A blog post by Denis Rancourt which I came across today (Hat-tip: http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/) is based on a contribution by him to an event organised by the geography student association at the University of Quebec in Montreal. He begins by listing in leftspeak such things as
# 'the majority of service intellectuals (high priests) in each civilization was only created and maintained to support the hierarchy'
# 'the whole climate change scam is now driven by the top-level financiers newly eyeing a multi-trillion-dollar paper economy of carbon trading and that this is the reason it’s now a dominant mainstream media and corporate messaging presence'
#' the invention of the US-centered military-backed global finance structure of predation'
# 'establishment scientists are service intellectuals who virtually never diverge from supporting power, who at best look for sanitized and hypothetical “problems” that do not threaten hierarchy and who feed their false self-image of relevance'
But then, mercifully, he says:
'Never mind all that.'
And goes on to examine some aspects of climate science under 5 'story-elements'. These are indeed key parts of 'the narrative' so loved by political activists and their spinners everywhere, but Rancourt is decidedly unimpressed by them:
Step-1: Combustion of fossil fuels produces CO2
Step-2: This large amount of CO2 from fossil fuel burning goes into the atmosphere
Step-3: Post-industrial atmospheric CO2 produces an increased planetary greenhouse effect
Step-4: The increased planetary greenhouse effect causes planetary warming
Step-5: Climate chaos and melting glaciers
The first of these steps he concedes as correct, albeit banal. The second he deals with by noting the relative unimportance of the anthropogenic contribution to the great and still poorly understood fluxes and stores of carbon dioxide and carbon, and declares, somewhat vividly 'Environmental scientists working from the CO2 climate hypothesis want post-industrial atmospheric CO2 to be large for the same reason they want their penises to be large.' For the third step, he notes many of the reasons why it is implausible that CO2 is a driver of climate, and highlights some of the controversy over its role in the atmosphere through the so-called greenhouse effect and the mythical positive feedbacks which form key pillars of the alarmist faith.
As for step four, he comments on and references papers with more technical background on such topics as the difficulty of defining a global temperature and the shoddy disregard of good forecasting practices by the IPCC, and concludes: 'These are the reasons that “global warming” became “climate change”. Model extractions and empirical evaluations of a mean global temperature were shown to be hog wash.' On step five, he points to the fatuous, but required of the faithful, blaming of anything and everything bad on 'climate change': 'We pull climate chaos out of the non-linear physics hat and every weather event and habitat destruction observation on the planet becomes evidence for climate change.' He describes this as a circus.
His final paragraphs draw overall conclusions which are also out of a radical playbook and are not at all to my taste as a ex-leftie. However, I believe it is the case that many teachers veer to the left and so might lap it all up. And that is the interesting point for this blog. Is this a straw in the wind, a wind blowing from the left that will make climate change activism look so reactionary and harmful that it will be anathema for any self-respecting radical? And will that mean less indoctrination in our schools? We can but hope.
Note added 22 January 2013. Rancourt was dismissed from his university in 2008, ostensibly because he refused to go along with the grading of students. More details here: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/Rancourt09.htm, where it is described as an example of academic 'mobbing'.
