Barrel Strength

I thought it might be helpful to remind everyone that Richard Warman is an agent sent to destroy the CHRC and its provincial counterparts.

http://www.barrelstrength.com/2008/04/02/letter-of-commendation-to-agent-117-from-grasp/

I cannot sufficiently emphasize that believers in man-made global warming are deluded as to the extent, causes and cures (none) of and for global climate change. I am rapidly becoming convinced that they should be breezily dismissed, as no doubt they have reached similar conclusions about us. The more I inform myself of the subject of past climate changes, and of the politics of the IPCC, the less probable it appears that humans have anything to do with climate change – with the exception of cutting forests in dry or mountainous countries.

I had a spasm of annoyance with the Very Reverend Geoffrey Simpson, of the Glebe and of the Globe, who dismissed skepticism about global warming as so much flat-earthism. Trust Geoffrey to be wrong about something so vast.

I have been reading into the subject of this government-sponsored delusion for some years. I recommend, for various reasons, the following:
a) Taken by Storm, by Christopher Essex and Ross McKittrick, 2001, updated 2007
b) The Skeptical Environmentalist, 2001 and Cool It, 2008, by Bjorn Lomborg,
c) The Long Summer, How Climate Changed Civilization , and The Little Ice Age 1300- 1850: How Climate made History, by Brian Fagan
d) Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, by Ian Plimer, 2009

e) The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon, 2008
f)After the Ice Age, by E.C. Pielou, 1992, which contains the best six pages I have read on the causes of ice ages. Colin Tudge’s Time Before History (1992) also presents the same information on what geologists have considered to be the origin of ice ages.

The last two books, and Fagan’s The Long Summer, make clear that we are are in an interglacial period of roughly 10,000 to 15,000 years, in an otherwise glacial period, where ice has extened much further south. Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard and and Nantucket Island are moraines left behind from the last ice sheet. These glacial periods have lasted off and on for the past several millions of years. In turn, ice ages are themselves extraordinary periods in earth’s history. In the past billion years, there has been ice at the poles for only a fifth of that time.

Each of these books in their ways undermines the central tenets of the Gaian doctrine, as laid out by Essex and McKittrick:

1. The earth is warming
2. Warming has already been observed.
3. Humasn are causing it.
4. All but a handful of scientists on the fringe believe it.
5. Warming is bad.
6. Action is required immediately.
7. Any action is better than none.
8. Claims of uncertainty only cover the ulterior motives of individuals aiming to stop needed action.
9. Those who defend uncertainty are bad people.

Professors Essex and McKittrick take aim at Big Official Science, the fallacy of computer models, and the meaninglessness of “global temeperature”, from a mathematical perspective. Their best line about global temperature, which they call T-Rex, is that has all the validity of an average global telephone number. It was they who exposed the deficiencies of the IPCC study that gave rise to the infamous hockey-stick graph, which obliterated the medieval warm period and the little ice age which followed. Essex and McKittrick are more persuasive to the mathematically inclined. You cannot take seriously a computer projection of climate after reading their explanation of “parameterizations”, that is, fudge factors, that go into every computer model. They explain that, for want of a theory of climate, all we have is models, and we are making up the models.

Fagan’s books cited above, and Plimer’s opening chapters, detail the dramatically bad effects of previous global cooling episodes on civilization and its prospects. A number of events, such as Europe’s Dark Ages, were accompanied by dramatic drops in temperature within historical time, and recoveries occurred when the earth warmed. Warmer climate is associated with more stable temperatures and more certain growing conditions. You cannot read about the effects of previous climate changes without realizing that:

a) climate change has been going on, frequently very suddenly, forever, and

b) warmth is good, cold is bad.

c) these vast changes in the habitability of the planet occurred long before humans had any significant eeffect on the earth.

The Deniers makes clear that the science is by no means settled. Together with Essex and McKittrick, Lomborg and Plimer, it is apparent that we are in the presence of a vast left-wing movement, the direct successor to Marxism, driven by environmentalist doom-sayers, and abetted by governments seeking greater power of their citizenry. Their methods are corrupt, their goal is power, and their motivations, while various, include a spurious atheistic Gaian religion.

The planet does not need saving from carbon dioxide.

The Left wants to make every human action neurotic. What better method than to make breathing a sin? Oxygen in, CO2 out. (I have written about sin and the Gaian releigion at greater length elsewhere.)

Closer acquintance with either the facts of previous climate changes, or the corrupt methods of the IPCC/Gore crowd, will persuade you we are in the presence of something very large, powerful, mistaken and foolish.