Last weekend, I conducted a poll asking this question that has been on my mind for a couple of years:
Is it time for an “official” climate skeptics organization, one that produces a policy statement, issues press releases, and provides educational guidance?
The results are in, seen below, and there is an interesting dichotomy that can be observed in the excercise.
I’ve closed the poll with a count of 2701 votes. While there was a clearly decisive result, there were over 440 comments on the thread, many of which argued for “no”. A common reason discussed was that “organizing skeptics is like herding cats” or that “it will provide a target”. While that may be true, I really wasn’t all that interested in herding or target practice, I was thinking about representation. By its nature, all representation of varied viewpoints of a group of people is imperfect, but it does have its advantages if that representation satisfies a common need. The common need I see is getting a slowdown on the freight train of bureaucracy that is growing from CAGW claims and more coverage in media.
Pointman writes about the poll results and that dichotomy in Get real, get organised and finish it.
Anthony Watts recently ran a poll at WUWT that posed the question – “Is it time for an “official” climate skeptics organization, one that produces a policy statement, issues press releases, and provides educational guidance?”
I voted “yes” and I’d like to outline my reasons for doing so.
Any scattered and disparate opposition to an unjust law, policy or controversial issue which doesn’t get organised under some umbrella organisation is not only politically naïve but a consequently weak faction which doesn’t need to be taken seriously. More often than not, they’re comfortable in their armchairs living in their own deluded and secluded cloud cuckoo land.
There’s nicer ways of saying it but if want to be a force to be reckoned with, you have to get all ganged up. You seriously want to take on that exploitive employer, get unionised brothers and sisters. You want political change, form a lobby group. You don’t want that wind farm monstrosity blighting your life, start a local campaigning group. You want equal civil rights irrespective of the colour of your ass, start marching en masse. You want women to have the vote, get those bustles out of the drawing rooms and onto the streets as a mob waving placards and make the powers that be listen to you.
There’s simply no other way to get an issue onto the political agenda, and if you happen to think global warming isn’t a political thing, you pop that blue pill brother and dream on.
Give people a standard they can rally to and if the cause has real popular support, they’ll flock to it and become a bigger voice which will be heard despite any attempts to suppress it. Those attempts will just serve to strengthen group identity and make it a much more powerful force.
The deep primordial history of us as a species is all about getting together and cooperation. You might be rubbish at knapping a flint spearhead, but as long as one of the group can do that specialist thing, everyone is happy. Crap at tracking game? No matter, that runty kid over there is somehow brilliant at it. You might just be a spear carrier, but you know you play your part for the good of everyone else. That compulsion to gang up and work together is by now deeply embedded in our DNA. It’s been selected for. Without it, civilisation would fall apart in a day.
The worst thing you can ever do is sit in grumpy isolation doing nothing more than bitching away to a few cronies, and that’s exactly what’s all too common across the skeptic blogosphere. I call it the whinge and dump mentality and in the whole history of the human race, it’s never achieved anything other than being known as a complete bore to be avoided at all costs. Here they come – run away, run away!
As I look at the poll results to date, out of 2,683 votes cast, the response was 63% Yes, 24% No and the rest going for unsure. Scanning through the five hundred comments below the piece, a substantial majority expressed a “No” for various reasons. That’s an interesting dichotomy but an unsurprising one given the web dynamics of such a controversial issue as global warming.
There are just simply too many polarised people on either side who’ve spent years doing nothing more than venting spleen at each other. It’s become a social activity, a recreational pastime, a macho ego trip, a catharsis for a lot of tangential frustrations. Log in quickly, hurl an insult or two and surf onto the next brawl. Underneath the most combative blogs, out of hundreds of comments, barely a single digit percentage of the comments even reference the original blog topic, whatever it was.
Full essay here: http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/get-real-get-organised-and-finish-it/
He’s right, it has become a social spleen venting activity, and that my friends doesn’t get much traction.
This passage:
More often than not, they’re comfortable in their armchairs living in their own deluded and secluded cloud cuckoo land.
There’s nicer ways of saying it but if want to be a force to be reckoned with, you have to get all ganged up.
Could just as easily be used to describe crazy Bill McKibben. Most of us think he’s nuts, and he most likely is. The difference is he got out of his “armchairs living in their own deluded and secluded cloud cuckoo land” and formed 350.org. Now look at what we have, an organization that has successfully lobbied for blocking the Keystone pipeline by affecting the office of presidency. Do you think weepy Bill could do that himself without having organized first?
Think about it, and sound off in comments.
I did not vote and would have voted NO for a couple of reasons.
First we have already seen examples of the skeptic infighting. Herding cats comes to mind.
Second if there is a “Group” it is very easily marginalized by using Psuedo-scientific polls and studies. For example the Looney Lew Papers. Or the much better designed Blair-Rockefeller poll – University of Arkansas that “found” the Tea Party was “Racist” by manipulating the questions. Asking a group opposed to a large Federal government questions starting with “Do you think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that….?” guarantees what the answer will be no matter what you tack onto the end of the question.
Third a “Group” especially a large group is easily infiltrated and moved in a direction none of the members expected. I have had it happen in two groups I was a founding member of. Heck all we have to do is look at the Royal Society and the other scientific groups for examples of what can easily be done.
I rather throw my support behind the already existing groups like C-Fact, GWPF, Heartland, NIPCC.
One big group just makes it that much easier to marginalize all of us by giving them ONE target.
More RC delusions;
“The right-wing trolls in this thread campaigned for AGW-sceptics to attack left-winger AGW-sceptics and for the proposed new AGW-sceptic organisation to adopt such attack as policy.”
It’s about the reality of the broad AGW movement being dominated by leftist agenda and inability of certain skeptics both left and right wing to accept this basic reality in the debate. Without “policy” implication AGW would be an obscure academic discussion with perhaps some abstract political culture attached to it like the “Big Bang” or “Evolution” theories. Since the underlying policy is total state regulation of carbon under they claim it impacts “climate” to a serious and “tipping point” degree the war is on and among millions of potential combatants on a global scale appears in many forms. Regardless of the variety the main philosophical field is between pro-government centralized planners and those who stand for individual rights.
Many left of center skeptics have contributed, perhaps their moderation motivated them in part to denounce outright political fraud creeping into their “science” value system. Perhaps, as similar to the executive power abuses of the moment in the U.S. which implies dictatorship and social decline they realize what a threat to reason and freedom the AGW rationalization agenda would mean in a future world in general. Perhaps many motivations and they deny the overwhelming nature of the left-wing political forces supporting AGW ideology of the core “consensus”. For all the contribution of left-wing skeptics Morano, Inholfe, Delingpole have a better grasp of the totality debate right from the start. Aside from Lindzen who is a prototypical democrat repentant-in-later life it remains difficult to find any honest and complete account of AGW culture coming from a typically left-wing academic enclave, a sub-set of “environmental studies”. You would have better luck finding conservative/libertarian views in “women’s studies” department, Washington Press core or the NY Times editorial board (slim to none). We are a completely polarized society at root professional levels and AGW is a stark example of that feature. The burden of this to liberal doubters of AGW may seem somewhat unfair to them but it’s time they consider the whole truth not just the segments which they can culturally absorb. Dr. Curry being the perfect example of someone who spends years of energy doing the “it’s about science” moon dance while listing a thousand example of how it’s not about science and the peer driven fanaticism of AGW advocates. Politics was always primary to AGW advocacy and it remains counterproductive to deny this basic fact. In many ways liberal skeptics are counter productive regardless of their technical support or even their marginal concessions regarding political extremism among the AGW advocate community. This is no different than any spectrum split among politically conscientious parties but it is fruit of the same poisoned tree. I refuse to accept the partisan “green” ideology over a non-empirical and politically motivated belief system that AGW certainly represents. It’s time the debate move on as if this is a debate among fellow greens who wish to maintain control of the narrative talking points.
Liberal skeptics need to suck it up, acknowledge the basic core AGW drivers publicly or be in the end marginalized in history. The same idiotic reasoning is applied by generations of liberals who might concede “Stalin or Hitler were bad guys” but greater communist/collectivist philosophy has merits and can be rationalized as a forward policy. Moderate “it’s about science” rhetoric enables fanatical AGW to survive and advance. Any organization that can’t accept this is counterproductive to science reform and delaying the eventual defeat of totalitarianism supported by the current academic community. “Consensus” as applied today is right out of Nazi or Soviet rationalizations for favored ideological policy solutions at any cost. You know who they are and you speak out or be damned. True of any person or would-be organization.
Redoubtable Doubt Academe
John
Gail Combs says:
April 28, 2014 at 5:11 am
Without the struggle between skeptics and the logical unification that it (AGW warming meme) really was, always, about politics we will remain in the black-hole of vague and inconclusive cherry picked observations and narratives. So far has the civilization sunk but a substantial population demands that an unproven claim be falsified before they will renounce it. In this unscientific culture AGW will likely survive decades longer and if the coincidence of unfortunate weather (higher then normal storms or a high population hit of a hurricane or any classic “warming” anomaly) then the culture of superstition will likely be increased. It’s a statistical inevitability based on where many skeptics accept the ridiculous talking point boundaries of the current debate.
If we have a high sea ice melt over a few years do you want go through every junk science extrapolation that is fully predicted from this again, for the thousandth (millionth actually) time?
Without unification on a very an obvious leftist agenda of the core AGW advocacy community success can’t be achieved. We currently live in a graveyard of a leftist academic split between AGW radicals and useful idiot moderates (it’s only/mostly about “science”). With the tools at hand it could go on for decades longer and the last 30 years in particular are a travesty. Realistically skepticism is benefiting from predictive non-correlation of weather to the AGW meme and natural variability works both ways. So rather then be forced into another speculative meme about cooler weather trends there is no obvious solution to eliminating AGW advocacy then convincing people of the certain truth of the political motivations that always drove the meme.
Why do “it’s about science” people insist on this falsehood? That’s the real question Gail, it’s wholly untrue on the face of it. I know why leftist academics in the field all pursue this falsehood (to reinforce authority as they dominate the “science” group, they control that ballot box for the foreseeable future in the field.) but why do skeptics parrot a reciprocal talking point to this degree? This is all similar to watching one party debates in NYC or California when liberals painstakingly obfuscate conservative arguments they might make for fear of being associated or validating central values they are culturally opposed to in general. So we are left with a general debate as if this is a schism between left-of-center parties if we follow the convention of “it’s about science” falsehood.
Many skeptics are comfortable in this endless science babble stalemate of their own complicit design, I find it repugnant and dishonest.
Gail Combs says:
April 28, 2014 at 5:11 am ” there is no obvious solution to eliminating AGW advocacy then convincing people of the certain truth of the political motivations that always drove the meme.
Why do “it’s about science” people insist on this falsehood?”
The falsehood is believing you can change someone’s mind by attacking their ideology. You will NEVER get anywhere by doing that.
The vast majority of the population are moderates and cannot possibly understand how misleading the media propaganda is on this subject without being showed scientific truths. Once they understand they have been lied to you then have a chance to help them “follow the money” to see who benefits from the scam.
There are lots of organizations and websites exposing what’s behind Agenda 21. Those are a better vehicle to attack the control paradigm than a science blog. There are many other outlets for political jousting where the fight can be taken if you want to waste time in an ideological stalemate. Make no mistake, when you engage in polarity politics you are playing the game of divide and conquer that has kept those you are opposing in power. Only by identifying specific issues that can be proven to be wrong can you change anyone’s beliefs. As soon as you identify someone a a leftist you have eliminated any chance of communicating with them. By reasoning with compassion, facts and logic rather than ideology you can connect intellectually with those who are being used as tools and help them see better solutions. Doing otherwise is like banging your head against a wall and expecting results.
John Whitman:
I write to demand retraction of your falsehoods in your post attacking me at April 28, 2014 at 12:35
am.
I take especial umbrage at your lie that I have tried to shut down debate “on how to resolve barriers to political collaboration in a PAG”. NO! On the contrary, I objected to trolling which has curtailed such debate in this thread.
The trolls have asserted – and continue to assert -n that such collaboration (which I have a record of providing) must be prevented because the trolls claim the PAG should promote right-wing falsehoods and attack those on the political left who oppose the AGW-scare.
I await your complete retraction and apology.
Richard
cwon14:
You make one – and only one – accurate statement in your diatribe at April 28, 2014 at 9:22 am.
Your accurate statement says
Yes. The AGW-scare was created and developed by Margaret Thatcher as a political ploy in furtherance of her personal right-wing political objectives.
Unfortunately for you, the one thing you got right refutes the remainder of your diatribe which is inflamatory and divisive nonsense.
Richard
– – – – – – – – –
richardscourtney,
Seriously? My retraction and apology?
By implication you are saying that I shut up until I do that?
So, you are still trying to shutdown the conversation focused now on me. Old news.
Your hostile taunting of people, by your name calling, who do not agree with your political-cum-CAGW position is a classic example of intimidation to shutdown the conversation.
Note: I see that cwon14 persists in circumscribing the issues nicely. Thanks cwon14. Yet, philosophically the usage of ‘left or center or right’ are silly non-starters that will deadend. We need to move the conversation to more logical and consistent terminology. N’est ce pas?
John
richardscourtney says:
April 28, 2014 at 9:43 am
Over decades rc there were many related machination from the 70’s oil embargo and resulting politics of those moments that we traveled. Including Thatchers pro-nuclear and in fact anti-union (what horrible cultures these really were by coincidence) complicity in the meme at the time. The GOP produced its own ahat versions in John McCain and Lindsey Graham parroting similar offshoots on “national security” deal making.
On a whole, of course, your views are absurd and selectively simplified in the usual pointless framing. At this point we are talking about less that 5-10% of conservative deal makers, panderers and compromise-rs as overall political weight that might be associated to the overall socialist agenda of the current time frame and historical overview. It’s about government taxing, redistributing and “regulating” on a global basis along usual socialist lines of agenda. That there are failures in GOP or Tory history do nothing to validate your assertion. The basket case that is England politically or in the EU doesn’t make your claims any less bootless.
Thatcher latter recanted as the perversion of alliances to green fanatics and their ultimate control of the AGW meme became evident.
Do you ever think things out at all? If you do then you know you are merely being dishonest.
– – – – – – – – – –
cwon14,
Is the non-scientific false ‘a priori’ premise*** (that is the necessary and sufficient basis of the IPCC assessment process) solely sourced from a political philosophy?
Can we sufficiently prove that a political philosophy is the sole basis of the premise? Yes, I think we can. I think it should be understood, though, that it will always be contested strongly by those who have the political philosophy that the premise is based on.
*** premise – Man’s nature, if allowed to have freedom of action, must cause climate catastrophe.
John
John Whitman says:
April 28, 2014 at 10:17 am
When people confront an issue, decades at a time, there is this inclination to believe it more complicated then what they might have thought 30 or more years earlier. The eco-green Earth day culture is the same as it was in 1970 in fact. The culture decline that it was even then has simply mainstreamed much to societal detriment. The point is, it’s generally the same and redundant regardless of visual form.
He’s not the best skeptical advocate but here is the simple truth AGW in the broadest sense;
http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/27/george-will-calls-global-warming-a-religion-socialism-by-the-back-door/
That liberal skeptics (among others) are offended and need like a crutch a thousand AGW subplots and motivations for all the suffering of the past 50 years in particular I can’t help.
Some people like spaghetti charts to the point of vice. I get that part of it but it in the entirety it isn’t “science”. There are no longer term trends out side historic variability. There are too many factors that can’t be isolated as changing the climate in itself, it’s a chaotic system. There is no physical or empirical evidence that GHG systems react to higher human contributions or follow any such assumed rules in the open set Earth. It’s not a fish tank or an enclosed arboretum. CO2 is a trace gas and less than 5% of any implied GHG effect from the start. The sink isn’t defined or understood, there are clouds and ocean cycles with undefined measurements and impacts. It goes on and on in uncertainty in the actual “science” area. The only thing that is constant is the political mantra that there is crisis and government and its academic toad class are here to save us along the usual centrally planned lines of argument.
Had the focused on SO2 and coal lead they might have racked up hundreds of local victories over the past 40 years but when the goal is global socialism and expert domination such results and improvements wouldn’t bring the desired power to the desired class aspiring for control and political power. In the broadest sense it is of course a left-right issue and the little nuanced outliers who can’t accept this are part of the problem in the skeptical gene pool. It’s part of the reason skeptics lose and the menace is at the gates.
Point of order: Richard S. Courtney has raised the Margaret Thatcher shibboleth before, to suggest that Climatist alarmism began on the conservative side. Back in 2012 I attempted to correct this bit of blinkered history:
The comment is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/why-we-need-debate-not-consensus-on-climate-change/#comment-1057657
/Mr Lynn
Mr Lynn:
You falsely write at April 28, 2014 at 12:07 pm saying
Your assertions are untrue on at least two counts.
Firstly, if you wish to make a “point of order” then your complaint needs to be at an action I made and not an action I did not make.
I did NOT “suggest that Climatist alarmism began on the conservative side”. At April 27, 2014 at 12:37 am I wrote
It is a fact that “the scare was created by Margaret Thatcher”. And the additional fact that others had attempted to create such a scare previously does not alter the truth of my statement in any way.
I state the facts of that matter here.
Please note that the introduction to that item explains it saying
Secondly, the only “blinkered history” is yours. The truth of these matters is clearly stated in the link with updates made in the 1990s. And that you attempted to promote your distortion of history in 2012 does not make the truth a “shibboleth”. You and your right-wing chums can assert whatever historical revisionism you want, but your false assertions do not indicate that “We have always been at war with Eurasia”.
You may be able to fool American ‘red-necks’, but there are many Brits who remember that the AGW-scare did not exist prior to Thatcher starting it.
Richard
John Whitman:
Your post addressed to me at April 28, 2014 at 10:17 am fails to retract and apologise for your egregious lie that I tried to a stop a discussion that I would have welcomed.
I still await your retraction and apology. I have not name-called and you should apologise for that falsehood, too.
Richard
cwon14:
At April 28, 2014 at 10:32 am you ask me
Yes. I often think.
Importantly, I think that your question coming from an anonymous, disruptive and divisive troll is strong evidence that the truth of my thoughts has hurt your attempts in this thread to harm opposition to the AGW-scare.
Richard
– – – – – – – – – – –
richardscourtney,
Apology? Retraction? Well that does start one thinking . . . . .
Shall we start listing the many commenters here on this wonderful venue who you have taunted and attempted to intimidate into silence with your namecalling behavior?
Will there be simple civil closure for the insult they received . . . . from you?
John
Thank you for responding. You say,
“. . . I did NOT ‘suggest that Climatist alarmism began on the conservative side’. At April 27, 2014 at 12:37 am I wrote
”
which to me looks at first rather like a distinction without a difference. However, I read your article linked from Tallbloke’s blog, which I had not seen, about the history of the AGW scare in the UK. It was very interesting, and a quite convincing account of the “coincidence of interests” that propelled the ‘global warming’ speculation into a full-fledged movement in the UK in the 1980s. Certainly in your original report you were prescient in predicting the explosion of this woeful end-of-millenium tomfoolery.
You say that early on Lady Thatcher saw the opportunity to make political hay by raising the alarm about global warming. By your account, it was Sir Crispin Tickell, the UK’s UN Ambassador who whispered in her ear and suggested she could also enhance her international standing by taking the lead in raising a ‘worldwide’ problem. That leaves me wondering, though, where Ambassador Tickell got the idea. Could it have been at the UN itself? And could not it have been from the ‘globalists’ whom the UN attracts and breeds?
The article I linked to essentially claims that the fuel for the ‘global warming’ scare was laid down by the Mead-Kellogg conference in North Carolina in 1974. Margaret Mead had previously attended a UN conference on population and was President of the AAAS, so probably thick with the UN science and globalist elites. Lady Thatcher may have sparked the global warming fire in the UK, but it sounds like the embers were already glowing on the US side of the Atlantic, and probably in Europe as well.
These globalists were if anything more aligned with the Club of Rome than with any national parties, including UK’s Conservatives. Your tale suggests that Lady Thatcher was looking at the global warming ploy for short-term advantage, and had no inkling of the monster conflagration that would start, nor that it would be adopted wholesale by ‘watermelons’ and other ideologues of the far left on both sides of the Atlantic.
So I’m not sure how you can say that “There is connection between the AGW-scare and RIGHTIST ideology. . .” when Mrs. Thatcher’s motives were more pragmatic than ideological. It still seems to me, in any case, that the origins of the AGW scare in the West lay with the international globalist neo-Malthusian community in the ’70s. And while it was the Thatcher government that gave it official status in the UK, it does not appear to have been ‘conservative’ as such. But I will grant that you know the subtleties of UK politics far better than I.
In any case, this is a complete diversion from the original topic of this thread, for which I ask the indulgence of our host and moderators.
/Mr Lynn
conscious1 says:
April 28, 2014 at 2:45 pm
In the largest context possible AGW is ideology. Many skeptics remain clueless on this point.
Mr Lynn says:
April 28, 2014 at 5:57 pm
The actual Crimean War was famous for mismanagement on all sides, soldiers sent the wrong caliber of bullet or no ammunition at all on the eve of battles etc. I think of this when I consider Richard Courtney and his incoherent histories of Thatchers blundering and co-op attempts to use greenshirt ideology to triangulate what were near Marxist unions that had nearly destroyed the British economy before her arrival.
Richard Courtney views are incompetent.
Speaking of “in fighting” in would-be, commonly based organizations;
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/28/Green-campaigners-demand-the-arrest-of-George-Monbiot-for-crimes-against-the-environment-and-humanity
The pro-nuclear tactics of Thatcher and others had some deep reasoning involved although it was a net negative as it validated an overall fraudulent claim about co2 etc. Again, think if everything had been focused on SO2 emotionally over these decades. The AGW movement insured more dirty water and air, starvation of the poor, greater income inequality etc. etc. AGW was full stupid on so many levels.
In the end greenshirt fanaticism might have had a more reasoned image (focus SO2 and lead) but they wouldn’t have contained themselves regardless of better political results. They want the whole prize of world domination and little twerp like Monboit isn’t even safe in his own cult. Irony, like Hitler shooting his generals.
Worried about skeptical groups dividing on politics?
I’d certainly be prepared to contribute to a moderate, rational, science-based, sceptics organisation. It would be harder to dismiss as ‘deniers’.
It is well past the time when honest sceptics should have taken the debate into the public arena. It’s not so much the debate, it’s their education that is remiss. Great sites llike this one do not reach the general public; we need a wider strategy. We have the tools available, with the internet and youtube to start with.
Wind opponents tried this and it just painted a giant target on the opponents of wind. There were articles on “the DC Group” and how they were organizing and the myths spun out from there. As with wind, what makes the opposition strong is their “grassroots” status.
Reality check, there’s nothing new about being targeted. It has been happening on this issue for a long time. Both sides are targeted. That’s been normal since time immemorial, whenever serious a disagreement arises. I support Rational Mal’s approach. But we have to go beyond these blog sites, because their audiences are restricted to the trench warriors, and the general public never gets to learn much about the climate. Many don’t even know that there’s a real argument going on. They just hear the orthodox views repeated by the media. We need to get information to them. That’s why I’m suggesting an internet campaign, with witty, clever, factual and engaging snippets on youtube.