climate change

So 56 newspapers are putting up a common editorial pushing the climate hoax. Are these editors: (1) too lazy to investigate the facts for themselves, and/or (2) too incompetent to do so and see the dripping evidence of fraud and political and financial manipulation cloying to this issue like thick red mud, and/or (3) one of the hoaxsters, who knows that the truth is that reducing CO2 emissions will cost lives in reduced food production as well as put endangered species in peril as their wild areas are converted to foodmaking by famished human beings? In other words, are they lazy, stupid, or evil? There is one other possibility, which I'll get to at the end, so without further ado, here is the entirety of their nonsense, with a few comments from me to the 56 editors.

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial.

Newsflash: Truth is not decided by majority rule, nor by authority.

We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Yes. The proposed Copenhagen treaty establishes an unelected, socialist government in all but name, with the power to tax every transaction in the western democracies. It will reduce the output of carbon dioxide plantfood, thereby starving humans and animals. This treaty must be defeated. From Lord Monckton's speech about the treaty:

"I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

"How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything."

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

A generation ago the lamestream media were telling us that there would be an ice age. Actually that was closer to the truth than your current alarmism, but in neither case was the lamestream opinion based on sound science. The Arctic icecap is actually freezing rapidly as we head into the northern winter, but taking the above misleading remark as a reference to the yearly meltback, the Arctic icecap is almost all the way back to the mean, having increased dramatically for each of the past two years [and notice, readers, how the Antarctic, doing well, is neatly forgotten]. So in what sense is it "melting"? It isn't melting right now, it is freezing. It isn't melting compared to last year, it is growing: 2008 was 10.6% more than 2007, and 2009 was 23.4% more than 2007. Editors, your statement is a lie pure and simple. Nextly, inflamed food prices can be directly traced to conversion of food crops to biofuel. What do you fools editors think will happen when you take a great chunk of the world's food off the food market? And we now know, thanks to climategate, that the insiders have been 'fixing' the peer-reviewed literature, thus making the record found in 'scientific' journals worthless from the point of view of a lay person simply looking for something to trust. It cannot be trusted, period!

Lord Christopher Monckton has come out with a condensed summary of some of the evidence in the ClimateGate papers.

Some highlights:

• A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

• The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.

• The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.

Many are wondering why the mainstream media are so slow off the mark reporting the revelations of sleaze and obvious criminality now emerging about the climate scare ringleaders. I can tell you a few reasons. Just think about it. The wealthy capitalists who run the media will be perfectly positioned to become key players in the Carbon Plantfood Reduction Schemes, trading nothing, and making no real difference to global warming (which would be a good thing anyway), but starving the atmosphere of plant food and thereby starving the poor - but the capitalists, who just love a corruptible market, will be perfectly positioned to skim their percentage off the top and become even wealthier than they are. The rest of us, meanwhile, see our fuel and electricity costs go through the roof and watch our standard of living plummet.

One of the strangest things about the success of the 'climate change' hoax is they way the perpetrators have so successfully got so many afraid of warmth. Whilst successful Americans have for generations fled their New Yorks and their Seattles for the Florida beaches, and Australian Melbournians and Sydneysiders have made the Queensland Gold Coast one of the fastest growing regions in the country, those same people have obediently lined up to condemn and to fear almost unmeasurably small warming trends in world climate. They would rather have their power bills and their food bills doubled, and to deny the benefits of extra food for the poor and for wildlife from enhanced atmospheric carbon nutrient.

Is it really that easy to stampede human beings into cutting their own throats?

Apparently so. The city-based environmentalists imagine, I suppose quite genuinely, that they are the knights in shining armour riding to save the planet.  I put this down to a complete lack of actual familiarity with the real processes of life that keep plants and animals alive - and of which we humans are not exempt. But here are a few things I noticed this week that should make sense even to people trapped in ignorance of the cycle of life.

From Glenn Beck. Heads up to WUWT.

The news of the digital break-in at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) is now all over the blogosphere. The climate realists are finding lots of what looks like seriously incriminating evidence of malfeasance, whilst the climate alarmists are scurrying around putting fingers in holes in the dyke.

For now I just want to make a brief observation about one of the most controversial passages:

In a previous post on peacelegacy.org,I used the example of a chappie called Fred to show you why the absence of an atmospheric hotspot is, all by itself, a complete disproof of the hypothesis of dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW). For those who came in late, the entire basis for the AGW claim is that certain unverified, and now falsified, computer models predict a lot of warming over the coming 100 years. It is shocking, but true, that there is no actual evidence whatsoever for this idea; it is computer models alone, and those models are basically no more than coded guesswork. And what do these models predict?

They predict that the world is heated by the appearance of a 'hotspot' in the atmosphere above the equator.

Model predicts air above the tropics heats up. from the NIPCC Report p. 107
But the reality is that this hotspot has failed to develop:

The Science Museum, dilapidated remnant and travesty of the imaginative Great Exhibition conceived by Victoria's Prince Albert and others, has humiliated itself thoroughly in front of the world by supporting the "Climate Change" fraud. On their website, they splash the usual rubbish and offer readers a chance to COUNT ME IN (or OUT) of leveraging the Government to sign up to wrecking the western economies at the Copenhagen summit.

The evidence is coming out that "climate change" is not merely a description of an ongoing process in the life of our planet, but a new religious phenomenon. In an article in New Scientist one of its "professors" comes out of the closet and tells us as much:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has constructed a powerful scientific consensus about the physical transformation of the world's climate. ... One way I [make sense of what climate change actually means] is to rethink our discourses about climate change in terms of four enduring myths. ... The value in identifying these mythical stories in our discourses about climate change is that they allow us to see climate change not as simply an environmental problem to be solved, but as an idea that is being mobilised in various ways around the world. ...

The world's climates will keep on changing, with human influences now inextricably entangled with those of nature. So too will the idea of climate change keep changing as we find new ways of using it to meet our needs. We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.

This is from one Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The UEA clearly needs to ask itself whether it is funding a professor of science or a professor of his own non-theistic religion. There's lots of disturbing stuff in the complete article - please do read it. But let's look at the short pieces above and ponder.

Sentence one is classic PC/postmodernist/anti-science obscurantism. Leave aside the fact that science can not and should not work by consensus. For those who haven't followed this stuff, "construction of reality" is a required tenet of the false postmodernist religion: the truth is not out there; we all make up our own 'truths', no one's 'truth' is any better than anyone else's 'truth'; he who believes the Sun rises because the Earth is rotating daily is no more correct than he who believes it rises because the morning chant was correctly intoned by the priests. Harsh? I don't think so. Only space and time prevent giving any number of examples. Here's how it works: first you convince yourself that 'truth' is whatever you choose to believe; then, a sufficient number of people choose to believe the prognostications (the "truth") of the committee of high priests (in this case, the IPCC) - who were busy planning out how to deal with global warming before they had established that there was any (see Plimer's Heaven and Earth amongst many other places). There's your consensus, and it is a "scientific" consensus because we all believe that it is (it is our 'personal truth'). Sad, but that is how the widespread psychological malfunction which I call the false religion operates.

The red Australian dust storm: I stood at the window, looking out in amazement. I had never seen anything like this before in my life. The front gate, a mere hundred metres or so away, was close to invisible. The red, choking dust had forced us all indoors, windows shut fast, the dust slowly obscuring more and more of our view. The fine, red silt nevertheless managed to find its way in under the doors and through the smallest crack, coating the floor near the entrances in red.