We have seen an astonishing 40 years of scaremongering triggered by a few irresponsible scientists whose computer models became so vividly real for them that they abandoned basic adult responsibilities in their consequent public agitations. After a brief dalliance with the possibility of the onset of the next glaciation, their efforts turned to warming, encouraged no doubt by the remarkable annual increases of CO2 recorded at Mona Loa. They devised models to give CO2 a more important role in climate than observations and properly conducted historical reconstructions support. The models do this by means of an hypothesised positive feedback involving water vapour, a feedback which is implausible from our knowledge of atmospheric history, and unconfirmed by recent observations, not least of air temperatures which fail to show the tropospheric 'hotspot' predicted by the models. The 'settled science' of CO2 applies merely to its radiative properties, since the impact of these on the climate system is far from settled, with expert estimates ranging from an overall slight cooling, to a slight warming from projected increases in ambient CO2 over the next hundred years or so. The apocalyptic stuff requires those computer models and their novel feedbacks. Models which are mere toys in the face of the immense complexity of the system they refer to. Models fit only to illustrate some aspects of speculations about the climate amongst relevant professionals, and not nearly good enough to warrant the widespread alarm they have been used to support.
It seems to me that adults, and in particular professionals, have a moral responsibility to avoid such scaremongering, and in particular to protect school-age children from it. The temptations to pursue it for financial and political gain, or even for the pursuit of publicity and public attention as ends in themselves, are obvious and in part explain the enthusiastic adoption of climate scares by powerful individuals and organisations keen to grow in power and influence. That they have dramatically succeeded in this is one of the most interesting features of the current scare, and one which is surely worthy of deep study in many disciplines if we are to have any hope of reducing our vulnerability to such exploitation.
While the media/political class chattering in and around climate will no doubt continue into the indefinite future, perhaps continuing the 20th century tradition of alternating, on an approximately 30 year cycle, between cold and hot dooms. (Certainly the recent cold weather over most of the northern temperature latitudes has seen more talk of ice ages, 'little' or otherwise.) Or, the talk may become more nuanced, and less vulnerable to refutation, by deploying less specific threats such as 'climate change' or 'climate disruption', giving the agitators scope for pushing their 'cause' on the back of the inevitable excursions of weather events near or beyond previously recorded extremes. Attempts have been made to make this particular spin, but their impact seems limited, presumably because of the huge prior success in promoting the warming motif.
The establishment (media, political classes, academia, governments, the EU, the UN, major NGOs and other multinational corporations) has bought wholeheartedly into climate alarm, some no doubt for genuine and honest reasons, based on trust in the pontifications of erstwhile respected bodies such as the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London, or indeed of the once 'dull and dowdy' Met Office, now transformed with the help of a WWF activist into an important exponent of 'climatism'. They make for a wealthy and powerful force driving and/or riding the tide of alarmist opinion about climate. It might seem futile to resist it.
But what else can we do? Will it self-destruct? The case for alarm over human impacts on climate is so thin, so tenuous, that it seems doomed to collapse from its own absurdity. The last year or so, from Climategate onwards, has seen much to encourage this view, aided and abetted by the wacky sense of humour of the weather gods who produced the Gore Effect so many times, and, now, another winter on the cold side over very extensive areas in the northern hemisphere.
Unfortunately the alarmist-virus is out and into the educational bloodstream, threatening to produce more and more demoralised and frightened children. At the very least, we who look on appalled at its spread, can try to find and encourage antibodies wherever and whenever they appear. To mix-in the earlier metaphor, the tide may be turned earlier in some places than in others. Variability is, after all, all around us.
Monday, 3 January 2011
Friday, 24 December 2010
Christmas Greetings
A Merry Christmas to all people of goodwill everywhere, especially those special few who drop in here!
My apologies again for the light blogging. My ambition for 2011 is to help find and promote antidotes for the poisonous alarm, and negative, destructive thinking deliberately injected into schools all over the world under the guise of 'environmentalism' by those using 'climate change' as the terror of choice to win attention and compliance from the young.
And, when it comes, a Happy New Year to one and all!
Monday, 20 December 2010
Only bourgeois science compares facts with predictions - our revolutionary climate science cares not for such trifles
"A SCIENTIFIC THEORY is judged by its predictive powers. Bah. Comrades, we must distinguish between mere bourgeois science, which is concerned with sterile facts and predictions, and Revolutionary Science, which is concerned with what will promote the Revolution."
Headline in Instapundit , 20th December 2010.
The now notorious talk of snow in the UK becoming so rare that children would not experience it is looking a little foolish now that we have had two snowy winters in a row, especially since increased snowfall and colder winters were expected by others, not obsessed with CO2 at the expense of everything else, who noted solar and other cycles pointed towards a colder period due in the northern hemisphere. Even the roughly 30 years patterns of minor warming and cooling we saw in the 20th century superimposed on the otherwise fairly steady warming observed since the early to mid 19th century, point to a cooler spell. These past two years, and the ironic coolings at the IPCC conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, do not disprove the alarmist case, but they ought to weaken it and encourage more attention, and more funding, for those outside the very prosperous 'CO2 dominates the climate' camp. For example, this research.
The powerline blog expresses it thus:
'But snow isn't all bad. Those British kids who were never supposed to know the joys of sledding, skating and, above all, snowball fighting are in luck:
'It's fun to ridicule the warmists because they are so often wrong, but their errors are in fact significant: a scientific theory that implies predictions that turn out to be wrong, is false. A principal feature of climate hysteria is its proponents' unwillingness to be judged by the standards that govern real science.'
Donna Laframboise has dug out some of the absurdly confident assertions of the IPCC with regard to what we were going to experience thanks to global warming:
'the 2007 climate bible written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It told us that winters would be warmer and less extreme. I invite you to take a look for yourself. This table is titled Temperature-Related Phenomenon and appears on a page titled: Some Unifying Themes. The table contains phrases such as:
Similarly, George Monbiot’s 2006 book was titled Heat. Its subtitle was not: How to Stop the Planet from Freezing. Rather, it insisted the planet was in danger of burning. A year earlier, in a Guardian newspaper column, Monbiot told readers that “The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are…unlikely to recur.”
As the final two weeks of 2010 count down, reality is not being kind to these prognosticators. Instead of sugar dustings of snow and mild temperatures, many parts of the world are in the grip of another unusually harsh winter:
Although the mass media barely mentioned this fact, it’s more than a little ironic that the Mexican resort town of Cancun broke cold weather temperature records six days running during the United Nations’ anti-global-warming summit earlier this month.
We’ve long been advised that the symptoms of climate change are all around us – and that global warming is happening faster than predicted. But Mother Nature, it seems, has a wicked sense of humour.
.
In related news, I love this headline on yesterday’s Christopher Booker column in the UK Telegraph: It’s ‘the hottest year on record’, as long as you don’t take its temperature
Back in January I wrote a lengthy blog post examining snowfall in Britain over the past decade. In the year 2000 the Independent newspaper interviewed climate scientists and then advised the public that soon children wouldn’t know what snow was. Global warming would result in “not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.” I examined every one of Britain’s winters since the year 2000, however, and found no shortage of the white stuff.'
Elsewhere, we hear of climate alarmists responding to the snow up to their ears to assert that that is exactly what we should, now, expect from global warming. In fact, that is just what we should, now, expect from global warmists.
Headline in Instapundit , 20th December 2010.
The now notorious talk of snow in the UK becoming so rare that children would not experience it is looking a little foolish now that we have had two snowy winters in a row, especially since increased snowfall and colder winters were expected by others, not obsessed with CO2 at the expense of everything else, who noted solar and other cycles pointed towards a colder period due in the northern hemisphere. Even the roughly 30 years patterns of minor warming and cooling we saw in the 20th century superimposed on the otherwise fairly steady warming observed since the early to mid 19th century, point to a cooler spell. These past two years, and the ironic coolings at the IPCC conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, do not disprove the alarmist case, but they ought to weaken it and encourage more attention, and more funding, for those outside the very prosperous 'CO2 dominates the climate' camp. For example, this research.
The powerline blog expresses it thus:
'But snow isn't all bad. Those British kids who were never supposed to know the joys of sledding, skating and, above all, snowball fighting are in luck:
'It's fun to ridicule the warmists because they are so often wrong, but their errors are in fact significant: a scientific theory that implies predictions that turn out to be wrong, is false. A principal feature of climate hysteria is its proponents' unwillingness to be judged by the standards that govern real science.'
Donna Laframboise has dug out some of the absurdly confident assertions of the IPCC with regard to what we were going to experience thanks to global warming:
'the 2007 climate bible written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It told us that winters would be warmer and less extreme. I invite you to take a look for yourself. This table is titled Temperature-Related Phenomenon and appears on a page titled: Some Unifying Themes. The table contains phrases such as:
- more frequent heat waves / hot spells in summer
- more warm and fewer cold nights
- fewer frost days
- fewer cold outbreaks; fewer, shorter, less intense cold spells / cold extremes in winter [bold added]
Similarly, George Monbiot’s 2006 book was titled Heat. Its subtitle was not: How to Stop the Planet from Freezing. Rather, it insisted the planet was in danger of burning. A year earlier, in a Guardian newspaper column, Monbiot told readers that “The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are…unlikely to recur.”
As the final two weeks of 2010 count down, reality is not being kind to these prognosticators. Instead of sugar dustings of snow and mild temperatures, many parts of the world are in the grip of another unusually harsh winter:
- new record-low temperatures are being set in a variety of locales, including: Cuba, China, Japan, the UK, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina
- snow and ice are stranding motorists in their cars in: Italy, China, the UK, Canada, and Indiana
- snow is interrupting air travel across Europe (more here with great pics)
- communities are coping with unusual amounts of snow from Helsinki to New York, from Minnesota to the UK
- people are dying of hypothermia in many parts of the US, including some unlikely ones: South Carolina, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin
- wildlife is being adversely affected by the cold in the UK as well as in Florida (more here)
Although the mass media barely mentioned this fact, it’s more than a little ironic that the Mexican resort town of Cancun broke cold weather temperature records six days running during the United Nations’ anti-global-warming summit earlier this month.
We’ve long been advised that the symptoms of climate change are all around us – and that global warming is happening faster than predicted. But Mother Nature, it seems, has a wicked sense of humour.
.
In related news, I love this headline on yesterday’s Christopher Booker column in the UK Telegraph: It’s ‘the hottest year on record’, as long as you don’t take its temperature
Back in January I wrote a lengthy blog post examining snowfall in Britain over the past decade. In the year 2000 the Independent newspaper interviewed climate scientists and then advised the public that soon children wouldn’t know what snow was. Global warming would result in “not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.” I examined every one of Britain’s winters since the year 2000, however, and found no shortage of the white stuff.'
Elsewhere, we hear of climate alarmists responding to the snow up to their ears to assert that that is exactly what we should, now, expect from global warming. In fact, that is just what we should, now, expect from global warmists.
Sunday, 19 December 2010
Wallchart materials: waxing hot and cold, climate scares 1895-2009
The AGW climate scare is notable in that it has been vigorously adopted by the left, under the guise of caring for the environment, in a way which reflects their transition from being in favour of industrial progress to being against it, and from being concerned with the 'working man' to being convinced the planet would be better off without 'him'.
Here is a post from a couple of years ago on the butnowyouknow blog that I think would make interesting reading for any youngsters startled or scared by the AGW alarmism, and perhaps encourage them to dig into it a little more deeply, while refusing to be intimidated by the clamour in the meantime:
'
Worse still, notice that in 1933 they claim global warming has been going on for 25 years…the entire 25 years they were saying we were entering an ice age. And in 1974, they say there has been global cooling for 40 years…the entire time of which they’d been claiming the earth was getting hotter! Of course NOW they are talking about the earth “warming for the past century”, again ignoring that they spent much of that century claiming we were entering an ice age.
The fact is that the mean temperature of the planet is, and should be, always wavering up or down, a bit, because this is a natural world, not a climate-controlled office. So there will always be some silly bureaucrat, in his air-conditioned ivory tower, who looks at which way it’s going right now, draws up a chart as if this is permanant, realizes how much fear can increase his funding, and proclaims doom for all of humanity.
Here is a post from a couple of years ago on the butnowyouknow blog that I think would make interesting reading for any youngsters startled or scared by the AGW alarmism, and perhaps encourage them to dig into it a little more deeply, while refusing to be intimidated by the clamour in the meantime:
'
- 1895 - Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
- 1902 - “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
- 1912 - Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
- 1923 - “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
- 1923 - “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
- 1924 - MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
- 1929 - “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
- 1932 - “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
- 1933 - America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
- 1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
- 1938 - Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
- 1938 - “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
- 1939 - “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
- 1952 - “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962
- 1954 - “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
- 1954 - Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
- 1959 - “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
- 1969 - “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
- 1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
- 1970 - “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
- 1974 - Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
- 1974 - “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” – Washington Post
- 1974 - “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
- 1974 - “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times
- 1975 - Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
- 1975 - “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
- 1976 - “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
- 1981 - Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
- 1988 - I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
- 1989 -”On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
- 1990 - “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
- 1993 - “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
- 1998 - No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
- 2001 - “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
- 2003 - Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
- 2006 - “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
- Now: The global mean temperature has fallen for four years in a row, which is why you stopped hearing details about the actual global temperature, even while they carry on about taxing you to deal with it…how long before they start predicting an ice age?
Cassandras are becoming
increasingly apprehensive,
for the weather
aberrations they are
studying may be the
harbinger of another
ice age
The actual Global Warming Advocates' chart, overlayed on the "climate change" hysterics of the past 120 years. Not only is it clear that they take any change and claim it's going to go on forever and kill everyone, but notice that they even sometimes get the short-term trend wrong...
The fact is that the mean temperature of the planet is, and should be, always wavering up or down, a bit, because this is a natural world, not a climate-controlled office. So there will always be some silly bureaucrat, in his air-conditioned ivory tower, who looks at which way it’s going right now, draws up a chart as if this is permanant, realizes how much fear can increase his funding, and proclaims doom for all of humanity.
- 2006 – “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” — Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT
- 2006 – “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” —Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
- 2006 - “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930′s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920′s until the 1960′s they warned of global warming. From the 1950′s until the 1970′s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” – Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006
- 2007- “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” – Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast, Feb 6, 2007
- 2008 – “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA, see above for Hansen quotes
Next time you see the usual "global warming" chart, look carefully: it is in tiny fractions of one degree. The ENTIRE global warming is less than six tenths of one degree. Here is the Global Warming Advocates' own chart, rendered in actual degrees like sane people use. I was going to use 0-100 like a thermometer, but you end up with almost a flat line, so I HELPED the Climate Change side by making the temperature range much narrower, and the chart needlessly tall to stretch the up-down differences in the line.'
This site illustrated their report of the above timeline with this graphic:
It would make an interesting project for a class to start collecting ice-age/cooling scare stories from the media since 2008.
Noted added 30 Sep 2012: cooling scare gets a mention herein a CAGW-trumpeting paper: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/30/ice-age-human-survival-alice-roberts?newsfeed=true
Note added 25 March 2013. There have been quite a few such stories. Here is a 'new ic age coming' one from Germany: http://notrickszone.com/2013/03/25/flagship-daily-die-welt-stuns-germany-scientists-warn-of-ice-age-cites-new-peer-reviewed-russian-study/
' For example veteran journalist at German flagship daily Die Welt today has stunned the rest of the German mainstream media with a piece titled Scientists warn of ice age.'
Note added 30 March 2013. In the UK press: http://www.express.co.uk/news/science-technology/387971/Scientist-predicts-earth-is-heading-for-another-Ice-Age
Note added 28 June 2013. I'm not sure about the veracity of the Time magazine covers shown above. This, though, is real from January 31st 1977:
as is this one from 24 Dec 1979:
Source: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19791224,00.html
Good set of links on the cooling scare of the 1970s: http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
(h/t: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/6/28/greenpeaces-desperate-smear.html)
Note added 09 August 2013. Here's another little ice age ahead story, this time in a Danish paper: http://notrickszone.com/2013/08/09/major-danish-daily-warns-globe-may-be-on-path-to-little-ice-age-much-colder-winters-dramatic-consequences/
Noted added 30 Sep 2012: cooling scare gets a mention herein a CAGW-trumpeting paper: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/30/ice-age-human-survival-alice-roberts?newsfeed=true
Note added 25 March 2013. There have been quite a few such stories. Here is a 'new ic age coming' one from Germany: http://notrickszone.com/2013/03/25/flagship-daily-die-welt-stuns-germany-scientists-warn-of-ice-age-cites-new-peer-reviewed-russian-study/
' For example veteran journalist at German flagship daily Die Welt today has stunned the rest of the German mainstream media with a piece titled Scientists warn of ice age.'
Note added 30 March 2013. In the UK press: http://www.express.co.uk/news/science-technology/387971/Scientist-predicts-earth-is-heading-for-another-Ice-Age
Note added 28 June 2013. I'm not sure about the veracity of the Time magazine covers shown above. This, though, is real from January 31st 1977:
Good set of links on the cooling scare of the 1970s: http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
(h/t: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/6/28/greenpeaces-desperate-smear.html)
Note added 09 August 2013. Here's another little ice age ahead story, this time in a Danish paper: http://notrickszone.com/2013/08/09/major-danish-daily-warns-globe-may-be-on-path-to-little-ice-age-much-colder-winters-dramatic-consequences/
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Background for teachers: smear-tactics against critics of CO2-alarmism
The logical legerdemain of 'appeal to authority' is widely used by scaremongers about CO2 in the air, and is easily spotted (e.g. 'the IPCC says...', as if the IPCC were worthy of trust!, or the appallingly misleading '97% of climate scientists agree...', as if a self-selected tiny-minority response to an obscure questionnaire had inductive merit). Perhaps less obvious, if more unpleasant, are the smear tactics to discredit 'opponents' (for the alarmist are waging a battle, as they solipsistically see it). A blogger called Russell Cook has collected examples of this , and has written several essays to draw attention to them:
http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/thread-1939-post-11632.html#pid11632
Examples of his output, these ones all being published on American Thinker:
An extract:
http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/thread-1939-post-11632.html#pid11632
Examples of his output, these ones all being published on American Thinker:
- "The Lack of Climate Skeptics on PBS's 'NewsHour' " The first piece I wrote when I began looking into this situation, online December 29, 2009
- "Smearing Global Warming Skeptics" July 6, 2010, my first detailing the myriad problems with the Gelbspan / Ozone Action accusation of skeptic scientists
- "The Left and Its Talking Points" July 29, 2010, about the 'JournoList' similarity of the accusation, and a quantification of the bias against skeptic scientists at the PBS NewsHour
- "The iceberg treatment" August 10, 2010, on Rep Ed Markey's "Deniersberg", and the lack of answers from the PBS NewsHour
- "Pelosi funding accusation about mosque the same tactic used against..." August 20, 2010, about how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's call to investigate protesters of the Ground Zero NYC mosque is thought by some to be a good tactic
- "Silencing global warming critics" August 26, 2010, the Union of Concerned Scientists' new efforts to create an intimidation system against certain journalists, contrasted with their 1998 efforts to thwart the petition of skeptic scientists
- "Warmist Slander of Scientific Skeptics" September 15, 2010, where Jane Mayer's New Yorker article about the Koch Brothers isn't a new exposé, but is instead has elements tied to the same single accusation originating with Gelbspan / Ozone Action
- "The Curious History of 'Global Climate Disruption' " October 04, 2010, on John Holdren's and Jane Lubchenco's 1997 ties to Ozone Action
- "Supreme Court to Hear Global Warming Case" December 8, 2010, describing how a lawyer in one of the global warming nuisance cases tie into this entire skeptic smear situations
An extract:
'Untold numbers of well-informed individuals are rolling their eyes about how all the ‘warming planet' warnings abysmally failing to happen, like low lying islands swamped by rising seas, more frequent and intense hurricanes, and the Arctic starting down the path of being ice-free in the summer -- a process less likely to happen since the big ice cube up there keeps getting bigger each winter.
Eyes roll, but tough questions aren't being asked about the origins of faith-based organizations' climate change concerns, so those ideas are allowed to spread, ultimately corrupting a perfectly unsuspecting Advent season.
The question is: what prompts this faith-based concern about an essentially political issue?
The USA Today article says,
Many of the 10,000 congregations involved in Interfaith Power and Light have joined a Carbon Covenant...
Click on the link for "Carbon Covenant" at the article's page and you are taken to the Interfaith Power and Light web page. Click on IP&L's Resources link and continue to their "Building" page, and the #2 link is for a PDF file of "Bottom Line Ministries that Matter: Congregational Stewardship with Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Technologies" by the National Council of Churches' Eco-Justice Program. A handy online version of that PDF file shows it was prepared by Matthew Anderson-Stembridge and Phil D. Radford, with absolutely no reference of who they both are.'
Cook goes on to explain just who they are, and it makes for an interesting read.
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