Thread: Another Hole In Global Warming Fraud

(Un)Settled Science - Hole in the AGWzone Layer!

by James P. Hogan
January 14, 2010

When beliefs that are normally regarded as the province of science become subject to an ideology that decides in advance what answers are required and censors the evidence in ways that steer beliefs toward them, then, regardless of what incidental use might be made of computers, satellites, and other kinds of advanced engineering and technology, what's going on isn't science. But most of the world has never learned to tell the difference – or maybe cared that much.

And that's serious in a society where scientists have come to occupy the position previously enjoyed by the high priesthood, of being revered as the source of true knowledge and providing the justifications for the policies that the governing authority pursues. The danger is that pronouncements made in the name of science will continue to be unquestioned and used as pretexts for controversial or oppressive rulings long after any grounds on a scientific basis have ceased to exist.

I'm writing this at Christmas time, 2009. We've just witnessed a circus of deception and foolishness in Copenhagen that marks a new high in the attempted foisting of a politically motivated ideology upon the world in the guise of bogus science. Fortunately – for the time being at any rate – the canniness of the developing nations in demanding that the supposedly rational West literally put its money where its mouth was by playing out a lemming-like stampede to economic self-destruction brought home the absurdity to a degree that even our scientifically clueless best and brightest couldn't buy, and the whole thing largely came to nothing.

Claims that human activity was – or was even capable of – measurably affecting the Earth's climate made little sense to begin with. For as far back as patterns can be reconstructed, the climate has always cycled between being warmer or cooler, wetter or drier, stormy or settled, and the changes observed during the industrial era have been well inside the swings that have taken place in the past. So there's no reason to suppose that anything, human-induced or otherwise, is affecting the climate abnormally. Compared to water vapor and the activity of the Sun, carbon dioxide plays a minor role in determining temperature, and the amount generated by Nature dwarfs anything that humans add. In any case, the times of rising temperature recorded over the ages have all happened first, not the other way around, so increases in CO2 levels are a consequence not a cause. And even if humans were having the influence that has been claimed, the results would be overwhelmingly beneficial. Living things thrive in warmer environments, not frigid ones. Far more people die in winter from the effects of cold than from heat waves. Carbon dioxide is plant food, the basis of all life. Crops and flora of every kind grow more luxuriantly with a richer supply of it. The big advances in human civilization, reflected in the rise of cultures and times of elevated expansion and exploration, inventiveness, agriculture, artistry, and science, all occurred in warmer climatic periods. Anyone who is sincere about praising the virtues of a "green" planet should love it.

Shortly before Copenhagen, the suspicions that even superficial consideration of such points should have raised were confirmed beyond doubt with the revelations of collusion, going back years, among a cadre of climate researchers to manufacture a scientific case supporting a quasi-religious world view and presumption of the relationship between man and nature that is being given as the justification for measures that would impose drastic energy cutbacks and costly changes in living standards worldwide. The practices employed include massaging and falsification of data; suppression and destruction of conflicting evidence; rigging of computer models to deliver predetermined results; withholding of information from independent examination; the exclusion of dissenters from the official peer review process; and the intimidation of journals from publishing their objections. For those who may have missed the controversy going on behind the scenes while the mainstream media are apparently doing their best to play it down, or have just returned from a vacation on Mars, a good overview by Paul Driessen is posted here. But a couple of examples will give the idea:



The figure above was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 1990 maiden assessment and shows the pattern of variation in the Earth's temperature over the previous thousand years that had been generally accepted up until then, based on data from such sources as tree-rings, lake sediments, ice cores, and historic documents. It clearly depicts the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) of 900–1300 AD, when the Vikings maintained settlements and farms on the green coasts of Greenland and wine grapes grew in Scotland, and the "Little Ice Age" (LIA) that followed, centered on 1600 AD, in which winter fairs were held on London's frozen River Thames, and R. D. Blackmore's novel Lorna Doone had trees on Dartmoor bursting with sounds like cannon shots under the pressure of internal ice. These periods are part of a series of natural cycles that go to greater extremes, such as one around six thousand years ago, when the Sahara was grassland watered by rivers, and southern England basked in subtropical luxuriance. (Humans and polar bears survived just fine.)

Ever since humans began turning applied intelligence in the form of technology to making life more secure, comfortable, and generally less burdensome, there has been a pervasive element among them who took it upon themselves to oppose and condemn what most were inclined to view as a bettering of their condition. There seems to be something akin to a religious guilt complex at work, in which the seeking of creature comforts and a reprieve from toil and drudgery is seen as sinful, and atonement calls for renouncing the benefits and returning to the rigors of a simpler but more virtuous, soul-cleansing life. (It's interesting to note that the guilt tends to be expressed primarily by the more affluent, articulate, and influential, whose own standards will be little affected by the sacrifices demanded of those who are supposed to do the atoning.)

Things reached a crescendo in the later decades of the twentieth century, when soaring productivity and such revolutionary innovations as affordable air travel and communications for the masses, and the prospect of unlimited energy threatened wanton iniquity exploding on a worldwide scale. Reactions from the righteous came swiftly with the campaigns to demonize DDT, pesticides, fertilizers, chemicals, and nuclear energy, and apocalyptic auguries of planetary destruction from exhaustion of the food supply (late 1960s); a carbon-burning-induced ice age (mid 1970s); jetliner exhausts, particularly the SST (late 1970s); depletion of the ozone layer (1980s). But of all the environmental alarms that were sounded and had their day, the banner issue to emerge, behind which all the disparate cohorts of doom and ruin rallied, was global warming.

For anyone with stakes in the manmade disaster business, it had everything going for it: lurid images of polar meltdown, drowning cities, and dried-up farmland; a threat of global dimensions that demanded coordinated global action, and hence the institution of a global policing authority that had long been the dream of those who would abolish sovereign nation states; limitless opportunities for tax-funded "further research" and worthy political causes; and all the usual suspects to blame for opponents of industrial civilization and the Western way of life in general. Frustrated academics and intellectuals with cravings for recognition but nothing to offer that anyone would vote for at the ballot box or freely spend their money on in the market place could become voices behind the throne and make the world notice them. Even the villains of the piece had something to gain with the promise of enormous subsidies and tax incentives in return for diverting their efforts into environmentally friendly projects and "alternative" energy sources that had the one common attribute of being utterly incapable of supplying the needs of an advanced, technology-driven society, and likely to price energy – and hence just about everything else – beyond the means of most people in all but approved and rationed amounts.

Moreover, a believable mechanism by which man's nefarious actions, if left uncurbed, might heat the planet to the verge of spontaneous combustion was right there. All major industries and large-scale transportation systems depend ultimately on fuel burning, with the consequent release of carbon dioxide (apart from nuclear, but that had effectively been put on hold for the time being). Carbon dioxide contributes to the "greenhouse effect," the natural process by which the atmosphere keeps the Earth around 33°C warmer – and therefore inhabitable – than it would otherwise be at this distance from the Sun. Provided one didn't look too closely at the numbers, which showed things like CO2 being a minor greenhouse gas compared to water vapor, and the bulk of it coming from natural sources such as oceanic outgassing, volcanic activity, and the byproducts of life and decomposition, CO2 could be presented as the principal mover, and human activity as the agency primarily responsible for generating it. In an age conditioned to accepting anything that comes out of a computer with uncritical awe and bedazzlement – Garbage In, Gospel Out – the next best thing to a infallible papal pronouncement on the veracity of the theory as an article of faith could be produced in the form of complex computer models with the appropriate assumptions and outcome built-in.

It was the perfect formula. A universal gravy train. The Great Social Equalizer – although some would remain more equal than others. The road to power of truly totalitarian dimensions. . . . There was only one small thing wrong. The record of temperatures past said that the Earth had already been through variations greater than anything that could be coaxed out of CO2-driven computer models while humans were still depending on sailing ships and water wheels, and nothing remarkable had come of it.

In an article that appeared recently in American Thinker, Marc Sheppard describes the astonishment, in 1995, of a geophysicist at the University of Oklahoma on receiving an e-mail from a leading figure in climate change research that said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.â€

I sometimes wonder if a race of super-intelligences exists in some transcendental reality, who in spite of their godlike qualities found themselves bedeviled by the same social and political problems as ourselves, and created the cosmos as a gazillion Petri dishes in a gigantic genetic programming experiment to see if any of the life forms that emerged in it might come up with an answer that worked. I know it won't come as much comfort to those who want to believe that there's something out there that watches over us and cares, but it seems to me that such an intelligence would do things for its reasons, not what we think ought to be its reasons, and the fate of any particular species in the collection – let alone an individual lost in among it – would not be a matter of any great concern. Which means it's pretty much up to us, doesn't it?

The Author: I am on the right and my above article proves it. Now that I have won your attention, can I please poke you in the eye and ridicule your faith, which by the way has not the first damn thing to do with my article! Come live with me in my transcendental reality.