New Yorker Staff Writer David Owen took a nosedive into eco-extremism. He argued that the refrigerator has become — wait for it — “an agent of climate catastrophe.”
Owen pontificated in a blog headlined, “How the Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe,” that “[t]he evolution of cooling technology helps to explain why supposed solutions to global warming have only made the situation worse.”
Specifically, he identified refrigerators, these unassuming little machines, as the vile culprits “of our unfolding climate catastrophe.”
Really? Owen wrote as if refrigerators are cartoon villains who chomp on cigars while they devise the destruction of the climate. But his article is, in typical liberal fashion, a truth “catastrophe.”
Owen continued fearmongering that cooling “technology has directly contributed to the crisis…mainly because its history suggests a counterintuitive explanation for why combating global warming has proved to be so hard, and why some of our putative solutions are actually making our problems worse.”
That is, beware! The modest “icebox,” home “freezer[s],” and “electric refrigerators” in homes across America may be more dastardly than they appear.
But it gets worse. Owen also fretted that refrigerants known as “hydrofluorocarbons [(HFCs)] are greenhouse gases with hundreds or thousands of times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.”
However, as JunkScience.com founder Steve Milloy explained in exclusive comments to MRC Business, villainizing HFCs is misleading.
The “notion that refrigeration is contributing to a ‘climate catastrophe’ is preposterous,” Milloy noted.
He also pointed out that the leftist “war against refrigeration” goes all the way back to the 1970s.
The “war” has since resurfaced under President Joe Biden’s push for ratification of the radical Kigali Amendment, which seeks to phase out HFCs on a global scale to fight climate change.
Milloy continued: “[W]hile Kigali advocates have the chemistry correct (HFCs are a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide), they have the environmental effects wrong as there are much lower levels of HFCs in the atmosphere and so HFCs make little difference to global climate.”
In Milloy’s opinion, what “climate activists” really “want [is] to continue pressing their political agenda.”
Perhaps that is why Owen, the author of books like Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, has strangely decided on “refrigeration” as his enemy of the day. As Milloy stated:
All they [(climate activists)] are really accomplishing is making refrigeration and air conditioning pointlessly more expensive. The war against refrigeration is just another massive green fraud.
Read more at NewsBusters
The New Yorker like Time,Rolling Stone and Newsweek are propaganda rags spewing their usial bile at is every day
Funny how he mentions “icebox” as if it is the same thing as a refrigerator. I suppose his solution would be to go back to having wooden sailing ships go to the arctic to cut tons of ice, then bring them to the cities by sea and rail, then distributing ice blocks by horse drawn carriage to your house every day.
Maybe that’s what they mean by “build back better”.
You beat me to it, Timo. The good old ice box. One per community.
Quaint. It was a solution looking for a solution.
My wife grew up in the mid-Hudson River valley. She says that her grandparents used to cut ice from the Hudson River that they sold to customers for their ice boxes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go back to that kind of life?
Dad told me that our town supplied ice to Toronto. A big mill pond beside the railway provided winter jobs for the locals. The ice blocks survived into the summer, buried under sawdust in warehouses.
Up the road from here, an Amish family use a pond for the same purpose. Why? It’s their religion.
“[W]hile Kigali advocates have the chemistry correct (HFCs are a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide)”
This assumes that greenhouse gases exist and also fails to mention that this gases are orders of magnitude lower in concentration that CO2. The same is true for methane. For that matter, the half-life of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere is about five years, which means it turns over rather rapidly. This belies the false myth that CO2 emitted decades or 100s of years ago is still present.
If one looks at the IR absorption spectrum of these gases, they would find that their infrared (IR) absorption range is limited to only certain bands and thus the rest of the IR radiation is lost to space. Try keeping a dog in your yard by only putting up two fence posts and no fence.
This is to say that the greenhouse effects does not exist in our atmosphere because Earth’s surface is ALWAYS hotter than the gases that are absorbing IR and re-emitting it and, thus, IR re-emitted downward is perforce reflected back upward and eventually lost to space. The atmospheric gases are always cooler than the surface and a cold object cannot warm a warmer object.
And the dog running out of your yard is travelling at the speed of light. ;^D
Charles Higley’s post is right on.
Another way of saying the same thing is this: you’re walking up the stairs and every 2500 steps (400ppm) you reach a landing, where you step forward, then climb another 2500 steps upward. Repeat, going, going, gone.
The early Ice Box took big block of Ice people used to put a special sign on their front windows to tell the Iceman how much Ice they needed its quite plain the New Yorker wont mention this fact