Little Boxes on the Hillside and What They Tell Us About Climateers

Some 62 years ago a condescending folk singer by the name of Malvina Reynolds wrote a song called “Little Boxes.” It has been labelled “the most sanctimonious song ever written,” and the first verse of the lyrics tell us why:

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same

Her parents were socialists and she became a folksinger, flower child and resident of Berkeley, of course, where she earned a doctorate. She wrote the song while driving through Daly City with her husband and taking notice of all the little houses penned what was her revulsion, as a committed non-conformist, to all the conformity she witnessed. She apparently took no notice of her own conformity with the values of the set to which she belonged, of course. and, a year later, her friend Pete Seeger, who admired Stalin for the longest time, made it somewhat famous.

“Little Boxes” came immediately to mind when I read an outstanding post at Net Zero Watch by Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s titled “How Did the Cbsession with Decarbonization Arise?” Here are some excerpts to whet the appetite:

The current obsession with decarbonization had its roots in the reaction to the amazing post-WW2 period, when ordinary workers were able to own a house and a car. I was a student in the 50s and early 60s. Mockery of the poor taste and materialism of these people was endemic.

With the Vietnam War, things got amplified, as the working class got drafted while students sought draft deferments (students, during this period, were still a relative elite; the massive expansion of higher education was only beginning). They justified their behavior by insisting that the Vietnam War was illegitimate, while ignoring the obvious fact that Vietnamese people were fleeing south rather than north. It was fashionable to regard the US as evil and deserving of overthrow. Opposition often turned to violence with groups like the Weathermen and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)…

This period seemed to end with Nixon’s election, but we now know that this was just the beginning of the long march through the institutions. Currently, there is great emphasis on the march through the educational institutions: first the schools of education and then higher education in the humanities and the social sciences, and now STEM…

The vehicle for this was the capture of the environmental movement. Prior to 1970, the focus of this movement was on things like whales, landscape, clean air and water, and population. However, with the first Earth Day in April of 1970, the focus turned to the energy sector, which, after all, is fundamental to all production, and relatedly, involves trillions of dollars.

This shift was accompanied by the creation of new environmental organizations, such as Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was also accompanied by new governmental organizations – the EPA and the Department of Transportation. Once again, professional societies were easy pickings: the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and even the honorary societies such as the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences…

In the 70s, attention turned to CO2 and its contribution to warming via the greenhouse effect. The attraction of controlling CO2 to political control freaks was obvious. It was the inevitable product of all burning of carbon-based fuels. It was also the product of breathing. However, there was a problem: CO2 was a minor greenhouse gas compared to the naturally produced water vapor. Doubling CO2 would only lead to warming of less than 1°C.

A paper in the early 70s by Manabe and Wetherald came to the rescue. Using a highly unrealistic one-dimensional model of the atmosphere, they found that assuming (without any basis) that relative humidity remained constant as the atmosphere warmed would provide a positive feedback that would amplify the impact of CO2 by a factor of 2…

Positive feedbacks now became the stock in trade of all climate models, which now were producing responses to doubling CO2 of 3°C and even 4°C rather than a paltry 1°C or less.  The enthusiasm of politicians became boundless. Virtue signaling elites promised to achieve net zero emissions within a decade, or 2, or 3, with no idea of how to do so without destroying their society. Ordinary people, confronted with impossible demands on their own well-being, have not found warming of a few degrees to be very impressive. Few contemplate retiring to the Arctic rather than Florida.

Excited politicians, confronted by this resistance, have frantically changed their story. Rather than emphasizing miniscule changes in their temperature metric, they now point to weather extremes – which occur almost daily some place on earth – as proof not only of climate change but of climate change due to increasing CO2 (and now also to the even more negligible contributors to the greenhouse effect like methane and nitrous oxide), even though such extremes show no significant correlation with emissions.

Lindzen hit the bullseye, I think, when he pointed to the mockery of spoiled elites toward those simply trying to provide a better life for their families. It’s a function of pride that we see so often in trust-funders who are unable to match the achievements of their parents and ancestors, but are, nonetheless, desirous of retaining all the privileges provided by the original creators of the fortune. They exhibit their pride in vain efforts to demonstrate their own superiority. “Little Boxes” was the perfect demonstration of this dynamic.

The climate game is, likewise, the perfect venue for implementing the program, for all the reasons Lindzen articulates. Whenever we hear or see the words “climate change” in the context of a planet-saving exercise, the words of “Little Boxes” should ring in our ears, because it’s all about pride, the fatal conceit of all us human beings. It explains it all; the grifting, the power-seeking, the demand that the rest of us just shut up and the political corruption that seems to deepen and spread further in Western Civilization every day. That includes the contempt for coal, oil and gas industries, which are blue-collar to the core, of course. They hate our ordinary way of life.

#Lindzen #Climate #GlobalWarming #CO2 #Decarbonization