Normally I don’t go for anonymous guest posters, but this one is from the famous “zombie” of zombietime.com whose identity remains hidden so that he/she may continue to record the anarchy and socially bereft behavior that permeates the McKibbenesque protestor culture of America. Zombie wrote to me yesterday asking that I bring attention to the post, and I’m happy to do so. The text is below, but please follow the link to the evidence (dozens of scanned pages) presented.
The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era?
Guest post by “Zombie”
I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change. I learned this:
• Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.
• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:
– Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
– Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
– Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
– Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
– In general embrace all environmental causes.
You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But there’s a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasn’t about Global Warming at all; it was instead about “The Coming of the New Ice Age,” and it isn’t exactly “new” — it was published in 1977.
The Solution Remains the Same
As many other pundits and analysts have pointed out, in the mid-to-late 1970s we endured a massive “climate change scare” that was the exact opposite of the one we’re enduring now. Back then, the media and activists trumpeted the arrival of a new ice age, with the specter of ice sheets and glaciers covering half the northern hemisphere, and brutal winters in the remaining ice-free zones.
The fact that the media and popular culture and academia have veered from one panic-inducing disaster scenario to another one which completely contradicts the first one is funny enough in its own right. But reading The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age opened my eyes to an even more significant aspect of this serial crisis-mongering:
The “solutions” prescribed to solve both Global Warming and the looming Ice Age are exactly the same.
In both cases, proponents of the theory-du-jour say that in order to stave off disaster, we must reverse the march of civilization, stop our profligate use of carbon-based fuels, cede power and money from the First World to the Third World, and wherever possible revert to a Luddite pre-industrial lifestyle.
I realized: The solution (commit civilizational suicide) always remains the same; all that differs are the wildly divergent purported “crises” proffered up to justify the imposition of the solution.
Seen from this angle, the entire Climate Change field should be more properly reframed thus:
In order to weaken and eventually destroy the existing industrialized nations, we must devise an ecological “crisis” so severe that only voluntary economic suicide can solve it; and if this first crisis doesn’t materialize as planned, then devise another, and another, even if they flatly contradict our previous claims.
I had long suspected that this is the most accurate characterization of Climate Changeology; but reading The New Ice Age clinched it for me. The true purpose of climate change disaster-mongering is to permanently cripple the First World, and to elevate the Third World, in order to create a planet with no economic inequality. The goal remains constant; the supposed imminent catastrophes justifying it come and go as needed.
Below, I’ll present scanned pages from the book so you can see for yourself.
The scenario we’re in reminds me of the classic Twilight Zone episode called “The Midnight Sun”: At first we see the characters sweltering in increasingly unbearable heat as the Earth, knocked out of its orbit, slowly plummets into the sun. Just as they are all about to burn to death, in typical Twilight Zone fashion, the lead character wakes up — she had in fact merely been having a fever dream about the world getting hotter; in reality, the Earth had been knocked away from the sun, and they’re all going to freeze to death. Ha ha — gotcha! Just as in the narratives spun by the climate change catastrophists, the Earth is doomed either way, even though the disaster scenario flips from one extreme to its exact opposite. Hot, cold, whatever; one way or the other, Mother Nature will wreak revenge on us for our hubris!
Ice Ages Are Making a Comeback
Turns out my choice of reading material (discovered recently at a rummage sale for 25¢, in case you’re curious) was fortuitous, as climate change — and ice ages — are suddenly back in the headlines this past week. And the news is not good for the crisis-mongers.
First we learned that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is actually helping us stave off the next inevitable ice age by a few years. Yes, you read that right: the “runaway global warming” scenario is now off the table; a new ice age is coming for sure, and whatever human warming effects there may be will only make our descent into the deep freeze a little more comfy.
Then, in a different breakthrough, leading scientists announced the discovery of a heretofore undetected type of molecule in the atmosphere which spurs cloud formation and negates global warming effects. Thanks to something called “Criegee biradicals,” the more we pollute, the more clouds form, and the cooler the planet becomes. Thus, the cumulative effect on the climate due to mankind’s activity: zilch. So for the second time in a week, the entire Anthropogenic Global Warming theory was fatally undermined.
But wait! We’re not done. Next up: A study out of Harvard proving that warming and cooling cycles are caused by orbital wobble and precession of the poles; and that the only reason the next ice age hasn’t arrived quite on schedule yet is due to our beneficial increase in carbon dioxide. Yes, that’s right: more data showing that another ice age is inevitable sooner or later.
A third nail in AGW’s coffin in less than a week? Why wasn’t this front page news?
But brace yourself — because those nails in the coffin were just the opening act. The next bit of news was the real blockbuster, a stake through AGW’s heart:
Now we learn that the world has not warmed at all for the last 15 years, and that the entire recent “global warming” hubbub was totally imaginary. Furthermore, the recent cooling is so significant that we may be headed for — you guessed it — a “mini ice age.”
Still not enough for you? The coup de grace came from our own USDA, which released a new “Plant Hardiness Zone Map” indicating that the mild global warming spike of a few years ago was actually good for plant growth and biodiversity. In other words: Even if we do experience warming, it makes the world a nicer place.
And that was just one week’s news. I wonder what next week will bring?
Now, you’d think that this devastating barrage of body blows would basically bring an end to the whole Global Warming “controversy.”
But no. Because, you see, true believers are nearly impervious to facts. In the midst of all this, the AGW activists and bullies continued their relentless quest to reshape the world’s economic landscape, as if they still had the upper hand. They even launched a witch hunt against “denier” weathermen, threatening to get any TV meteorologists fired unless they present global warming propaganda during their forecasts. Meanwhile, Al Gore continued on his decade-long tirade, declaring that “civilization is at risk” if the presidential candidates don’t cave into his demands immediately. And if you check the Web sites of any number of climate change nonprofits and organizations, they’re all still in hysterical crisis mode about the coming calamity. To them, you see, news stories like the ones we saw this week may come and go, but Global Warming is forever!
Something’s Gotta Give
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as William Butler Yeats once wrote. This disconnect between reality and hysteria can’t last forever. As impervious as Global Warmists may be to facts, they’re highly sensitive to their social environment. Eventually, as the general public loses interest in humoring the hysterics, whose status is rapidly dropping from “cutting-edge hipsters” to “embarrassing kooks,” the Alarmists will go into a huddle and emerge with a new crisis scenario so horrifying and immediate that something must be done NOW! And that something, as we learned above, will be the exact same something prescribed to solve the previous crisis.
We already saw the first half of this transition just a short time ago. For years, the crisis peddlers threw all their weight behind the phrase “Global Warming” to describe the looming disaster. But in recent years as data crept in casting some doubt on their prognostications, the phrase “Global Warming” was inconspicuously discarded and replaced with the more flexible “Climate Change.” Voilà! No matter what the weather did, it could be chalked up to “climate change,” because hey, change could go either way, right?
Needless to say, however innocuous “climate change” may have sounded, the activists said Trust us, it’s way worse than mere “global warming,” so the drastic solutions we proposed earlier are still required.
But the ever-growing mountain of evidence pointing to an eventual (naturally occurring) ice age phase in the distant future may trigger yet another huddle among the climate change crowd. Perhaps after a suitable wait, banking on everyone’s short memory, they’ll re-emerge from the huddle this time dropping “Climate Change” for something ice-age themed, like “Accelerated Glaciation,” or perhaps “Man-Made Chill Factor.”
And you can guarantee that they’ll have a solution for this new crisis; and it will be the exact same solution they announced for climate change, and for global warming before that, and yes, for the looming ice age they worried about the previous time back in the ’70s: De-industrialize the First World, end civilization as we know it, and cede power to “the global south,” i.e. the Third World.
The Evidence
To prepare you for this eventuality, I hereby present scans from The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age, published in 1977 and written by “The Impact Team,” a coalition of authors from various fields.
Each scan below is taken from a page in The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age; click on any image to see the passage in context on the full page.
Under each passage I’ll make a few comments; but in general, the text speaks for itself.
Think of this as a warning from the past. Not a warning about looming ice ages, but rather a warning to ignore politically motivated disaster-mongers.
See the rest of the post and all the scanned pages here
Hi, zombie, its me the one who knows.
Be cool.
Alarmism about chemicals poisoning the earth and our need to live as cavemen were similar but never broke the sarcasm barrier to be taken seriously.
Word is that the next time the carbon club meets the title of the meeting will include Sustainability. Climate and warming will be absent from the title, the agenda and the meeting.
Be aware that Sustainability requires the taxation of carbon dioxide, and sending money to large landowners, bankers and third world dictators.
Wait for it, is will be here in less than 3 months.
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 4:55 pm
“I started reading this post about a “Terrifying new book” and thought … Really??? Being skeptical, I googled it myself and the first thing that came up was this 1977 book review by Steve Schneider, an actual climate scientist who thought The Climate Conspiracy was a mess. ”
Well, it’s no wonder that Schneider would deride a book that outlays his battle plan. He was the driving force of the IPCC for years and kept all the lesser scientists in line.
1975 `Endangered Atmosphere’
Conference: Where the Global
Warming Hoax Was Born
Mead, Schneider, Holdren and Lovelock
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/highlights/Fall_2007.html
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf
Schneider, Ehrlich, his wife and Holdren were from Stanford.
Schneider was part of the original Malthusian movement that started the CO2 scare, so he would have been critical of a book that outlines his battle plan.
http://inthesenewtimes.com/2009/11/29/1975-endangered-atmosphere-conference-where-the-global-warming-hoax-was-born/
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2010/03/aha.html
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2010/04/global-warming-origin-of-crime.html
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 7:07 pm
“I apparently have a different learning style than most of you. Instead of posting sarcasm and conspiracy theories, I looked the book up and read Schneider’s 1977 review in Nature. I looked up Peterson’s 2008 BAMS study and read that too.”
Oh, you’re a superior being! Next you will read the links about the Endangered Atmosphere Conference I posted; superior beings are like that; they’re reading all of that stuff… unfortunately, what they did there in 1975 was CONSPIRE… hope your superior intellect can handle that.
I used to own a copy of that book. It amused me greatly to refer to it when the global warming hysteria started.
Brutal cold snap here (the Balkans). Freezing temperatures (-10 to -15 °C) for weeks and now it started snowing again! No end in sight. More people will die in the remote regions.
AT KEN MEVTHEN: The “not so new” book is interesting in that it illuminates the scare-mongering teams and the political agenda, but why is it not as obvious to those who hold the purse strings on public purses? They cannot all be gullible? But they will go along with it….if the ‘concensus’ of voters think its true. Keep getting the message out!
A large part of why those who hold the public purse strings go along with the scam is that they were planning to cash in themselves. Liberal pols from the president on down were invested in the carbon trading scheme.
• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:
– Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
– Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
– Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
– Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
– In general embrace all environmental causes
Message to author:
“And how would you know?”
¡Hasta la victoria siempre!
This probably invokes a corollary of Godwin’s law (lore?), sorry.
SSDD.
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 7:07 pm
[Richard M writes,
“Put on your thinking cap and get back to us when you have it figured out.”]
I apparently have a different learning style than most of you. Instead of posting sarcasm and conspiracy theories, I looked the book up and read Schneider’s 1977 review in Nature. I looked up Peterson’s 2008 BAMS study and read that too.
Evidently your “different learning style” forgot to include the ClimateGate emails. There is no doubt what I stated is true. All you have to do is read their own words. Trying to invoke the “conspiracy theory” put down doesn’t work when these people use terms like “the cause”.
The facts are all there. You can ignore them or you can accept them. What will it be? Religion or science?
And in typical Communist fashion, when in disagreement with someone, simply repress and deny them. Don’t bother with facts or argument, they don’t matter. Everyone here seem to remember the Ice Age scare, there are entire books written about it, but yet you claim it was a fruad and simply did not exist! Unlike Stalin you don’t have the power to airbrush out the parts of history you do not approve of.
—
“And please – the myth of a “global cooling scare” has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.”
J Fischer says:
“And please – the myth of a “global cooling scare” has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.”
Are you serious? My June 1975 Stuyvesant HS senior physics project was a plot of UK temps 1870(or so?) – 1972 and a projection of future temps and growing season. The database I used? The Royal gardeners at Windsor castle, Baltmoral, and one other royal estate. Staring with Victoria/Albert, the royal estate gardeners kept daily records of temps, rain and growing season cycles. All available at the NY Public library main beanch. Plotting that data with graph paper and straight edge, and using a simple — very simple– 12th grader’s algorithm I plotted temps until 2000. OK I was wrong, I projected temps being significant colder in 2000 than 1972. Hey– at least I wasn’t taxpayer funded!! Point is that my paper included as source material all the Global Cooling stuff in the media and science publications. Cooling was in vogue with many ‘malthusians’ because the shortened growing season was consistent with the Club of Rome scarcity/starvation scare. But cooling had NO VILLAIN! The coolists only cited natural variation. Where’s the research funding in that!! So the alarmists found Mauna Loa CO2 levels, some dubious physics and AGW was born. Read some history Fischer.
Alchemy says:
February 2, 2012 at 9:06 pm
I would like to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels because I think they are as much a mug’s game as alarmism.
———————-
How so? and what’s the alternative?
Yep, I distinctly remember the big global cooling scare in the ’70s, that was the primary reason why I had difficulty believing Al Gore when he popped up a decade later. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Stephen Schneider was a contributor to this book.
Wish I could remember who it was lately that claimed the ENTIRE global cooling scare stemmed from a solitary Newsweek story………..
No, it extended well back into the 60’s. I recall reading articles on the coming ice age in 1969, and it wasn’t quite new then, although it attracted the most attention in refereed publications a bit later than it appeared in less rigorous media:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
has references. I can’t remember the magazine where I first read about it, though — I don’t think it was Playboy or Popular Science — although I can still visualize the cover page and content of the article. It knocked around in stuff like this for a few years before “big boys” wrote articles and books and so on and it went mainstream.
Remember, global temperatures plunged in the early 60’s and remained low through the early 70’s, an inconvenient truth that the warmists are trying to write out of history by carefully washing and rinsing and kneading and baking the actual data. As the book excerpts say, arctic and antarctic ice increased by 10% in a single year back there, and of course the book is quite right about the high albedo of ice and its negative feedback (somewhat ameliorated because the polar regions aren’t major absorbers in the heat budget anyway).
One day, possibly in saner times, the world will look back at all this and Ph.D. dissertations will be written on the entire cycle as a nearly perfect example of cognitive dissonance, a.k.a. “adaptive preference formation”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Here’s wikipedia’s take on the seminal study in which the term was coined (by Festinger):
Perhaps the most famous case in the early study of cognitive dissonance was described by Leon Festinger and others in the book When Prophecy Fails.[5] The authors infiltrated a religious group that was expecting the imminent end of the world on a certain date. When that date passed without the world ending, the movement did not disband. Instead, the group came to believe that they had been spared in order to spread their teachings to others, a justification that resolved the conflict between their previous expectations and reality.
Does that sound at all familiar? End of the world prophecy, prophecy fails, massive cognitive dissonance, followed by a smooth transition to another world-ending prophecy so that they were right after all, in a way, in a way that they quickly make the only way that matters. Curiously, in the throes of CD people actually become more committed to their beliefs when presented with contradictory evidence, not less. I mean, in the Gospels Jesus is reported as saying, quite clearly, that he would return in the lifetime of at least some of his followers to bring God’s Kingdom to earth. This wasn’t supposed to happen thousands of years later, it was supposed to happen right away. I’m not talking about Revelations, I’m talking about the straight up supposed biographers, in the official if somewhat contradictory biography.
Obviously, this didn’t happen. Has that stopped Christianity? Has it stopped apocalyptic Christian Zionists? Did it stop Jehovah’s Witnesses, an entire cult devoted to an end of the world prophecy that failed to happen — twice?
Something in our brains is wired to favor this sort of anti-reasoned behavior, to a greater or lesser extent, in nearly all of us. A very few philosophies — scientific rationalism on the epistemological side, Buddhism on the ethical side — are more or less devoted to overcoming our inclination toward CD as a means of justifying irrational or unethical behavior by ruthlessly stripping away our self-imposed blinders, by using skepticism and the power of doubt to winnow the better, consistent ideas out from the worse, inconsistent ideas. CD is present on this site — never doubt it — as much as it is elsewhere in the world. CD is potentially present wherever and whenever a human transforms a “question” into a “cause”.
In a way, CD is a form of mental crutch. It permits us to avoid massive reorganizations of our worldview when we are presented with direct experiential evidence that our worldview is wrong. It is so very difficult to change the actual facts, so much easier to change our perceptions of those facts. Amazingly, we have a well-developed ability to selectively blind ourselves to contradictions, to live with an inconsistent system of beliefs. We can actually strengthen our beliefs in one part of our worldview that we thing we “understand” and that seems to hold together (if you don’t examine it too closely) in direct response to evidence that is is incorrect or inconsistent around the edges. In other threads on list, there are people who are prepared to throw out the laws of thermodynamics rather than confront the fact that they contradict some of their cherished core beliefs. Pure CD.
Zombie has the right of it, although it doesn’t really require a “conspiracy” to make the curious paradox he describes happen. In the United States, the so-called “Tea Party” has emerged as a lunatic fringe, one that actually still inherits institutionalized CD in the form of religious extremism from those failed prophecies of so long ago. Nobody “planned” this — it simply served as a nucleation of unsane memes of a certain sort that have knocked around in the population forever. Similarly, there is an as-yet unnamed lunatic fringe that we might call the “Tree Party” that is just as unsane and cognitively dissonant, nucleated around a hodge-podge of disconnected beliefs.
The litany of “remedies” that Zombie recites are some — but not all — of the core memes that are crudely shared by the Tree Party. The Sierra Club doesn’t want drilling or pipelines in Alaska or running down from Canada. The reasons for holding this position are diverse among its members — protecting wildlife from environmental disruption, concern about the impact of spills, concern that oil companies already have enough money that they exert tremendous political influence in our bizarre system of electing our government, where whoever raises the most money often wins, so that the real election takes place long before election day with cash-rich corporate entities dominating the “vote”. Note well, all of these are perfectly reasonable concerns. Wildlife is worth protecting as we have well-documented examples of driving species to extinction and the evolved genes of the world are a form of natural wealth. Oil spills are ugly and expensive and all too likely in a world where work is done by the lowest bidder (who has to cut costs to the bone to deliver on their low bid). And who isn’t aware of the eternal problem of the excessive influence of the very wealthy on political decision making — it’s an everyday adage: “Money is Power”.
The really interesting thing happens when these reasonable concerns become obsessions, become “causes”. The causes involved start to overlap and merge. CAGW (if true) would absolutely be a terrible thing, I think we can agree. So would an asteroid falling into the Indian Ocean. So would a gamma ray burst. So would an Ice Age. Note well that all of these are just “bets”, mostly bets we have no choice but to take, except for the “A” in CAGW. That’s a very important A, the same A that people managed to insert into the Global Cooling scare. Note well that religious beliefs are based on the idea that humans can influence the outcome of bets like this by “right action”. Pray to Jesus, and he will help you win the lottery or cure your cancer, even though the odds of either one are solidly against you. The “A” allows these concerns to become a religion, because they provide the illusion of control.
But now observe the synthesis. I love wildlife, think oil companies left to their own devices are all too likely to do things sloppily enough to create a mess I’ll ultimately have to pay to clean up (who do you think really pays for things like the Gulf Oil Spill?), and do indeed think that multinational oil companies function as global shadow governments that wield the kind of political power that only hundreds of billions of dollars can buy. The entire war in Iraq was arguably bought and paid for by oil money. Somebody comes along and points out that CAGW threatens wildlife, will create a huge mess that I might have to pay for, and besides, all of that oil is a political problem that threatens my freedom and the worth of my vote!
Suddenly my interest in assessing the actual probability of CAGW goes way down. Screw inconvenient truth, it becomes a convenient fiction, even for somebody that isn’t horribly unreasonable.
This becomes a link between my particular “Tree Party” spectrum of beliefs and the beliefs of Luddite neo-Jeffersonians, who dislike modern society altogether, since the remedies overlap their prior belief. It becomes a link to frustrated neo-Communists, who oppose corporations altogether quite independent of their supposed political power and who are still smarting (from the point of view of CD) from the global collapse of communism. It becomes a link to pure ethicists who do, quite reasonably, wish for the enormous inequity in the distribution of the world’s wealth and freedom to be reduced, and who are reasoning (whether or not it is justified to do so) that we are resource constrained so that the only way to increase the wealth of others is to become less wealthy ourselves. CAGW has nothing to do with this problem, of course, but one of the absolutely brilliant moves of the people who are pushing this agenda was to link them, the birth of the IPCC.
Suddenly the Tree Party has become a vast global network of humans, each pursuing a possibly narrow single agenda — or narrow cluster of agendas — but who have a clearly defined overlap, unified by CAGW. As long as CAGW — or CAGC, for that matter, or Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Pollution (CAGP) or any other CAG-fill-in-the-letter-of-your-choice — exists, CD will prevent people with the right spectrum of overlapping agendas from looking at it too closely, because it is such a convenient fiction.
The really sad thing about this is that it has been such a powerful link that it has long since corrupted the science. Scientists are human, and often have at least some of the beliefs in the spectrum I partially explore above. I certainly do. Our tendencies towards cognitive dissonant behavior and mental reworking of our Universe don’t magically go away when you get a Ph.D. Indeed, confirmation bias is the single greatest well-documented problem in science today, and not just climate science. It is even more prevalent, and arguably much worse in its impact, in medical “science”, for example. Scarcely a week goes by without yet another “scandal” coming to light where some poor sap with tenure at stake bent the data that fuelled the publications that got him or her tenure, or a publication that directly contradicts the “valid” conclusions of an earlier study. Because nobody understands statistics — not even most scientists understand statistics — it is all too easy to publish crap when one is really trying hard not to.
The moral of the story is simple. Whenever you hear the magic trifecta of terms “Catastrophe”, “Global”, and “Anthropogenic” (where the latter is any variant of “it is our fault/under out control, but only if we do…”), put your hands on your wallet and back slowly out of the room! Time for extreme skepticism. Since this happens routinely in every church, synagogue, mosque, or temple on Earth, you can start there. Only when you are safely away from it, far from the influence and arguments of glassy-eyed CD-contagious True Believers can you even think about objectively assessing the facts. Pascal’s Wager will be dangled in your face a thousand times if you stay, and this will sooner or later corrupt your judgement, just as it did Pascal’s. Sure the probability of disaster is small, but the asserted cost of disaster can be inflated without bound, so that no measures taken to avoid or further reduce this small probability can be too expensive.
Our real hope is that most people — I truly believe — are not idiots. Sure, one has to worry about Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, because people are often ass-holes and will abuse the hell out of the commons if measures aren’t taken to regulate it (look at any roadside in the country for evidence — every McDonalds cup on the side of the road equates to an individual act of ass-holery on the part of an actual human being). But the same inclination to pursue personal interest that leads to dumping cups or trash on the roadway rather than carry it to a can also sooner or later leads people to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis of the Pascalian wagers that they are constantly being offered. Jesus might send me straight to hell for littering, but overall, I bet he either doesn’t really exist or that if he exists he won’t condemn me to an eternity of horrific pain if I throw my freshly emptied beer can out of the window of my car to reduce the risk of being busted for driving under the influence.
The simplest way to proceed in the context of the current discussion is to snip the “C” off of the CAGW scenario. That’s well underway, with January UAH lower troposphere temperatures solidly under the 32 year running mean, and the trend solidly downward (although probably not “meaningfully” so, see nobody understands statistics). Overall, R-squared for the UAH-LTT data is visibly a very small number (statistically indistinguishable statistically from no trend at all), doubly so if one includes error bars on all of the data points, something that climate scientists seem allergic to doing (perhaps because they would be so large compared to the variation of the data).
Working on the “A” is also not unreasonable, as long as one doesn’t make the error of trying to completely erase it. As I’ve posted long and hard elsewhere, and will return to soon, there is no doubt whatsoever that the GHG-GHE is a factor in the dynamic flow of energy into and out of the Earth, one that raises lower troposphere and surface temperatures compared to what they would be (on average) in a GHG-free atmosphere. There is direct IR-spectroscopic evidence for it. However, very little beyond that fact is certain, this is not settled science, and hence the entire dynamic mechanism of the Earth’s heating and cooling is correctly open to the process of scientific enquiry, all the more so when models that predict catastrophe appear to be failing, when they have little predictive skill either forward or backward in time.
In the meantime, be assured. There will always be a CAG-X out there to propose Pascal’s Wager on, and there will always be overlap between X and some spectrum of people who believe passionately in some cause the remedies for X would advance. This not only isn’t finished, it will never be finished, not until humans actually evolve away from it, memetically if not genetically.
rgb
J Fischer says:
February 2, 2012 at 4:31 pm
“And please – the myth of a “global cooling scare” has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.”
_______________________
That is a totally untrue statement. Wishing it were so doesn’t make your statement true. All the Lefty sites and blogs made a big effort a couple of years ago to “debunk” the claim that there was any sort of widespread fear- mongering about “Global Cooling” in the 70’s, but they were dishonest in their efforts, just as YOU are in yours.
When books and TV series and numerous “scientific” efforts of the time are obviously linked above and you still make that claim, then you expose yourself as one who is not interested in the truth.
Nigel S says:
February 3, 2012 at 3:30 am
“¡Hasta la victoria siempre!
This probably invokes a corollary of Godwin’s law (lore?), sorry.”
Nope. Not for leftisms.
WUWT:
This is being used by some alarmists to support their AGW dogma.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120201181218.htm
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeah, we invented a time machine and we went back in time to plant some articles on selected magazines and journals.
/sarc
One of the many themes of idiocy championed by the AGW political movement is the idea of a “rich West” and the poor rest-of-world.
This short video presentation by Hans Rosling:
is a very needed antidote to this obsolete idea that the white-skinned West somehow are an economic master-race who need political doctrines such as AGW to self-flaggelate their moral guilt for being so much richer and better off than everyone else. Its simply not true any more.
WAKE UP to the fact that there is no “West”. There is no north-south. In fact the “West” has had to go fatally into debt just to sustain our myth of superiority and now it is all falling apart.
We have reading comprehension issues, don’t we? The point of this wasn’t whether the global cooling scare was a massive consensus, a minor fad, or one guy. They point was (if you actually read), that the policy recommendation was exactly identical to the policy recommendation for every other enviro craze, which is to choose poverty. Why is self-selected poverty the answer regardless of what the question is?
You should be embarrassed that you presented that book. Full stop.