Story submitted by Stephen Rasey
On July 12, I wrote a comment cautioning not to underestimate the Gore Climate Reality event scheduled for Sept. 14, 2011. Mixing metaphors, I said that this was an “All In” bet and that this was Gore’s D-Day.
Pickett’s Charge from a position on the Confederate line looking toward the Union lines, Ziegler’s Grove on the left, clump of trees on right, painting by Edwin Forbes via Wikipedia
A better analogy is that this is Gettysburg, July 3, 1863. Al Gore’s Climate Reality is “Pickett’s Charge”: thousands of troops, marching in formation in the open field, supported by the artillery of the internet and mass media, bent on destroying the deniers that stand in the way of themselves and Washington D.C.
Today we are engaged in a great Civil War of testing whether our nation, or any nation, conceived in liberty and individual freedom, can long endure the calls to “save the planet” through strong government and world government to better control the use of energy, land, and air by constraining the freedom of its subjects.
Back in late-June 1863, Robert E. Lee carried with him knowledge of a letter from Jefferson Davis dictating terms of peace to Lincoln. It was Lee’s strategy to bring the Union Army of the Potomac into the open, destroy it, and then march on Washington. The Letter would be delivered to Lincoln and hopefully end the war.
Today, Al Gore carries with him the plans for the IPCC Rio+20 Sustainability Agenda. The “Climate Reality” Charge is to bring “denier’s” out into the open, destroy them, and carry the momentum into Rio meetings in June 2012 and Washington for the Nov 2012 elections. The green energy carpetbaggers are already among us. After a Rio recharged by a Gore victory, there will simply be more of them acting without restraint.
The critical question is, “Is there a strong enough opposition standing between the Charge and Washington, D.C.?”
Today, my answer is, “No, the skeptic’s are not yet strong enough.” Skeptics are more of a disorganized guerrilla force of sharp-shooters. (Of course, I could be completely wrong and I’m just blowing the cover of an entrenched ambush.)
I do not think skeptics can field an army; it is not in our individualistic nature. But that does not mean we cannot prepare the battlefield. We know from which direction they will come. We know the type of ammunition they use – much of it is blanks – false, misleading statement, but full of fire, smoke, and noise. The skeptics artillery of web sites can be zeroed-in. Counter their arguments before they have the opportunity to fire theirs. We can field forward observers, and squads armed with facts and backup.
We must make it obvious to all observers the skeptics’ side in the climate debate is fighting against slavery of billions of people. I’m willing to help as a defender of freedom. It will take some organization.
Who are our, Buford, Reynolds, Chamberlin, and Hancock?
In what may be a related action, Anthony Watts has asked readers to find quotes for “ice free Arctic by the year xxxx”. This is the kind of preparing the ground and zero-in we need to do now in advance of September.
We know who the CAGW leaders will be. Find every false, misleading, scary, idiotic, non-scientific statement they have made in the past twenty years. Create an index by name with pages listing those statement with links to the source. Keep it factual. Let their own words come back to haunt them.
We know the basics of their arguments and lines of “evidence”. Cross reference each of the statements above with the type of evidence.
How can we efficiently do this without a Wiki? A Wiki would only be vandalized. We also want an efficient division of labor. I don’t suggest we eliminate duplication, but let’s avoid quadruplication. Somewhere we should start a list of the Whos and Whats to research. Volunteers can comment that they are searching sources X over dates Y-Z and will report back in 48 hrs. Someone will have to organize it.
In the responses to Anthony’s plea for help, many people provided links without helpful context and additional information about Who, When, What and Where. We can do better. But the response has been helpful showing that Anthony (and other moderators) could delegate research work to the readership of the blog and they can do more target location and synthesis.
Is there a simple six column Excel format OR six element Text format we could use to make a table driven content page work?
Person, Topic, Date, Link, Quote, Comment and Context
Or
[P] Person(s)
[T] Topic
[D] Date
[L] Link
[Q] Quote
[C] Comment
It may be his Gettysburg, but he also may be followed by the Gore Effect. With a looming La Nina and the roughly3 month delay it has in temperature effects up here, it may be pretty cool by September!
This will be fun to watch.
It would also be a nice touch to include sceptics who got it wrong, too. Let’s let chips fall where they may – makes your truths invincible.
Formulaic, narrowly targeted, unemotional and unimpeachable research will win the day.
The hallmark of good research is a narrowly defined topic. The process of gathering data needs to be purposeful and narrowly defined before the search begins. Else the answer is just as fuzzy and useless as the data. One of the warning flags would be the need for some kind of grand organization. If you need a complicated structure to organize the data, you have not narrowly defined and refined your purpose. Fuzzy in, fuzzy out.
R. Gates said:
July 17, 2011 at 5:49 am
[Gore], to the very core of his being, truly believes in what he says and does related to climate change. To not understand this, is to not get a fundamental truth about those you would oppose.
==============================
Yeah, that’s why he bought ~$4M beachfront property in San Francisco; a place he claims will soon be awash in CAGW rising seawater. And that’s why he uses more energy in one month at one of his five domiciles than the average American does in a year.
Fundamental truth about Gore: snake oil peddler.
Koch Brothers? Heh. Not even close.
===============
GaryP says:
July 17, 2011 at 7:19 am
I am reading Ann Coulter’s new book, “Demonic” and it has good lessons about dealing with a mob and the warmists do fit that description. This post recommends reasoned arguments. Mobs do not respond to reasoned arguments. You need to provide them with mental pictures based on good arguments such as:
Headline: “Electricity prices to double.” followed by a picture of the sweltering poor unable to afford air conditioning.
Headline: “Greens stop coal plant in Africa.” followed by a picture of a hut where burning dung has to be used to cook food.
Video of some idiot saying, “Energy prices will necessarily skyrocket.”
Video of the unemployed in Montana where an aluminum plant was shut down because the greens in California will not allow power plants to be built.
Get the picture? Every time the warmists show a picture of a polar bear, show a picture from Detroit.
=====================
I think this is one of the very best suggestions in the whole thread. It’s not Gore’s beliefs which are destructive, and I do think he believes some of them, it’s the policy changes that he and his ilk wish to inflict upon us.
So let’s show the consequences of those policies.
How about a video of people tring to manage with their 6 hour a day electrical allotment, then the camera pulls back to show that it’s us, under Gore’s policies.
People freezing in the UK because the windmills are frozen/broken and not generating anything. The video can open with the green elites (eg: Gore, UK/EU pols) living high in their heated mansions with all the lights on.
Show the Gov types adding up their new tax revenues while the sidebar to the video shows unemployment climbing.
Make it sexy enough and you might get some media outlet to run with it, since they do love scandals and scare stories.
CAGW isn’t about facts, it’s about emotion, power (control,) and money. So we need to show who’s profiting and who’s paying.
Stephen Rasey
Interesting analogy, thanks for the post.
“Today we are engaged in a great Civil War of testing whether our nation, or any nation, conceived in liberty and individual freedom, can long endure the calls to “save the planet” through strong government and world government to better control the use of energy, land, and air by constraining the freedom of its subjects.”
This statement rang a bell concerning something I read at http://www.nationalacademies.org/nrc/
Report # 12- Climate Change, the Indoor environment, and Health. It’s a free read, 300+ pages.
The goals they state are so pervasive that, well, make up your own mind.
Anon says:
“If you play the political game, go for the jugular – abolish the EPA, restore the Constitution, Nullify federal laws, restore sound money, etc”
___
So you believe a country run by the Corporate elite would have your best interests at heart? Nullifying federal laws and abolishing the EPA would only assist large companies in their complete disregard for the environment. You think the companies that are doing natural gas fracking really care that much about what it might do to water supplies? (http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2011/jun/30/cuomo-administration-outlines-plan-regulate-fracking/) In an age where multi-national corporations already control much of what goes on in Washington and other political centers of the world, I find your appeal to “restore the Constitution” rather charming, but equally naive. I certainly believe in the Constitution, but the age of “we the people” controlling our fate is sadly long gone. The political landscape of America is simply a battle for WHICH corporations control Washington and therefore get to write the laws (or abolish them) tol favor their industries. Most corporations now simply do what in the investing world is called a “straddle”, by contributing heavily to both parties, they know they’ll win either way.
Maybe you’d like a government that pretty much let’s companies do whatever they’d like to so long as it “grows” the economy? This has been the case in China for the past 20 years, and the consequences to China’s environment have been severe. (http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2008/0319/p09s01-coop.html, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/03/31/archive/main178697.shtml, http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/08/24/idUSPEK169088)
Corporations exist for one reason: to make money. Protection of the environment is only done when that “horrible” EPA makes them do it. If you think companies will voluntarily spend billions to keep our environment clean and healthy, you simply don’t know what the term “maximize profits” means.The Corporate control of our political process goes back to the fact that to get elected takes millions of dollars, and the only way to pay for that is to take money from corporations, and they don’t give up their money without wanting a little something in return. So, until there is true campaign finance reform, where you don’t have to spend millions to get elected, there will be no changes in the control of our Democracy by the corporate elite. Until Mr. Smith can truly go to Washington, (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031679/) and truly represent “we the people” and not ‘we the corporations”, it is an uphill battle.
.
Rather than tackle gore on science, how about on behavior. how a person acts tells you much more about what they truly believe, as compared to what they say.
For example:
1. gore lives in a big house and creates lots more co2 than the average person. does he want us all to live like he does? if not, then why does he live like this?
2. gore has 4 children yet is going around telling women to have less children. apparently at the same time he was going around trying to spread his own seed, if events with tipper are any indication.
3. gore in the past made his money selling tobacco. an addictive substance that causes great harm. reportedly his sister died of lung cancer. gore is a rich man. he says he regrets selling tobacco. has he set up a substantial trust fund with his wealth to pay victims of tobacco?
4. gore was heavily invested in co2 tracing before ccx was sold. has he simply moved his investments into another co2 vehicle such as redd? has he filed a conflict of interest statement?
5. gore says sea levels are rising dangerously but bought a property vulnerable to sea level rise. does this make sense if sea levels are rising dangerously?
6. gore in his movie misrepresented the connection between temperature and co2 in the ice cores. he used a clever wording to overcome the causation problem with temperature leading co2, to imply that temperature was caused by co2.
7. etc. etc.
These points would seem to be the sorts of things that the average person would use to evaluate whether gore can be trusted. most people would skip the science because it isn’t their specialty. what most people look at is behavior to judge if the person is truthful or not. most people recognize that folks don’t always tell the truth, even to themselves.
@davidmhoffer: horsepower is a non-issue.
We are talking about a few thousand records and very simple query structure.
Example
What did [Hansen] say about [coal trains]? Output: Standard List:
SourceRank, Date, SourceType, Source,
__Quote,
__Link to source,
__Link to rebuttals.
3-Original, 2009.02.15, Op.Ed., guardian.co.uk
__ Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them (Op. Ed Title)
__ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/james-hansen-power-plants-coal
__rebut: http://junksciencearchive.com/ByTheJunkman/20090302.html
__rebut: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/15/hansen-on-death-trains-and-coal-and-co2/
End_example
The key functionality sought is a simple way to collect from 100 volunteers, the hypertext quotation and supporting categorical data, via an open internet. Then reduce as much as possible the loading and cleaning to a small data structure. This is the kind of “database” that 50 years ago was done with index cards.
Several people have asked, who is this for?
It is for anyone skeptical of any claim.
What is an easy way to quickly research a quote and learn who has already covered the ground with a documented rebuttal? Google can get you close, but there is an extra step to distill it and evaluate it. Saving the results of this distillation is worth doing.
David, if a solution is a clever way to use WordPress, I’m all ears.
David Ball says:
July 17, 2011 at 10:46 am
R.Gates MUST be a comedy writer.
_____
The first person to even come close to what I do for a living!
But more to your point, the first rule of war is to know your enemy, and if you want to misunderstand what Mr. Gore is really all about, then go on believing that he is simply in this for some kind of power or money play. He, and millions of so called “greens” truly believe this is a cause to save mankind (and the majority of currently existing species) from a climate that will change so severely, that the majority of species could go extinct. If you want to “do battle” against them, you need to convince them that there is no threat of this happening. And this perceived threat comes not just from warming or climate change, but from a general breakdown of the systems that support life on this planet as we’ve come to enjoy it during the Holocene.
If you want to do battle against Gore and the Greens, you will fail if you think they are not true believers that the earth’s life support systems are in peril. This is one of their core beliefs.
The second part is to show what happens to countries that follow gores advice. Spain is the leading example of a country that tried to go green. they are in serious financial trouble with high unemployment.
If you read the EU report on Spain you discover the problem. Spain has installed green energy with huge subsidies that now must be paid. These subsidies are driving up the cost of energy in Spain making it uncompetitive. This has led to plant closures and high unemployment, with falling tax revenues which cannot meet the cost of subsidies.
The advice of the EU to Spain? Continue to install green energy, but don’t install the green energy that needs subsidies. Instead, install the green energy that costs the same as fossil energy and use that to replace your fossil fuel power plants. And do it quickly as you need to shut down the fossil fuel plants.
The UK is now well on the way to following Spain. This is interesting because the French are finally getting their revenge on their historical enemy. Having installed windmills to meet EU regulations, the UK is now discovering that they are poor at making energy when it is needed.
Thus, the UK now has to buy its power from France, which has made France the largest exporter of electricity in the world. In effect the UK has been forced by EU regulations to buy French electricity. The English are paying to build both English windmills and French nuclear plants, to the delight of the French. And of course the other EU countries that are supplying the windmills, knowing full well their limitations.
See if we can get the manbearpig episode of SouthPark to air the night before to get the young ‘uns tuned up and at the same time Penn and Teller to get the old ‘uns primed.
It’s really more like Napoleon after Borodino, when he enters the emptied Moscow trap. The long retreat is just ahead aided by General Winter.
Here is a potential WordPress solution to continue the thinking toward the simple and flexible.
In the Climate Fail category (or some other):
Create an index page of Names, leaders of the climate change scientific and political realm.
For each name, Link it to one or more pages. For instance there could be a Hansen-1980s, Hanson-1990s, etc.
On each page, Commenters can post information about quotes in a simple text template format, such as
Quote:
Link:
Source:
Date:
Topics:
Other Authors:
Rebuttal Tag:
RebuttalLink:
Rebuttal Tag:
RebuttalLink:
This is only to be a medium level index.
Put no discussion here. Put that in the linked rebuttal docs or bookmarks.
Limit the Rebuttal Tag to a short phrase. XML could be used, but I would rather keep it humanly friendly. Contributors keep to the format or the moderators will hose the contribution regardless of content. Can we handle errors and graffiti?
With standardized tags, it would be fairly easy for data to be normalized and load later for better database search, but this first order organization could be an 80/20 solution, at least to get started with the first 1000 quotes.
This structure allows for volunteers to take a page and publish a new one page with a sorted by importance and consolidated by topic and moderators can add the new page to the highest index.
There is such a bad economic time coming to the Western world that no one will give the slightest bit of a d%#n about “global warming”.
Simpleton, NOBODY wants dirty air or dirty water. Those ‘corporate elites’ have to breathe, bathe and drink water too.
Extrapolating the past into the future belies your narrow perspective; we are no longer using tube-powered IBM mainframs to perform payroll calculations …
.
R. Gates says:
July 17, 2011 at 12:09 pm
David Ball says:July 17, 2011 at 10:46 am
R.Gates MUST be a comedy writer.
“The first person to even come close to what I do for a living! ”
Perhaps writer for Al Gore presentations?
The overriding problem isn’t lack of proof of the mendacity, stupidity, self-deception or carelessness of “scientists” and their lackeys, but treasonous abandonment of MSM’s investigative journalism in favor of propaganda spewing.
It would seem that the problem isn’t on the ‘hard science’ side, but rather in the political arena- where the news media has been working to create an atmosphere of Preference Falsification: anyone who casts doubt on our ability to *measure* human contribution to global climate change is tarred as a ‘denier’ and a tool of nefarious corporate interests.
“The overriding problem isn’t lack of proof of the mendacity, stupidity, self-deception or carelessness of “scientists” and their lackeys, but treasonous abandonment of MSM’s investigative journalism in favor of propaganda spewing.”
I’d not use the inflammatory language, but in essence I agree. If there were a list of villains in this mess, I’d put the NYT’s right up with Al Gore. Their abandonment of anything that even remotely smacks of journalistic integrity has been stunning.
R Gates wants to argue that large corporations already control almost everything that goes on in Washington and in the next breath asserts that the only reason those same corporations aren’t running rampant over the environment in the pursuit of their one and only goal (profits) is the strict control the government has over them. Oddly, they have all that control yet can’t use it to achieve their only goal. Do you even listen to yourself R Gates?
Is anyone else having a problem with A Lovell’s link (July 17, 2011 at 1:25 am) to the numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm site?
I’ve tried from a search engine and get the same problem.
I would suggest that the Google+ service would be an excellent platform in which to host private, in-group organizing. It can also be used to make public “blog posts,” provided they aren’t too long or complicated. It provides precise control over the visibility of posts: They can be made visible to a single person, to a small, ad-hoc group, or to large persistent, named groups whose membership changes continuously. Instant messaging, voice calls and group video conferences are also supported well.
Large and/or complex documents not yet ready for publication could be shared and edited collaboratively using Google Docs, which will be ever more fully integrated with Google+ over time.
Complex documents would still need to be hosted on a conventional web site, which could be organized thematically by topic and subject domain so as to present a coherent message as a whole. It could be an existing site, or a new one. Discussion of the site as a whole, and of the individual documents, would probably best happen on Google+. Requests to join the non-public discussions could be made by e-mail, or simply by using Google+ to send a message to one of the gatekeepers.
Stephen Stasey;
your wordpress description is sort of what I had in mind. At days end though, regardless of how small the database is, the question becomes how many people have access to it? If the input is crowd sourced, lots and lots. If the use of it is opened up to crowd source for assembly of rebuttals, other web pages, lots and lots. If only a handfull of people interact directly with the database, nope, you don’t need much horsepower. If thousands do….different story. If you set it up so that web pages can link to it…now we’re talking millions of threads.
Keep in mind also the first rule of application development. Upon presentation of the final application to the end user, the invevitable comment is “that’s exactly what I asked for, but its not what I meant”. The second rule is that when you get the thing running, the avalanche of requests for tiny changes to make it “actually useful” will exceed the work that went into the initial project by several orders of magnitude. The third rule is that any attempt to make the application to straight forward so as to be fool proof, will instantly yield the evidence required to show just how clever fools are.
What I had in mind was more like no database at all. By using crowdsourcing to gather content, you can also use crowd sourcing to keep it updated and current. You don’t need a searchable database (in my opinion) you need a list topics with a summary of the relative issues and CURRENT facts at the top, and the crowd sourced information to debate and justify them below. So…
Wordpress already provides for that type of functionality. you can have categories and pages and comments below each page. So set up the issues, arguments, science, stories, etc how you would like, one to a page. Crowdsource the material (comments just like Anthony got will appear in droves, and some people will post in the standard you ask for and some people…most people…won’t). The moderator for THAT page keeps the top updated with an accurate summary of the issue, the claims, and based on the crowdsourced material documented in the comments below, a summary rebuttal with links to relative sources, web sites and cross topics. If you can get sufficient attention for the crowd sourcing, and sufficient number of moderators, there’s no need for an application at all. WordPress already has search tools, and the “database” will grow itself as commenters post links and present facts, and the moderator keeps the most important of these summarized at the top.
Those who need only the summary and current state of affairs have it right there for easy reference, and those who want to dispute the summary, or provide additional information, or debate the fine points are free to do so in the comments. Warmists can comment just as freely as skeptics, just like on Anthony’s blog, but on that specific issue only. If you want to have an Al Gore page, you could even have an open invitation to Al Gore to set the record straight on any misinformation and so on.
You could easily break things up into categories. One for people, the claims they make, and the facts like you have in mind for Al Gore. Another for favourite talking points like the plight of polar bears and the actual facts, or another might be the “big oil funding” rhetoric which would include lists a various research groups, including skeptic ones, and who their known funding sources are.. with an invitation to those groups and anyone else to post comments showing otherwise.
Crowdsourced articles on Al Gore’s bullarky for example, might link to both public documentation, but part of the rebuttal might also be a more detailed explanation of a particular issue. For example, Al Gore’s public retraction of his stance on ethanol might include links to external sources where he was quoted to that effect, but also a link to a science page focused on the current known science on the net benefit of ethanol.
No need for a database app in my mind, just some up front work settting up the categories and topics and recruiting enough moderators to keep the discussions under control and the summaries up to date.
I hereby volunteer to moderate the “CO2 is Logarithmic” page.
P.F. says:
July 17, 2011 at 8:48 am
We skeptics need to put good science, observation, and reason next to the many absurd notions of AGW and through that contrast, reveal how the entire movement is simply a Progressive agenda to redistribute the world’s resources through climate policy.”
I keep hearing this – where does it come from? The object as I see it is to take wealth from every oik that has it to any degree, up to and including the ‘middle class’ and reduce everyone to practical slavery under ever more burdensome taxes and with drastic reductions in basic amenities, together with preventing the poorest nations such as in Africa from even rising out of poverty, meanwhile also exploiting their resources to the benefit of the few.