Peter Kalmus, a data scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and noted climate scientist, told the Bloomberg audience that the California fires are caused by the fossil fuel industry which produces products that, when used, heat the planet. “It’s simply physics,” he said with certainty.
Shawn Hackett of Hackett Advisors makes his living helping agriculture producers deal with climate change. He told Ash Bennington on Real Vision, “the climate is always changing” because the other planets in our solar system change their rotations. He added that the sun isn’t producing sun spots as it did previously and that is creating volatile weather and will continue to until 2050.
The current spike in temperatures is from the Tonga Effect. A one-in-a-thousand year VEI-6 Volcanic eruption happened on January 15, 2022, which pumped water vapor aerosol into the atmosphere. Record-high temperatures were predicted and that’s what has happened. But the Tonga Effect is receding.
Hackett reminds us that there was an awful drought in the 1930’s known as the Dust Bowl. Temperatures were above 100 degrees in Iowa for days on end. In the 1970’s, an ice age was predicted.
When asked if fossil fuels had anything to do with climate change, Hackett—who makes money from the insurance industry as well as Ag producers from predicting weather patterns—said, “We have not found a correlation between weather volatility and increases in CO2 concentrations.” Hackett is open to changing his mind if presented with data indicating a correlation. Not 50 years of data, but hundreds of years of data.
While TV commentators are wagging their fingers at the fossil fuel industry, Taylor Sheridan has provided a different point of view with “Land Man.” The co-creator of “Yellowstone” has produced a show about the boom and bust of the oil business set in the Permian Basin. Visvesh Shivakumar summarized “Land Man” in a piece for meaww.com,
In ‘Landman’, Billy Bob Thornton portrays Tommy Norris, a crisis manager tackling the problems of the West Texas oil industry. The series, created by Taylor Sheridan and based on the ‘Boomtown’ podcast, shows us a subtle look at the petroleum sector. Rather than pushing a clear pro or anti-oil agenda, it attempts to depict both the human and industrial sides of the business.
The following monologue is indicative of Land Man’s greatness,
Looking up at huge wind turbines, attorney Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), who fancies herself an environmentalist, said to Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton), “Please, Mr. Oilman, tell me how the wind is bad for the environment?” To which, Norris responded,
You have any idea how much diesel will have to burn to mix that much concrete or make that steel and haul this s***t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f*****g thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery.
“If Exxon thought them f*****g things right there were the future, they would be put all over the goddamn place,” he added.
In the season finale on Paramount+, Tommy meets with Rebecca to prepare her to negotiate an oil drilling deal known as a farm-out. After Tommy explains what M-Tex oil is trying to accomplish and a quick overview of what fracking involves, she vents her environmentalist spleen.
“You understand, I don’t think anyone should be doing this, all right. I think [fracking] should be illegal.” To which Tommy responds, “Well, you should have run for Congress instead of getting a job with an oil company.”
“I just have a very hard time advocating for something I believe is wrong.”
“Says the lawyer. Good and bad don’t factor into this. Our great-grandparents built a world that runs on this s**t. And until it runs on something else, we gotta feed it or the world stops.”
After Tommy gets in his truck, he rolls down the passenger window and yells to her,
Hey, there is an alternative. You can throw your phone away and trade in your Mercedes for a bicycle or a horse and start hunting for your own food and live in a tent. But, you’ll be the only one and it won’t make a damn bit of difference. Plus, I hear the moral high ground gets real windy at night.
If you wonder if climate scientist Kalmus has decided to live in a tent and hunt for his own food, he has not. Mr. Kalmus, writing recently in the New York Times about leaving Altadena, California after the Bobcat fire in 2020. “In 2022, my wife was offered a job in Durham, N.C., and we moved.”
