Asheville residents turned out in scores to show solidarity with the National People’s Climate March on Saturday, April 29. The procession marched through downtown, waving banners and signs, and chanting slogans urging government leaders to recognize climate change data. The marchers, which ranged in age from small children to older residents (and a couple dogs), also featured several people in costume, and a brass band.
The rally began at 10 a.m. in Pack Square with a series of speakers, including Buncombe County Commission Chair Brownie Newman, Asheville City Council candidate Dee Williams, First Nation Elder Sharon Oxendine, and Rev. Thomas Murphy of All Souls Cathedral, among others.
Asheville’s march coincided with rallies across North Carolina and the United States, with simultaneous events occurring in Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Greensboro and Boone, in addition to national gatherings in Washington, D.C. and several other major U.S. cities.
The People’s Climate March was organized across the country in response to the Trump administration’s actions to roll back environmental regulations put in place under former President Barack Obama, as well as the current administration’s skepticism regarding the validity of climate change data, according to the the national event’s website, peoplesclimate.org.
The marches coincide with President Trump’s 100th day in office.
Photos and video by Max Hunt.
Walter Williams: “Environmentalists Are Dead Wrong”
Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom. Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.
In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, ”Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of ”The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, ”The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: ”If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, ”In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.” Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.
In International Wildlife (July 1975), Nigel Calder warned, ”The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” In Science News (1975), C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization is reported as saying, ”The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”
In 2000, climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that within ”a few years,” snowfall would become ”a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. ”Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. ”Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” In the following years, the U.K. saw some of its largest snowfalls and lowest temperatures since records started being kept in 1914.
In 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt told a Swarthmore College audience: ”The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Also in 1970, Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look magazine: ”Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian (Institution), believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Scientist Harrison Brown published a chart in Scientific American that year estimating that mankind would run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver were to disappear before 1990.
Erroneous predictions didn’t start with Earth Day. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last for only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey said that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is that as of 2014, we had 2.47 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, which should last about a century.
Hoodwinking Americans is part of the environmentalist agenda. Environmental activist Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine in 1989: ”We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. … Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” In 1988, then-Sen. Timothy Wirth, D-Colo., said: ”We’ve got to … try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong … we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Americans have paid a steep price for buying into environmental deception and lies.
All part of the plan that allows people like Newman to serve in public office and also become a millionaire at the same time.
Then again . . . https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative/.
Climate always changes, always will.
But human beings haven’t always caused climate change. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/.
“Ha ha I’ll be dead, so future generations won’t be able to hold me responsible.”
Your pithy argument, my Deplorable One, proves too much. Carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have driven most ancient climate changes. But most of the changes were slow. The changes that were catastrophic for life forms occurred rapidly, just like the one human activity is producing now. See https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm.
“Truth is treason in an empire of lies” — George Orwell.
When it’s decided that the skim and profiteering have to be removed from how the the “man-made climate change theory” gets funded and monetized, I’ll pay more attention. (It won’t happen, the touters will ride the money bonanza as long as they can and then change their theory or tactics if things aren’t working their way. Same as it ever was.)
The melting polar icecaps don’t give a damn about your exquisite sense of what criteria need to be satisfied to deserve your attention.
Neither do the droughts, acidifying oceans, intensifying weather extremes, etc.
Here’s a question for luther and Peter – do you understand the concept on conflict if interest? Maybe not, because I have run across an unbelievable number of adults in recent years who don’t. It’s basic, almost irrefutable and I’ve watched it in real time too often to have any doubt at all where the loyalties rest of those in the position of conflict. When money and power are on the table — objectivity is gone. Do you get that?
I want nothing but good things for our precious Mothership and live my life accordingly. But because you are emoting rather than thinking, you did not grasp that my contention is with the profiteers…..not the issue of climate, environment, pollution, etc. (This is why it is so easy to convince large numbers of people of any concept whatsoever, as long as the prophets are pretty slick and of the right denomination).
If you don’t care how much bank many of the touters are making….and how deep their conflict is — well, I’ve got some cool things to sell you. Really. Promise. Very cool.
Read the Scientific American article I linked to and tell me which of the scientists it quoted is on the take.
Conflict of interest? You mean like putting the CEO of ExxonMobil in charge of our foreign policy?
Or putting the President in charge of anything?
Will you listen to this rascal? https://www.propublica.org/article/trumps-defense-secretary-cites-climate-change-national-security-challenge.
Ya, and it makes sense that General Mattis would be concerned about climate changes. They impact military efforts.
From your link, “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today,” Mattis said in written answers to questions posed after the public hearing by Democratic members of the committee. “It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.”
Climate has always changed; many times quite dramatically. Humans may be causing some of the current issue but until we can specifically measure human impact versus natural changes — what are you saying we should do? Shouldn’t what is in bolded text be where the effort and money go?
And…..I can’t reconcile what accomplished and respected climate scientists who dissent from heavily-conflicted Al’s organized orthodoxy have to say about the matter. Can you reconcile it?
Look at the Bloomberg link. It does measure the human contribution to global warming versus natural causes. And the scientific question over whether the globe is warming has basically been settled since about the 1990s. The debate amongst climate scientists now is over how bad things will get and by when.
And if we can agree with Gen. Mattis that renewable energy is a national-security imperative, then, to that extent, we can all get behind a military buildup. How’s that for common ground, conservatives?
“until we can specifically measure human impact versus natural changes — what are you saying we should do?”
Invest in renewable energy. If it turns out that we’re at the lower end of the projections, then hallelujah: the difference between action and inaction is having cheap diversified local energy production that disentangles us from ugly relationships with ugly states that happen to be sitting on dinosaur juice. If we’re at the higher end of the projections, then the difference between action and inaction is the difference between bad and catastrophic. The industrial revolution disproved Malthus, but that’s 200 or so years of running up a line of credit against the planet.
I’m sure there are lots of edgy contrarian points in saying “we need more certainty of the precise human impact”, but that’s largely a rhetorical ploy among the well-funded skeptics to kick the can down the road until they can say “oh well, too late to do anything now, also I’m nearly dead, sucks to be young.” It’s a cheap position to hold, because it requires no sacrifice and no real accountability.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ante-up-or-leave-the-table
So let me get this straight, it’s been fairly well established that glaciers extended to this area previously, widely assumed to be the reason for our diversity of species from the seeds carried by the ice. Yet now we are to believe that it was all mankind’s fault that it is allegedly getting warmer, and not a natural occurrence driven by the planet’s position relative to the sun, and that another layer of government control is necessary, as well as new taxation in the form of “carbon taxes”. Of course these carbon “indulgences” will be paid to insiders with huge conflicts of interest that claim it is imperative to “act now!”.
Do you accept: a) the earth is 4.5 billion years old; b) the last glacial period lasted for about 100,000 years; c) the world has been burning fossil fuels on an ever-increasing industrial scale for about 200 years; d) the link between carbon dioxide and global temperature was established over a century ago?
https://www.vox.com/2017/5/1/15482698/new-york-times-bret-stephens
Sigh. Here’s another of the plethora of articles that explain, in summary fashion, the evidence for human-caused climate change: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/human-contribution-to-gw-faq.html#.WQe3btn7-Tc. You can find plenty more on your own, “Jim.” Good luck getting your understanding straightened out.
And here’s one on that mean old sun: https://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm.
Another one on the sun: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/02/23/no-the-sun-isnt-driving-global-warming/?utm_term=.4a2efd0d60f3.
We are at the beginning of the end times…. that’s just the deal. The deniers are delusional at best… ignorant as all get out -and/or riven with shortsightedness and greed- the rest of the time… sigh.