![truth-and-lies[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/truth-and-lies1.gif)
Essay by Tom Harris, originally published in PJMedia
Over the past twenty years, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of catastrophic climate change forecasts and prophecies that would put Moses to shame. Coastal communities will be submerged due to rapid sea-level rise caused by soaring temperatures and glacier melt. Record heat waves, droughts, floods, insect infestations, and wildfires will result in millions of climate change refugees fleeing their ruined homelands. Competition over increasingly scarce water resources will lead to armed conflict. About all that has been missing from these doom and gloom predictions is alien invasion.
Like Moses’ warnings to Pharaoh in the Bible, we are told there is a high price to pay if we are to avoid climate change-driven “death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods,” to quote from the March 31 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We must reduce our carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 70% by 2050 to keep so-called global temperature from exceeding 2° C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC claims. This will require massive cuts in our use of coal, oil, and natural gas, the sources of 87% of world primary energy consumption. What’s also needed, according to yet another IPCC report, Climate Change 2014 – Mitigation of Climate Change, released on April 12, is nothing less than:
a tripling to nearly a quadrupling of the share of zero‐ and low‐carbon energy supply from renewables, nuclear energy and fossil energy with carbon dioxide capture and storage [CCS, a technology the IPCC admit is currently problematic], or bioenergy with CCS by the year 2050.
Former Vice President Al Gore tells us that “the survival of civilization as we know it” is at risk if we don’t take these kinds of actions.
While historical evidence increasingly suggests that cataclysm really did follow Moses’ prophesies, modern-day forecasts of climate Armageddon are not coming true. The reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) reveal that there is nothing extraordinary about late twentieth century warming, a temperature rise that stopped over 17 years ago. The NIPCC explains that ice cover “is not melting at an enhanced rate; sea-level rise is not accelerating; and no systematic changes have been documented in evaporation or rainfall or in the magnitude or intensity of extreme meteorological events.”
Contrary to the IPCC’s warnings, the NIPCC report released this month, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, shows that long-term warming and CO2 rise are benefitting nature and humanity, “causing a great greening of the Earth.”
Faced with such good news, what are global warming activists to do?
Read the entire analysis here: http://pjmedia.com/blog/telling-noble-lies-about-climate-change-will-backfire/
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Science has to drive policy, and not the other way around. If the science is uncertain, such as climate sensitivity, then drastic action is not required.
Bob Bajini says:
April 18, 2014 at 4:42 pm
The NIPCC can make the IPCC look sober and moderate. That’s the problem: two groups of people with competing positions yelling over each other with red faces.
You equate the NIPCC — an organization primarily composed of volunteers, and which does not get one-thousanth the operating income that the UN/IPCC gets — with an organization that is purely political in nature, and which is highly paid to produce the narrative that its paymasters desire?? The UN/IPCC has nothing to do with real science. IPCC ‘science’ is simply a veneer that allows them to appear credible to the average person.
The Co-Chair of one of the IPCC Working Groups, Ottmar Edenhofer, made this comment in a moment of regrettable candor:
You should not equate the NIPCC with the UN/IPCC. The first is an honest skeptical organization trying to bring some probity back into the discussion, while the UN/IPCC is a throughly political body with an agenda: redistribution of the West’s wealth to people who never earned it.
Is that A-OK with you? I welcome the NIPCC. They fill a real need, and they should be commended and supported. They are one of our few bulwarks against official pickpockets.
bushbunny says:
April 18, 2014 at 7:19 pm
We have long used the enviro’s CAGW beliefs as a “religion” worshiping GAIA in all her pagan atheism as a metaphor for their faith and (in some) their earnest but otherwise empty lives of desolation and worldly concerns. For most, the ecological-religious fervor of the indoctrinated is merely a convenient “hook” for the bureaucratic pinworms and parasites infesting the body of the world.
But, an ecological religion is not so far-fetched as it used to seem ….
Unfortunately, while we may be winning majority of popular opinion, in the US, our voters are to apathetic to slow our government down as it races to use AGW as the lever to pry many many $billions from the US economy. The economic damage is already set in play.
While I don’t doubt the serious amount of alarmist nonsense spouted about AGW, i’m sorry, but you lost me as soon as you suggested that Moses made predictions that were more accurate. There are so many things wrong with that I don’t even know where to begin, and only serves to diminish your credibility..
Well there is evidence that Rameses II chased the Israelites out of Egypt considering that territory was huge then. But they were in bondage that proved to be like slavery. As punishment they could not use straw to make bricks, and they went on strike. Good story though. It is possible that Moses just timed the his exit right, as Egypt did suffer famines etc., but the Passover is a bit hard to believe. Yet an important convention in the Jewish faith to remember their obvious freedom from a tyrant and eventual settlement in the Levant. I can’t remember but the old testament and Exodus was not written then, and the first Holy Bible was transcribed in Greek. I know when I was a young Roman Catholic the old testament was not used as a guide to our faith, as it was Jewish born, so to speak. Only the New Testament. My father forbid me from doing religious studies at school, but I had to sit in the class. I would have passed the exam with flying colours if allowed to sit in my GCE ‘o’ levels. Such was religious prejudice in England in the 1950s.
You are totally wrong in thinking that carbon dioxide is a primary cause of warming.
Radiation in just a few spectral bands from carbon dioxide can never cause a warmer surface to increase in temperature. It can have a minuscule effect slowing down radiative cooling, but virtually all the slowing of surface cooling is by conduction at the surface-atmosphere boundary. The energy thus absorbed primarily by nitrogen and oxygen molecules subsequently finds its way by diffusion into water vapor, carbon dioxide and other radiating molecules, all of which act like holes in the nitrogen-oxygen blanket, radiating energy out of the atmosphere.
There is no need for any warming by radiation anyway. It is now well-known and proven empirically that a thermal gradient forms at the molecular level in the tropospheres of any planet with a significant atmosphere. On Earth the surface temperature would be a few degrees hotter if there were no water vapor, but it is cooler because water vapor and other radiating molecules (carbon dioxide included) help to cool the lower troposphere by radiating energy to higher altitudes and to space.
That is what physics tells us. From my reading of what climatologists have assumed, I find their writings to be a complete travesty of physics.
Totally agree, and one doesn’t need to a climatologist to know the physics and the forces involved in climate changes, and what weather patterns we can expect. Although they should before they produce papers on the subject.
Having been in the political arena for years, sometimes the truth of a situation politically speaking sometimes takes years to come out. And politicians are renown for hiding the real truth of a situation, by throwing in a red herring. I have been amazed that this climate change AGW has gone so far and cost so much money to implement a lie.
I can’t say am a scientist but I do hold a degree in archaeology and palaeoanthropology and a graduate certificate in Arts (GCA) a halfway towards a MA. We studied evolution and geology and climate changes between interglacial and glacial and the impact this had on human beings and other living organisms. The mega fauna demise or adaptation to smaller genus’.
I have always wondered if governments already fear another glacial period is on the horizon. However, a glacial period will impact more on the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern hemisphere. This would impact greatly on the world’s economy and energy output that we developed nations are heavily dependent on. They have grasped at straws to try to prove global warming is a reality but the causation factors are what is driving their argument.
The thing is that the planet always warmed before a glacial or mini ice age, and one of my geology tutors said,”… we are at the mercy of nature and natural disasters. But we are still an ice planet and believe it or not, we are thriving better in an interglacial than we have in a glacial or mini ice age… ‘Humans propose and nature deposes’ and their very little we can do other than adapt.
I wonder, just speculating that if a meteor or asteroid was heading for earth from the sun, it would not be spotted early enough to give a warning, would they announce it was coming and there was nothing we could do to prevent it? Instant panic and social upheavals, anarchy etc. People committing suicide or trying to buy as much food as they could, even stealing others resources, the mind boggles of what outcome this could have on humans generally.
Is it possible, and I believe it is, that governments are trying to tell people there isn’t going to be another ice age in our life time, and you should worry as the planet is warming, that it isn’t?
While it is true that we will some day begin to run out of fossil fuels, that day is at least several hundred years in the future.
Planning for it now is a complete waste of time as the technology and societal needs of that far distant future are completely unknowable, and any plans made now stand as much chance of making things worse than of making things better.
Australia’s Attorney-General – whose party was at least partly elected to dismantle CAGW legistlation – which they have so far failed to do because they don’t have the numbers in the Senate until July – has weighed into the CAGW sceptics/believers debate. yet, what a bizarre argument to be making, when you go on to suggest CAGW proponents engage with sceptics intellectually and show them why “they are wrong”! surely he would have served his argument better by stating: whilst i “believe” in AGW, that doesn’t mean the debate/science is settled.
unfortunately, his party is still sticking to the line that they believe in it, but will fix it differently!
18 April: SMH: Lisa Cox: Climate change proponents using ‘mediaeval’ tactics: George Brandis
George Brandis has compared himself to Voltaire and derided proponents of climate change action as “believers” who do not listen to opposing views and have reduced debate to a mediaeval and ignorant level…
While he says he believes in man-made climate change, the Queensland senator tells the magazine he is shocked by the “authoritarianism” with which some proponents of climate change exclude alternative viewpoints…
“He (Brandis) describes as ‘deplorable’ the way climate change has become a gospel truth that you deny or mock at your peril, ‘where one side [has] the orthodoxy on its side and delegitimises the views of those who disagree, rather than engaging with them intellectually and showing them why they are wrong’.”…
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/climate-change-proponents-using-mediaeval-tactics-george-brandis-20140418-zqwfc.html
Col Mosby on April 18, 2014 at 4:29 pm is absolutely wrong on each point.
The best thing about nuclear power is it raises electricity price so that renewable energy sources become more attractive, and sooner.
France, with its much-touted nuclear energy-supplied grid, has higher power prices than does the US, and that is with France subsidizing its electricity prices. In 2011, per the IEA, France industrial power price was 11.6 cents per kWh compared to US at 6.7 cents, and France residential price at 17.5 cents per kWh compared to US at 11.9 cents per kWh. For the facts on France’s nuclear power, see
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part.html
Nuclear power plants in the US cannot compete, even with old, paid-for plants that must only recoup their on-going costs of operation. They cannot survive with sales at 3.2 cents per kWh, per this article: http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-one.html
Facts, not wishful dreams about how nuclear power will someday save us all.
After fully 50 years of commercial operation, nuclear power has managed to provide only 11.7 percent of all the electric power in the world (source: IEA). If the technology was any good, one would expect that nuclear would provide 80 to 90 percent of the power produced.
In fact, nuclear has not replaced oil-fired power around the world. Oil-burning power plants produce almost 5 percent of the world’s electricity (source, IEA for 2011). If nuclear power is so cheap, why are utilities around the world still generating power by burning expensive oil? With oil at $100 per barrel, the utilities are paying approximately $17 per million Btu for oil. With a power plant that achieves 40 percent thermal efficiency, the cost for fuel alone is 14 cents per kWh. Yet, those plants are not replaced with nuclear power. In 50 years, those plants still burn oil.
pat, Brandis is being political, I had an email from Julie Bishop a few years ago, when the report from CERN was published. She told me her party was committed to cutting greenhouse gases.
I replied, which one? Surely not water vapor, in Australia, we need more thanks. Brandis is also getting flack on changes to freedom of speech legislations, that’s a bleedin’ debatable point, and won’t pass legislation I think. Human activity creates pollution for sure, but that won’t change the climate.
I have to go folks keep at it, I need some food, rump steak, mushrooms, potatoes, veggies and gravy. And I have very low cholesterol but eat lots of bananas.
Carbon capture such as the North Sea project just launched in the UK, will eventually be recognised as the most expensively pointless action in human history.
Re Carbon Capture technologies, not only is it here but it is commercially viable. From the press release in 2013:
AUSTIN, Texas –Sept. 30, 2013 – Skyonic Corporation is hosting a groundbreaking event today at its Capitol SkyMine plant in San Antonio. Once fully operational in 2014, the plant, which is the first of its kind in the United States, is expected to capture 300,000 tons of CO2 annually
through the direct capture of 75,000 tons and additional 225,000 tons that will be offset by the production of green products. The plant is expected to turn a profit within three years from the sale of the products including sodium bicarbonate, HCl, and bleach.
http://skyonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Skyonic-Groundbreaking-Release-September-30-2013.pdf
Plato’s Republic as it says itself is not a political science book but a method of examining self knowledge and using the analogy of the city state for the soul and to magnify some aspects of it. In the days before printing such methods were used as a mnemonic to fix a system of ideas with a pictorial method. Images, usually of families or journeys, were used to attach ideas and make them memorable.
Plato wasn’t into lying which is why he said the mythologies were only for experts [in symbolic analogies] because they had the gods doing all sorts of bad things which gave the wrong impression to those without training. The worst thing you can do in the ancient system is tell lies to your self because that results in a pathalogos [false ideas about yourself and reality]. http://noeticsociety.org/the-signs-of-a-pathalogos-problem/
The university system hasn’t done Plato any favours with their literalistic [and thus comical] take on it Plato is a form of symbolic yoga which is how things were communicated before printing. The Platonic dialogues are a careful examination of truth and the debunking of those who think they know the truth. Socrates is called wise because he says he is ignorant.
As for moderns using Plato as an excuse to lie people who want to lie will use any excuse.
An excellent post, Tom.
Thank you!
Even as Plato’s disciple Socrates sipped his hemlock, he realized that Plato’s “Philosopher King” Utopia was a failed Utopian dream, and that democracies are ultimately and inextricably ruled by kleptocrats who form kleptocratic regimes designed to enslave and rob its citizens.
One need only look at the puke-inducing “leaders” we have running our countries into the dirt to realize Plato’s worst fears were an inevitability; I give you Nancy Pelosi… Enough said…..
Any human institution based on “Nobel Lies” will eventually collapse under the weight of reality it’s built to obfuscate.
Doing a quick back-of-the-bar coaster calculation, if the world were to spend $10.5 trillion dollars in building Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors over the next 30 years ($350 billion/yr or 0.4% of world annual GDP, for you math majors), CO2 emissions could be cut to near ZERO and total world energy costs would be roughly cut 1/3rd of current expenditures…
Instead, the IPCC suggests spending $3.2 QUADrillion to “avert” 1C of CO2 induced warming…. That’s 305 TIMES the cost of “solving” the “problem” with LFTRs AND would IPCC’s “solution” would kill BILLIONs of people through energy and food starvation AND wind/solar energy would cost 10 TIMES as much/kWh… Oh, my…
Here’s the $3.2 quadrillion calculation explained:
http://topher.com.au/50-to-1-video-project/#prettyPhoto%5Bflash%5D/0/
So, we can replace almost all our fossil fuel consumption with LFTRs at a cost of around $10.5 trillion and get cheap, safe, clean, efficient and unlimited energy, or spend $3.2 quadrillion and get expensive, clean, unreliable, inefficient, diffuse, intermittent and severely limited energy that will kill billions of folks with energy/food starvation….
Hmmmm…
“Plato’s disciple Socrates”
lol
The big lies.They insult my intelligence.
The problem with nuclear is these thieves can’t make money from it.
The actual law school dictum:
“If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the table.”
You see, the price of forever living in fear of something is to become indifferent to it in the end, and once you realise you’re still alive anyway, you’ll never fear that particular bogey man again.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/why-isnt-the-alarmist-propaganda-working/
Pointman
There are undoubtedly many advocates of such objectives who doubt, or are agnostic about, human-caused climate change. However, they see benefits to promoting, or at least going along with, the climate scare because it furthers their objectives in other fields that they regard as beneficial to society.
I am inclined to support the concept of AGW. Because I believe that when society comes to its senses, it will reject ALL the green environmentalist fanatics in a huge counter-revolution, and that will be good for society…
What a great essay.
Sums up my thoughts perfectly