The anthropogenic global warming fraud is the subject of today’s commentary.
The issue for me is the time gap between the first real evidence the thing was a fraud, and the abandonment of policies in places like Ontario that were predicated on a global warming that is not happening, and if happening, not caused by man’s CO2 emissions.
I cite, for example, the comment by Falsum to the blog posting Inconvenient Facts posted yesterday. The report by scientists appeared in the Daily Mail. Falsum wrote:
The Daily Mail? Seriously? That newspaper has slightly less credibility than the average 14 year-old youtube commenter. The scientific community is agreed that global warming is real, that we are causing it, and that it will be catastrophic if we do not do anything.
Hack journalism does nothing to change that. Try again when you find an article in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.
What the article said – which evidently Falsum did not bother to read, was that the British Met Office had realeased the data. The first paragraphs were:
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
The East Anglia Climate Research Unit is the source of the Climategate email hacking scandal.
In Falsum we find the complete believer, confident that the science is on his side, and not afraid to say so. The last time he thought through the issue must have been four or five years ago, because he has missed everything since.
What has fascinated me is the several-year-long gap between the first publication of the emails that showed the whole thing was a vicious academic game played for keeps (Climategate 1, in 2009), and the spread of this realization slowly slowly through the intelligentsia until now.
Consider Ontario for example, where the provincial government has been pursuing a policy spending billions on wind farms and coal plant shutdowns, paid for by large increases in electricity rates. The opposition leader Tim Hudak dare not attack the theory behind Premier McGuinty’s folly because to do so would offend the state of believed ignorance in the Ontario media.
Wikipedia entries on the subject of Climategate are fully controlled by warmists to this day.
Climategate 1 occurred in 2009. It exposed all the doubts and lack of facts of the perpetrators of the carboin myth for all to see. A cascade of toothless inquiries since, led by warmists, has exonerated the perpetrators.
Yet anyone with a few hours of time on their hands and the inclination to read into a subject can find convenient summaries of the emails in question.
We are in the presence of a believed mythology. Man bad. Gaia good. Spaceship earth being plundered and ravaged by insensitive male boors. Imminent doom from CO2 emissions. Redemption through atonement to Gaia.
It took many decades for communism to be exposed.
Capitalism bad. Capitalists evil. Working man good. All power to the working man through the revolutionary appartus of the Party. The Party knows the outcome of history, and it must temporarily assume dictatorial powers, but only until the work of socialism is complete, when we shall all be free and equal and living in a man-created paradise.
Communism had the advantage of a huge captive state, a ruthless regime of terror and victory in WW2. It was a vastly successful ideology that held a third of the world in thrall to a primitive Gnostic superstition. It lingers in North Korea, which is a theme park of xenophobic failure and starvation.
By contrast the climate thing has all the features of leftism without the bother of Marxist economic claptrap. The climate thing carries on with its own regime of intimidation inside universities, hysteria in the media, mathematical modeling that is fact-free and cannot even predict the past, and government subsidies. Its influence today vies with communism in the 1930s. Will it die soon, or will it take another few decades for most average informed people to realize it was a scam?
And will it die suddenly, or just peter out?
That the whole warmist fantasy will fail is not in doubt. But the average person of good conscience has neither the time nor the motivation to inquire too deeply into it, and so drastically mistaken measures are undertaken in all western economies by fools like McGuinty on behalf of Gaianism, the latest Gnostic outbreak.
We can only hope that the learning cycle will be faster and less murderous this time with Gaianism than it was with communism.