Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
I learned in school that King Canute (990 – 1035 AD) was the most stupid King in English history (Figure 1). He was so ignorant and arrogant he believed he could stop the tide. World leaders in Paris led by President Obama, who promised to stop sea level rise in his election campaign, are the modern day equivalent of Canute’s mentality.
Later historical research discovered documents that changed the entire story. People believed Canute was the greatest King and capable of doing anything. He obviously was a great King because he realized the limitations of his power and the need to lower people’s expectations. He staged an event to show there were things he could not control. He sat on his throne by the ocean and ordered the tide to stop rising. It is great leaders who know the limits of their power. It is necessary to remind others.
It was the historians of subsequent Kings who wrote the false Canute narrative. They did not want to compete with the people’s view of Canute, so they chose to get ahead by pushing him down rather than pulling themselves up.
The modern day Canute’s are not great leaders. They demonstrated their limitations in Paris where they planned to stop climate change. Figure 2 shows a symbol we can use to represent their stupidity. It shows the range of temperatures and climate variability over the last 420,000 years. Temperatures range is over 12°C, as the Earth swung naturally between very cold glacial periods and very warm interglacial periods. Three of the last four warm interglacial periods were warmer than today.
The temperature variations in Figure 2 are the result of thousands of variables all interacting to create the weather, of which climate is the average. To achieve their “stop climate change” objective the world leaders gathered in Paris must control all the variables.
Figure 2: Stop Climate Change.
Source: The author.
Stopping climate change means creating a “flat line” temperature record but that, like on a heart monitor, would mean the patient died.
They are like the original interpretation of Canute ignorant and arrogant enough to think they have that power. They did not look at the IPCC reports because if they did they would discover what Klaus-Eckart Puls found.
“One day I started checking the facts and data—first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements.”
They didn’t read what Puls wrote, especially his comment that
”Scientifically it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO2 adjustment knob.”
They believe that by turning the knob, like Canute held up his hand and ordered the tide to stop, they can stop climate change.
Which variables must they control to stop climate change? The answer is simple, all the ones deliberately ignored by the IPCC. The list is very long because the IPCC list was deliberately shortened by the definition given to them in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Article 1
“Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
The IPCC authors know the limitations of their work, but the politicians don’t know. By the time the IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4) was written, under pressure from skeptics about the limitations, they inserted a broader definition.
Climate change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity.
It was apolitical ploy. It did not and could not change anything because of the cumulative format of their Reports. To apply that definition requires scrapping the entire process and starting over. They wanted to be able to say they knew of the problem, so they put it as a footnote in the Summary For Policymakers (SPM) of AR4.
The long list of variables they must control is all those omitted by the IPCC. Their short list appears in the “Forcings” diagram from the 2001 IPCC TAR Report (Figure3).
The right-hand column labeled LOSU, which stands for Level Of Scientific Understanding, underscores the challenge they face. Seven of the nine are medium or low, and if you act without understanding, the chances of disaster are greater than not acting. For example, when global cooling was the consensus from 1940 to 1980 people demanded action. One proposal involved building a dam across the Bering Straits. The idea was to reduce cold-water flows to the North Pacific to create warmer water and raise temperatures in the middle and higher latitudes around the globe. What would that have done to temperatures in the warmer period from 1980 to 1998? If you want to play God, you need to know what you are doing.
Figure 3
The point of Canute’s exercise was to show there were things well beyond his control. The leaders in Paris and the IPCC scientists and bureaucrats who advise them don’t recognize the limitations.
This is not an argument for a religious answer or, necessarily, the need for a God. It is a result of the vacuum left when a belief system is removed. As G. K. Chesterton said
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
There is a reason why books, like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion or Christopher Hitchen’s God is Not Great, are part of today’s wider discussions. It began with science choosing to defeat Christianity using Charles Darwin. Although he was an atheist, he was, like Copernicus, a reactionary not a revolutionary and realized the implications of his ideas.
Before Darwin, western universities comprised two faculties, The Natural Sciences and The Humanities. Once science used Darwin’s theory to replace God as the Creator it left a void. It required an answer to the question of who created the Universe, but more important the question of who put humans here and made them so markedly different from all the other species. It was a question that Alfred Russel Wallace (Figure 4) posed to Darwin directly.
Figure 4
The academic world filled the void created by removing God as the answer by creating the Social Sciences. Many believe the name is an oxymoron while others think that applying science to humanity is dehumanizing. As mathematician and philosopher, A.N. Whitehead said,
“There is no more common error then to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.”
Darwin also crossed the line into the social sciences when he took Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population with him on the Beagle, declaring it the most influential material on his thinking. Darwin’s ideas captured the thinking of Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “Survival of the fittest.” In turn, Darwin was taken by the idea and included it in the 1872 Sixth edition of Origin of Species.
In western society people began to view science and technology as the source of solutions to all human problems. Science and technology were also credited with all major advances inhuman history. Parallel development of the new paradigm of environmentalism provided a new form of religion for young people looking for Chesterton’s “anything”.
In this political and social environment, 190 world leaders met in Paris to advance the belief that they can stop climate change. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon led them as the modern day Canute (Figure 5). He set the stage for his demands when in 2014 he said that
“…climate change has been one of his top priorities since taking the office in 2007. He noted that progress has been made but warned the time for decisive global action is now, else the world risks climate chaos.”
Figure 5: Ban Ki-moon in Paris holding up his hand and asking the tide to stop, but failing.
Source: The author
Consider the challenge they face with just one variable – the Sun. Astronomers define our Sun as a variable Yellow Dwarf Star that is approximately half way through its 10 billion-year cycle. It is the major source of energy in our climate system. It is so dominant that the IPCC ignore one other source, geothermal heat from the nuclear activity within the Earth as inconsequential. To stop almost all of the variability of temperature and climate change that are shown in the graph in Figure 2 they must stop changes in the Sun. This is a much greater challenge than stopping the tide for the modern ignorant and arrogant Canute’s.
Ban Ki-moon said,
We are also the last generation that can fight climate change.
Hopefully, future historians will report that his was the last generation that ignorantly and arrogantly believed they could stop climate change and sanity finally prevailed, but I won’t wait for the tide to come in.
Old Knut was a fascinating figure, one of the few Viking Kings of England, and a King who far outshown most of those who came before and after him. The Norman invasion 30 odd years after his death mostly erased his legacy.
outshone
King Canute was not foolish or arrogant. He did that to demonstrate the limitations of his powers as a king.
Yes, and everyone who didn’t read the whole article was asked to stand up and applaud themselves.
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/1094E/production/_87181976_delegatesgetty.jpg
What we saw at this Paris Climate Conference, it was truly a case of “lunatics being in charge of the asylum.
Fourteen months ago, Victor and Kennel published an article in Nature explaining some of the reasons why the “temperature targets” such as the 2 °C target should be ditched because this kind of targeting is ill-defined, meaningless, inconsequential, unreachable, … and just plain idiotic. Victor’s and Kennel’s main complaint was that the global mean temperature wasn’t in any useful sense correlated with the health of our planet.
But the climate hysteria has lost all contacts with science. The hundreds of stupid mammals from all corners of the world who gathered in Paris don’t read Nature. It’s much worse than that, of course. They don’t talk to anyone who has a clue about science, either. They’ve brainwashed themselves into believing that the global warming temperature must be a high-precision, well-defined number and, which is even worse, they may push it in any direction they want by meeting their fellow tetrapods and signing meaningless arrogant declarations.
PragerU made a brilliant YouTube video about why people choose to become radicalized by violent Islamism. It has nothing to do with poverty or ignorance (or Climate Change).
The reason why some people choose to become radical Muslims turns out to be the same reason why some people choose to become radical leftists, attempting to create some supposed Utopia makes them feel good about themselves. And clever people recruit them by pointing out real problems and corruption (while hiding the fact that their solutions only make things worse).
http://youtu.be/-IchGuL501U
That video didn’t make the connection between radical Islam and radical leftists, but some of the similarities can be clearly seen in this video about how leftists choose to believe what FEELS good over what DOES good. And clever people indoctrinate people by talking about real problems (while hiding their constant failures).
And this explains why facts and reason bounces off them. Reality doesn’t tickle their ears and make them feel good about themselves like participating in the Climate cult mission to save the planet does.
http://youtu.be/_rOb_z-yYrU
LarryFine:
You admit
True, it did not.
And it did not because there is no such “connection” except in your imagination.
An easier case to make is the dangers of radical rightists such as Naz1s.
Richard
@richard,
The first video was focused on Islamism, but it did briefly touch on the similarities between Islamist and Socialist leaders at 2:13, pointing out how they both operate by citing real problems in the current system and then offering Utopian solutions. The video mentioned how Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler and Bin Laden all did this. And ALL of those men WERE Socialists.
Fascism, Nazism and Islamism are all left-wing, Socialist philosophies. And anyone who claims to be a Communist today is really a Socialist who believes that they will attain the end goal of Socialism some day, Communism, according to Marx.
Many people mistakenly believe the Nazis were right-wingers for the same reason they believe that Segregation and the KKK were not the products of left-wing Democrats. They believe that lie because Democrats framed Republican with their own crimes.
Whether they call themselves American Socialists, German National Socialists, a Union of Soviet Socialists, Communist Chinese or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria*, their shared goals are to fundamentally change the current order to deliver some Utopia where social problems will be solved. And in order to establish this, they all enlarge the state’s power at the expense of person freedoms and liberties. But they always fail miserably, causing more poverty, misery, destruction and death.
Right-wingers, who recognize that all people are deeply flawed, struggle against such concentration of power in the hands of a few. The Founding Fathers knew history, which is why they were obsessed with limiting the central government to preserve Liberty.
But many left-wing westerners and Muslims today have fallen prey to lies told by Socialists and Islamists because believing Socialist’s Utopian promises FEELS good (as cited in the second video).
*Democrats always claim that certain differences among these groups (American Socialists, German National Socialists, a Union of Soviet Socialists, Communist Chinese and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) is proof that they’re not ideologically alike, or at least “not like us”. But such differences among these groups always have to do with the cultural and economic differences in the various countries their leaders started with, and the individual prejudices of the leaders.
But they all share the same basic mission and methodology, to solve unfairness and corruption once and for all by fundamentally changing society using powerful big governments that can control everyone, and necessarily diminishing personal freedom and liberty.
On the other hand, right-wing politics is about limiting the expansion of state power, allowing people to enjoy personal freedom and liberty. In this paradigm, the state is not there to raise your children, determine your diet and measure the water in your toilet (and punish you for non-compliance or simply being a spoilsport “denier” of their hive brain magical thinking) but simply to guarantee your rights.
LarryFine,
“Whether they call themselves American Socialists, German National Socialists, a Union of Soviet Socialists, Communist Chinese or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria*, their shared goals are to fundamentally change the current order to deliver some Utopia where social problems will be solved.”
I suggest one not assume such a thing. I suggest one merely note that’s what many wish us to believe is their goal.
I don’t believe them, I see it as a mere “sales pitch” (for the most part), and suspect that (for the most part) in reality, the goal is simply power/domination. Once the “Socialist” system is in place, it really doesn’t matter whether anything remotely resembling a utopia results, because the means of controlling people is inherent in any truly “Socialist” system.
@John,
I agree with you.
Perhaps I should have referred to Utopia as “..their STATED shared goals…”.
Richard,
Sorry, but you have that backwards.
Leftists then and now were aligned with the Naz!s, not the anti-statist American Right, nor even the traditional conservatives in Europe.
In the US, FDR had far more in common with H!tler than did, say Hoover, Landon, Taft or Dewey. Wilkie was practically as far Left as FDR.
The modern American Right comes in two flavors, but both are the very antithesis of Naz!sm, while American and European Leftism borrows heavily from National Socialism, especially in countries such as Scotland and Greece.
The Naz!s killed the unwanted; American social conservatives oppose abortion. H!tler confiscated private firearms; US conservatives fight for the naturally endowed right of self-defense. The Naz!s murdered Jews and others en masse. American conservatives support Israel against its enemies, and favor equality for all before the law, regardless of religion or ethnicity. To take but three obvious examples.
The Naz!s in effect nationalized heavy industry in a command economy, to meet the needs of the state, not consumers’ choices. While the owners of record often remained shareholders, these companies had to do as ordered by the state plan, as in the USSR. By contrast, American conservatives favor free enterprise and market economics. H!tler restricted the personal liberty of Germans and those in conquered countries. US conservatives favor civil liberties and freedom under the rule of law, not of men. Many are indeed libertarians, supporting the sovereignty of the individual against the power of the state. We are anti-statists, not statists.
Thus on issue after issue, the National Socialists fall close to their Leftist roots, while conservatives are as far removed from Naz! ideology as possible.
The Idea that heat radiation raises the temperature of the surface of the Earth above the ambient temperature is wrong. heat radiation is not like solar radiation because solar radiation has its direction towards the earth but total heat radiation has no vector towards the Earths surface. During winter when the solar radiation hits certain parts of the Earths surface at a greater angle then surface heating above the ambient temperature falls but total heat radiation given off by co2 molecules has no direction towards the Earths surface. It is obvious that if less energy leaves the Earth and more energy enters over a period of time then the total energy rises and this likely to be as an increase in ambient temperature of all the molecules in the Earth.
JohnKnight, how come this kind of question is of any interest to you? Have you no purpose in your own life – a family, a job, a desire to work creatively, paint, write, make music? Maybe just do sports or tinker around in the garden? Enjoy the life that whoever you believe in gave you?
These are misguided questions of bored and boring people. Don’t let them get the better of you!
Chris,
“JohnKnight, how come this kind of question is of any interest to you?”
I don’t like conjecture being passed off as scientific fact, for one thing. I think It leads to things like the (as I see it) CAGW con.
PS~ And I believe that con will endanger many millions of very poor people if successful, who can barely manage to keep themselves and their families alive now, The price of food and other basic necessities will necessarily rise significantly , if everything from fuel to run tractors, to transport systems, etc, becomes more expensive. Many will suffer and die . . I believe.
As a follower of Christ, I don’t really get an option as to whether I try to resist such a gruesome eventuality once I become aware of it, it seems to me;
~ Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal. ~
That’s the Boss speaking. I can give a bit of time, so I do . .
“There is no more common error then to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.” –A.N. Whitehead
That’s a great refutation to the argument made by some that the multi-verse “theory” is fact simply because it’s believed to be supportable mathematically.
In fact, according to the multi-verse theory, the laws of our universe don’t apply in other universes. Therefore, our logic and Math don’t apply. Therefore, it’s illogical to attempt to prove their existence using our Math.
In other words, it’s impossible to prove the existence of something that defies Math by definition using Math. (But it sure is lucrative for those who can con politicians into paying them to try.)
Dr. Tim Ball, I would like to let you know that you touched upon so many points of interest to me and just to mention a few, probability theory, history, revisionism, beliefs, politics etcetera and cast Canute so well that you merit ten on ten even for purely literary merit. Considering that adding to this the gist as well as the main hold so true then according to me you are the essence of the astute wrapped in quite some style. Thank you for the elucidation and education. One must not forget however the little matter of the earth’s magnetic field, a shield as I understand it against the sun’s irradiation, which magnetic strength is a function of the earth’s core, internal heat production, rotation and heat loss through the earth’s mantle plus a host of other parameters. To play God is to be divine something we surely aren’t though it seems that reductionist determinists being aware of the matter tend to ascribe their own penchants to Him whilst very contradictorily holding themselves up and exceptionally beyond that which applies to everybody else.
Your description of Canute shows either you didn’t pay attention in school or your teachers were as stupid as they thought Canute was.. Canute was not stupid! He was being pressed by his priests to do something impossible and he brought his throne to the shore to show them up by demonstrating that no man, not even a king, could turn the tide.
Paragraph 2….keep up please.
math and reading the whole article was so last generation.
G. K. Chesterton said
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing,
they then become capable of believing in anything.”
____
love Dr.T.Ball’s great panorama; but I don’t BELIEVE man has to believe at all.
____
‘believe’ is ok to follow incultered rules – when they yield positive: And so the need for that special rule is long forgotten – the gain is proof.
____
And it’s realistic politic to make the children believe to follow the ‘good’ King Knutes – and not scary them with tales of gruesome invaders with murderous iron fists.
Thanks for the imaginary picture show – Hans
Today, we can be sure that the Germanic, Nordic, Slavic barons and kings
– still regarded their ancient gods as guiding stars: for
themselves.
– but used ‘modern’ Christianity for discipline and
standardization -and some civilization- of their now
mixed peoples.
Regards – Hans