Mike Lorrey looks at the PNAS skeptics paper and some historical issues related to it. – Anthony
My primary area of accomplishment in life, other than virtual worlds development, is in political activism. Despite my technical training, I am a very political animal, having helped Killington, Vermont vote to secede from that state in protest of excessive taxation, and having organized the effort to eminent domain the New Hampshire vacation estates of Supreme Court Justices Souter and Breyer after the Kelo decision, as political theater to “encourage” the two political parties these gentlemen hailed from to support my state constitutional amendment to restrict eminent domain.
I was a founding member of the Free State Project, yes, one of *those* libertarians, guilty as charged. I’ve managed the election campaigns of both libertarians and republicans, and treat politics as a sport or quest to improve our country’s “more perfect union” with principles couched in pragmatic use of political theater and holding petty fascists to their own standards. I’ve studied the Constitution and the writings of the founding fathers extensively, as well as their Enlightenment forebears, and a lot of the little known history of this country. I’ve also studied the history of various flavors of tyranny, in particular the various modern flavors, communism, fascism, islamism, and especially liberalist majoritarian tyranny.
So it is from this perspective that I approached the global warming issue, observing the players and how they act, trying to tease out their hidden agendas, if there are any. Originally I believed the dogma. I founded a company in Seattle focusing on energy conservation safety lighting, inventing new lighting products that were highly rated by the EPA’s Greenlights program. I was once the poster boy of Al Gore’s reinventing government campaign, getting government agencies to buy my new technology despite not having prior issued paperwork, etc. Eventually I was given access by the energy department to a lot of material that exposed to me how screwed up the energy conservation business is, and I started to challenge claims about global warming orthodoxy. I saw how Al Gore, in the early Clinton administration, sabotaged the proposed carbon tax, turning it into a BTU tax, so that coal produced by his home state of Tennessee would not be the most highly taxed energy source. So I questioned more, and was cast out by the ruling party from golden boy status. So I questioned global warming a lot more, online, publicly.
This caused a certain degree of conflict within my family. As some of you know, my cousin is a professional climatologist. When he was still working on his doctorate, certain persons of influence attempted to threaten his academic career before it really got started in order to coerce me into removing statements I’d made about global warming from certain influential email lists. This was in the 2000-2001 timeframe, so I got a pretty early taste of the sort of “tricks” that the high inquistors of the Church of Global Warming would pursue in order to enforce their orthodoxy against heretics like myself, and when I acted offended, about my first amendment rights, I was made to look like the bad guy.
This is why this recent essay about modern political correctness being merely a form of social marxism developed during WWI by a group of renegade marxists who sought to use Freudism to spread marxism through society struck a chord with me. It illuminated a lot of what I’d been thinking over the past years, and perfectly explains why the AGW alarmists behave the way they do. The witch hunts, the character assasination, the Alinsky method du jour. The Hockey Team is a Marxist organization, not in the traditional economic sense (though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist) but in how they operate toward their opponents. This is not unusual, though. It has become standard practice in academia to engage in persecution of dissidents from orthodoxy.
This fact is illustrated quite clearly in the new National Academy of Scientists Blacklist of Climate “Deniers” this is the list that is online, referenced by the PNAS paper trying to make skeptics into media untouchables. At first glance, its pretty amusing that the author of this list ranks skeptics by the number of references in the published record to their FOURTH published paper, with the claim that anybody who has only published a few papers, even if they are “big papers” is clearly a lightweight. As if Einstein wasn’t immediately a rock star when he published his first paper on Special Relativity, eh?
Maybe I’m an ignorant heathen, but it seems to me that someone who can’t get their most important ideas on the same subject, with sufficient proof to convince the entire world of the truth of their writing, published in a few papers, is simply regurgitating the same old tired pap and really isn’t intelligent enough to have even one “big paper” in their lives. But I may be wrong. However, the ranking this guy does seems to rank a lot of the best skeptics at the top: Pielke, Jr., Dyson, Lindzen, Tipler, etc. It seems to me, though, that the number of cites should be divided by the number of years since their PhD to give an idea of their relative productivity in their field… However, when you shift the ranking to go on the cites of climate related papers, you get a more impressive list:
68: Roger A Pielke Sr, FAGU
446: James J O’Brien, FAGU
1649: Kirill Y Kondratyev
747: John R Christy
710: Reid A Bryson
278: Sherwood Idso
1562: Robert C Balling
1410: Patrick J Michaels
136: Richard Lindzen, FAGU
1198: G Cornelis van Kooten
1686: Sultan Hameed
954: Willie H Soon
1503: S Frederick Singer, FAGU
625: Petr Chylek, FAGU
1024: James A Moore
500: Roy W Spencer
1230: Nils-Axel Moerner
1651: George Taylor
These are the top 15. Sure, they don’t have NAMES like Dyson or Tipler, but we all know who most of these guys are from their climate work that tends to debunk the AGW garbage, and which tends to get published, and cited by others. I’ll try to post a link to the excel file I made from scraping the PNAS blacklist.
The entire list is essentially made from the names of any scientist who has ever signed a letter, petition, or public advertisement expressing doubt about the AGW orthodoxy, IPCC, or the Hockey Team. SO the list really ISN’T about whether their science is for or against the AGW orthodoxy, the list is meant to intimidate and damage the reputations of anybody who has dared to publicly question the absolutist “we have a consensus” political games being played by those who are intentionally politicising climate science to pursue their leftist agenda. This is classic Alinsky tactics. There is no valid scientific purpose for this PNAS paper or this blacklist. It is a political showboating that is going on under the guise of “science”.
The Leipzig declaration and Oregon petition also make public the views of Scientists on Global warming, are they also ‘Communist black lists’?
REPLY: I signed the Leipzig declaration. -A
I’ll give you $100 if you can post this at forums.treehugger.com and not have it censored. The censorship over there is unbeleivable. No wonder we can’t make headway when they won’t even publish opinion pieces. I dare you!
It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.
I remember the effort to take the SCJ’s fancy vacation homes under the eminent domain laws they found to be constitutional. Brilliant. Way to make an example out of them. I was way heated up at the thought that a city could come along and forcibly take my property from me and give it another private party who would use it to “better serve” the community. That’s SO abhorrent and SO against the strong private property rights enumerated in the constitution. If if I hadn’t seen the USSC decision with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed that could possibly get five votes in favor of it.
Oh my, it’s commentary like this that makes me embarrassed to be a climate change skeptic. Your site does a fine job of disseminating scientific criticism of the AGW position, but when your posts tackle politics, not to mention the commenters, you veer off into self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, victimology. I find your continuous allusions to the the Nazi Holocaust increasing distasteful. The critics of AGW are not having their lives threatened, they are not, the vast majority of them anyway, being tossed out of their jobs, they are not being hunted down and imprisoned, and they are not likely to be anytime in the forseeable future. Get real.
AGW is an intellectual fad with routes in romantic environmentalism, and it suffers from all the pitfalls of close-minded groupthink, besides having some advocates who have really caught on to how to work the media. It is not the black boot of the one party state coming down on your windpipe.
Statements such as this:
[REPLY: Thanks for pointing that out, I made an edit to the story earlier, at pub time, but somehow it didn’t take or I made a mistake. Fixed, thanks -A]
“…(though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist)…”
I think Fascist is the more accurate label as Marxism seeks state ownership whereas Fascism seeks to buttress private cartels. Mussolini stated that Fascism and Corporatism are synonymous and it is quite apparent that the AGW agenda which is the vanguard of the Environmental movement seeks to alter the laws of a given State to control the flow of energy. Of course Environmentalism has always been an Oligarchical position for which Reactionary Conservatism and Fascism are the cloaks used to advance the agenda.
Junk science should not be debunked by junk sociology IMO.
jcrabb,
The difference is that Leipzig and OISM are voluntary; the scientists decide for themselves if they want to be included or not.
But the PNAS list is an official blacklist endorsed by a quasi-governmental organization. The list is entirely political in nature, arbitrarily assigning names based only on someone’s perception [“My table lists all the names I’ve found who have signed any of the open letters or declarations expressing skepticism of the IPCC’s findings…”], and not allowing for any recourse if a listed scientist objects. [Note also that the blacklist compiler is a believer in Astrology.]
This blacklist is no different than Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List,” put together by the Nixon White House and specifically designed to destroy careers.
Fortunately for those Nixon blacklisted, Watergate intervened.
Think that’s outrageous? Try “Perfect Citizen” on for size. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704545004575352983850463108.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories
That’s a good write-up, there Mr Lorrey. I hope people take the time to understand their opponents – not so much to smear them for their motives, but to understand their modus operandi.
Otherwise you just make sincere arguments and leave perplexed everytime.
It took a lot of work to compile the list: as a Word file it is 63 pages long. The warmists are into this vendetta thing. Bjorn Lomborg was the first victim when he came out with his Skeptical Environmentalist. They established a web site that minutely criticized every page of his book. When he wrote another one they actually published a counter-book to tear it apart, page by page. NAS is now into it on a mass scale, apparently intent on selecting candidates for a Gulag. Or is it for an auto-da-fe? If I were a member I would simply resign. This organization is no longer interested in promoting science, just enforcing their own doctrines and stealing research money.
The NAS has always been an old boy network; however, it was (and I emphasize, was) a great honor to be elected to the Academy. If I were a member, I would resign in protest and I think all true scientists who are academy members should resign.
This sort of behavior reminds me of the school-yard bully who threatens to take his ball and go home because he the rules of the game don’t apply to him.
“It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.”
They aren’t blinkered. It’s deliberate.
Funny a commenter would say ”It is not the black boot of the one party state coming down on your windpipe. ” with the present administration threatening to keep its boot on the throat of the BP CEO.
Andrew W says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:25 pm
It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.
It is also possible that there are no such blinkers, and that they are engaging in these tactics with full awareness. They simply don’t care about being fair, – but in winning.
@ lichanos
I hope you’re right. I’m not so optimistic. Perhaps I read to many of the comments on news articles and blogs and have too good a feel for what the 45% who support Obama think about the other 55% of us and think about the institutions the founding fathers established. I should stop taking that pulse because too much more of it is likely to stop mine.
“It illuminated a lot of what I’d been thinking over the past years, and perfectly explains why the AGW alarmists behave the way they do. The witch hunts, the character assasination, the Alinsky method du jour. The Hockey Team is a Marxist organization, not in the traditional economic sense (though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist) but in how they operate toward their opponents.”
*********************************
Andrew W says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:25 pm
It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.
*********************************
VILLABOLO:
Mirror, mirror on the wall.
——-
US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’
James Inhofe calls for criminal investigation of climate scientists as senators prepare proposal that would ditch cap and trade
[–SNIP–]
Senate Panel Holds Hearing on Climate Change : James Inhofe The Republican James Inhofe during the Senate Environment and Public Works hearing on global climate change. . . .
The US Congress’s most ardent global warming sceptic is being accused of turning the row over climate science into a McCarthyite witch-hunt by calling for a criminal investigation of scientists.
Climate scientists say Senator James Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation into American as well as British scientists who worked on the UN climate body’s report or had communications with East Anglia’s climate research unit represents an attempt to silence debate on the eve of new proposals for a climate change law.
Inhofe’s document ends by naming 17 “key players” in the controversy about CRU’s stolen emails, including the Britons Phil Jones and Keith Briffa.
“I think this is like a drag net, just to try and catch everyone whose name happens to be on this list. It’s guilt by association and I thought those days were over 50 years ago,” said Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who is on the list of 17 scientists. “It looks like a McCarthyite tactic: pull in anyone who had anything to do with anyone because they happened to converse with some by email, and threaten them with criminal activity.”
Inhofe is also accused of further fuelling a spike in hate mail and politically motivated freedom of information requests in the three months since the emails of climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
Rick Piltz, a former official in the US government climate science programme who now runs the Climate Science Watch website, said Inhofe and others were getting in the way of scientific work. “Scientists who are working in federal labs are being subjected to inquisitions coming from Congress,” he said. “There is no question that this is an orchestrated campaign to intimidate scientists.”
Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University who is on Inhofe’s list of 17, said that he had seen a sharp rise in hostile email since November.
“Some of the emails make thinly veiled threats of violence against me and even my family, and law enforcement authorities have been made aware of the matter,” he told the Guardian.
He said the attacks appeared to be a co-ordinated effort. “Some of them look cut-and-paste.”
A university investigation largely cleared Mann of misconduct for his connection to the East Anglia controversy. However, a rightwing group in Pennsylvania are demanding further action.
Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute who is also on the list of 17, said he had seen an increase in freedom of information act requests. “In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight,” he said. “These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information.”
He said Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation created an atmosphere of intimidation. “The idea very clearly is to let it be known that should you be a scientist who speaks out in public then you will be intimidated, you will be harassed, and you will be threatened,” he said. “The idea very clearly is to put a chilling effect on scientists speaking out in public and to tell others to keep their heads down. That kind of intimidation is very reminiscent of other periods in US history where people abused their position.”
Other scientists on Inhofe’s list of 17 admitted they were disturbed by the threat of criminal prosecution.
“I am worried about it, I have to say,” said Raymond Bradley, director of the climate science research centre at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is also on the list of 17. “You can understand that this powerful person is using the power of his office to intimidate people and to harass people and you wonder whether you should have legal counsel. It is a very intimidating thing and that is the point.”
Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican on the Senate’s environment and public works committee, released a document last week suggesting scientists be investigated for breaking three laws and four government regulations.
[–SNIP–]
But climate scientists say the report takes the campaign to a new level by threatening criminal prosecution. The report calls for the inspector generals of all US government agencies touching on the environment to investigate the scientists as a first step to possible prosecution.
“The minority staff of the Senate committee on environment and public works believe the scientists involved violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws,” the report says.
A spokesman for Inhofe rejected the charges of a witch-hunt. But he said a criminal investigation was warranted and that it should not necessarily be limited to the 17 “key players”.
“We are not saying that there are 17 scientists we should be calling criminals,” said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Inhofe. “I’m not putting a number on 17.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/01/inhofe-climate-mccarthyite
lichanos says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
“Oh my, it’s commentary like this that makes me embarrassed to be a climate change skeptic.”
“AGW is an intellectual fad with routes in romantic environmentalism, and it suffers from all the pitfalls of close-minded groupthink, besides having some advocates who have really caught on to how to work the media.”
“It is not the black boot of the one party state coming down on your windpipe.”
==========================================
Embarrassed? Really?
Maybe you should then check your “skepticism.” [GREAT post, Mike!]
And the dominant reason there is currently no big black boot on your larynx is because people like the author of the post DARE to stand up against it.
How is that self-aggrandizing? Give me a break.
Sure, Michael Mann or Al Gore or not necessarily evil dictators…but they ARE contributing to a larger system that becomes its own behemoth….larger than them…that takes on a life of its own.
Big Government, Big Academia, Big Corporacracy….they ALL have that in common.
[The power therefrom…is only greater in the whole…because the sum of its parts consists of many mindless individuals.]
I am sure there are plenty of decent people that work at the EPA but that doesn’t mean that the EPA has not lost its marbles when it comes to CO2.
Your legalistic [and rather shallow] interpretation of this brilliant post is not significant, other than it has caused me to react enough to set the record straight.
I do not agree at all with your assumption and you are definitely tossing out the the baby and the bathwater….as well as the tub, the plumbing, and half the house.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I find your continuous allusions to the the Nazi Holocaust increasing distasteful.
Well, so would I. If there were any!
The critics of AGW are not having their lives threatened, they are not, the vast majority of them anyway, being tossed out of their jobs, they are not being hunted down and imprisoned, and they are not likely to be anytime in the forseeable future. Get real.
Ho, ho! Unless it’s the Gulag it doesn’t count then? We could perhaps submit you to a range of ad hominens, threats and taunts and you would brush them off as mere trifles? I think not.
My favourite example of the pressure exerted on sceptics came with the Amazing Randi posted suggesting that he was a trifle sceptical of the extreme claims of AGW not long back. The sheer weight of criticism that came down – and his scepticism was very mild – was incredible. He ended up recanting, just to shut down the heat. (I bet he did a “and yet it moves” under his breath though).
So an icon of the sceptic movement cannot afford to be sceptical! It would be funny, if it were not sad.
Lord Oxburgh did pontificate
that nothng wrong was done!
Then good old Penn joined in the fight
to clear its favourite son.
Now Russel Muir has taken sides
and struck out with his cosh.
Another repeat, it has been said, of establishment peer whitewash
Now you may not believe me,
you may think that I’m a liar
But i’ll ask you this one question
whose side are you on?
The fish-fried or the fish frier?
When Juries are picked by the accused and the cries of the plaintiffs are dismissed as inadmissabke, then Climatology, like despicable one one crimes becomes unprovable!
The link with academic Marxism is spot-on.
It is Marxism as a science — the neo-marxism of Social Science academia — that legitimates this approach to science; that is, science-as-activism and science provided with permission to promote ad hom assessment of scientific opinion attacks due to economic class of speaker etc. Their methodology was an open attack on the normal bourgeois science ethics and protocol that have always tried to dampen these tendencies to stray from a discussion of the evidence.
The linked essay by Lind explains well the dark side to the new marxism of the Frankfurt school etc…but it might be a bit hard to follow for the uninitiated.
In this essay the affinity of Environmental Science culture with Marxism is explained in terms of Post-Normal Science (of Ravetz) and especially with reference to Mike Hulme’s use of it.
Finally, I think Lichanos (above) is right to ask us to keep the level of persecution in perspective – e.g., the black list was not made by state institution.
Graeme Rodaughan says:
They simply don’t care about being fair, – but in winning.
You got it. Ethics are for hobbling the sheep. Butchering sheep requires none and fewer than that is even better. One just wants the sheep to not struggle. Bleating is fine.
I bet the Westborough Baptist crew could do a brilliant vid on their take of ‘the suffering of science’. Omg… that’s too funny to contemplate!
villabolo says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm
‘Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute who is also on the list of 17, said he had seen an increase in freedom of information act requests. “In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight,” he said. “These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information.”’
======================================
Well of course this “public servant” on the taxpayer dole…is going to say this!
Wah wah wahh.
Poor NASA. They have to deal with so many FOI requests.
Sniffle sniffle.
James and Gavin, and other publicly funded scientists-turned-politicians…until you get off the public dole and work in a private venture….you’d better believe you are obligated to be under a 24-hour microscope!!
I know that makes you nervous because of what’s at stake: the millions and millions and millions of heard-earned taxpayer dollars that you have been able to divert toward a dying myth….but hell that’s the risk…
…when you use other people’s money!
Wah wah wah.
Eight FOI requests in a few months!
It’s OK….I understand, Dear….being removed from taking real world observations and doing science the old way….that such stress is too much for the air-conditioned, model-fantasy, smooth-handed “ideal”world in which you live.
Bless your heart, Gavin.
Let me pass you the recycled, green tissues.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
What you’ve described is the “Fabianism”. Unlike the Communists, who took you by force, the Fabians strive to take you over from within. The three pillars of influece that must be taken are 1) the Media, 2) the Education Elite, and 3) the Courts.
It is indisputable that the AGW crowd is operating through the Fabian model. The Media is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the agenda. The University system is nothing more than an “expert” witness to the agenda, and will exonerate any wrong doing associated with the agenda [just look at the “investigations” that have involved UEA and Mann]. Lastly, the Courts have been complicit in allowing the EPA to usurp powers of authority that are not designated to it in the Constitution.
Unfortunately, the American Public is too involved with the latest Iphone or Ipad to notice or care that their individaul freedoms and liberties are very slowly being dissolved.
Andrew W says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:25 pm
“It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.
In a war, both sides insist that their opponents are evil incarnate and that “God is on our side.”
The CAGW war is being fought on three fronts; “religion” (sheer belief), politics (how can we use this to increase our power and influence), and science (there are many honest brokers trying to figure out the climate despite the requisite AGW or CC mention in every paper).
Go ahead, ask either side who is evil incarnate and who has science (or ‘god’) on their side.
Smokey: “But the PNAS list is an official blacklist endorsed by a quasi-national organization. It is entirely political in nature, arbitrarily assigning names based only on someone’s perception, and not allowing for any recourse if a listed scientist objects.”
Thats exactly right. Many of the names on that list are NOT persons who describe themselves as AGW skeptics, but they were unfortunately naive enough to think that being a public spirited citizen and putting your name to a statement urging objectivity and restraint against jumping to conclusions, would be met with anything other than condemnation and character assassination.
There should never be recriminations and reprisals taken against anybody of any political persuasion for expressing their opinion in an earnest and honest manner in a respectful mein. Those that seek to engage in reprisals ARE, in fact, fascists *using* marxist methods (for those who have studied political science, ideology and propaganda, etc know that there is not much difference between the practices of Goebbels, of Mao, and Alinksy. Alinsky never needed to use actual bullets in his “community organising” of urban leftist insurgencies because he found it was more effective simply to destroy the person in reputation, because such tactics have the added bonus of often times making one’s target behave badly in public, and occasionally end their own lives in private.
Many who think in the traditional political spectrum are very blinkered about how they define “fascist” and “marxist”, seeing fascist as being someone who uses the state to exterminate a given ethnic group, when that is merely one minor and nonmandatory policy, when in general fascism is any policy that seeks to use the force majeur of the state to dictate how private citizens live their lives and use their property. Land use zoning regulations are a form of fascism as much as directing industry what to produce and how much to produce. Economically, marxism is fascist in nature, in that it seeks an extreme form of central planning and regulation of economic enterprises to the point that the whole reason for having a private owner is rather superfluous and is thus done away with.
Where marxists and fascists tend to differ is in foreign policy. Fascists are nationalists because they seek to bolster and preserve the power of the state to achieve perfect order, their method of enforced ethnic homogeneity as a means of building nationalist loyalty is merely one means to an end, while marxists are internationalists who seek to tear down nation states through revolution in order to achieve global brotherhood of workers under The Party. Both use socialism as a means to an end, so the idea of defining one as right wing and the other as left wing is really only valid from a certain perspective of international politics. Both are totalitarian in nature and both are enemies of the individual, the concept of individual ownership of property, and the private acquisition of wealth.
That said, marxism as a social-historical theory, per se, is neither right nor left, it is a set of tools. It is a way of looking at history and society. Marxism in art is a progressive evolution of art away from the realism of the Renaissance masters and toward an avant garde academic movement of art commenting on art for the sake of promoting political orthodoxy. For instance, the Bauhaus School of art and architecture is decidedly marxist in nature because it seeks to empower the people to have “good art” and “good furniture and architecture” that is utilitarian and common. The Constructivist school is also marxist, as is Art Deco (now I love art deco design quite a lot, but this says nothing about my politics). Such avant garde movements arose as a means of establishing a new elite that was intent on telling people what was good art. Futurism, particularly of the italian variety, was closely aligned with Moussolini’s fascist movement, however it is also marxist as it attempts to define a progression of history of a person or thing through time as a more true definition of that person or things identity. So to, then, is the Cubism of Picasso that evolved out of Futurism.
Similarly, political correctness is social marxism as it uses softcore psychological methods to enforce orthodoxy and drive out dissent.
Now, back to political activism. A political group can be marxist in tactics without being marxist in agenda. Understanding that these two can be entire divorced from each other and still allow the group to be effective is of crucial importance. One important concept of marxism is dialectical conflict, the idea of creating opposing groups to polarize an issue, putting them in conflict, and dictating the progression of the conflict in order to manipulate the public into moving their perception of the “moderate middle” by alienating and disenfranchising a group that gets manipulated into committing atrocity.
Real marxists would use this method, for instance, to stage protests whose aim is to encourage police forces to brutalize peaceful demonstrators, in order to strip the state of its moral authority to govern and moving public sympathy toward the cause of those protesting.
However, my eminent domain activism, for instance, also utilized dialectical conflict. I behaved as a tin pot fascist, “victimizing” the poor supreme court justices, in order to motivate their allies in the two major parties into voting for the Eminent Domain Restriction Amendment that I was the actual author of. Thus I was a non-marxist using marxist tactics to achieve anti-marxist ends. Some might say it was unethical of me to do that, but in reality, since I, as a libertarian, was excluded from the electoral political process by rigged election laws, it was perfectly acceptable for me to use other means to get elected officials to do what I wanted even though they thought they were acting against me and not with me.
To conclude, marxist tactics are inimical to and corrosive of classical liberal representative democracy and republican individualism. They are intended to undermine a stable political system in order to establish a new political order. On the other hand, if a representative democracy is intentionally structured to alienate and disenfranchise some segment of society, using such tactics is the only option in order to achieve a more perfect union. This is true whether the disenfranchised are blacks fighting for civil rights, libertarians fighting for access to the ballot, or scientists fighting to reestablish scientific principles of skepticism, objectivity, and transparency.
berniel:
“…the black list was not made by state institution.”
The NAS is supported by the State. This odious blacklist is now official dogma.
I had posted a [very polite] comment on the site of the maker of the PNAS blacklist. It never appeared. Further, his blogroll lists the sites that he reads. WUWT is missing – yet he responds specifically to WUWT posts.
Defenders of this situation, have at it. I look forward to your defense of this official PNAS blacklist.
This is black-helicopters paranoia, folks. And as usual, not a trace of true skepticism in sight.
Dave Springer says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
> I remember the effort to take the SCJ’s fancy vacation homes under the eminent domain laws they found to be constitutional. Brilliant.
It started with the proposal to take Souter’s home and turn it into the Lost Liberty Hotel. (With an ice cream parlor to be named Just Desserts.)
Have you seen Souter’s home? It was no fancy vacation house, see old and new at
http://www.bergproperties.com/blog/retired-supreme-court-associate-justice-david-souter-pays-510k-for-a-new-3500-square-foot-house-in-hopkinton-nh/
Somehow Wikipedia tolerates the story, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Liberty_Hotel
One good thing out of all of it was that it helped firm up limits on eminent domain in New Hampshire and other states.
Getting close to the time we will be able to fight fire with fire.
Wonder how the warmies will feel when they have zero funding.
The current administration spent it all.
Sorry if this was pointed out on an earlier thread, but I thought it worth pointing to the irony that this PNAS paper did not pass normal peer review. It is marked as ‘contributed’, meaning that the senior author, as a member of the NAS simply sent the manuscript to two colleagues, then submitted it to PNAS together with their ‘reviews’ for publication. This is very far from peer review in the biological sciences where reviewers are selected by an editor and offer anonymous (and frequently tough) criticisms. Whether PNAS should retain this route for publication is a different discussion but its amusing that this particular paper, seeking to measure the reputation of other scientists, should be slipped into the literature through a backdoor.
Mike Lorrey says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:56 pm
=======================
Saved that for future reference. Extremely well said.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Gneiss says:
July 7, 2010 at 8:00 pm
This is black-helicopters paranoia, folks. And as usual, not a trace of true skepticism in sight.
=====================================
Uh huh. And did you ever think that your hand-waving is even remotely better?
You won’t address what is being said, because you can’t. You don’t know, so you dismiss.
And as usual, not a trace of truth-seeking from one of the Believers.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Smokey
The paper is a compilation of the voluntary signatures to open letters or declarations expressing skepticism of the IPCC’s findings and how often papers published by said people are cited, there is nothing arbitary about it.
All this paper does is put the voluntary letters and declarations contrary to AGW in one place, hardly a Machiavellian exercise, except for maybe a lazy Machiavelli who can’t be bothered to look up things on the net for themselves.
Inhofe is also accused of further fuelling a spike in hate mail and politically motivated freedom of information requests in the three months since the emails of climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
Yes, that’s so outrageous because FOI requests should only come from those who agree with you. [insert emoticon indicating mordant sarcasm]
We don’t have a single black boot on the neck Party, but we do have a Good Cop/Bad Cop political agenda that has been at work for decades.
That is why there is a Tea Party. AGW isn’t an end, it’s a means to an end: the ultimate pickpocket followed by chains and debtors prison.
Ha…I knew the mass exonerations of Mann and Jones would push WUWT toward the nuttery right. Kind of like the way the 911 Commission report made truthers even crazier.
REPLY: Boris, you’ve been saying terrible things about me and this blog from day 1, it wouldn’t matter what we published, you’d find a way to make some smart-assed comment out of it. It is your MO -A
lichanos says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
You apparently haven’t investigated this issue well enough yet. There have been threats, both direct and veiled.
More importantly, we today have some of the most powerful individuals in the world tightening the noose around America’s energy throat because they are members of this cult. These individuals are too powerful (and too corrupt) to ignore. Renewable energy isn’t the goal. Denial of energy is the goal…. Along with denial of water and land on which to grow food.
This has happened throughout history.
Our country is being systematically strangled for energy. The FDA is so obstructionist, they won’t let skimmers suck up 99% of the gulf oil because 1% might be returned in the discharge. This is psychotic. Members of this cult are devoid of rational thought.
And
villabolo says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm
The difference between these two sides : Inhofe vs AGW establishment (which includes most members of Congress, The President, Most of Europe, Academia, and the EPA) is that his attack is defensive. Inhofe is not the big dog here. The US DOJ is on the CAGW side!
But hopefully, if we take the house this year, he can get some real teeth. Exposing the FRAUD of CAGW is absolutely necessary to stop this dangerous cult. The courts must be used because the CAGW “scientists” are political activists enjoying cover from the ruling party. This is the only way to get the facts into the open. I have no pity for those who would destroy this country. They should be prosecuted.
jcrabb says at 8:25 pm [ … ]
You have it wrong. The PNAS blacklist names political undesirables. Rather, people should be free to offer their opinions unimpeded by political correctness. Blacklists like the PNAS list do not allow that. They are the equivalent of the Supreme Soviet Politburo.
It is reprehensible that a free society should accept the blacklisting of those with a different scientific point of view.
Why do you and Boris defend the PNAS blacklist?
lichanos said [on persecution of dissidents by environmentalists]:
“It is not the black boot of the one party state coming down on your windpipe.”
It is. In the USA, both parties are green. In the UK, all three parties are green.
There is one party in any modern Western state, and it is green.
Not to mention that the green banner of Al Gore’s religion merges seamlessly with the green banner of the fundamentalist Islam. Jews, take note.
lichanos says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
“Oh my, it’s commentary like this that makes me embarrassed to be a climate change skeptic.”
And then goes on to say how the AGW movement isn’t the worst form of socialism nor the worst form of fascism, but later bemoans the misguided environmentalists. lichanos, correct me if I’m wrong on summarizing your statement.
That said, given the multinational response, the laws that have already been passed, and the world leaders demand for more to be done, I’d say reality differs. If the Hansens, Manns, Jones’ of this world are bright enough to be given weight to their opinions, then they can’t possibly be oblivious to the laws which are being passed at their behest. Viewing the laws that have been passed, which most of us live under, I can’t understand how you don’t see the totalitarianism in the said laws. The world’s demand and necessity of energy and the subsequent throttling of said energy can’t be expressed in any other way other than oppression. The proposed and/or implementation of taxing industrial entities for the byproduct of production can be seen as nothing other than a tax on capitalism. Please define socialism again, because I can’t see how that doesn’t meet the criteria. The intrusion of personal liberties in response to this alleged catastrophe hasn’t been seen in a few decades, yet, foretold by Orwell. Today, in-home displays, which can communicate, via the ZigBee protocol, with the various appliances in your home has been implemented. By implemented, I mean control when your appliances can be used or not. In what manner do you choose to rationalize away the totalitarian implications of such an vile act? How do you not throw this at the feet of the “AGW” crowd and the complicit various powers? By various powers, I mean, government and quasi governmental entities, such as utilities. You may take offense of the communism and fascism references if you will, but that simply denies the reality the rest of us are living today.
Personally, I don’t give a rat’s azz if this globe is warming or not. Likely, (with a confidence factor of 60%) 90% of the rest of the world feels the same way. Yet, we have intrusive laws being passed. We have restrictive power use being supplied. We have punitive damages being assessed to productive corporations for no other reason than to continue to be productive they require more energy.
Yeh, no socialism there, no fascism there, no totalitarianism there. It’s just some tree huggers out of skelter. I’m very glad there are some that understand the world isn’t always made of people just misguided, but there are, indeed, people of evil intent.
a group of renegade marxists who sought to use Fruedism to spread marxism through society
What is ‘Fruedism’?
Note to lefties: It is your side that has politicized everything. We can’t even eat or breath in peace without the word “unsustainable” and “man is destroying the world” thrown at us. Get over yourselves. I don’t know what you are doing to your environment, but my little piece of the world is better than ever.
Layne Blanchard says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Our country is being systematically strangled for energy. The FDA is so obstructionist, they won’t let skimmers suck up 99% of the gulf oil because 1% might be returned in the discharge. This is psychotic. Members of this cult are devoid of rational thought.
============================
Very well said.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
It would be nice if the debate changed to WHAT is right or wrong versus WHO is right or wrong.
I don’t think the debate is settled yet so the focus should be on what is factually accurate. By moving the debate to WHO, you are skipping the step where the science proves 3.0C per doubling is accurate. You are assuming it is and that makes the WHO question a “political” one rather than a “scientific” one.
“We have punitive damages being assessed to productive corporations for no other reason than to continue to be productive they require more energy.”
OK, yeh, that was probably fragmented too much.
We have punitive damages being assessed to productive corporations for no other reason thanthey wish to continue to be productiveand they require more energy to be productive.……….for the people that can’t read between the lines.
villabolo says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm
“It illuminated a lot of what I’d been thinking over the past years, and perfectly explains why the AGW alarmists behave the way they do. The witch hunts, the character assasination, the Alinsky method du jour. The Hockey Team is a Marxist organization, not in the traditional economic sense (though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist) but in how they operate toward their opponents.
Villabolo
I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. Seems those that attack, conveniently choose to “not remember” the carefully crafted attacks on the most qualified Climatologists/scientists who dared to question the orthodoxy of AGW or raised objection to the scary prediction, the questionable results of climate models that were peddled as scientific truth. Easy then to snipe and email each other to plant destructors in the way of any article that didn’t toe the line of CAGW. How many times did we get scientific consensus rammed down our throat and if we dared to quote any authorative scientist in support of the sceptics, The he’s an Effin liar, worked for big tobacco, paid by big oil and all this being fed out from those convenient cabal of insider government paid, academic protected, taxpayer funded towers of evil – yep they have convenient as well as short memories, the epithets hurled, the ad hominem attacks. It was nasty then from the warmist eletist side, and when the tide turns against their shoddy version of science, its the same old spite and nasty black balling to defend their right to plunder the public purse WITHOUT QUESTION from academics, science, under dictatorial protection.
Hmmn not surprising that the tide of public opinion has turned as even the much ignored and detested start to understand how badly the have been conned, and they are weeping and whining – I just say with a smile – who are the real deniers now!!
Thanks for the article, thought provoking and timely as they struggle to pull their jackboots on – its hard with underpants around ankles!! (and their fingers in their ears)
Layne Blanchard says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:09 pm
But hopefully, if we take the house this year, he can get some real teeth. Exposing the FRAUD of CAGW is absolutely necessary to stop this dangerous cult. The courts must be used because the CAGW “scientists” are political activists enjoying cover from the ruling party. This is the only way to get the facts into the open. I have no pity for those who would destroy this country. They should be prosecuted.
VILLABOLO:
Forever the bully pretending to be the victim. Can’t you smell the oil all over yourself?
***********
“Those who bring ruin on their families will inherit only wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise.”–Proverbs 11:29 Today’s New International Version
“The critics of AGW are not having their lives threatened, they are not, the vast majority of them anyway, being tossed out of their jobs, …”
Oh, well that’s all right then. Only a minority of them are being tossed out of their jobs. Why didn’t someone say so? Nothing to worry about at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
http://www.the-family-doctor.com/the-family-doctor/f/freudism.htm
Whatever. It’s abstract, generalizations applied to individuals. It’s upside down on its first outing. Freud was insanely wrong.
To those who want to take politics out of this debate: the simple truth is you can’t because if you take away the politics from the global warming scam, all you have is a small bit of apparent warming of no concern to anyone.
So whilst I do not particularly agree with the specific analysis above, I do agree that understanding the politics of the global warming scam is fundamental to understanding the causes and power base of this scam.
I used to be a member of the Green party in Scotland, I was even selected to stand for the Scottish Parliament with an outside chance of getting in. However when I looked at many of the activists I found they were far far more interested in what I’d call pink-socialism than in green conservation.
But eco-activism has been a god send for the left, creating a whole new group of people who are willing to support parties of the left who would traditionally have voted for parties on the right. Indeed, the voters who are most likely to vote “green” tend to be professional classes (old ABs) who would otherwise tend to vote for the right.
But to be honest, I could equally make comments about the right. In Scotland, the biggest winners from the huge government created subsidy toward wind have been land owners and commercial wind farm developers. I could easily make the case that this whole global warming scam is conspiracy of the right dreamt up by rich landowners to such money from left leaning politicians.
And don’t be smug if you are a middle leaning “liberal”, because I could just as easily put forward a liberal intelligentsia conspiracy to get government to pay for airy fairy academic rubbish for the traditional “sit on the fence” academics of this world.
The truth is that this scam is supported by a rainbow alliance include left leaning greens, right leaning land-owners and centrist academics. And that is one hell of an alliance: the left with its ability to mobilise the populace, the right with its money and the centrist who have been able to control the academic research agenda.
mike, thanx for the essay.
however, it is vital this fight for scientific accuracy on the subject of CAGW does not fall into the left/right political pit. there are sceptics of all political persuasions and what unites many will be opposition to the money grab and the creation of another unsustainable financial bubble created out of thin air.
7 July: UK Tele: James Delingpole: Never mind the Climategate whitewash – what about our new £50 billion annual climate bill?
The new figure our glorious Coalition intends to squander – every single year for the next 40 years – is £50 billion, all in order to deal with a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
We learned this horror in questions posed in the Lords earlier this week by Lord Lawson of Blaby in response to something called the Green Investment Bank Commission on “Unlocking investment to deliver Britain’s low carbon future” – aka the Wigley Report.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: “I am grateful to the Leader of the House. Is my noble friend aware that only a couple of days ago, Mr Bob Wigley, the chairman of the previous Government’s Green Investment Bank Commission, stated that meeting the requirements of the absurd Climate Change Act will cost the United Kingdom £50 billion a year, every year, for the next 40 years. How-above all in this age of austerity-can this possibly be justified?”
I don’t know which is more terrifying – Lawson’s shock revelation or the nauseating mix of delusional arrogance and complacency in the response from the coalition’s parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Energy and Climate Change Lord Marland.
Lord Marland: ” I am very grateful to noble Lords for fighting over a question for me; it is quite rare in this job. However, I must correct my noble friend; the Green Investment Bank was an initiative set up by our own party and one must not rule out the phenomenal business opportunities that it offers for this country. We must have 2 million heat pumps by 2020. We must have bioenergy, which will create 100,000 jobs at a value of £116 million. Wind alone should create 130,000 jobs at a value of £36 billion. At a time when the country needs investment, these are heartening numbers.”
Why is that Lord Marland’s boast reminds me so much of my favourite Daily Mash story – the one about ex-chancellor Alastair Darling’s ingenious scheme to pay off the national debt by selling unicorns to the Chinese?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100046507/never-mind-the-climategate-whitewash-what-about-our-new-50-billion-annual-climate-bill/
Wikipedia: Jonathan Peter Marland, Baron Marland (born 14 August 1956) is a British businessman and former Treasurer of the Conservative Party…
In 2010, he was made Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change [12], serving on Her Majesty’s Government frontbench
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Marland,_Baron_Marland
Sarkozy, Merkel and their ilk are as keen to create the CO2 bubble as are Obama and Lula, not to mention the Chinese.
it is on this level we can all agree and the fight is far from over. more power to the sceptics on all political sides or none.
Bill Illis: Your premise sounds nice and reasonable. Unfortunately, the big Government advocates have decided that C02 is the culprit and YOU and YOUR FAMILY are the cause of earth ending warming that has not occured. Never mind that there is no evidence of their claims and the weather has always changed. It is still YOUR FAULT!
Alexander Feht says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:11 pm
. . . In the USA, both parties are green. In the UK, all three parties are green.
There is one party in any modern Western state, and it is green.
Not to mention that the green banner of Al Gore’s religion merges seamlessly with the green banner of the fundamentalist Islam. Jews, take note.
***********************
VILLABOLO:
Let’s see. Republicans are “green”?!?! And, of course, Al the Demon Gore is spiritually seamlessly merged with Islamic fundamentalism.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnzHtm1jhL4&hl=en_US&fs=1]
[Thank you for providing your theme song. ~dbs]
Bill Illis says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:41 pm
“It would be nice if the debate changed to WHAT is right or wrong versus WHO is right or wrong.”
I disagree. The question goes directly to who is right and who is wrong. It should be WHAT, but that isn’t what occurred. If we’d not passed prohibitive and expensive laws, we could still debate the question. However, we went beyond the scope of the question and made it an assertion.
All the while, we know, from this website and others, but particularly Mr. Watts, no one can say, with any reasonable assertion of knowledge whether the earth is warming or not. Check the weather stations and the statistical perjury occurring. No one can say with any reasonable assertion what the optimum temp should be, so we don’t know if we’re running to the best temp or not, even if the first assertion is correct. Maybe we should be a bit warmer. Lastly, if we are warming, we don’t KNOW the cause of the alleged warming. Many have said CO2, but that assertion is only a hypothesis, many others have attributed the alleged warming to other factors.
Given the uncertainties, why go through the draconian, totalitarian measures? Who is indeed the question for me. Even if their assumptions are correct, they can’t possibly know they are correct, yet it is insisted on human suffering to correct something they don’t know is in error.
Yes, beyond the question of right, it goes to morality. I see the CAGW crowd as woefully lacking in such a base, human quality.
This is the kind of place bad scientists belong.
Could we come to an understanding that the word “breath” is a noun and “breathe” is a verb and use them appropriately in our posts? AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
[Reply: Why certainly, Sisyphus. A simple task. ~dbs, mod.]
Smokey,
If Heartland or CATO had put this list together showing how many Scientists are critical of AGW I wonder if the same claims of ‘Blacklist’ would be heard.
pat says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:57 pm (Edit)
“mike, thanx for the essay.
however, it is vital this fight for scientific accuracy on the subject of CAGW does not fall into the left/right political pit. there are sceptics of all political persuasions and what unites many will be opposition to the money grab and the creation of another unsustainable financial bubble created out of thin air. ”
I agree entirely, Pat. If you read my entire essay you’d see that I dismiss the whole left/right thing as inapplicable. The idea that you can assign two ideologies that believe in the same means to similar ends to extreme opposite ends of some fictitious single axis political spectrum is laughable. Libertarians like to promote two axes in their Nolan Chart to help illustrate this, but even this merely covers domestic policies and does nothing about foreign relations. I try to make it clear here that I distinguish marxist policies from marxist tactics. You can have one without the other. Marxist tactics are a toolset for undermining a stably governed society with a revolutionary movement. It is not necessary that the forces behind the instability be leftists, or rightists. In this case, it is some scientists using marxist tools to undermine science in order to enforce a politically motivated orthodoxy against other scientists.
Scientists in general should be aware enough to recognise these tactics when they arise and agressively reject them from infiltrating science, no matter what agenda is being pursued by the practitioners of these tactics.
Mike Lorrey says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:56 pm
I behaved as a tin pot fascist, “victimizing” the poor supreme court justices, in order to motivate their allies in the two major parties into voting for the Eminent Domain Restriction Amendment that I was the actual author of. Thus I was a non-marxist using marxist tactics to achieve anti-marxist ends. Some might say it was unethical of me to do that, but in reality, since I, as a libertarian, was excluded from the electoral political process by rigged election laws, it was perfectly acceptable for me to use other means to get elected officials to do what I wanted…
Interesting post, and interesting followup comment.
To try to help steer the debate back towards scientific relevance, I would like to mention the book by Paul Feyerabend called “Against Method”. In it, Paul Feyerabend described the way scientific viewpoints are advanced and promoted and achieve dominance not by revealing Scientific Truth through rational debate and logical reason in an orderly sphere of academic neutrality, but by kicking, gouging, maligning, cajoling, evangelising, outmanouvreing, lying and cheating. Just like politics. He is not saying that this is how it should be, but that it is how it is.
Science is not seperate from the rest of the sphere of human intellectual activity, and it’s players are not any less human than the rest of humanity, with all it’s faults and traits. He summarized the situation with the phrase “Anything goes”, which is pretty much what Mike descibes in the way he got what he wanted in his battle with the state.
It’s also the way the warmists have tried to make their view dominant, using a mixture of rabble rousing, false certainty, infiltration of institutions and their quality control procedures, and media manipulation, all resting on a corpus (or corpse as we see it) of scientific knowledge which claims legitimacy.
Sceptics have fought back through the uncontrolled media (blogosphere) and organised their own conferences and press releases, championing legitimate scientists who oppose or at least nuance the warmist stance with their output.
The great danger here is in making stereotyped caricatures out of the actors on both sides of the divide. There are warmies who genuinely believe the world is in danger and practice good science which feeds into the warmist agenda. at the other end of the spectrum there are cycnical manipulators such as Gore and Romm, who peddle falsehood and political bias under the guise of sciency propaganda. There is a coterie of salaried hangers on who want to advance their careers on the back of the green agenda etc etc.
People who strongly believe in the scientific method and simply want good science to prevail are rightly appalled at the misuse and manipulation of the data and theories. It seems to me the way to getting climate science, and a few other sciences back on track is by reinforcing oversight of quality control, and giving the informed public more of a say in the directing of public funding towards research.
In the C19th there was a strong push from the enlightenment science community for a seperation of church and state. Reading the main post, I think many will be pushing for a seperation of science and state. The danger is, once a field of human endevour is cut off from the political sphere, it withers intellectually, much as the church has over the C20th.
Science unable to influence policy loses much of it’s raison d’etre. Science manipulated by policy makers loses much of it’s moral and literal authority, whichever colour of administration is in power at the time. To polarize the science debate around political categories simply drives the whole enterprise further into the mire of personal prejudice and mutual misunderstanding. National politics doesn’t export well.
They say the only certainties in life are Death and taxes. The death of the current adminstration will be followed by another which still needs to raise taxes. Those of us who cherish science and the truth can only hope it will be honest about why we will all be paying more for energy in the future.
jcrabb says:
July 7, 2010 at 10:40 pm (Edit)
“If Heartland or CATO had put this list together showing how many Scientists are critical of AGW I wonder if the same claims of ‘Blacklist’ would be heard.”
That is irrelevant. The PNAS article clearly states that they assembled this list with the stated purpose of using it to inform their media lackeys about who is politically reliable and who is not in AGW orthodoxy. Therefore, it is a blacklist.
We bloggers are not MSM, while AGW people are deeply woven into the major media and major government agencies, thus we are incapable of being oppressors when we don’t hold government power or media influence, while AGW elites are all about power and influence.
Can I be on the black list too? Can I can I can I paaleeezzze????
Maybe we could have an annual party / awards ceremony for folks who have been on the black list the longest. Issue little medallions with the date one first made the list?
Surely there is some way we can recognize these folks as being clearly the best and the brightest… Perhaps an annual research grant for the Most Influential on the Blacklist or “best blacklisted paper of the year” award? I’d kick in some bucks for that…
E.M.Smith says:
July 7, 2010 at 10:54 pm
Issue little
medallionsenamelled yellow smiley badges with the date one first made the list?There, improved it for you. How’s the competition going Anthony?
Great ideas E.M.
Villabolo (whoever you are):
1) Yes, most Republicans in the US and most Tories in Britain make noises in favor of the AGW/ACC scam. This poison pervades the whole fabric of our society; Vatican is as green as EPA.
2) All green media outfits (such as BBC World News) are active supporters of Hamas, Fatah, and Hezbolla. The leftist anti-Semitism is established and widespread in Europe, and is becoming fashionable among American socialists.
Don’t pretend that you were born yesterday, please.
Using the F, N or C word is traditionally taken to mean you have lost the argument. Losing your job /funding is not the same as going to the gulag. It may be alleged there is a Hollywood blacklist. Unequal access to the media is annoying but largely misses the point. The big climate deal failed. The public are not prepared to take the hit on living standard. Public belief in climate warming is like the everyday Church of England folk. There is a vague feeling they should believe, but they still prefer to go shop on Sunday rather than go to Church. You can pass bills to censor Films/DVDs/internet as Christians we need to protect children. But if the target is divorce or birth control/ we are whole not lot Christians, as we are directly concerned.
So if you are a mild warmer or cooler, this is not life and death stuff, and we need to take a tone that reflects that. Which in turn means when people make comments about going after 17 Warmer or any warmers we clearly have to oppose it. You can tackle the idea but not the person. You can go after an error of fact or interpretation.
Even malpractice is in practice at the limit and needs a light touch, as there appears not to be common standards.
Bill,
IMO the “what” is valuing the title above the actual claim. In the AGW debate the title is the credentials of the individual or group who makes the claim. It is the (academic) hierarchy which determines those credentials, with the hierarchy being instrumental in marginalizing the individual, as discussed by Mike Lorrey.
In the context of AGW/ACC, the claim is that there exists current and foreseeable environmental damage which is due to anthropogenic causes, specifically carbon-based emissions. IMO the best form of denial is one that specific enough to repel straw men from the apologists and has sufficient relevance such that it is apparent that it relates to an essential link in the logical chain of the claim.
I would guess that the particular argument you favour depends on your area of expertise. The point I would like to stress is that your argument should avoid the fallacy (called an appeal to authority) of making a reference to a title in support of that argument. If a reader picks up on your fallacy then he has good reason to abandon the consideration of your argument.
jcrabb says:
July 7, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Smokey,
If Heartland or CATO had put this list together showing how many Scientists are critical of AGW I wonder if the same claims of ‘Blacklist’ would be heard.
That is exactly the point. They wouldn’t and they haven’t.
I’ll stick in my oar again on behalf of my button-idea: A pair of upraised hands snapping a hockey stick, with a large-type caption around the rim that reads, “Gore Resisters League.” It’s a clear, clever “grabber.” (Would work for T-shirts too.) Nothing else comes close.
Ditto the queen. (Nattering to the UN on the matter now.)
From the green-agenda website, a small sample of the attitudes and politics behind the AGW attempts to establish central control —
“The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society,
which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”
– David Brower,
founder of Friends of the Earth
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of
saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have
an ecologically sound society under socialism.
I don’t think it is possible under capitalism”
– Judi Bari,
principal organiser of Earth First!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong,
founder of the UN Environment Programme
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the
United States. De-development means bringing our
economic system into line with the realities of
ecology and the world resource situation.”
– Paul Ehrlich,
Professor of Population Studies
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another
United States. We can’t let other countries have the same
number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US.
We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
– Michael Oppenheimer,
Environmental Defense Fund
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty,
reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
– Professor Maurice King
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place
for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and
plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams,
free shackled rivers and return to wilderness
millions of acres of presently settled land.”
– David Foreman,
co-founder of Earth First!
Arno Arrak described Bjorn Lomborg as the first victim of the warmists. It is worth reminding people (although readers of pro-AGW blogs would be more in need of a reminder) that some of Lomborg’s opponents complained about his work to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) and the DCSD, to its shame, found Lomborg guilty on the following counts:
1. Fabrication of data;
2. Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
3. Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
4. Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
5. Plagiarism;
6. Deliberate misinterpretation of others’ results.
At first I thought that some of the items on that list reminded me of Climategate, but I was obviously wrong because the Climategate crew did nothing wrong according to the … what was name of the Committee? I’ve forgotten but never mind. If you wait a few weeks I’m sure that yet another committee will come along to exonerate them.
By the way, anyone who did not follow the Bjorn Lomborg saga can read more about it in the Wikipedia article about him. He was eventually exonerated after the Danish Ministry of Research and Information Technology investigated the DCSD’s handling of the investigation and found it improper.
Actually I don’t think such committees are a very good way of settling scientific questions regardless of whether the persons under investigation are people like Bjorn Lomborg (who actually accepts AGW but thinks money spent combatting it could be better spent on other things like providing clean drinking water) or like Phil Jones and his associates in the Climategate scandal.
“And the irony is that of the quixotic quartet, only one (Schneider) can lay claim to “credibility” and “expertise” – in accordance with their “criteria”!”
As hr001 noted, the name-calling exercise PNAS paper about the ‘expertise’ of ‘skeptics’ is put together by a student, a librarian-blogger and a private foundation officer. They sure missed the irony train on that one.
“We, the undersigned hereby find that skeptics have no expertise and therefore the media should not talk to them, but we don’t have much of the same ‘expertise’ anyway”
Secondly,
If you live out in the rainforest subsisting on yams and small mammals, minding your own business and you are forced to organize your community when you are evicted – you become a “left-wing revolutionary”.
If you live out in the suburbs, minding your own business and you are forced to organize your community and protest against one more ‘tax’ – you automatically become a ‘right-wing, libertarian nutter’, ‘tea-party revolutionary’ etc.
The idea is not to smear you per se, but to smear you, the initial naysayers and early protesters who awaken to some of the negative aspects of any measure (say CAGW-directed policies), so much that, other neutrals will not follow along the same path or discuss the issues raised. It is a form of exclusionary politics.
If AGW is ever falsified this list will have the opposite effect for which it was intended. They may even receive a joint Nobel Prize. :o)
I note that Saul Alinsky is mentioned several times in this post and commentary. People seem to think that his methods are the exclusive property of the looney-liberal-groupthing-left. The New York Times noted several years ago that conservatives and libertarians were reading his works and applying his organizing techniques with good results. (I believe Newt Gingrich was a fan.)
Politics is about power: who has it, how to get it, what to do with it. It’s really silly to to approach scientific issues politically, and to assume that your opponents in scientific debate are the only ones doing the dirty deeds you would never stoop to. Most often, you would, and have, when the opportunity arises.
The defense some Warmers offer here of the blacklist mentality is frightingly illogical. That itself completely corroborates this post.
No comment.
“Fascist Ecology: The “Green Wing” of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents
Peter Staudenmaier”
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
[reply] Link seems to be broken, try this: http://www.openwaldorf.com/anthroposophyandecofascism.pdf RT-mod
My conclusion – homo-sapiens is a highly superstitious genus, with an innate need to seek relevance through worship of one religion or another, be it Buddhist, Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, Islam or in the Western post religious era the earth mother Gaia.
Sadly over the ages religious zeal has lead to the persecution of many visionaries of science e.g. Darwin, Copernicus, Galileo to name but a few. Sadly, many of our present day scientific visionaries will have to endure this vilification by ideological zealots and the opportunistic beneficiaries of the greenhouse gravy train until the passage of time inevitably vindicates their efforts.
The author says:
“Maybe I’m an ignorant heathen, but it seems to me that someone who can’t get their most important ideas on the same subject, with sufficient proof to convince the entire world of the truth of their writing, published in a few papers, is simply regurgitating the same old tired pap and really isn’t intelligent enough to have even one “big paper” in their lives. But I may be wrong.”
Yes, you’re wrong. Simply look at the number of papers Roy Spencer has published. Or maybe Stephen Hawking: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=a+hawking&FORMAT=WWW&SEQUENCE=
But I wouldn’t call you an ignorant heathen.
So, it has come down to :”If you can’t attack the science, you attack the scientist”.
“The market for mitigation credits is now worth an estimated $2.4 billion a year in the United States”
“The trade in ‘species credits’ amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”
“In 2009, the voluntary carbon market was worth about $387 million worldwide,…”
“In 2009, the global carbon market was … $144 billion for the regulated market”
“The money raised (Mexican forest tax) has grown from US$15 million in 2003 to $150 million this year.”
“Similar schemes are under way in countries such as China, the United States, South Africa and Costa Rica”
Where, can you guess these ideas and facts are floating around? In the latest issue of Nature magazine, no less.
These people are running a protection racket on nature itself. Plain and simple. Only it is couched in good terms and published in the peer-reviewed literature.
Nature Volume: 466, Pages: 184–185 Date published: (08 July 2010)
DOI: doi:10.1038/466184a
More…
“Imagine, for example, that the Brazilian government introduces regulation that imposes a value on the environmental services of a rainforest. The regulation would make it more expensive to destroy the rainforest, thereby increasing the production costs of whatever replaces it, for example, soya beans or cattle. As these costs would be passed on to the consumer, this would push people and companies to find ways of producing without destroying the ecosystem. At the same time, it would make it more profitable to protect the rainforest, thus creating a market for conservation.”
“Green blackout
Careless environmental ideology was a root cause of the blackout that cut off power to tens of thousands of Toronto homes, businesses, and institutions for several hours during rush hour on Monday this week.
Although a full technical report on the event is not yet available, it is clear that some transformer station equipment at the Manby transformer station in west Toronto failed. Transmission planning experts have long identified a failure at Manby as a known risk to the reliability of Toronto’s electricity supply. Three years ago, the Ontario Power Authority published a transmission plan for the province that included a detailed scenario analysis for a failure at Manby almost identical to Monday’s event. Unfortunately, that transmission plan got shelved, replaced by government directives to support more wind and solar generators.
Transmission experts have also long recognized that the power transmission network upon which Toronto depends is the most vulnerable to blackouts of the type experienced on Monday of any major financial centre in North America. Toronto’s special weakness is its lack of local transmission system redundancy.
The transmission system serving downtown Toronto is operated at its limit, with no capacity to spare. As a direct result, maintenance schedules are squeezed or eliminated, a factor that may well have played a role in initiating the event. The ability of grid operators to transfer load from one transmission path to another in the event of failures is severely limited, a factor that directly determined the scale and duration of the blackout. The large number of customers blacked out and the duration of blackout was a function of the system’s flawed design.
Environmentalists, including the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, the David Suzuki Foundation, World Wildlife Foundation Canada, Peter Tabuns of the Ontario NDP and Toronto Councillor Paula Fletcher, have played leading roles in blocking the development of another transmission line into the city’s core.
Many environmental organizations, working with the Ontario government’s Trillium Foundation (which distributes the government’s gambling profits), the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure and others formed an umbrella group in 2007 called Transforming Toronto. The new group was developed specifically to oppose a new high-voltage transmission line into Toronto. In Ontario’s highly politicized electricity policy environment, affected electric utilities and agencies have not challenged Transforming Toronto’s fluffy assertions that transmission reinforcement is not needed.”
http://www.financialpost.com/opinion/columnists/3247806/story.html
…-
“To The Good Citizens of Toronto Sweltering Through This Heat Wave
Just think of it as practice.”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/014382.html
@Mike Lorrey – And i was doing so well today that i haven’t engaged my brain all day now you’ve taught me something with your very good post.
And if you put the law behind the warmists i’m sure they’d prove to be facist’s as they’d happily give up trying to assasinate your char. if they could simply cart you off to the Arctic to measure ice gain or feed you to the polar bears (Of course as i said only if it was legal).
Unfortunately for the CAGW, Climategate changed the game. Only die-hard believers left, with the political will destroy economies to save the planet gone for good.
The sceptics have won this battle, but other opportunities to crush the freedom of individuals will be sought by the ruling elite. Luckily we are many while they are few.
There is a difference between being a conservationist and being a climate skeptic. Being your basic New England cheap chap (Use it up, wear it out, do without), I have pretty much replaced all the fluorescent lights in my house with SMD LEDs. (The billion little leds on wafers stacked together have thermal problems that cause the wafers to detach from their power bus, do not use them if they are in any sort of capsule that traps the heat.) So I run my own well, run my solar system, use Leds for lighting and generally use less power. However, there are some places that only an incandescent will do. High temperature environments do not take well to either florescents or leds.
I will admit that part of my motivation is to “get off the grid”. The clowns in DC can’t get at me that way.
Everyone with any sense at all is in favor of “better environmental conditions and cleaning up a little of the garbage we’ve created in the last hundred years or so”, but –and this is where it get’s sticky– there is the truly vast majority in favor of a cleaner and better neighborhood, city, state, country; and there is the truly loudmouthed minority in favor of worldwide retribution, restitution, and restriction programs and, oh yes, total revolution. It’s not a realy distinct “we vs they” fight; it’s much more crazy than that. I guess that’s why our poor old old old politicians are sooooo confused.
Boris says 9:03
Sorry Boris- but I don’t think you know a nut from a plum.
“They” aren’t the enemy.
The narrative they put about is what needs to be dealt with.
Remember “I have met the enemy and the enemy is us”, that’s just how it is .People will always have their point of view without being “evil” or driven by base motives they just see it differently.
Surely the strength of our argument, backed up with science, is sufficient over time without going to war with the other side. Ad hominem attacks are just plain tacky whether against the individual or the group.
We are correct, no doubt about it, we just need to remove their arguments using facts and logic not “sport”.
If we are going to go round in meandering circles, would it not be easier to just get steve to post something about arctic ice….?
Keith Battye says:
July 8, 2010 at 8:01 am
“They” aren’t the enemy.……………………..
And if “facts and logic” do not suffice? Will you surrender to the other point of view?
The question here is one of commitment. And when the stakes are high, so is the commitment. And if both sides are equally committed to their point of view? Carried to the logical extreme it does indeed mean eventual war. Real war, with real weapons. As has been demonstrated time, and time again, throughout history when differing points of view were irreconcilable.
Was the exclusion of skeptic scientists prompted by a coordinated effort of ex-Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan & activists at Greenpeace?
“Smearing Global Warming Skeptics”: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/smearing_global_warming_skepti.html
“The lack of climate skeptics on PBS’s ‘Newshour’ “: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/12/the_lack_of_climate_skeptics_o.html
Ref – Keith Battye says:
July 8, 2010 at 8:01 am
“They” aren’t the enemy….”
_______________________
On the other side of the veil this is probably true. On this side, your ‘worst’ enemies are yourself and those most like you. You are in a conflict if they want to force their will upon you, or you wish to force your will upon them. It’s a very human condition, and there is no escape. As they used to say on TV – ‘There can be only one!’
Seriously! This is a conflict. We may be able to dissuade some, perhaps most, but the truly dangerous ones will then be all the more dangerous. With them…? Keep your eyes open and your powder dry;-)
Vilabolo,
The difference is, the 17 on the Inhofe list have all violated scientific integrity standards, and many of them have skirted perfectly valid FOIA requests, and quite of few of them have testified before Congress giving Congress information that now looks like it may have been completely manufactured rather than factual.
You see, for most of those 17, it is fairly likely that their activities can be PROVEN TO HAVE VIOLATED EXISTING LAW.
What are you called if you can be proven to have violated existing law? Hint: Criminal
I am afraid if the shoe fits they are going to have to wear it.
It isn’t a “witch hunt” if the people on the Inhofe list are actually guilty, and that looks like it may very well be the case.
On the PNAS list, the only thing the blacklisted scientists are guilty of is speaking the truth, which is of course heretical to the religion of AGW.
So you mirror analogy is actually quite apt. A mirror shows you THE REVERSE IMAGE of the actual object. So, on the one hand, you have a blacklist of scientists who are attempting to tell the truth, and on the other hand, you have the Inhofe list of 17 “scientists” that very likely did actually violate existing law.
Berniel,
The black list was NOT made by a State Institution? Where do the universities and PNAS get > 90% of their funding from for “climate studies”… the GOVERNMENT perhaps?. PNAS might not be an “official” government institution, but it knows where its money is coming from.
stephen richards says:
July 8, 2010 at 1:16 am
-If Heartland or CATO had put this list together showing how many Scientists are critical of AGW I wonder if the same claims of ‘Blacklist’ would be heard.
That is exactly the point. They wouldn’t and they haven’t.
Here is a list of 500 scientists who disagree with Global warming published by the Heartland Institute,
http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/21971/Research_by_Hundreds_of_Scientists_Undermines_Global_Warming_Alarmism.html
Günther Kirschbaum says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:19 pm
“What is ‘Fruedism’?”
Use your grey cells? The name “Freud” should pop up automatically.
If not, check for the color of the cells. If green, go to a doctor.
Hopefully he will not use anything from Freud when trying to fix the situation.
Curiousgeorge says:
July 8, 2010 at 8:38 am . . . .
That being the case we need to up our game because far too many of our posts are totally interchangeable with theirs with very little modification.
I suppose I feel that we are on the high ground and rushing down the hill into their lowlands will not serve us well.
Be careful getting down into the mud to fight the pig because the pig likes it down there.
Keith Battye says:
July 8, 2010 at 9:18 am
That being the case we need to up our game because far too many of our posts are totally interchangeable with theirs with very little modification………………………
That’s true. However; this issue moved from the scientific arena to the political arena many, many, years ago. The “science” is merely a convenience and is nearly irrelevant to the real dispute – that being political power. It will be won or lost on political ground (or mud if you prefer ), not on the ivory pedestal of science.
“Boris says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Ha…I knew the mass exonerations of Mann and Jones would push WUWT toward the nuttery right. Kind of like the way the 911 Commission report made truthers even crazier.”
I loved the 9/11 Commission report. What a great PDF to download and read. I never knew that Hani Hanjour was “the most experienced of all the 9/11 pilots”. Wow. A few quotes from the owner of the flight school “he was a complete waste of time” and “he could not fly at all”. Then there were the 2 certified flight instructors who checked him out a month before 9/11 “he could not keep the plane level” and “he had trouble controlling the plane”. For a Cessna 172? 1 prop and 2 seats? I think Commander Kolstand was right on his take.
Evil do exist as cancer do exists: A group of cells, enough idiotized as to believe themselves more powerful than God’s organism, rebel against him
The heading above refers to “a famous statement attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group”
“THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…
Smokey says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:09 pm
“The PNAS blacklist names political undesirables. Rather, people should be free to offer their opinions unimpeded by political correctness. Blacklists like the PNAS list do not allow that. They are the equivalent of the Supreme Soviet Politburo.”
Correct!
And those who support it are anti-democratic. “Socialisticly inclined”, I would say.
Smokey, isnt this list illegal according to the Constitution?
The Constitution of the United States of America is there to protect citizens against that kind of madness. Thats what it is made for.
If we analyze the issue philosophically we shall see that this is the eternal struggle between opposites: agnosticism and gnosticism, the first one denying knowledge to man, the second one affirming it.
But it would be rather more constructive to see it as thermodynamics see it:
Entropy, going to the maximum order: Death, and Negentropy, going to the maximum freedom and disorder. Tanathos,death and Eros, life. Then, it is not a matter of the prevalence of protons over electrons or these over protons but the elegant, peaceful, dynamic coexistence and equilibrium of water.
The Hockey Team is a Marxist organization
We all saw Mann, at the Washington rally, shouting with the crowd: “The people, united, will never be defeated”
That was the first time in my long life the last thing I could have imagined being heard in an american street, which was a daily scene during the 1960’s in south america.
Once more, they naively believe that imposing a centralized order works: It doesn’t, we have already tried it and it didn’t. Ideology is seen and thought as good by good hearted people, however that is a total mistake.
Under such regimes, believe me, the only ones who can eat, yes, eat everyday, are party people.
One day, i was riding in a public transportation bus; being an employee working for a enterprise owned by the government, I use received two bags of food every mont; in it two bottles of corn oil. Passengers looked at me, some with anger and some others trying to see what I was carrying in those bags, until two people couldn’t wait any longer and offered me to buy one oil bottle, which was impossible to find in those days in the market….
There are a lot of stories like these that tell you the stupid levels human idiocy can reach. It seems, everything indicates that, that you are going that way.
Steve in SC says:
July 7, 2010 at 8:06 pm
Getting close to the time we will be able to fight fire with fire.
Wonder how the warmies will feel when they have zero funding.
The current administration spent it all.
____________________________________________
NAH, the Demirats will pass the Amnesty bill and buy themselves lots and lots of new friends who will vote them back in.
#
#
Bill Illis says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:41 pm
It would be nice if the debate changed to WHAT is right or wrong versus WHO is right or wrong.
I don’t think the debate is settled yet …
________________________________________________________________________
The “debate” has always been about power, greed and absolute control. It has never been about “science” Science is just the mask used to get naive people to willingly put on the collar and chains of a slave.
The end game is Agenda 21 and “global governance” That is why Maurice Strong was Chair of the First Earth Summit in 1972 when CAGW and environmentalism first came to political prominence He was chair at Kyoto. But perhaps the most significant information is his membership on the U.N.-funded Commission on Global Governance.
“On July 14, Kofi Annan released Maurice Strong’s initial plan..The 95-page document, entitled Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform, is a step-by-step program to implement many of the recommendations advanced by the UN-funded Commission on Global Governance in its 1995 report entitled Our Global Neighborhood. The reform plan comes as no surprise. Maurice Strong was a member of the Commission on Global Governance and a lead author of its report.” http://www.iahf.com/world/un-refm.html
As Walter Schneider puts it:
I wonder what proportion of individuals discussing and worrying about sustainability ever read Agenda 21. Here is the link to the full text of it: http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml
It is a detailed prescription for the goals and objectives of a global, totalitarian system. It is all out in the open and always was. It has nothing to do with a conspiracy. Those with the potential for absolute, total power to control have no need to conspire. They just do.
Gail Combs says:
July 8, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Agenda 21 is a wish list of a foolishly inspired elite. We are allowed to wish for anything but there are laws, ya know, bigger than us…and that “Strong” guy…living now in China!…does he ignore that sometimes heads are cut over there?
@Enneagram says:
We all saw Mann … shouting with the crowd: “The people, united, will never be defeated” That was the first time in my long life the last thing I could have imagined being heard in an american street, which was a daily scene during the 1960′s in south america.
Guess I am revealing myself as a member of the liberal-ruling-cabal of marxist pseudo-scientists when I say that although I am probably younger than you, I have heard that being shouted in many American streets over the last thirty years. I guess you don’t pay attention to demonstrations – your choice, but they are legal and constitutional – and you don’t read or watch news that reports on stuff you don’t like to hear about – not a wise choice. I suppose you associate that slogan only with Latin American leftism, but if you think about it, it really has a down-home flavor to it, no?
Tim Neilson says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:51 pm
“The critics of AGW are not having their lives threatened, they are not, the vast majority of them anyway, being tossed out of their jobs, …”
________________________________________________
Tim the Germans before World War Two and before things turned ugly started compiling lists. These lists included farms, animals and other assets and who owned them…. for later confiscation. Guess what is going on now?? The UN/WTO is having governments to compile lists. Specifically lists of Farms and what assets are on them. I and many other farmers received a USDA questionaire that must have been 50 pages in length within the last couple of years. People who subscribed to horse, farming or gardening magazines also got the highly intrusive questionaire. That is step one:
Many of us protested the questionaire and the government issuing “Premises ID” and tagging our animals. Take a look at this and see if there is not backlash from the government towards individuals over an issue THAT WAS NOT A LAW!!!
4H and NAIS: http://xstatic99645.tripod.com/naisinfocentral/id33.html
The Drs Fallice worked on the project to show mad cow disease came from scrapies in Sheep. Unfortunately for the Drs Fallice there was no proof. Here is the USDA retaliation: http://nonais.org/index.php/2006/09/25/fallice-sheep-disease-free/
AND then there was the day break raid and holding at gunpoint for two weeks of the Henshaws on false charges: http://nonais.org/2006/09/29/henshaw-incident/
OR an example of the government fighting dirty: Karen Nowak, Pond Ridge Farm Hackney Horses: Since it is apparent that some of you think our government agencies are above board, let me share a story of my recent experience….
These are just a few examples of harassment by US officials. I have two friends I correspond with who have had their homes broken into and their computers trashed. The response by local law enforcement is ” well you would not have these problems if you would just sign up for premises ID and quit making waves…”
So please do not try to tell us this list is innocent, US farmers, especially in Wisconsin will laugh at you. http://naissucks.com/wordpress/?p=400
lichanos says:
July 8, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Well, and I did not mean Mann also, the “man on the spot” was J.”death trains” Hansen.
I good rule of thumb is to examine incestuous citations per paper (papers with authors in cited paper being the same as on new publication), the more self citations there are , the more worrying it is. More than 20% incestuous citations is overboard; 35% is warning bells; 50% or more is dire.
Mike Lorrey:
Thank you for your article and subsequent posts below it.
Yes, those who promote adherence to the scientific method and, therefore, reject AGW catastrophism come from every part of the political spectrum. And it seems to me that only in North America is this presented as being a left vs. right issue.
I was a speaker at the first Heartland Climate Conference. During a dinner I was sat at a table where some right-wing Americans were pontificating about how AGW is a left-wing myth. I pointed out that their assertions may possibly be true in their country, but those assertions are not true in the UK where the right-wing Conservative Party is a prime promoter of AGW. Indeed, I said I was attending the event to speak against the AGW hypothesis because I am convinced that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) cannot happen to a discernible degree and so cannot become problematic except as an excuse for political action(s). And, I said, I am a left wing socialist of the old-fashioned British kind.
One of them responded that they knew AGW is socialism and they knew “who the enemy is”.
I was shocked. I naively thought consideration of AGW is a matter of scientific consideration and not about having those of similar opinion declared as being “the enemy” on the basis of political views. I had not experienced this before.
However, and fortunately, I can report that the organisers of the Conference did not share this view about “enemies” and no others at the event seemed to share it either.
As you say in your article, at all places in the political spectrum there are people who are fervently pro-AGW and there are people who are fervently anti-AGW. And, as you also say, the Marxist methods used by the pro-AGW advocates does not indicate that they are Marxists: their methods only indicate that they have chosen to use methods they consider to be effective.
Personally, I despise them for using such methods.
Richard
Steve in SC says: “Getting close to the time we will be able to fight fire with fire.
Wonder how the warmies will feel when they have zero funding.
The current administration spent it all.”
What do you think carbon taxes will be used for?
Jimbo says: “If AGW is ever falsified this list will have the opposite effect for which it was intended. They may even receive a joint Nobel Prize”
They should certainly be given honors, but I doubt if a Nobel Prize will be of any value by the time this farce is over.
mike –
thanx for the followup.
Richard S Courtney –
there are attempts in australia to portray believers/sceptics as left/right, and there are attempts by the MSM and some Team Members to portray young people as believers while older people are allegedly selfish ‘deniers’. rejecting such attempts to divide and conquer is vital in this far-from-won battle.
an example of the latter:
7 July: Korea Times: Kenneth Rogoff: [PS] Can good emerge from BP oil spill?
Kenneth Rogoff is professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University, and was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Anger is especially rife among young people…
Might a reawakening of voter anger be the ticket to rekindling interest in a carbon tax?…
A carbon tax can help preserve the atmosphere while also discouraging some of the most exotic and risky energy-exploration activities by making them unprofitable…
Some say that young people in the rich countries are just too well off to mobilize politically, at least en masse. But they might be radicalized by the prospect of inheriting a badly damaged ecosystem…
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2010/07/137_68963.html
Kevin wrote on July 7, 2010 at 6:40 pm:
I think Kevin is right in terms of economics. However, both Fascism and Corporatism arose from socialist politics. To expand on Kevin’s thought, both are tyrannical, in that they deprive citizens of choice through some level of force (authoritarianism or totalitarianism).
Climate change is a stalking horse for the socialist agenda (DSA USA is the Democratic Socialist of America):
DSA USA. “Toward An Economic Justice Agenda.” Political. Democratic Left, May 2008. http://www.dsausa.org/pdf/eja_may2008.pdf
Blacklist? It reads more like an Honor Roll.
Congratulations to all who made the cut. Each has good company.
Mike Haseler says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:53 pm (Edit)
But eco-activism has been a god send for the left, creating a whole new group of people who are willing to support parties of the left who would traditionally have voted for parties on the right. Indeed, the voters who are most likely to vote “green” tend to be professional classes (old ABs) who would otherwise tend to vote for the right.
But to be honest, I could equally make comments about the right. In Scotland, the biggest winners from the huge government created subsidy toward wind have been land owners and commercial wind farm developers. I could easily make the case that this whole global warming scam is conspiracy of the right dreamt up by rich landowners to such money from left leaning politicians.
And don’t be smug if you are a middle leaning “liberal”, because I could just as easily put forward a liberal intelligentsia conspiracy to get government to pay for airy fairy academic rubbish for the traditional “sit on the fence” academics of this world.
The truth is that this scam is supported by a rainbow alliance include left leaning greens, right leaning land-owners and centrist academics. And that is one hell of an alliance: the left with its ability to mobilise the populace, the right with its money and the centrist who have been able to control the academic research agenda.
Nail on the head Mike. You can trust a scot to cut through the crap and tell it like it is. In my opinion, this is why trying to pidgeon-hole the players on the climate carousel is a waste of time. These old political categories are obsolete.
What I see are players with a range of motivations using whatever tactics they think will further their agenda. The western nation politicians are using the AGW mythology to justify taxing the population to generate sufficient money to maintain law’n’order and at the same time using the AGW story to try to discourage the rise of the developing nations. The Corporates are riding the gravy train to enrich themselves. The Academics are garnering research money and prestige. Useful tools as the trusted purveyors of scientific ‘Truth’ who the public trust(ed).
Mike Lorrey’s analysis is useful because it provides us with the opportunity to lance the boil which threatens to divide the international sceptical confederation. And I don’t mean to criticise Mike Lorrey, I just think needs to add Mike Haseler’s and Richards Courtney’s perspectives into the mix of understanding.
We are all in this together.
The return of the blacklist.
I must have missed the pogroms, inquisitions and reigns of terror caused by “liberalist majoritarian tyranny”. Can you point to an example, or is it that you don’t like Democratic presidents when they’re voted in by democratic means?
@ John A:
I must have missed the pogroms, inquisitions and reigns of terror caused by “liberalist majoritarian tyranny”.
Ha ha! Right on, John A!
John A says:
July 9, 2010 at 6:33 am
“…I’ve also studied the history of various flavors of tyranny, in particular the various modern flavors, communism, fascism, islamism, and especially liberalist majoritarian tyranny…”
I must have missed the pogroms, inquisitions and reigns of terror caused by “liberalist majoritarian tyranny”. Can you point to an example, or is it that you don’t like Democratic presidents when they’re voted in by democratic means?
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You are not alone. Most people have missed it because examples are never covered in the news but it is happening right now. Here are articles that explain the “reign of terror” in the USA.
I will leave out the intentional genocide of Native Americans that continued until the 1970’s with forced sterilization programs and stick with the present dat.
Here is the more subtle reigns of terror:
“Civil asset forfeiture has allowed police to view all of America as some giant national K-Mart, where prices are not just lower, but non-existent — a sort of law enforcement ‘pick-and-don’t-pay.'”
—U.S. Representative Henry Hyde
Incredible as it sounds, civil asset forfeiture laws allow the government to seize property without charging anyone with a crime. Until FEAR achieved the nation’s first major federal forfeiture law reform at the turn of the millenium, the government was allowed to keep whatever property it seized without ever having to prove a case. Seized property was presumed guilty and could be forfeited based upon mere hearsay—even a tip supplied by by an informant who stood to gain up to 25% of the forfeited assets. Owners were forced into the untenable situation of trying to prove a negative—that something never happened, even though no proof of any illegal act had been offered at trial. “ http://www.fear.org/
Intentional removal of farmers from their lands (resulting in suicides & social upheaval)
History: http://www.opednews.com/articles/History-HACCP-and-the-Foo-by-Nicole-Johnson-090906-229.html
Actual example of a reign of terror: http://www.readthehook.com/stories/2006/10/05/COVER-boarSlaughter-F.doc.aspx
In depth analysis of above incident: http://nonais.org/index.php/2006/09/29/henshaw-incident/
Documents: http://nonais.org/index.php/2006/10/02/henshaw-documents/
Another example:
http://nonais.org/2007/03/02/607/
http://nonais.org/index.php/2007/09/24/mi-greg-niewendorp-served-warrant/
http://www.naisstinks.com/index.php?con=Fight_For_America_Farms_in_Wisconsin
http://nonais.org/2010/03/11/wi-judge-kills-premise-id/
Please note this fight is NOT ended. I just got a phone call from the government on tagging my sheep this morning…
The Federal Reserve Act 1913: you had better become familiar with how money works are you will never see what is actually going on:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Banks/Bankers_MoneyMachine_WOD.html
http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm
A Primer on Money by SUBCOMMITTEE ON DOMESTIC FINANCE. COMMITTEE ON BANKING AND CURRENCY. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 88th Congress, 2d Session
http://www.devvy.com/pdf/2006…/Patman_Primer_on_Money.pdf
The newest: “Debtor’s Hell” http://www.boston.com/news/specials/debt/
In jail for being in debt: “In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man “to indefinite incarceration” until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt. “http://www.startribune.com/local/95692619.html?page=2&c=y
None of the above answers my question, but thanks for playing
Ah, wonderful photograph! With the name of the blog post, the subject matter of blacklist, and the police sign in the image, was I alone is assuming that this was an image of a member of the French Resistance being dragged off by the collaborators to interrogation and certain death? That interpretation of the image fits the melodramatic tone of the post for sure.
The white coat of the guy on the truck was a little disconcerting. Still a great photo, but it’s from a documentary series on mental hospitals. Published in 1955…I figured it was taken in 1945.
The real story…?