Barrel Strength

There are thousands of useful sites that go for and against the notion that man is principally responsible for global warming. Some of us at Barrelstrength have written elsewhere about this phenomenon. Chiefly the consensus among us crusty reactionaries is that:

1) Global warming and cooling are principally natural phenomena related to solar output, albedo (earth’s reflectivity), ocean current heat transfers to arctic zones, influenced by the shape of continents, and many other attributes of the earth’s wobble, tilt, magnetic fields, as well as cosmic rays and possibly even the location in the local galaxy as the sun circles around it and goes through the galactic plane.

2) Opinion differs on rational grounds as to how much of the post-1970 global warming trend has been caused or increased by man, but the range of difference in this group would probably be from zero (no human influence) to some, in the 5-10% of increase, which are themselves trivial compared to fluctuations which have been recorded in human-recorded and in pre-human history.

3) Global warming as it is currently understood by most people is religious and not scientific, insofar as its function is to provide the sin for which humans must atone. The deity is Gaia, the religion is ecology, and the sin is ours, for breathing, heating, and all forms of energetic transformations, whose inevitable output is carbion dioxide and water. (That is the chemical truth, and cannot be avoided). 

4) For my part, and not speaking for Barrelstrength, I would tend to see all religions as creators of sins for which there is no cure, only atonement and repentance. For Christianity it was lust. For Marxism it was “exploitation”, hiring people and selling their products at more than what you paid them. In the Gaia religion, it is the production of carbon dioxide, which humans as animals are powerless to stop. Global warming- in this political and religious sense- as a large scale scam perpetuated by many elements in most  countries to increase the scale and scope of governmental intervention in the economy, principally with a view to ensuring jobs for the boys (and girls) among the governing classes. We tend to see that, as Marxism has failed and Christianity has declined, the religious void has been filled with all kinds of competing theories, the most successful of which is global warming, because it appears to have a scientific basis, as did Marxism, and is an attractive religion whose rites are relatively easy to follow: recycle garbage, drive smaller cars, go through faintly ridiculous procedures to lessen your carbon footprint, and snob your neighbours who do not.

The other dogmatic religious replacement is Islam, which is a far sterner creed and cultural transformation, but that is not a topic for today.

All of the “scientific” claims of the global warming alarmists rest on the projection of observed temperature increases (facts) into the future at some consistent or increasing rate (conjecture). All depend on the reliability of computer models to project what will happen, and the accuracy and significance of the temperature measurements on which the projections are made.

Scientists examining foodchains in the oceans have found that computer projections cannot model what species will prevail in future times.

“An eight-year study of ocean life shows a “chaotic” balance of nature, and Dutch scientists say this chaos makes it impossible to predict the rise and fall of wild species — anywhere, ever.

Ecologists and politicians often want computers to show how nature will react if we bulldoze a forest or change the global temperature, but the Baltic Sea study now argues this kind of modeling may not be worth much.

If so, it raises doubts about how we can ever preserve a healthy environment, except through good luck.

The small Baltic creatures such as plankton were isolated from the rest of the ocean and studied for eight years. Each member of the “food web,” or network of who eats whom, took turns multiplying and becoming scarce, even though the scientists kept the outside conditions constant.

And they could never figure out a pattern that allowed real predictions of how any species would fare.”

Read it all. Climate may be more predictable than weather, but how that could be so needs explaining too. And If predictions are vain, and the whole planetary system is chaotic, then most “scientific” alarm about global warming is merely scare mongering: it fails the test of predictability.