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Guest essay by Charles Battig
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Shakespeare’s Hamlet pondered the eternal conundrum of competing choices. His “Aye, there’s the rub” nicely summarizes the conflicts inherent in the present socio/political/scientific arena of climate discussions.
Years of relentless doomsday prognostications by a variety of public voices spanning the political-scientific spectrum have found their mark in a gullible and guilt-prone public. There is a Medusa-like quality in the serpentine web of doomsday prophets, including members of the Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb,” and the current White House science advisor, John Holdren. Al Gore came to discover “Inconvenient Truths,” later found to be not so truthful.
Al Gore’s contribution to making climate change a co-equal amongst the four horsemen of the apocalypse is matched by M. Mann’s reinterpretation of global temperature history. Repeated refutations of “faulty” science and failed predictions of climate calamities have not deterred these marketers of doom. Cut the head off, yet it lives on.
Sustainability, population control, and redistributive-based social justice were offered as moral justifications for the one-world governance needed to solve one-world problems, as posited by the UK’s Barbara Ward. Answering this “cri de coeur,” the U.N. global bureaucrats crafted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the instrument by which life-sustaining carbon dioxide would be reinvented as the most dangerous threat to the world. Our current Federal government is more certain than ever that “the science is settled,” and that the global climate bears the human stain of excessive consumption of fossil fuels. An unelected Federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has assumed the role of guardian of public health via arbitrary edicts regulating all things atmospheric, in addition to all surface waters. Those wishing to pursue independent traditional scientific inquiry and reproducibility of EPA claimed findings have noted an adamant shyness by the EPA in producing the requested original data.
“Fear and loathing” is no longer confined to Las Vegas, but has been turned into a self-hate/guilt propaganda tool by doomsday prophets and fear profiteers. Humans are carbon — based life forms intertwined in the biological interdependence upon green plant production of oxygen and consumption of carbon dioxide. Thus the guilt stage is set for humans to be declared a living source of this newly-defined carbon pollution, and therefore enemies of mother Earth. According to the Club of Rome: “The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” Population control is the implied remedy.
More recently, a trio of financial market heavyweights has entered the climate change propaganda fray with their “Risky Business” media blitz. Perhaps somewhat jealous of the huge financial profits that Al Gore‘s Generation Investment Management (GIM) made from his doomsday climate predictions and inconvenient truth campaign, these risk experts have their own updated scare story. Business will lead the way, they say: “We believe that American businesses should play an active role in helping the public sector determine how best to react to the risks and costs posed by climate change, and how to set the rules that move the country forward in a new, more sustainable direction.” Trust us, we are from the government has been usurped by a “trust us, we are from business.” These risk experts and their companies have reaped huge financial rewards by profitably defining and pricing risk, and then getting the public to pay insurance premiums to protect itself from the hypothetical risk. The greater the hyped risk, the greater the corporate insurance profit.
Countering this climate doomsday propaganda has been a number of scientists and independent organizations. Manipulation of the historical temperature record by our own government agencies has been documented. Such revisions serve to make the historical record conform to the political aims and views of our Federal government, that global warming is occurring and is linked to fossil fuel use. Proliferation of internet access has provided the new open public soap box, independent of traditional media, itself fully in the climate panic mode. Web sites maintained by Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, and Steve Milloy are just a few of many striving to get the unpoliticized science before the public.
In this admittedly truncated history of climate change propaganda and counterargument, there is contained the conundrum originally mentioned. Incomplete climate science, unsubstantiated claims in place of traditional scientific proof, political policy dogma, social equity objectives, and businesses feeding off the largess of government and public fear continue to receive scant criticism in the general media. The public has downgraded its concern with “climate change” when polled, yet it continues to elect politicians dedicated to enacting a governmental cure for climate change. Businesses profit from proclaiming that they are “green.” Renewable is the key word for obtaining government largesse.
For the public at large, scientific truth alone does not trump feelings of environmental guilt and demands that politicians take care of the presumptive problem. Scientific validity in these matters is an essential, but not adequate response to change the public’s emotional concerns for “clean air,” “clean energy,” and a “healthy environment for themselves and their children.”
Economist Julian Simon reflected upon the failure of the news media to report his debunking of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “vanishing farmland scam” in his 1999 book, Hoodwinking the Nation. Most of the rest of the book deals with the conundrum of the public’s propensity to accept “false bad news.” In the intervening 15 years there is little evidence that this peculiar human trait has changed; bad news still sells; bad news still drives charitable public donations.
Even earlier, Charles Mackay provided historical evidence for the peculiar behavior and beliefs of large crowds in his 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It contains an insightful account of the “Tulipomania” craze of the mid-1600s. When considering the current climate change craze, reflect upon Mackay’s observation that: “We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
So perhaps climate change hysteria may yet have to burn itself out much like a disease pandemic. Meanwhile traditional science-backed climate studies will continue to have an uphill fight against the propensities of human nature and the madness of crowds.
Charles Battig, M.D., Piedmont Chapter president, VA-Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment (VA-SEEE). His website is www.climateis.com
The overlapping disciplines of cultural evolution, anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and more, can well-describe the social phenomena of self-sustaining cultural entities, which CAGW appears to be, and of which there are many examples throughout history. ‘Religions’ are a subset of these entities,
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and then we have this sort of drivel.
Between pat (oh, look, I just found something on the internet and will therefore post it in the middle of a completely unrelated thread! Because I’m special! And my views are even more special!) and woolly, meaningless guff like this, oh dear.
It rather brings out the Ian Dury in me.
In 1900 it was thought that the economy would be brought to a standstill by excessive horsesh1t. In 2000 it would appear that it will be halted by excessive bullsh1t.
I see that one of the lemmings is wearing a lifebelt. Does this mean that even lemmings have sceptics?
The last Climate Change hysteria was the Witch Hunts of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (approx). It took about
two hundred years and many deaths to work through that
and come out the other side.
The US’s system government was designed to prevent
that from happening again …
“…to make the historical record conform to the political aims and views of our Federal government.”
Fellow U.S. citizens, let’s make that ‘the Federal government.’
It is more than 100 years since it has been ‘ours’.
@Sensor man July 11, 2014 at 1:41 am
I think you assessment of Ed Miliband is not quite on the mark. He is hiding his redness under a barrel in order to garner votes. Make no mistake he is a millionaire Marxist as was his father. Given the opportunity he will implement (p)redistribution of other peoples wealth and state control of the means of production of wealth.
Other than that your analysis is spot on. Not one of the political parties is willing to come out and say we are going to end this nonsense and make sure there is enough affordable energy to go round. They love a scares that they can save us from whether it’s health, terrorism or .71C of warming. A scared and grateful populace will put up with just about anything.
In the European elections UKIP ignored global warming as an election issue. I can’t think they are any better than the rest.
The politicians are the wise lemming with the floatation device.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the new Cosmos-naut, the new Carl Sagan
Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how Republicans got it wrong on climate change
http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/running_out_of_time_and_space/13204/
DailyKos Essay: Weinberg, Dawkins, Tyson, Porco, Sloan, and Harris – Idiots of
Science on Parade
This is about the idiocy and the idiots at the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science,
Religion, Reason and Survival.” The idiots of science were in attendance: Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson , Carolyn Porco, Richard P. Sloan, and Sam Harris. I thought some of them were intelligent, until now.
Science is the best hammer in humanity’s toolkit. It is the most useful tool we have.
Because a few religious extremists have irritated the grand idiots of science, they propose to set up science as a religion. This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.
snip
There is the assumption in the comments by Dawkins and his buddies that they are morally better than the religious right because they are scientists. Oh, really?
snip
Please note the names of the idiots of science. If you run into them on the street, be sure to explain how their attempt to “save” science could destroy science
http://thesciencenetwork.org/docs/TheConversationContinues.pdf
http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/02/what-scientific-ideas-are-ready-for-retirement/#comment-447384
Science uber alles ??
Sophocles.
I always wondered about the Witch hunts, as to their ultimate purpose, as they make no rational sense. I suppose the easiest answer is denigration of women, same as in fundamental religion, for power.
But there might be other things involved. To believe a woman has magical and threatening powers against others is more than a little odd, and since it is specific to women then why don’t men also have the same powers? I think that an inability for men to relate to women in general may be part of it. In India today witches are still believed in in places, and they get blamed for disease and such like. But the tendency to denigrate women as witches, and not ascribe the same to men, has a very long and strange history.
Thank you Mr. Battig. Nice article.
I think the fundamental argument is religious. The traditional side says that humans are special. For religious or economic reasons we were told to be fruitful and multiply. Much of our morality was focussed on increasing human population. Taboos on homosexuality, sex as entertainment instead of reproduction, and abortion all tended to increase human population. In the mid 20th Century (as noted by Mr. Battig) some authors popularized the worry about world overpopulation and the consequent destruction of the environment. In a rather short time a new morality was formed. The new morality said that humans are not special. It proclaimed that the environment (less humans) are special. The new morality proclaimed that birth control, homosexuality, and abortion were good because they reduced the growth of the destructive human species.
The great climate battle is just one aspect of this great morality war. Science will be used or misused as the combatants see fit.
Of course it is more complicated then that, A humanist can also be a devout environmentalist and vice versa. But I believe much of the heat in the climate debate stems, not from science, but from this fundamental difference in moral viewpoint. The science debate is fun, but that is not where the decisive battle lies.
The Hydra rather than Medusa but otherwise spot on
In many respects, the “War on Carbon” is similar to the “War on Fat”, although the former is certainly much larger in scope and in the damage done. Bad science becomes mass hysteria, and as always, there are those who stand to gain from that mass hysteria, ready and willing to fan the flames. Nowadays, not only can you not trust doctors, but scientists themselves are suspect. The future of science itself is now in jeopardy, I fear.
Nice essay Charles.
I notice that doctors seem to suffer one particular deficiency when it comes to discussing politics, they’re too kind to the enemy. Healers do not make good fighters.
“…..The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” Population control is the implied remedy.
What I think you are passing by is the blaring detail that their imposition of “sustainability” policy is in of itself the very means of that population control – via starvation. For example, mandates and price supports for bio-fuel are so blatant a means to drive up food prices and starve the third world that even Al Gore distanced himself from it. Other examples, tell third world farmers they cannot plow/harvest their crops with fossil fuel energy like we do and then tell them that “global warming” is causing poor yields.
Evey single aspect of the progressive/commie agenda hurts poor people the most – by design. The only reason they enact polices to “domesticate” the poor is to ultimately make it easier to slaughter them.
Holdren as Wormtoungue. It fits. What has he ever done except to give poisoned, bad counsel disguised as science?
And of course Ehrlich is …..
32 years of 95% certainty for the worst crisis imaginable is anything you want it to be.
It has been my discovery over a long life that if “everyone knows a thing to be true” (1) then there is a high likelihood that the thing is, in fact, false. Or, at the least, only partially true.
I would give several examples other than the magic molecule CO2, but most likely several would dispute some of the examples and derail the thread. (after all, the examples would be of “what everyone knows to be true”)
One of my first clues to this fact of life came when the idea that the continents are totally static and unmoving was overturned and then everyone accepted the opposite of the previously held settled science. Imagine being the poor sucker who was ridiculed and maligned for saying the the continents did move back when that was not “mainstream”. What courage the man had!
______________
(1) Please note: when I say “everyone knows” I don’t really mean 100% everyone. That should be obvious.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
Great essay. Stand-out points:
• the U.N. global bureaucrats crafted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the instrument by which life-sustaining carbon dioxide would be reinvented as the most dangerous threat to the world.”
• According to the Club of Rome: “The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” Population control is the implied remedy.
• Businesses profit from proclaiming that they are “green.” Renewable is the key word for obtaining government largesse.
More on “Global Warming” ideology and population control :
“In Searching For A New Enemy To Unite Us, We Came Up With The Threat Of Global Warming”
http://climatism.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/in-searching-for-a-new-enemy-to-unite-us-we-came-up-with-the-threat-of-global-warming/
For good reason – no serious politician can afford to be less than alarmist.
Why?
Because the public has downgraded its concern with “climate change” but a few vocal loonies haven’t.
The only ones who care enough about the issue to vote on it or campaign on it believe the world is ending. Rational people who look at the empirical evidence vote and act more on real issues.
So politicians have nothing to gain from questioning catastrophic AGW and lots to lose. So they don’t question catastrophic AGW .
And we all have to vote for the new faith or not vote at all.
Johanna says: July 11, 2014 at 1:44 am
Your praise for the head post (I agree it’s a great post), seems to indicate that you find Mackay’s ideas about ‘human herds’ (see Klaus Olischlagers comment at 12.23 regarding this term) plausible, ditto their applicability to CAGW as speculated by Battig. I do too. So do you think that in the 150 years or so since Mackay, the combined efforts of the disciplines I noted have made little or no progress in understanding the scope of such phenomena and how they work? Or am I wrong here and you disagree with the Mackay section anyhow?
Love Ian Dury’s music, btw.
Greek myths are tricky because there are a lot of versions. Here is the Wikipedia description of Medusa:
Here’s the description of the Hydra:
Charles Battig said: “… There is a Medusa-like quality in the serpentine web of doomsday prophets, …”. You could probably get a PhD thesis on whether Medusa or Hydra is a more appropriate analogy. 🙂
“Who was it who said ;”Humans go mad in crowds, return to sanity one at a time”?”
The afore-mentioned Charles Mackay, in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” Don’t be put off by the 1841 publishing date – this truly is the greatest book on crowd psychology ever written. If there’s anyone who hasn’t read it, get a copy on Amazon and read it as soon as you can! You’ll be astounded at how accurately an Englishman writing in 1841 described the trajectory of every bubble and fad in the ensuing 170 years – it leads one to want to say Mackay was a prophet, but he would be the first to say that this was absolute bunk, he was just a careful and dispassionate observer of human behavior.
Perhaps the most important key are his insights that a) we have a herd instinct and can’t resist the temptation to act as the group acts, and b) we always tell ourselves that we won’t make the same old mistakes that people have made before, because we’re smarter now, and then we go ahead and make the same old mistakes over and over and over again.
I would say, based on Mackay, that we’re over the top of the parabola on the Climate Change bubble, and that it’s all downhill for the scaremongers from here – but it’s still got quite a lot of play in it, and the warmist supporters can do an incredible amount of damage to all of us still.
Often these bubbles don’t come to an end until everyone involved in them has been ruined financially. And there have been many times when that has happened to entire countries, and entire economies. We’re no exception.
brent says: July 11, 2014 at 3:15 am
Spot on about Dawkins and buddies. It has always struck me as deeply ironic that a man who comes down so heavily on religions, essentially because religions are memeplexes, has his head so deeply stuck into CAGW (a rampant secular memeplex). Nor does he seem to have grasped that since religious or spiritual believers form the vast majority of the population, plus when you add in secular memeplexes too, essentially *everyone* is subject to some influence or other, and so this is wholly normal. Scientists are no less subject to such influence than anyone else; to claim that they are morally (or in any other way) superior, is highly dangerous.
Al Gore’s contribution to making climate change a co-equal amongst the four horsemen of the apocalypse…
I’m somewhat partial to using the word “Clipocalypse”.
After all, the Apocalypse may be real, while a made up word for a made up problem seems a bit more appropriate, don’t ya’ think?
john robertson says:
July 10, 2014 at 8:48 pm
“Or is government service so disgusting now, that only fools and bandits need/will apply.”
Hey John!
No, a lot of good people still apply for government service jobs. Unfortunately, they are all weeded out during the interview process.
Will the ghost Julian L. Simon call the office…
I went through high school in the early to mid-80s, and our curriculum included books such as “The Fate of the Earth”, and “Entropy”. “The Day After” was required viewing.
In other words, not only was the millennium something we weren’t likely to see, but if we did, life would be “nasty, brutish and short”.
When I catch up with my (unfortunately still) lefty acquaintances from those days, I do tend to remind them of the failed predictions of Apocalypse Soon. They generally mumble stuff about “oh, we’re still going to hell, we’ve just postponed it”, I ask when, how will we measure how close we are (see Simon above).
Crickets…