Tuesday, August 31, 2021

"Climate Change and the Importance of Skepticism"

 


Those Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Climate Change and the Importance of Skepticism”

August 28, 2021

 

The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.”

                                                                                                                     Walter Gilbert (1932-)

                                                                                                                     Molecular Biologist, Harvard Univ., retired

 

We live in strange times. We don’t think through the consequences of ending “endless wars.” We don’t debate what it means for our children and grandchildren to add trillions of dollars to a national debt that already, as a percent of GDP, is the highest since the Second World War. We permit hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom are infected with COVID-19, to enter our country illegally through our southern border, while limiting the number of legal immigrants. We have replaced free-thinking skeptics with acolytes for big government. The dark arm of progressivism is aimed at increasing the power of government and decreasing the role of the individual. When it comes to climate change, progressives borrow from George W. Bush: Either you are with us, or you are against us. There is no room for debate.    

 

In part, this is because of the leisure time we have gained through economic success. The technological advances and the increased wealth of our nation and its people – results of free market capitalism operating under the rule of law – would be unimaginable to our grandparents. Included in our well-being is the environment, which is far healthier than it was twenty, fifty and a hundred years ago. It was individuals, not government agencies, that led that change – through eleemosynary organizations like the Sierra Club and Audubon Societies. New York City began to migrate from coal to oil in the 1930s and Los Angeles recognized the problem of smog in the 1940s, both long before the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 1970. Government regulations have hastened the move to a healthier environment, but they were not the instigator. It is the wealth produced through capitalism, operating in a society that encourages individual initiative, which has afforded us the ability to focus on climate. It is ignorance of that past that helps feed the myth that it is government, not free market capitalism, that has been the principal force for the good of our environment. In seeking political power, progressives pander to the electorate on soft issues – “wokeness,” inclusion, identity, equity, critical race theory and hurtful words – while they fail to encourage those traits that historically led to success: merit, aspiration, competition, diligence and hard work.

 

On August 10, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on climate and projections for the future. How many people have read its 4,000 pages? Not many, I suspect. I, for one, have not. According to summaries, the Earth has experienced a two-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature since industrialization began about two hundred years ago. We know man has been responsible for some of that increase, but the exact level remains in question. Nevertheless, a recent lead editorial in my local paper, The Day, expressed no doubt as to the cause: “Humans have heated the planet about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the dawn of the industrial age.” The next day Steven Koonin, director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “As is now customary, the report emphasizes climate change in recent decades but obscures, or fails to mention, historical precedents that weaken the case that humanity’s influence on the climate has been catastrophic.”

 

The recent storm, Henri, was a reminder that climate and weather, while related, are inherently different. When then President Donald Trump, on a cold day, joked he could do with more global warming, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s project on climate change, denounced the comment as “scientifically ridiculous,” and added: “There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is.” Yet the liberal media cites anthropological causes for today’s “extreme” weather. Predictors of climate doom have been with us for decades. In an August 10, 2021 op-ed in the New York Post, Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (and in my opinion the most rational voice in the climate wars), wrote: “The first U.N. environment director claimed half a century ago that we had just ten years left, and the then head of the IPCC insisted in 2007 that we had just five years left.” Nevertheless, here we are, with climate Cassandras still shouting from rooftops.  

 

Progressives like to tell us to follow the science. But science is (or should be) innately skeptical of scientific “facts.” The motto for the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences founded in 1660, is nullus in verba, which translates as “take nobody’s word for it.” The qualities of skepticism and independence of thought that Professor Gilbert ascribed to scientists, in the rubric that heads this essay, should also apply to journalists who too often display a religious-like devotion to their favorite politicians and policies. Too many are deficient in curiosity, behaving like acolytes for narratives they accept on faith. This indifference by Leftists to facts is not new. In his 1970 book, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote: “Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.” Little has changed in fifty years.

 

Yet, much has changed for the better, in terms of carbon emissions, at least here in the United States. Using numbers from Statista, a German company specializing in market and consumer data, The United States reduced its carbon dioxide emissions 30% between 2007 and 2020 (6.003 million metric tons to 4.571 million metric tons), while expanding its GDP by 48% ($14.45 trillion to $20.9 trillion). But you would not know that from reading the Washington Post or The New York Times. The real culprit, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions is China, the worlds largest producer of rare earth minerals, raw materials on which many “green” industries are dependent. Their carbon dioxide emissions increased 49% between 2007 and 2019 to a level 123% above that of the United States. However, during those years, China’s economy expanded 420% to $14.3 trillion; so even in China there has been improvement. The message from the media should be one of hope – political leaders should applaud what the U.S. has accomplished, while encouraging it to do more, and they should point out China’s opportunities. We have no need for scolds.

 

What we need is less hyperbole and more acknowledgment of what has been accomplished in terms of climate change. As well, we should talk about adaptability, which is the only option most species have, and which we tend to ignore. The single biggest factor in the U.S.’s reduction in greenhouse gasses over the past dozen years was the substitution of natural gas for coal. Again, free markets led the way. Today, in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), renewables (wind, solar and water) account for 19.8% of electricity generation, up 224% since 2007. In the same period, natural gas has increased by 180% and now accounts for 40.3% of electricity generation. Over those thirteen years, the use of coal in electricity generation declined from 40.5% to 19.3%. While we have further to go, we have come a long way. Our success should be hailed as a marker for other developed and emerging economies.

 

Human progress has always been most productive and most equitable when based on millions of individuals making tens of millions of decisions. It is always least productive and most inequitable when a few bureaucrats make decisions on behalf of the people. One has only to look at countries that have adopted central planning, from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to China, Cuba and Venezuela. The politicization of climate serves no one, other than those industries and individuals who benefit and the politicians who do their bidding. What is wanted are skeptics, not group-think conformists.

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Sunday, August 8, 2021

"Lighten Up"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Lighten Up”

August 8, 2021

 

There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing.”

                                                                                                                                Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

                                                                                                                                Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

 

 

It is not that I am without concerns, for everything that happens today is a ‘crisis.’ We live on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years. Over that time, it has been warm enough in Connecticut, where I live, to host dinosaurs and cold enough to place it under thirty feet of ice. By the time of the last ice age, man had been around for tens of thousands of years. He adapted. Yet today’s changing climate is said to present an existential challenge for the planet. “Woke” governments and large businesses demand diversity, equity and inclusion, but what they really mean are uniformity, unjustness and exclusion. Universities, once places for inquiring minds, have become venues for intellectual conformity. In sports, men, as transgender women, compete against biological women. Merit has fallen victim to social equity. What gives? The United States was founded on principles of personal liberty and the rule of law, derived from the Enlightenment. Should we let what has taken 250 years to create devolve into darkness? 

 

We should not. We need to lighten up. The political atmosphere has become nasty. In an essay (“Old Glory, new anger”) in the August issue of The Spectator, Peter Wood wrote: “There is the wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters.” As for the Right, he noted: “Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.”  Friends and family members are no longer able to air political differences without one being called a racist and the other a toady. If we are to survive as a free, decent and independent people, composed of myriad races, religions and nationalities, political leaders, the media and universities must promote tolerance and mutual respect. To achieve this, they must encourage traditional American values, like family formations and public schools that teach. They must reaffirm the values of common sense, responsibility, hard work, merit and reintroduce civility and humor.

 

The political spectrum is linear, with autocracy at one end and anarchy at the other. Understanding that, we should know where on that line our own political philosophies lie. Fundamentally, our differences are simple. Progressives believe equitable progress is best achieved with more government involvement. Conservatives believe in what Margaret Thatcher said in Gdansk in 1988: “Economic freedom and personal freedom go hand in hand.” The first depends on the ability of a few hundred senior bureaucrats. The second relies on millions of people making millions of decisions. There are gradations of belief. A few extremists are clustered at either end, believing in either the benevolence of autocracy or the benignity of anarchy. Mainstream media would have us bunched (along with them) at extremes – the “woke” on one end and “deplorables” at the other. Most of us, however, lie within a few degrees of the center. But anger divides us, and communication is difficult.

 

Abetted by vitriolic, non-stop talk radio, biased cable and network news commentators, ignorant Hollywood and sports figures, sanctimonious university personnel, politicians who see both profit and votes in discord and “woke” corporations who just want to get along, we are being pushed, unwillingly, toward extremes. Our minders are puritanical, meanspirited, stupid and humorless. For students, fear of not being politically correct has meant withholding healthy emotional release. On college campuses political debate is discouraged and mental health distress is rising. A 2019 study by the American College Health Association found that 87% of college students expressed being overwhelmed. To improve conditions, the Association suggested empowering students, launching wellness campaigns and offering a “decision tree.” Absent from suggestions were open debate or fun and laughter, the latter being a well-known antidote to tension. Remember the old Reader’s Digest column, “Laughter the Best Medicine?” But in 2018, the threat of censorship kept Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock from performing on college campuses.

 

Humor that disparages should be shunned. But the ability to laugh is important. Mark Twain looked at politics through a lens of humor: “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress…But I repeat myself.” P. J. O’Rourke once wrote on the differences between Democrats and Republicans: “The Democrats are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then get elected and prove it.” Political correctness, which abjures humor, has infected all aspects of our lives, including the National Football League. Dan Mitchell, economist and former senior fellow at the Cato Institute, recently forwarded the following: “Redskins change name to ‘Lizard People,’ to better represent the population of Washington, D.C.” 

 

Would today’s politicians be offended and find jokes about them hurtful? Would they cry ‘Victim?’ Perhaps, but so what? They are public figures, light on wit but heavy with hubris, so subject to satire. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s quote in the rubric speaks to politicians whose dancing around truths can be a source of fun. Laughing at oneself can be endearing. Lyndon Johnson once said: “Being President is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but stand there and take it.” Ronald Reagan used humor to deflect criticism from opponents. In a 1984 debate with the 56-year-old Walter Mondale, the 73-year-old Reagan said: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” In recent years, that self-abasing humor has been missing from political discourse. Obama, Trump and Biden are noted for egos, not for laughing at themselves. 

 

Peter Wood ended his piece: “Despair breeds wrath and that fire, once ignited, will engulf us all.” If our “betters” in politics, the media, campuses, “woke” corporations, the sports world and the entertainment industry fail to dispel the anger that envelopes our nation, which is my assumption and fear, then the responsibility to find light in this darkness falls upon ourselves. Turn down the news, pick up a Wodehouse novel, watch a Bob Hope movie, take a walk in the park, try “forest bathing,” as Peter Wohlleben wrote in The Heartbeat of Trees. Visit with family and friends. Just stay off politics and discover what you have in common. Laugh. Life is short. Those of us in the United States and in other free nations are fortunate to be alive and to live where and in the time we do. To go through life angry is self-defeating.

 

Most of us have beliefs that cluster toward the center of the political spectrum. It has been, more than anything else, the media, and especially social media, that has divided us. We are after all fallible. No one, not the President of the United States, not the senior Senator from Kentucky, not the Congresswoman from California’s 12th District, knows what the future holds. But we should not let the darkness of despair overwhelm us. We should read, watch and listen to the news with healthy skepticism and a lively, restorative sense of humor. We must lighten up.

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021

"Once More to Peterborough"

 


 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Once More to Peterborough”

August 3, 2021

 

It is strange how much you can remember about places like that

once you allow your mind to return to grooves which lead back.”

                                                                                                                         E. B. White (1899-1985)

                                                                                                                        “Once More to the Lake”, August 1941

                                                                                                                         One Man’s Meat, 1942

 

Thomas Wolfe’s posthumously published novel You Can’t Go Home Again tells the story of George Webber, a fledging author, who frequently references his hometown in a book he is writing, to the annoyance of the town’s residents. I spent three days last week in my hometown, with my wife and a grandson. And we did so without annoying anyone…at least as far as I know. 

 

In his essay “Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White tells the story of taking his 10-year-old son to the lake in Maine to which his father had brought him when he was a small boy. He writes evocatively of mortality – how each new generation replaces the former. In the last sentence he wrote of his son pulling on a cold, wet bathing suit, a habit he remembered from his childhood: “As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

 

Our Town is Thornton Wilder 1938 play about living in Grover’s Corners, a small New Hampshire village, around the turn of the previous century. Through the “Stage Manager,” he tells of the Gibbs and Webb families – their births, loves and deaths. Wilder began to write the play at Peterborough’s MacDowell Colony, which makes it special to those of us from that part of New Hampshire. It was first performed at the Peterborough Players in 1940. On this trip we ran into Beth Brown whose grandmother, Edith Bond Stearns, started the Peterborough Players in 1933. I remember Mrs. Stearns and her daughter Sally Stearns Brown, a friend to my parents. (Beth was the age of my younger siblings and used to take riding lessons from my mother.)  With Beth was Gordon Clapp, the New Hampshire-born, Emmy-winning actor who will play the Stage Manager in a revival of the play to be staged outdoors in Peterborough, in about two weeks. (Unfortunately for us, the performance coincides with our annual time at the Jersey shore.)

 

On this latest return to Peterborough, Caroline, grandson Alex Williams and I had an “Our Town-like” experience. Act III of the play opens at the Grover’s Corners cemetery, on “a hilltop – a windy hilltop – lots of sky, lots of clouds…”  We drove to Pine Hill Cemetery, which is on a hillside. Looking south from the graves of my family there was little wind but lots of sky. Wilder’s cemetery held mountain laurel and lilacs. In this, nestled under White Pines, rest my paternal grandparents, my parents, a brother, sister and an uncle and aunt. American Flags decorate my father’s and uncle’s graves, commemorating their service in World War II. We stop and spend a few minutes in quiet reflection. Driving out, we pass tombstones with familiar names – Bishop, Nichols, Pettengill, Snow, Wilson and Shattuck – each conjuring a memory of an individual from my past. 

 

The purpose of this Peterborough trip was to meet with publisher Sarah Bauhan and her art editor Henry James about a book to be published next year, Essays from Essex. It is to be illustrated by my grandson, who brought some of his artwork, including a drawing for the cover.

 

We stayed at the Cranberry Meadow Farm Inn, a bed and breakfast now owned by Carolyn and Charlie Hough. It was built in 1797 as the Wilson Tavern but was converted to a private home in 1834. Again an inn, it is located about two miles from the village, on the corner of Old Street Road and Route 101. It sits on 80 acres, with wonderful walking trails. When I was a child, we would pass the house driving home from skiing at Temple Mountain; my father mentioning that legend claimed it was a stop on the Underground Railway.

 

Following our meeting with Sarah, we drove past the house where I grew up on Middle Hancock Road, four miles from town and now looking sad, with weeds in the driveway and in need of paint. Gone were the cries of children happily playing, the bustling business of my parents’ Red Shed Rubber Animals, the music from the radio that kept my father company in his studio, the barking of dogs, the neighing of horses, the bleating of goats and the rattling of the male Peacock’s outstretched tail, as he flirted with his peahen. Through the woods and over the hill, on Windy Row, we drove by my grandparent’s summer home, now owned by a cousin, Nathanael “Sandy” Greene. While there is a new garage, the house and grounds are well maintained and look as welcoming as they did sixty years ago.

 

We visited the Unitarian Church (now the Unitarian Universalist Church), which dominates the town’s center. The large, historic brick building is located on the corner of Main and Summer Streets. In 1956, twenty-eight-year-old David Parke was ordained at the Church and served as minister for five years. He was a favorite of my father’s. He returned seven years after leaving to officiate at my father’s funeral in December 1968. My five youngest siblings were Christened there and three of my sisters were married before its altar. Besides my father, funeral services were held in the church for my mother, a sister and brother. At all three, I gave eulogies.

 

Street layouts in the town remain much as they had been, but old stores are gone, replaced by restaurants and small specialty, food, art and clothing stores. Derby’s, once the town’s department store, is now an art gallery. Clukay’s Pharmacy, where we bought nickel ice cream cones, is a clothing store, and the land on which sat the Village Pharmacy, owned by Myer and Florence Goldman, now sits a bank. The hardware store on Grove Street is a restaurant. The Nichols Ford Dealership, bought in the 1950s by Milt Fontaine, has moved out of the village. The American Guernsey Cattle Club building, built in 1950 and the town’s largest building, now houses a variety of businesses, including Bauhan Publishing. The railroad no longer comes to town and Depot Square, where we used to meet my grandmother when she arrived on the train from Connecticut, now houses the Toadstool, my brother Willard’s bookstore, the largest retail outlet in the village. Shopping centers have sprung up outside of town, on land which was once fields and woods.

 

Thomas Wolfe was correct: You can never re-live the life you once knew. But we can recall past times. In returning to Peterborough, I am reminded of scenes from long ago – stopping at a diner in Brattleboro after a day’s skiing at Hogback; picking blackberries on Cobb’s Hill, galloping along dirt roads, swimming in Norway Pond; arguing with my father at the dining room table; listening to my mother as she read aloud a Jane Austen novel; taking a long walk with David Parke, when he recommended Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen, a history of the 1920s. In turn, I recommended the book to my author daughter-in-law, Beatriz Williams, who tells me it was important to her understanding of that decade.

 

As we age, there is in us a bid for immortality, a desire to recapture our youth – to go home again. But that is an impossible dream. But it is possible and healthy to revisit venues of our past, and to recall people and places that shaped who we have become. And when we are gone, we hope our children and grandchildren will do the same, so that our bid for immortality comes true, at least in their memories.

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