Barrel Strength

CBC has been whipped like a rented mule by Russian television. CLICKSKI. You don’t need Russian or massive taxpayer subsidies to understand the story.  It is a disgrace that the public broadcaster has not run this story.

Seriously, the word occurred as indirectly as it possibly could have, but they conquered their inherent distaste and used it.  But really, it is only validation of the fact that there really is ‘citizen journalism’ and it is happening in the comments sections of news – all right, a provisional term for what they actually do – outlets like the Globe and the CBC.

You have referred to the climate crisis as Global Warming, Climategate and Climate Change… There may not be consensus on the nomenclature, but clearly this is a topic that resonates with readers.

Considering the legacy of 9/11 – The Globe and Mail (26 November 2009)

George Monbiot, England’s chief propagandist for anthropogenic global warming (AGW), has recently found reason to call for the resignation of Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit for criminal suppression of evidence.

In a column produced in November 2 this year, he tried to explain why global warming denial was spreading so fast.

“Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?” he asked.

He answered his rhetorical industry thus:

“A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival(14). …. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

“If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death? I haven’t been able to find any experiments testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?”

Here are simpler reasons for opposing AGW, even before the recent news of fraud and bad evidence.

1. We can smell a commie rat.

The notion thatthe advanced industrial powers should send money to the Third World in perpetuity, and lower our standards of living, while obeying the dictates of interfering moral busybodies, strikes us as just another commie plot. We have lived through the twentieth century and we went to university with communists. We recognize them for what they are.

2. We can read a book or two on geology and glaciology

Geology trumps climatology. Rock beats air. For the last 400,00 years, we have been in an ice age, of which this latest interglacial has been one of six interruptions. The likelihood that processes which have continued for hundreds of thousands and even millions  of years to trump human activity strike us as a reasonable bet. In the last billion years, there has been ice at the polar caps for only 20% of that time. Think about global warming in that context.

3. We can recognize fanatics and enthusiasts when we see them

The most disturbing aspect of most of the global warming proponents is their enthusiasm: a word which connotes being taken up with godliness and God – the Greek word theos is the core of the word. They, and not we skeptcs, seem to be impervious to argument, quick to find moral fault in those who are insufficiently persuaded, and invested with vast moral superiority. If I found a skeptical global warmist I could talk to him reasonably. But I search for them and find them not. Maybe some of Monbiot’s psychologizing might better be directed to the understanding of warmist enthusiasm.

When you look at the work being done on the East Anglia data by different software professionals, it is hard not to see it as a forensics exercise. All we see are the results – the crime – and scraps and pieces of what led up to to it. On Bishop Hill and Strata-Sphere and other sites, people are trying to figure out where the climate data came from, and what the researchers did with it to reach their conclusions.  The picture that emerges, even for someone who knows nothing about programming, really does point to a sustained effort to derive a predetermined outcome. This impression is sustained by the energy with which various scientists resisted sharing their original source data. Some of it somehow just kind of went away in the eighties, for lack of storage space. Some cannot be released because it was purchased from the states or entities that own it.  If that is the case, it would perhaps be within the means of investigators to buy the data themselves.