Guest post by Thomas Fuller
Like a supervillain from Marvel Comics, a new threat to civilization has emerged. It is Climate Disruption, the result of a rebranding exercise announced by U.S. Science Czar John Holdren.
George Orwell understood the importance of controlling the terms of political debate, and predicted this level of Newspeak long before John Holdren joined with Paul Ehrlich to demand the U.S. ‘de-develop,’ a Newspeak way of calling for a return to medieval life.
But this one is a real beaut. Climate change, which morphed into ‘global warming’ for political reasons and later re-emerged after the globe stubbornly refused to warm fast enough, is now climate disruption.
What this means is that any unusual event–or even usual events, like walruses showing up on Alaskan beaches, which they do every year–can be called climate disruption in action, and blamed on human activity.
We are fulfilling Orwellian requirements in other respects as well: Cameras everywhere, recording everything (including dust devils that can inflate tornado statistics)? Check. Intrusive software following us around? Check. A devaluing of the English language to suit political objectives? Double check.
Take the term ‘denier.’ Please. It is hate speech, pure and simple. It was dragged into the climate debate specifically to compare skeptics with skinhead thugs who denied the Holocaust occurred. It has persisted despite it being pointed out as hate speech because those who use it are thugs themselves, needing to devalue any contribution from their enemies and because it gives them an almost sexual sadistic thrill.
But ‘climate disruption’ is more dangerous–it is a potent political weapon. There are no terms of reference, there is a certainty that it will be misused and it will cheapen any attempt to objectively observe our climate and to accurately describe what is happening to it.
Where’s the Silver Surfer when you really need him?
It seems to me that, in order to claim that some current climate condition has been disrupted, there needs to be some baseline of what a disruption-free climate looks like.
I suggest that a global surface temperature of 2.7 Kelvin (cosmic microwave background radiation’s blackbody temperature) is what can be defined as a disruption-free climate (no sun, no geothermal heat, no cosmic ray flux). Based on that, the current average global surface temperature of 288 Kelvin (15 C) is hellishly disrupted already, and variations of a few degrees C up or down are inconsequential.
@whoever
“instituted a nearly complete moratorium on births for a few decades”
Nearly complete? And who would ‘you’, the rulers, the deciders, permit to breed then? Only those who agree with you? Only those who look like you? And how will you stop the rest, two generations of humans perhaps (how many decades?), from having offspring? This is a disgusting and, if it weren’t so vile, puerile standpoint and a clear expression of an arrogant acceptance of fascist ideology (this is not an ad hom moderator, it’s a simple statement of political theory) . I don’t know who this troll is and I know I shouldn’t feed it but any decent person who believes in liberty needs to speak out and stand against this. My father and my uncles fought a war to stop it and I’m on their side. Contemptible.
GM:
“Not with 100% certainty. But the odds of the experts being right vs the laymen being right are always greatly skewed towards the experts. A point that those who reject expertise on the basis of certain primal anti-intellectual “who are you to tell me” instincts rarely appreciate (or prefer to omit when they do understand it)”
The counter-views that I have seen expressed against AGW by other experts in the same field, or related fields, maths, physics, chemistry, statistics, oceanography, or solar science, make very valid points.
However, the most valid observations have come from people who see the actual global temperatures charts over the last fifteen years, and can come to the conclusion for themselves that there has been no global warming.
You do not need to be an expert yourself to know that an expert is wrong if you compare their predictions against reality.
In the late nineties the experts told us that they had comprehensive data, a full understanding of climate feedbacks, the computer models of sufficient granularity, and the agreement of ~2,000 peer reviewers to validate their approach. They told us that the results of the model runs showed conclusively that the temperatures were to increase at an unprecedented rate. The observed reality over the following decade shows no increase in temperature, instead a levelling off.
If an expert in any field tells you that definitely this thing will happen, and indisputably something else happens, how much of an expert are they?
Science adviser picks scientific word to portray political intention, disruption!
Any one notice that the Character of “Galactus” has hockey sticks on his helmet?…
Not silver on top myself-more “Lex Luthor”…
Right now in Australia, Climate Change (they’re not using Climate Disruption yet), Carbon Footprint and Price on Carbon (Emissions Trading not so much now) have come back to haunt us and are spoken about by the licorice allsorts Labor/Greens/Independents Minority Government; Marius Kloppers (head of BHP); the head of the Business Council of Australia and many other leading figures – you wonder where their brains are or their honesty, when you know they know it’s one big CON. It’s very depressing. Has the world gone mad?
We, the people, stopped it last time the ETS was going to be passed in the Australian Parliament by sending hundreds of thousands of individually written emails and placing calls to our politicians. Even our conservative Coalition Party won’t stand up and tell the world it is crap. They have to play politics to appease the believers by saying they will lesson Australia’s carbon emissions by 5% by 2020 through direct action instead of a great big new tax on everything (carbon tax).
If it looks like being passed again, the people won’t let it happen.
They should have been honest and called it “CO2 concentration disruption”. That way they can incorporate their newer bugaboo of ocean de-alkalinization and various unknowable and potentially alarming climate impacts. Plus having more CO2 in the atmosphere is correlated with increased volcanic activity and even asteroid impacts.
I think of Aztec priests killing thousands (of their enemies?) to make sure the Sun returns every day or after an eclipse.
Dear Mr J. Holdren,
I am delighted that you follow reasoned & rational thought by realising that the Evil Empire, or what used to be called the USA, should be de-developed as soon as possible to save the world from impending doom from Global Climate Disruption. The evil wrong-doers or deniers who peretrate & peretuate the capitalist propaganda wicked myths by saying that people should look at real-world observations is nothing more than a trick & slight of hand by unreasonable, irrational far right lunatics, clearly out to destroy Gaia!
Therefore, Sir, we must weed these deniers out & I have developed from original thought guranteed scientific methods to test who these deniers are. Firstly, if we suspect a man in a denier or has denialist tendencies, he could be put on trial, & by the simplest of scientific tests he could be made to walk across a large room carrying in one hand a red-hot iron bar. If when he reached the othre side of the room he is found to have no burns on his hand, he is guilty as tried by scientific method & has used the very devil to protect him flesh from the searing life-long disfiguring heat! Admittedly they would never be able to use that particular hand ever again, but they could live happily in the knowledge that they had proven their innocence to one & all. On the other hand if we suspect the same of a woman, we could place her on a stool & continuosly dunk her into a pond! If she unfortunately drowns we will at least know that the poor creature was innocent after all, as the water clearly accepted her, however if by some trickry & consorting with the devil she survives this scientifically proven ordeal, she is evidently guilty! Having successfully used both rigorously tried & tested peer-reviewed methodologies, the guilty parties should be burnt at the stake to purify their mortal souls!
Please let me know what you think as soon as possible as loyal my band of freedom-loving & peace-loving brothers & sisters are itching to get started straight away.
Scincerely yours,
Wit Chunter, General, First Batallion, Green Malitia.
GM, it would seem, speaks for
“Humanity as a whole.”
What an inflated idea these AGW types have of their own importance
Richie P,
“I don’t know who this troll is and I know I shouldn’t feed it but any decent person who believes in liberty needs to speak out and stand against this. My father and my uncles fought a war to stop it and I’m on their side. Contemptible.”
Allow me to explain. GM is well know as someone with an extreme neo malthusian ideology and fanatical belief in the writings of ‘Limits to Growth’. His past postings have shown that he believes that civilization is in ‘overshoot’ because we have reached peak oil, and civilization is about to collapse. They also show a total rejection of market solutions in favour of a totalitarian control of everything.
He also seems to have ‘spidey’ senses that alert him whenever an article appears on WUWT that suggests that resource depletion or AGW might not be a problem. His modus operandi is fairly consistent. He will single out the first post that contains any semblence of the view that humans have the ability to continue to improve their lot by inovation and technology. The response will always begin with an opening salvo attacking the mental faculties of the poster, followed by a series of strawmen arguments and non sequitors. Eg, don’t you just love “. . .and while that person is somewhere between the 30th and 40th floor on his way down. . .”
Wow, I’m starting to sound like one of those psychological profilers who work with the FBI. Better stop.
I’ve always thought of a ‘disruption’ as a short break in an ongoing, well oiled, perhaps hectic, assembly line existance of something; an opportunity to take a breather, have a smoke, get to the WC, rest a sec. Never anything long or really big. Something the mechanics took care of quickly. Well, I have to tell you, I’m sure glad this insanity about blowing up Civilization for the good of the common cause of the Warmistias is over. I guess it wont be long before the wackos dream up another crusade for their inevitable Marxian Utopia –guess we ought to enjoy the time we have to take a breather, have a smoke, get to the WC, rest a sec. Aren’t ‘disruptions’ great?
http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/earth-day-then-and-now
Imminent global famine caused by the explosion of the “population bomb” was the big issue on Earth Day 1970. Then–and now–the most prominent prophet of population doom was Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. Dubbed “ecology’s angry lobbyist” by Life magazine, the gloomy Ehrlich was quoted everywhere. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” he confidently declared in an interview with then-radical journalist Peter Collier in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Ehrlich in an essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe!,” which ran in the special Earth Day issue of the radical magazine Ramparts. “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
I should believe what Paul Ehrlich says now? Why?
PaulH- Thanks for posting the link for “William Briggs has a fun blog post on the subject:”
Briggs has great insights today. Here is a wonderful example-
“One could look forward to the day, for example, of the creation of the Climate Calamity Civil Patrol, the CCCP, a group which will ticket citizens for anti- environmental activities.”
You know, CCCP sounds familiar…
Martin Brumby says:
“I’m hoping for the peasants with pitchforks and flaming torches turning up at their ivory towers real soon.”
They might need more than pitchforks and flaming torches:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2009-12-03/arming-goldman-sachs-with-pistols-alice-schroeder-correct-.html
Interestingly, George Orwell was a socialist.
Changing the name again looks like desperation to salvage a damaged cause. It will be interesting to see if the news outlets pick up on the new name. I doubt it except for maybe the History and Discovery Channels and public radio.
*sigh* Holdren’s been on this “climate disruption” kick for years:
“When addressing the issue during a Harvard symposium on Nov. 6, 2007 Holdren said, “The first message is that ‘global warming’ is a misnomer. It implies something gradual, something uniform, something quite possibly benign. And what we are experiencing is none of those. It is rapid in relation to the capacity of societies and ecosystems to respond. It is highly non-uniform and it is certainly not benign. And that’s why I prefer the term ‘global climate disruption’ to ‘global warming.'” ”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/75296
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” Abraham Lincoln
I can’t believe that no none has linked to this yet. If you are going to refer to Newspeak, you have to share Orwells appendix “The Principles of Newspeak”. Everyone who visits WUWT surely appreciates a good essay, and Orwell was the master of the essay. Here is a taste:
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”
“The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.”
Enjoy.
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/
GM says:
September 19, 2010 at 2:27 am
You have to be completely out of your mind to claim some sort of governmental conspiracy behind AGW. Stuff like this is the reason the word “denialist” is used, much harsher words apply very well too.
Not sure if there is a conspiracy but there is definitely a movement that wants to use AGW (or GCD) to instill a global government, redistribute wealth both within and between nations, and to transfer technology and technological know-how from the ‘North’ to the ‘South’ all in order to reduce wealth disparities force a convergence of GDPs by the year 2100.
I can back up every point I just stated with multiple links from links from credible sources (i.e., the UN, academia, news, and various pro-environment sites).
Why Climate Disruption?
As Holdren is saying in one of his presentations:
“WITHOUT climate there is no environment.”
So the danger obviuously is that climate disappears one day soon.
And then the environment disappears. How sad.
Climate Change > Climate Disruption > Climate Disappearance.
I am sure that we paid to have a private (outsourcing) marketing firm come up with the catchy new and improved phrase “Global Disruption”. It probably didn’t cost more than a few million, as it was a rush job. Does anyone know which firm should be getting the accolades, so richly deserved?
GM,
Have you looked at the birth rates of the industrialized nations of the world lately?
Isn’t disruption what happens when you and you’re spouse are having some intimate exercise and your teenager barges crying into your bedroom to announce that they’ve just been dumped by their best friend?
the silver surfer has been poisoned by chromium! And Denial needs to get off the planet! http://www.earthspeak.org