Barrel Strength

Al Gore wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this past weekend, in the same tone as Geoffrey Sachs’ latest in the Guardian. Nothing is wrong with the AGW craze, some little mistakes were made, the scientific consensus is overwhelming, floods, droughts, snowfall, species extinctions, alarums, dismay, send money. You know the drill. Former chief nerd at the Hadley CRU Phil Jones admits there has been no appreciable warming for past 15 years, but Gore’s buddies over at NASA find we have lived through the hottest decade since records have been kept. Oh and thnks to Gavin Schmidt and all the unindicted co-consprators over at NASA who have based their findings on reducing weather stations to low-lying and more urban locations.

Gore’s lyrical hymn to his wisdom can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html?ref=opinion

Full of gnostic hyperbole:

“From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.”

Is there no end to his megalomania? Apparently not.

This story doesn’t need commentary.

A seven-month-old girl survived for three days alone with a bullet in her chest after being shot by her parents as part of a suicide pact over their fears about global warming…

Her parents said they feared the effects of global warming in a suicide note discovered by police.

Update: UK Daily Mail provided the following additional details.

Their son Francisco, two, died instantly after being hit in the back.

But their unnamed daughter cheated death after the bullet from her dad’s handgun missed her vital organs.

Paramedics rushed her to hospital covered in blood when police alerted by worried neighbours discovered the massacre three days later.

The youngster is recovering in hospital in the town of Goya in the northern Argentine province of Corrientes, where doctors say she is out of danger.

It appears that a prominent Tory politician, Maxime Bernier,  has made the mistake of telling truth in a public place:  caution should be exercised in relation to the global warming scare because the science is faulty. Whenever a politician tells the plain truth in public, and that truth has become subject to a politically correct untruth, which in this environment always trumps it, the act is called a “gaffe”. Hence the discomfiture with M. Bernier. Everyone knows he is right except the Liberals and the Canadian media.

A Liberal activist treats this as the wonderful wedge issue that will separate Tories from the Canadian mainstream. Robert Silver is an energy consultant seeking to develop clean energy for Ontario.

“As a Liberal I obviously think this is a wonderful idea. I have a funny feeling Stephen Harper will think otherwise. He may have a real internal problem on his hands and I would expect this wedge to be exploited mercilessly in the months to come.”

I think this is one of those situations where, once again, it is the Tories who are reading it better than the Liberals. With whom will this issue resonate?

A more substantial and worthwhile discussion ensues at Watt’s Up With That. A debate is taking place between Judith Curry and Willis Eschenbach on the question of trust in science, which is really what is at stake here. Eschenbach insists the issue is not one of communication: the issue is, as he reports tongue in cheek, 73.1% of peer reviewed papers are junk science. Communicating junk better is not the solution.

One thing that your correspondent derives a great deal a pleasure from is reading leftist European newspapers, like the British Guardian.  They are very well written, thoughtful, well argued, albeit dead wrong.  The same cannot be said about the US leftist paper, such as NYT, which rely on deception and lies of omission to make their point.  The reason is obvious.  The US is a centre-right nation and Europe is centre-left.

One area where this has become painfully obvious is the coverage of Climategate.  The European leftist newspapers have been much more “forceful” in their coverage and US leftist newspapers have hardly noticed the kerfuffle.  This article provides a good overview of this disparity.  The European leftist realise that AGW is dead, while the naive US leftist, exemplified by NYT, dream on.

First, Geoffrey Sachs. Then me, in five carefully worded megatons.

Geoffrey Sachs in the Guardian:

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Climate change science is a wondrous intellectual activity. Great scientific minds have learned over the course of many decades to “read” the Earth’s history, in order to understand how the climate system works. They have deployed brilliant physics, biology, and instrumentation (such as satellites reading detailed features of the Earth’s systems) in order to advance our understanding.

And the message is clear: large-scale use of oil, coal, and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet. We are fuelling dangerous changes in Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry, giving rise to extreme storms, droughts, and other hazards that will damage the food supply and the quality of life of the planet.

 On the motives of those who oppose the global warming agenda:

“the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.”.

Finally, it is our duty to obey:

“The IPCC and the climate scientists are telling us a crucial message. We need urgently to transform our energy, transport, food, industrial, and construction systems to reduce the dangerous human impact on the climate. It is our responsibility to listen, to understand the message, and then to act.”

So let us review his argument:

• Those who oppose us are against the scientific method itself, it is not a mere disagreement about some facts.
• Our side is filled with wonderfully intelligent minds.
• Their side is corrupt and evil.
• Obey or be damned.

And now I am going to  give some of it back.

[After the passage of a few days since first reading the Sachs article, I realize what drove me and Antony Watts up the wall about it. It was not intended to rationally persuade anyone who differs in the least from its views. It was the equivalent of an officer slapping a dazed private, saying "get back in line, soldier. Nothing has happened". The entire eastern front has collapsed. The shattered wreck of armies is drifting past the position, and the officer is merely trying to cow the soldier back into line. It was an assertion of authority over weak minds, and the insult lies in the author's belief that we are weak minded. But he was not talking to us. He was talking to the wavering fanatics.]

First, this line of attack is entirely typical of all global warming alarmists whom I have encountered personally and in print, without exception. I have not met any global warmist who has failed to use his adherence to the dcctrine as a signal of his moral superiority, rather than as a position in a rational discussion. The most disturbing thing about warmists is their religious enthusiasm and intolerance.

Second,  I have observed this form of argument many times before.  I have argued with Jews, of whom Geoffrey Sachs is one, for over forty years on all matters political, theological, factual or legal. Many Jews, if not most, exhibit a strong tendency to overstate the argument in the terms used by Sachs. We shall discuss what those features are below.

Third, the global warming movement shows many of the features associated with ideological movements of the twentieth century: Feudianism, Boasian sociology, and subsequent intellectual movements making  left-wing critiques of society (the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, Marcuse et al). These were mostly Jewish in origin, composition, and working styles. These groups exhibited or exhibit:

• high degrees of authoritarianism: intellectual subordination of the group to a charismatic leader or his ideas;
• sharp in-group out-group distinctions, between the elect/the saved/the initated and the rest, who are divided into the possibly useful and the damned (those who knowingly disagree).
• a conspiratorial style: worldly success in ensuring members of the in-group are placed in the right spots to manage the propagation of the group’s ideas and the upward mobility of its members;
• Condescension towards and failure to respect the ideas of others. Indeed, failure to agree is a sign of psychopathoogy.

To summarize:

1. The pattern of thought and behaviour of the global warming alarmists exhibits many resemblances to the intellectual fads of the 20th century.
2. The style of argument of Geoffrey Sachs is particularly Jewish.
3. People should not be cowed by Sachs’  style of discourse, particularly they should not be afraid of being called anti-semitic for saying that this style of argument is obnoxious, authoritarian, and anti-liberal.

Freud, Boas , Marcuse and their doctrines  have turned into the equivalent of a pet rocks.  Global warming via CO2 emissions is rapidly joining these intellectual poseurs on the rubbish dump of failed ideas.

The style of argument, the conspiratorial methods, the inability to withstand criticism from members of an out-group: all this will persist. It will simply find a new authoritarian ideology to latch onto.

So Geoffrey Sachs can go fuck himself.

Settled science indeed. Phil Jones qualifies, recants, and suddenly has reason to mention the medieval warm period.

Oh, and he may simply have lost the papers containing the data underlying claims of anthropogenic global warming. Messy professor’s office, you know. Remember, trillions of income transfer were riding on this.

To quote Glendronach, “the global warmists are retreating so fast they are red-shifting.”

I ought to have seen Joanne Nova’s Climate Money before now. If you haven’t, you too can cite it in the unlikely  event of being invited to Geoffrey Simpson’s for dinner. In short, government billions for AGW; millions somewhere for skeptics.

James Delingpole, that right-wing vicious attack dog – God I love him – has come out with something similar.

Fanaticism is shouted out by Cabinet ministers and policy choices continue to be made for purely political reasons, despite the collapsing “science”  of man-caused global warming. The zombie stumbles on.

 
Britain’s Climate Change Minister, Ed Miliband, declares war on climate change skeptics.

“Mistakes and attempts to hide contradictory data had to be seen in the light of the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC’s four-volume report in 2007, said Miliband. The most recent accusation about the panel’s work is that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, may have known before the Copenhagen summit that its assessment report had seriously exaggerated the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers.

“However, Miliband was adamant that the IPCC was on the right track. “It’s worth saying that no doubt when the next report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied,” he said.”

“The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband, who is also energy secretary.

Yep, I guess it would.

Worse, in a way, is Canada’s Jim Prentice saying Canada will reduce its CO2 emissions by 17%.

 ”Canada has formally notified the United Nations that it has embraced the Copenhagen Accord and will cut its carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says it was the federal government’s plan all along to align its position with that of the United States.

Prentice has said that the first step towards a binding international treaty on climate change is for countries to outline their own emission-reduction targets before the UN’s official deadline of Jan. 31.

He says that although reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent will be challenging, he believes it is attainable.”

 In the case of Prentice, does he believe a word he is saying? Or is he just talking for the microphones?

A great source of left wing insanity is Open Left. It helps me guage the extent to which Climategate and the implosion of global warming doctrine has made any progress in leftist mindshare. Zilch. Nada.

In a recent posting, Paul Rosenberg of Open Left cited NASA’s latest figures, courtesy of James Hansen.

[These figures are trashed in Watts up with that here]

The alarmist figures show a one degree Celsius rise of global temperature since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. [Never mind the conceptual difficulties of a "global" temperature and the statistical underpinnings thereof].

This one degree rise in temperature since 1850 shows, according to Rosenberg:

“No rational person can pretend that there’s any doubt about global warming. It’s way too late for that. By now it’s clear that the “let’s hear both sides” crowd is openly pro-lie, and in fact, pro-end-of-human-civilization. They are moral monsters. Period.”

So, let us get this straight. A one degree rise in global temperature (forgetting all the measurement issues associated with the declining number of weather stations), since the end of the Little Ice Age (1300-1850) means that the world has warmed up by one degree centigrade. And this is a moral catastrophe!

Did human-generated carbon dioxide emissions play any role in this?  What role? What proportion of this quite insignificant rise of one degree centigrade have to do with us? This question is never asked.

Never mind, you hideous moral monster! My feeling trumps your fact! In the instant case, the hideous moral momonster is George Will. This does not suffice to temper author Rosenberg’s vitriol. The problem is – you guessed it – the System. (How many times have you hear a leftie use the words “the system” to prevent rational thought? But I digress.)

Speaking of George Will and how he was not censured enough, Open Left rants to its true believers:

“The problem …is the system.

“And not “just” when it comes to global warming. The problem is the system when it comes to everything. The “war on terror”, the financial system, the broken Senate, the dictatorial Supreme Court, all of these are ultimately nothing more than symptoms of the underlying fact that the system is the problem. Because the system simply does not care about the truth. Which means it doesn’t care about anything or anyone, other than covering its own sweet sociopathic ass. “

Open Left then proceeds to castigate Obama for not being pur et dur enough.

Conclusion: Any time you are tempted to think that you are being too harsh in your understanding of the political Left, read their blogs. Confirm and strengthen us, Lord, in our faith. And confirm and strengthen us, lefties, in our rejection of your doctrines and self-righteous  moral posturing, by better acquaintance with what you think and how you behave. Amen.

James Delingpole of the Telegraph has a charmingly sly proposal for the retention of Rajendra Pachauri, in order to complete the destruction of the IPCC.

“Joshua, when fighting the battles of the Lord, prayed fervently that the Almighty would continue the light of day, that he might complete the overthrow of his enemies.”

Delingpole writes:

“But let’s not underestimate the scale of the struggle we climate rationalists have ahead of us. AGW is the biggest and most far-reaching scientific scandal in history, whose tentacles spread into almost every aspect of our lives, from how we dispose of our trash and how we light up our homes, to how we travel and how we are taxed and regulated. Big business stands to make a fortune out of the scam; for governments it’s a way of extending their control and increasing power; for eco-fascists it’s a way of destroying industrial civilisation.

“This conspiracy is much, MUCH bigger than one unfortunate bearded troll-impersonator.”

Unfortunately, none of the heavy hitters in the global warming establishment appear to have come to his defence.

Forget prorogation, which is a temporary blip in the microcosm of Canadian politics.   Remember Copenhagen. Do you? Do you know how big a victory we won?

The scale and speed of the collapse of the AGW scare ought to inspire us with trust that truth will prevail. It is doing so before our eyes.
 

The rats are leaving the ship. Andrew Weaver, one of Canada’s leading scientific bedwetters on the subject, has declared the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri,  tainted

“Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.

 ”There’s been some dangerous crossing of that line,” said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week.

 ”Some might argue we need a change in some of the upper leadership of the IPCC, who are perceived as becoming advocates,” he told Canwest News Service. “I think that is a very legitimate question.”

To those more familiar with the story, Andrew Weaver has been foremost among those who have crossed the line into advocacy. But let that rest.

• Himalayan glacier melting has been shown to be speculation based ona telephone call to a glaciologist working for one of Pachauri’s organizations.
• Missing weather stations have been shown to have been selectively removed, not maintained or not reported (for whatever reasons) from places that are more remote, or at higher elevations, than the weather stations kept open. The result is selective favouring of those weather stations exposed to more urban heat, and a great reduction in sample size, and hence the reliability, of temperature records.
• The IPCC itself is under severe, and heeded, criticism for its methods and behaviour.

“Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.”

 Some stories play out over decades. Global warming is one of them. Considering the amount of government funding which sustains it, it has proven remarkably fragile in the face of the email leaks of climategate. Considering also the massive buy-in of the MSM and ordinary people to its simple tale of global sin  through CO2 emissions and global redemption through carbon offsets, it is amazing how quickly intelligent people do not discuss it anymore.

If you are still skeptical as to whether sanity has prevailed, then read this: and this: The bedwetters are declaring it a disatrous year for global warming “science”.

Remember: whether the earth is warming or cooling is a matter of science; what we might need to do about that is a matter of policy, if we can affect the outcome at all. There is plentiful evidence that we are not causing, and cannot cause, much of an impact through CO2 emissions. There is absolute proof that we can cause environmental catastrophes without blinking an eye: deforestation, overfishing, overgrazing, and so forth. So while truth has prevailed against lies, hubris and folly, on this major issue, the latter three have plenty more force in them yet, and always will.

All the conceits of enviro-’watermelons’ and the simply awful United Church of Canada come together in one package:

Mardi Tindal, the newly elected moderator of the United Church of Canada, returned from last month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen with a deep malaise. Not a true clinical depression, but an anxious despair that reduced her to weeping.

[...]

“And I said, ‘Doug, I’m weeping for the millions of lives that have been lost as a result of what did and did not happen in Copenhagen,” Ms. Tindal said. “My experience was that I had a place to go with my tears and my lament … It’s an expression of pain for the world’s suffering.”

Climb down, madam, that cross isn’t a two-seater model!

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/broadcasters/bbc-trust-to-investigate-science-coverage/5009412.article

It cannot be long now before the trials begin.

BBC Trust to investigate science coverage

6 January, 2010 | By Jasmine Phillips

The Gaia-worshipping clique behind the false god of climate change now brand non-comformity to their doctrines as the product of religious reactionaries:

So it comes as no surprise to hear a female pastoralist from the arid lands of North-East Kenya decrying the combined wisdom of the world’s scientists, after being told that climate change is man-made.

“How can man change the climate and make it stop raining: it is God’s will that has brought the drought,” she utters.

[...]

The “God not man” cry from the lady in Kenya’s northern reaches illustrates a common problem relating to understanding the underlying causes, and underscores the incapability of people in such situations to deal with the crisis that has impacted so severely on their communities.

Silly Kenyans, if only they could see the proper way:

The primary belief of this religion is that life in this universe is a mistake which must be corrected.

… A continuing series on Obama’s efforts.

Obama and Copenhagen

December 18, 2009. Obama Calls Global Warming Agreement an “Unprecedented Breakthrough”

President Obama touted that “for the first time in history, all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change,” calling the late-hour agreement struck in Copenhagen, Denmark an “unprecedented breakthrough.”

December 23, 2009. Obama says disappointment at Copenhagen justified

“I think that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome in Copenhagen,” he said in an interview with PBS Newshour.

“What I said was essentially that rather than see a complete collapse in Copenhagen, in which nothing at all got done and would have been a huge backward step, at least we kind of held ground and there wasn’t too much backsliding from where we were.”

Returning home empty-handed – yet again!