excerpt:
I have long suspected that much of the fear-mongering has been baseless or exaggerated. Another example is the Hajj pilgrimage, see Heat Is Killing Thousands, and Big Events Have Not Adjusted (link). Excerpt:New York Times said:And indeed, when the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geologic history were bound to be corrected and the tiny islands returned to watery oblivion, probably in this century.
Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.
Scientists have come to understand some but not all of the reasons for this. Which is why a team of them recently converged in the Maldives, on an island they’d spend weeks outfitting with instruments and sensors and cameras.
Long into the article, we learn (something I knew) that the Hajj floats around the calendar and often winds up in June-August. Excerpt:The consequences have been dire. At this year’s hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, at least 1,300 people died as temperatures surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And in many ways, that heavy toll was just the latest sign that crowd control and heat waves fueled by climate change are on a dangerous collision course.
I have been following weather records in the Times for over 50 years and little has changed. I picked out a random date, June 25, 1983, where Riyadh, not far from Mecca, reached 107°. That area is always baking hot. The people who are pushing the "climate change" agenda think we have been over-consuming for other reasons and finally found an issue that gives traction. This philosophy of life was expressed in the U.S. via books such as the 1950's classic by John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society. This was foreshadowed by other authors and thinkers, such as Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck. In Travels Steinbeck rails against conspicuous consumption and other signs of affluence. There was also the Club of Rome report, written over a period between 1968 and 1972, affiliated with MIT (link). This was at the end of the sunshiny era of the 1950's and early 1960's, when highways were constructed and widened. Speed limits were generally raised. It was mostly a "let the good times roll" era, until it wasn't. The "Arab Oil Embargo" was seized upon as an excuse to limit highway speeds to 55 m.p.h. and the "Club of Rome" mentality became general. That was the point, culturally, where the good times were over. The mourning for doing well continues.New York Times said:The hajj calendar is also set by the lunar cycle, so the scheduled times for the journey could be the hottest, as was the case this year. And because pilgrims tend to be disproportionately old, they are more vulnerable to the effects of intense heat.