Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reasoning are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason. As Edmund Burke wrote in England 20 years before the American Revolution,” no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning past fear.”
Fear is aided and abetted by exaggeration, distortion, and falsehoods. Sadly, these exploitations litter history as people sought to control others and push a political or religious agenda. There appears to be a difference today as Farhad Manjoo identified in his book “True Enough: Learning to live in a Post-Fact Society”:
Facts no longer matter. We simply decide how we want to see the world and then go out and find experts and evidence to back our beliefs.
If that doesn’t work, you manufacture the material and hire spin doctors to spread the lies and misinformation more effectively. The truth doesn’t need spin doctors.
Most people are afraid of lawyers and the law. There is the apocryphal story of a lawyer (solicitor) in England who had a standard letter that said,
“Sir: This matter has come to our attention, and if you do not deal with it immediately we will do things that will astonish you.”
Many think a letter from a lawyer is a legal document, it isn’t; it is a letter from a lawyer. Apart from the potential legal action that might follow, the recipient knows it is going to cost money even if only to hire a lawyer. The increasing use of the law to intimidate people is a frightening trend that is a perversion of the laws purpose to protect the citizens. Now that trend extends to those who are doing their job. It is the job of a scientist to challenge and question. As Thomas Huxley wrote,
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
Even the threat by US Attorney General (AG) Loretta Lynch that the FBI are going to examine the role of climate skeptics for charges under the RICO is deeply disturbing. It is the practice of leaders who hold a singular political view from either extreme to isolate and threaten. Totalitarianism occurs on the left and the right.
While Lynch was threatening skeptics, President Obama held a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at which they announced total agreement on the need to fight climate change. Both present themselves as leaders who only have the people and the planet at heart, but consider the actions of what Trudeau’s father Pierre did when his belief in centralized government was challenged.
French-speaking people in Quebec with distinct cultural identity wanted to form a nation-state.
After the First World War the principle of ‘the right to national self-determination’ were commonly used by international lawyers, national governments and their challengers. The demand that people should govern themselves became identified with the demand that nations should determine their own destiny.
“When the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) sought separation of Quebec from Canada, Pierre Trudeau used the murder of Deputy Premier and Minister of Labour of the province of Quebec Pierre Laporte to act.”
This does not change the point of the story. It was a gross over-reaction to take away all citizens rights and use the Canadian Army against Canadian citizens.
For comparison, imagine if a State politician was murdered by a person and Obama used that as an excuse to take complete control of the US and use the Army to control citizens. There is a reason for the second amendment. As Thomas Jefferson said,
“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
When challenged about his draconian actions, this academic lawyer who suddenly became a tyrant said in a TV interview,
Trudeau: Yes, well, there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in a society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who we don’t like the looks of.
Reporter; At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?
Trudeau; Well, just watch me.
At what point would the White House decide that the threat of climate change and the subversion of “big oil” and their skeptical lackeys justify suspending the Constitution? After the 911 attack
President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51). This, for the sixth time, extended for one year the emergency proclaimed on September 14, 2001. It empowered the President to personally ensure “continuity of government” in the event of any “catastrophic emergency.”
To my knowledge that is still in place and provides a justification for those who seek one. The phrases used are easily adapted to the climate issue, especially when they are given legitimacy by the consideration of the Attorney General.
Misrepresentation of information to make a political statement or achieve financial gain is central to the AG Lynch’s claim. The White House web page talks about “greenhouse gas pollution” and “carbon pollution.” They incorrectly use carbon, a solid, when they mean carbon dioxide, a gas. They incorrectly label CO2 a pollutant when it is essential to plant life and thereby all life. They threaten with the fear that
“we need to avert an additional 2-degree temperature increase to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.”
When a story is spun, it is essential to capitalize headlines, which is why I repeat them here in that format. Everybody knows because of the Internet practice that capitals are the equivalent of shouting. They claim “THE WEATHER IS GETTING MORE EXTREME,” but provide no evidence. The reason they don’t is because it isn’t true. Instead, they follow the headline with comments about warmer temperatures across the US. Then they do what was done in the 1990s after a sequence of hurricanes ending with Andrew. Stories claimed that hurricanes were increasing in numbers and intensity. This was not correct, and investigation showed the actual increase was the cost of repairs, which was due to inflation and corruption as the cost of building materials sky-rocketed. The WH follows the temperature data with a section titled,”EXTREME WEATHER COMES AT A COST,” which again conflates inflated costs with increasing number and severity of events.
The next section compounds the falsehoods with a headline that says, “CARBON POLLUTION IS THE BIGGEST DRIVER OF CLIMATE CHANGE.” It is followed by a subheading that infers a link without providing evidence. “Global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are on the rise” is classic sleight of hand like those practiced by the IPCC between the certainty of the Science Report and the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). If challenged, they can say that they acknowledged the reality, but the deception is the method.
Saki, the pen name of a British social commentator cynically observed,
“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.”
In the case of the President’s web page it is more than a “little inaccuracy”, but the need to instill fear in the public is necessary to justify the agenda. Is this a case where fear of failing to instill fear led to abandoning reason? The answer is obvious.
The person who wrote the opening quotation of this article also wrote the following,
The truth shall rise again. I wasn’t the only person who heard that promise, nor was I the only one for whom that hope still rings loud and true.
But before such a hope can be realized, we need to understand the implications of fears new prominence in our democracy. In the following chapter, I will explore why, in an atmosphere of constant fear, the public is more likely to discard reason and turn to leaders who demonstrate dogmatic faith in ideological viewpoints. These new demagogues don’t actually offer greater security from danger, but they’re simplistic and frequently vitriolic beliefs and statements can provide comfort to a fearful society. Unfortunately, the rise of these leaders serves only to exacerbate the decline of reasoning and further jeopardize our democracy.
The quotes are from the master of fear AL GORE in his 2007 book “The Assault on Reason.” The truth is few exploited the false fear of global warming like Gore, and few made more money.
I presume Ms. Lynch is going to apply the same reasoning of exploitation of fear and false information to Gore and the White House. I presume Ms. Lynch will apply the law to all skeptics throughout the world including the White House. If not it is another example what Obama claims to despise, American bullying.
The actions are among the first steps toward totalitarianism defined as
“any system of political ideas that is both thoroughly dictatorial and utopian.”
The White House web page is pure propaganda deliberately designed to strike fear so they can come to the rescue of people and the planet by declaring a state of emergency. This appears to coordinate with the AG giving legal weight to the political agenda by identifying the method and the enemy. It is those dastardly ‘deniers’ funded by the fossil fuel industry who dare to perform their legitimate task as scientific skeptics. I am still waiting for my cheque. Meanwhile the White House confirms that exploitation of fear does suspend reason, just as Gore said.
Update: 3/14/16 The section on…
“When the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) sought separation of Quebec from Canada, Pierre Trudeau used the murder of Deputy Premier and Minister of Labour of the province of Quebec Pierre Laporte to act.”
…has been updated to reflect history more accurately.
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Having an opinion, backed by scientific fact, as opposed to the Establishment view supported by scaremongering and data manipulation, should be considered a possible crime by one of the highest authorities in the land, says a lot about America today.
Sick and sad.
Truly, that’s the Obama legacy. Possibly knocking Jimmy Carter off his title as the worst US president in the past 50 years
..Obama makes Carter look like an Eisenhower type of president ..
And as for Eisenhower; he killed around 1 million German prisoners in the Rhine Meadow camps, AFTER the war was over, by designating them “Disarmed enemy forces” so as to deny access to the Red Cross, then systematically denying them food, clothing and ANY shelter through the harsh winter of 1945-46 – but you won’t read about that in the victors history books either. Another American hero eh?
…Wikispooks ??? ROTFLMAO…put your tinfoil hat back on and take your meds !
The only think in dispute regards the Rheinwiesenlager is the number of dead. Official estimates are 10,000 (approx). A 1989 author claims as many as 1 million. The actual number can never be known and doesn’t matter – 1 or 1 million dead from incompetence is unacceptable. The conditions at the camps were unjustifiable and serve as an example egregious rationalizations people in charge are capable of which is the topic of Dr. Ball’s article.
…to Marcus….you are wrong…those post world war 2 camps did exist and many German POW’s died of disease and starvation. Also…did you know that in the early 1930’s…the 3 Lieutenants they put in charge of routing, rousting and killing the homeless veterans of world war 1 who were camped outside of DC demanding that they be taken care of, paid pensions, etc….those three lieutenants were Patton, Ike and MacArthur….firing on ww1 vets and crushing their encampments…great patriots, eh?
RJ O’Guillory
http://charlesfrith.blogspot.com/2013/06/airbrushed-history-eisenhowers-death.html
I think Dr Ball needs to correct: “When the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) sought separation of Quebec from Canada, Pierre Trudeau used the kidnapping and death of an ambassador to act.”
The British Trade Commissioner James Cross was neither an ambassador nor murdered and was released unharmed. The murder victim was Deputy Premier and Minister of Labour of the province of Quebec Pierre Laporte*
*http://bit.ly/1pokLqo
SFM
This is way off topic.
Information about those camps is quite scanty. Obviously not a bright spot in the history of the US Army.
I knew a German who was a POW in one of those camps. He said conditions were awful, but he didn’t blame the Americans. They just didn’t have the materials to house everybody properly. (Try housing a million men, all of a sudden, all soldiers and no telling who is out for revenge.) He only survived he said because he spoke English and he got better housing since he was then working for the Americans as a translator. He came to America to settle down after the war, with his wife, and became an American citizen. Not much resentment with him, apparently. Of course, no telling what he saw the German army do during the war.
BTW, nobody knew that the Germans had given up the fight despite the surrender of the German govt. There were calls for continued fighting by some die-hards. Eisenhower was extremely worried about continuing fighting and did everything he could to prevent it.
But, nice try. Here we are talking about the imminent heresy trials for climate skeptics by a completely corrupt American govt, and you want to criticize Eisenhower, probably our last decent President.
One more correction:
The correct quote
: “Dear Sir, Unless you pay the rupees within seven days, we shall take such steps as will cause you the utmost damned astonishment.”
I don’t think there was any great malice in Jimmy Carter but there certainly is in Obama.
Obama said exactly what he would do before the first election. Hope and Change not withstanding.
Nobody listened to what he said, they were fixated on Hope and Change. (including the Nobel comity).
Mikebartnz
I have to agree. Carter was a terrible president but one without malice towards America. He was just wrong about everything he did.
Obummer is a lot weirder. He blames American arrogance for the world’s problems (remember he was bowing humbly to some foreign leader while returning the bust of Churchhill in the White House to the Brits). He is an intellectual lightweight who believes he is wise and thinks Socialism is settled science. (He is concerned about what is good for Socialism, not what is good for America.) He is a race baiter and divider setting classes and ethnicities against each other in an attempt to “revolutionize” America. He is a lot of negative things — but strangely his one saving grace is that he is scared to death of being a leader. The happiest day of Obummer life will be the day his presidency is over. What is for him the unbearable weight of leadership will be lifted from his shoulders and he can go back to being the loud-mouthed pretend he has always been, free of all consequences from anything he says. After his presidency he plans to live in the Washington area — undoubtedly intending to be the loudest and most public ex-presidents the country has ever seen. He’ll strut and rant from that Washington stage — continuing what his entire career has been — an acting job.
Eugene WR Gallun .
@ur momisugly Eugene WR Gallun
Obama is not an intellectual lightweight, he is an intelligent but ignorant ideologue, much worse. Socialism, while impractical, has many admirable attributes. You are too generous when you imply Obama supports a political / economic model with any admirable attributes. Dr. Ball more correctly describes Obama’s attributes as totalitarian and we should call him exactly what he is.
The last few decades has shown that there is ample malice in Carter.
LBJ was the worst president. He gave us the Viet Nam war, the failed war on poverty and the counter-culture of the ’60s.
I am no fan of LBJ but the president who got the USA into the Vietnam war was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Cmon now, LBJ? Who gave us the civil rights laws? Who retired rather than die in office with all the chaos that would entail? My nomination would be FDR, who introduced the massive all-powerful federal government and had (ultimately) a Supreme Court to go along with him.
Correct.
Let me withdraw my remark. It’s been subverted by the moderation pipeline.
You could trace the blame back to Truman and Eisenhower after him. link Some people blame Robert McNamara. There’s plenty of blame to go around. I have always liked to think that JFK was a much better poker player than LBJ and would not have escalated but we’ll never know.
LBJ gave us the entire 23 part entitlement system that subverted the Civil Rights Act and enticed most of the black population to convert from Republican to Democrat and to chase after freebees, creating a dependent class that would forever vote Democratic. Yep, LBJ was a winner, but NOT for best President by a long shot.
JimB, Was that the same LBJ who after the civil rights laws passed was quoted as saying “Now those N****s will be voting for use for 100 years”?
As to not running for re-election, he was so far behind in the polls that he stood no chance of winning anyway.
Those rascals could not have done those things had Abraham Lincoln not gone on a killing spree to break the Constitution.
Obama, and his minions, have (wittingly or unwittingly) long-ago decided that it’s Capitalism, not climate-change that is the greatest threat — don’t be mislead. Everything he’s done is consistent with that supposition. (Fear of AGW,reinforced by widespread ignorance, is but a handy tool.)
Hope & Change
Can the people be awakened, is there still enough time?
Are the powers that be frightened, intimately aware of their crime?
Can you feel the anger building, the increased rate of rage?
As people begin to recognize, their ever-shrinking cage.
Can you feel liberty shrinking, diced up into little cubes?
Courts pretend to rule, as though we’re silly rubes.
Can you feel the Revolution, the ever-growing vibes?
People throwing off their chains, of blatant corruption and bribes.
Can you get the humiliation, the years of pent-up fury?
Millions rotting in prisons, no right to trial or jury.
Can you feel all the sorrow, of all this Hope & Change?
People have come to realize, their dreams were really strange.
Can you sense the switch of direction, the move towards Change & Hope?
As the crowds begin to gather, each…with a length of rope.
RJ O’Guillory
fjoguillory — are you writing about Venezuela? — Eugene WR Gallun
Peter Miller March 13, 2016 at 3:13 am wrote: “Having an opinion, backed by scientific fact, as opposed to the Establishment view supported by scaremongering and data manipulation, should be considered a possible crime by one of the highest authorities in the land, says a lot about America today.”
It says a lot about the corrupt Obama administration only.
The FBI will come back without a criminal referral because no crime has been committed. You can’t legitimately charge someone with denying something that doesn’t exist, like catastrophic human-caused global warming/climate change. Even if it did exist, there is no crime in denying it that I can see, if it is a personal opinion, not meant to defraud anyone.
The FBI Director may be one of the few honest people in the Obama administration. If so, there will be no charges because no laws have been broken.
And President Obama is definitely the worst president in U.S. history, IMO.
Here’s one who must be in his pay: https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=3264 JAW-dropping, I tell you! Must have been hit with his own (original!) Hockey Stick!
You may want to check your link because it goes to a blog post by Jeff Masters and you’re certainly crossing the line into the twilight-zone when questioning his integrity.
It’s far fringe stuff like that as well as rants about an Obama third term and the mass arrests of climate change skeptics that gives climate change skepticism a bad name it neither deserves ,or desires.
Tides Canada, Jan.21, 2016
‘Is 2016 the climate change tipping point? Tides Canada and Toronto Star climate and economy series wraps up’
Announced in September 2015 and written by Tyler Hamilton.
http://tidescanada.org/climate-and-energy/tides-canada-and-toronto-star-climate-and-economy-series-wraps-up
Our Windsor, Dec.7, 2015
Reprinted from: The Star, Toronto
By: Tyler Hamilton + another author
http://m.ourwindsor.ca/community-story/6162065-what-will-his-life-be-like-with-climate-change-
Note the scientists quoted from for this article.
Scary stuff!
York University, Ontario, Canada
Sustainable Energy Initiative/SEI
Our Team includes:
Tyler Hamilton, Adjunct Professor, York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies.
http://sei.info.yorku.ca/our-team
Clean|Break
Tyler Hamilton Blog @ur momisugly http://www.cleanbreak.ca
Clean | Break
Tyler Hamilton Resume
http://www.cleanbreak.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/T_Hamilton_Resume_Dec2015.pdf
Science education?
You guys are hilarious.
…Well duh, how else is Obama going to get his third term ? CAGW will force him to declare a state of emergency and cancel all elections, for the good of the world, of course ! And I’m sure mini Trudeau will be right there behind him with his head stuck up Obama’s derriere !
And when someone goes to trial after being arrested for speaking against global warming, all data to used for defense will be disallowed, leaving no possible verdict but guilty. That’s the future being built.
Either that, or an executive order will declare that, like taxes, accusation is equal to guilt.
I weep for our country, and would have given to despair if not for WUWT, where I find hope from the articles, and especially the comments that show I am not alone.
We are many Stevan, WUWT has restored my faith in human nature more than any other single agency. For a very experienced retired civil engineer it was like coming home after a long time away.
Anthony and his helpers have achieved an incredible thing here at WUWT. It is much broader than just the US, important as that is. I am from New Zealand, an electric power engineer in my 60s. WUWT, the authors and the commenters have stretched my mind and changed me for he better. The community here is just amazing, and It seems to me to contain a good number, if not a majority of scientifically literate folk, with moral fibre and not afraid to state their case.
I understand. I weep for my children and grandchildren.
Stevan. I believe with the press of time these climate hucksters will diminish to the background noise a mouse would make squeaking doom and gloom at a climate conference afterparty, the odds are against them.
AGW is just the latest tactic being used to advance the agenda of big govt socialism.
When it is abandoned, the same people will move on to the next lie.
In the meantime, the programs put forth under the AGW umbrella will only be rolled back a little, if at all.
When politicians use the phrase “if you’re not breaking the law then you’ve nothing to fear” when justifying ever more surveillance I think yes, but I don’t know what future law I might be breaking. Being sceptical of mankind’s influence on the climate and saying grows evermore risky, but that isn’t a reason to change your mind about the truth.
Sandy: Whenever someone quotes that “If you have nothing to hide…” crap at me I just ask them: You’re driving along and suddenly a police car appears behind you with ‘blues and twos’ going – what’s your first thought?
Every one of us unknowingly commits several misdemeanor and occassionally felonious acts each day. For example, to aid in the war against drugs, the federal (US) government passed a law that mandates all prescription drugs be kept in their original bottles with the prescription lable attached. This identifies the drug and who has the right to possess it. Sounds reasonable on the surface. However, a great many people, most notable seniors and the elderly, transfer their numerous meds to a pill case for convenience and as a reminder when to take their medication. They are all committing felonies.
Many such laws are written broadly in order to give the government more leverage against the bad guys. They were never intended to be used against the otherwise innocent. Given the right (wrong) totalitarian government, though, they could selectively screw whomever they wish to silence.
You always have reason to fear those whom have power over you.
Lable=label
This is off the weather topic, but does illustrate your point, jtom. When I was a young physician, less than a year into my career (it was the early 90’s), I went into a patient’s room to find a very well dressed man sitting there. Before I could say anything, he looked at me and said, “Did you know that you are guilty of Medicare fraud?” I was obviously quite shocked, and not a little nervous, about what he said. I told him I could not be–I hadn’t been practicing medicine for that long, and besides, the clinic I worked in didn’t even take Medicare. He asked if it was possible that a person on Medicare could drive into our parking lot, find out we didn’t take Medicare, and then drive away. I said “Sure”, so he replied, “Then you are guilty of Medicare fraud”. He then apologized for surprising me like that, and explained that he was a former investigator of Medicare fraud for the US gov’t, and stated that the rules and regulations for Medicare/Medicaid were so numerous that almost any action you take will be listed as illegal in some part of the “manual”, and any action a Medicare patient takes, even if you don’t even see them, can be interpreted as fraud on the physician’s part. He also stated that any action you are explicitly ORDERED to perform in one portion of the regulations will be listed as illegal in another. He stated the only reason 100% of doctors aren’t in jail is because the government doesn’t WANT them in jail–yet. Heckuva way to start off my career!!
I’ve heard that the tax laws make criminals of us all. You say also the drug laws!
I do not remember what book it was from, but one of the minor characters in it noted that the purpose of the law was to make felons of everyone. After all, innocent people have no need to fear their govt. Make it impossible to go through the day without breaking some law, and the govt will own you. For the magistrate then has the power to destroy you if he wishes, or let you off if he wishes. All that is required for mercy, is that you dance to his tune.
You described a mutual extortion society. These are common throughout the non-Anglosphere, and seemingly expanding quickly into the Anglosphere.
The problems come when they change the law making what you were doing, illegal. Then they change the law to making thinking about it illegal. It is not a slippery slope, it is a cliff.
Cecil E Cook Jr points out that in the US there were many warnings that the cliff edge was near. After the edge was well and truly crossed, Western society finds itself plummeting into the abyss, and comments, ‘Well, that was a false warning! We have fallen over the edge and so far we are doing just fine!’
Mountaineers know it is not the fall that kills you, it’s the impact.
As always, impeccable and to the heart of the matter.
It appears that the USA has been so successful at exporting democracy that there is none left for the American citizens
I like it. Sadly seems to be true.
Kiwikid March 13, 2016 at 3:40 am wrote: “It appears that the USA has been so successful at exporting democracy that there is none left for the American citizens.”
Don’t count American citizens out, just yet. Let’s see what things look like Wednesday morning. We will have some clarity then, I believe.
They are too blind to see that at some point it is going to be them against us.
Alex “They are too blind …”
You underestimate them. They know exactly what they’re doing. Christians are being systematically removed from your police and military forces, which are trained to kill American citizens without compunction (InfoWars.) Their plans to reduce world population to 500 million are no secret (Dakota stonehenge.) Plans to make ~96% of the USA out of bounds to ordinary citizens have been reported on WUWT. Just hand over your guns and meet the fury of their eugenic religion.
Sheldon Whitehouse, Raul Grijalva and Loretta Lynch?
These green hooligans and fellow-travelling government thugs are clearly conspiring to violate the First Amendment free-speech rights of those who dare to disagree with them.
They are the Brownshirts of 21st century America
Also happens in the political realm: http://realclimatescience.com/2016/03/violating-civil-rights/
It was beyond IRONIC that Bill Ayres was a major participant in the thuggery to shut down the Trump Chicago event!! Saul Alinsky is smiling from the bottom of his crypt, and winking at Hillary
She clearly needs someone to wink at her. 😉
The brownshirts were charged with pushing communists out of Germany, how are these communists brown shirts?
… similar tactics.
So come on America, vote for a Republican. But preferably not Trump.
and all the bureaucrats will still be there. Also the NSA, FBI, CIA and others of their ilk you don’t even know about
I am not share that any other candidate, but Trump could beat Hillary…
Polling says otherwise. Cruz beats Hillary handily, Trump squeaks by.
“Trump squeaks by.”
As Trump himself says: he hasn’t started on her yet. She has so many cracks that with a few taps she should fall apart like auto door glass.
I can’t imagine Trump ‘squeaking.’
Just so that you Americans know (and not that it helps either way), theer are an awful lot of British people over here in the UK who are hoping that Trump is the next President. Don’t listen to our media (who are amazingly out of touch). I can tell you from speaking to people every day of my life, so many Brits are rooting for Trump.
Sorry, “there”.
I’m not sure that the difference between Trump and Hillary is enough to matter.
Continue electing professional politicians and you will continue getting what you have gotten from professional politicians. How many elections will it take for voters to learn this?
If the politicians in DC wanted to fix the issues we have been debating for decades, they would be fixed. They create the problems (complex and unfair tax code, uncontrolled bureaucracy, mountains of regs, not being able to fire incompetent bureaucrats, SS funding problems, immigration problems), then claim the experience needed to fix the problems – but never do. They are the problem, and we need to fix it by removing them from Washington.
I don’t care who people vote for as long as it is not for a career politician.
You don’t have to hold office in order to be a professional politician.
Trumps been a politician his entire professional life.
Yet another timely, reasoned, and insightful essay by Dr. Ball. Thanks for taking the time.
The USA is already a police state or nearly so, but we may not yet be as bad as Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China … yet. But we have not followed the Constitution in many, many generations. Oh, we pretend we follow the Constitution but we just follow what the rulers want it to mean.
In this case, the President is using totally un-physical theories of how the weather machine works to claim that he is in the business of “saving the world”.
The problem is that there is no global warming other than the natural warming that brought us out of the Little Ice Age due to natural variation. We see some rises in “average temperature” (whatever that means) and then some reductions. We don’t really know what the next 100 years will bring other than the probability is very high that the models have it dead wrong. (which means cooling I guess)
In addition to the probability being against any more than a tiny bit of warming, we have to remember that the alarmist team of [insert forbidden word here] who told us that what warming that would come would do so at night and toward the poles. A warmer night and a warmer Canada?!? What the heck is wrong with that?
And the “luke-warmers” don’t help our side any by censoring and attacking the real skeptics. There is much controversy about what CO2 really does in the atmosphere — heck, there is real controversy about what and how the atmosphere in total helps to moderate temperatures on the planet. It is time to stop marginalizing those who reject the “CO2” warms the earth speculation.
The bottom line is no one can prove that CO2 is warming the planet (in my view because it is not) and no one can tell us what the climate will be 100 years from now.
For these reasons and many more, Obama is simply going for a power grab. A police state needs to be able to silence those that voice opinions the State does not want voiced. What better way to start than by putting skeptics in jail because they are “hurting our chances of saving the world”?
..Why do you think he wants America’s guns ??
Who needs a gun? When you can exhale more and destroy the planet.
Whatever Obama may be doing for his part in the power grab it is worth observing that police action that was popularly and properly vilified a generation ago has become commonplace these days. The entire city of Boston “locked down”, everyone confined to their homes, while homeland security engaged in a manhunt for two suspects with out so much as a whimper in the press about police state measures. We are hearing more and more for civil law enforcement this expression of “lock down” which, so far as I know, only applied to prisons in danger of rioting not that long ago. Then Homeland security runs in with HumVees and “tactical units” that employ every bit of military not police tactics against civilians. Amazing! If you have nothing to hide why should you object? Because that sort of behavior by police is Unamerican and has been battled against for the entire history of the country.
Lynch would seem to be an appropriate name.
Loretta Lynch should be impeached and banned from any office.
Impeachment applies only to elected officials. Loretta Lynch was appointed, therefore indictment is what applies.
Article II, Section 4:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment . . .
Appointed Judge Alcee Hastings was impeached and convicted and booted off the bench.
Yes, Lynch can be impeached.
As soon as he got out of jail, he ran for congress and won easily.
The use of fear for control has been around for a long time.
Captain Bligh: Remember, fear is our best weapon.
From Mutiny on the Bounty.
In Dead Wake, the fine book about the sinking of the Lusitania, the author relates the story of how the British head of intelligence visited Germany in 1934, and wrote to a friend…
“All the young men are in the net,” he wrote, “anyone who tried to keep out of being a Nazi is hazed till they change their mind; a form of mass cruelty which exists only in such a country.”
I’ve been audited by the IRS 3 times in the last 6 years and so have a few of my friends. This documentary highlights just a few of the efforts made by some of the biggest names in Climate “Science” to silence a skeptic. The main clip starts at 49:28 and another starts at 38:34.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=49m28s
BTW, this tactic was outlined by Saul Alynski, “Blame Others Of What You Are Guilty.” Every criminal points the finger at others to deflect blame. The whole purpose of these lawsuits and threats are to throw the scent off the truly guilty. That is why I keep going back to the idea of an open source, crowd funded and/or X-Prize approach to a temperature data reconstruction and climate model. No way would the Hockeystick and IPCC Models be recreated if people understood what went into creating them, Real science is done through 1) Reproducible (which the Hockeystick is not) and 2) Models being validated with a high R^2. No way would the public allow “Mike’s Nature trick to “Hide the decline” and any climate model that reduces the significance of CO2 in any of the IPCC models will have a greater R^2. All one would need to do is take an existing IPCC Model, reduce the coefficient assigned to CO2, or even eliminate if from the model, and I bet the R^2 would increase. It would be that simple. The existing models clearly have exaggerated the impact of CO2, and that is why their forecast of temperature tracks CO2 and not the actual temperature. They have a CO2 forecast model, not a temperature model. Temperature tracks the amount of radiation reaching the earth’s surface, not CO2. That is why every control for CO2 like the deserts and Antarctica don’t show any warming, and Mars, with 20x the CO2 of earth, shows such extreme temperature swings between day and night.
The Russian model seems to be fairly accurate in reproducing recent tropospheric temperature. That one would be a good start.
If that is their official ‘state model’ it also explains why the Ruskies aren’t getting too upset about this whole farce….
Facts no longer matter. We simply decide how we want to see the world and then go out and find experts and evidence to back our beliefs.
This is in fact the postmodern approach to philosophy, where the mantra that ‘reality is a cultural construct’ has been somewhat…misinterpreted.
Reality as we experience it, may well be a cultural construct, but it isn’t a totally free choice.
The postmodernists seem to deny that there is a Reality behind and governing the reality of our perceptions.
This is tantamount to believing in Magick, that Reality is conformant to our will and choices.
Which of course denies the metaphysical assumptions of science altogether, which is that there is, behind the reality of our Perceptions, a Reality, even if we can’t completely grasp it.
I wanted to make this point because I think it really summarises the nature of the struggle – maybe the war – that is going on between rationalism and anti-rationalism. Of which climate change is just a small part.
For sure, we can show philosophically that reason doesn’t provide all of the answers, but it is a major step to them declare that it provides therefore none of the answers, and what counts is faith and belief…in climate change, in political correctness, in cultural diversity or whatever the latest fashionable bigotry is to be.
If it were true that the world conforms to our beliefs, we would never have developed Science. The whole point of Science was to explore the humble proposition that Something Out There, be it a God, Gods, Spirits, or Natural Mathematical Laws, was rather in charge of stuff we had very little control of, and if we could guess at its Laws, we might be able to second guess the future.
And to an extent that has been spectacularly successful. So successful that it has given rise to those in charge of Black Magick, which today we call Politics and Marketing, a severe case of (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy) ‘Physics Envy’ . They seek to usurp the perceived qualities of Physics, and ascribe them to not hypotheses of a testable nature, but emotional narratives of a metaphysical (untestable) nature.
Since the Druids, and other shamans, it has been understood that power over men consists in having charge of and control of their beliefs. The terrifying prospect of the latter day shamans who run the media, and infest the pages of the Sunday papers and the screens of the mass media, is that if enough people understood science and its underlying philosophy, they would be able to counter belief in falsehood, by means of mere observation. It is after all no warmer today than 50 years ago, so global warming has to be a load of bullcrap.
And this is why there is today an full on assault on ‘reason’ by those who will tell you that what counts is ’emotional intelligence’ and that doing wrong is not wrong ‘if you sincerely believed it was right’ (Tony Blair on Iraq), and in fact the phenomenon of the Left is, it seems, precisely about these ‘values’, that what counts is not what you can do, and do do, to alleviate human misery, but what good intentions you hold!
And that is why these people can gaily travel 12,000 miles by first class airliner to a climate conference, because what counts is not reducing emissions, it’s altering the perceptions of people to see emissions as a Sin.
And that is why these people will gaily allow millions of culturally antithetical immigrants to flood their countries, because at some level to deny them access would make them feel guilty.
I am not joking.
This is why “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”, “CO2 is a pollutant”, “Ocean Acidification”, “Global Warming Increase Snow” and other patently false narratives can stay in the public discourse despite their obvious inaccuracy.
Each of these can be proven wrong with a simple link to the DOJ, a greenhouse growers website, a pH table, a meteorological description of snowfall amplification by cold.
Yet, people do not want to embrace the facts because it is a “just” cause they support – racial justice, warming planet, protecting ocean life, climate change.
Our society’s current willingness to live in a “fact free” world results in the dramatic polarization we see among factions. If there are no absolutes, where is the central basis to build agreement upon.?
..It is ONLY the liberal left that lives in a fantasy world of Unicorns, Elves and CAGW !!
Leo Smith excellant comment +100
Thanks Leo. Always interesting comments.
I sympathize with your views, Leo, but need to add that there is no necessary “metaphysical assumptions of science … that there is, behind the reality of our Perceptions, a Reality,…” Science is about deriving explanations for our observations. Observations arrive. In deriving an explanation for them, there is no need for an assumption regarding their source. We can deduce a falsifiable explanation for their source, (the physical universe), but that deduction is not a metaphysical assumption. Science would be the same if we were all brains in vats being exposed to hallucinations (which, in some senses, we are).
Also, let’s not let the scientific establishment off the hook for the AGW scare. Postmodernists can yowl about cultural text all they like, but they would have no effect on science were it not for the fact that the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the US NAS, the Royal Society, and all the rest willfully swallowed the poison and bugled the fakery for the past 25 years.
Were the physics establishment as skeptical of AGW as they were of cold fusion (rightly or wrongly), we’d not be in this mess today and the postmodernists would be confined to their academic playpens. A huge portion of the fault lays with them. Postmodernists have just moved into the vacuum created by the new default of dishonesty of the physics establishment.
It wasn’t the scientists in those organizations who swallowed the Kool-Aid, it was the politicians who ran them.
The real scientists let the politicians have control because they were more interested in doing science than in dealing with the grind of running such organizations.
Postmodernism is a suicidal or self defeating philosophy. If truth does not exist and it is just a matter of taste what we want to believe, this verdict also applies at postmodernism it self. As a matter of taste I have put this philosophy in the garbage bin many years ago.
Large parts of most American universities have been taken over by crap. Alan Sokal demonstrated this by getting a bogus paper published in Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. My favorite Sokal quote:
Gad Saad has done videos that brilliantly take apart the crap.
Well said Leo Smith. I wish I knew how to cut and paste for repost
Dallas,
Cut and paste it into an email. Send to yourself, then you will have it permanently.
Here is a real world case study:
https://youtu.be/xl7Q36V9pg4
…I wonder how many times she’s been called an ” Uncle Tom ” for not toeing the line ?
When George LeMaitre’s Big Bang theory was accepted in the latter part of the twentieth century, two physicists from Stalin’s Soviet Union wrote a paper accepting the theory. For that thoughtcrime, one was shot and the other sent to the gulag. As late as 1948, Soviet scientists were forbidden to accept the Big Bang theory. Because “clericalism”. LeMaitre, the ‘father of the Big Bang theory’ was also a Jesuit priest. The alarmists are the Stalinists of today; only they just want the money from the huge enviro business….follow the money, except for the ‘useful idiots’, who haven’t been educated about how science works…it is never settled dogma.
They now want to sell their gas to Europe.
Something which they are doing quite successfully.
And with it’s increasing obligations to serve its renewable heavy fluctuating supply, Europe is in need of more and more gas.
Hence, whilst the Kremlin has little interest in spending its own money on off-shore wind turbines – they are extremely interested in seeing that their European neighbours continue to expand such self-defeating plans.
European leadership sees nothing wrong with banning fracking and fossil fuels while simultaneously empowering Russia through dependency on its energy resources.
Better to serve a foreign master than empower and free your own people. Rallying the public around “clean energy” is how the a EU leaders get the commoners to place their heads under the yoke — or guillotine.
Fear to silence? That’s not an “assault on reason” it’s a violation of The Constitution up here in the US.
Dr. Ball. Your posts are always interesting, however in this case your use of the Quebec Crisis is sadly misinformed and incorrect. At that time the FLQ was seeking independence for Quebec through the use of force. Specifically kidnapping, killing, and the indiscriminate use of bombs, specifically blowing up mail boxes. Worse, they were getting more radical with every act of violence. The government needed to act and act they did. Further, this was not an act to put down the separatist movement in Quebec. It was an act to stop the radical FLQ, a terrorist organization, not to stop the independence movement. In fact, there were several subsequent referendums on independence in which the Quebec people rejected separation. In fact, it could be argued that the referendums were an act to try and get more power for the provincial government by intimidating the rest of Canada, not the other way around. Whether it is climate science or politics you should be more careful and try to get your facts straight.
I agree. The FLQ was like the WUO (weathermen), the IRA, or even the Taliban; that is a terrorist organization intent on setting up a totalitarian state similar to Castro in Cuba. They were not a political party in the way that the Parti Quebecois is. The FLQ needed to be quickly crushed. It is just too bad that Batista didn’t quickly crush Castro. In this sense Tim’s analogy is backwards and poorly chosen much as the Velikovsky example was poorly chosen.
It appears that once again Dr Ball in his zeal to help Anthony Watts, has in his haste to publish neglected to perform due diligence and we have another post that is chuck full of irony that make clear eyed skeptics groan. There is no way the FLQ was anything other than a dangerous terrorist organisation that performing bombings, kidnapping and eventually murdered a hostage.
correction: second to last line of my comment
that performing bombings replace with
that committed bombings
I love it when people take a few actually spoken words, insert their own assumptions about the author and their personal interpretations of his/her words and then reply with full confidence against the author as if doing so in an authoritative manner somehow compensates for their irrational, illogical, biased conclusions. It’s amusing to me.
The entire point Ball makes with the FLQ reference is that governments can, and have, used “FEAR” to take away the rights of INNOCENT citizens-as if THAT is a perfectly “reasonable” thing to do in crisis situations! (Your response could easily be taken as your endorsement for such a practice ) Dr. Ball doesn’t say a WORD that indicates his views on the FLQ at all! So you attempting to impune him as if you have mind reading abilities while defending the suspension of citizens rights by a totalitarian using FEAR to control his country really only makes you look idiotic while so perfectly proving Dr. Ball’s point about how governments use FEAR to rob people of their ability to reason!
Your assumption that there was no other way to combat the FLQ is false. The Canadian Federal Government has the full powers of the RCMP and the law(Parliament would have passed any extra provisions, such as search, that he needed). The reason Trudeau used the War Measures Act was simple.. he was totalitarian by nature.. my way or the highway. That is why he and Castro were buddies.
The Republicans are just like Obama when it comes to getting their own way. Just look at the disinformation propaganda for Iraq War II. Look at how the CIA was destroying careers of anyone who got in their way. Look at the lying propaganda in the UK Press about US multinational investment in the UK if we went to war with them, not a single cent of which materialised.
I really, really, really, wouldn’t try and make this out as Republican vs Democrat.
Until proven otherwise, it should be assumed that every politician, every CEO of a multinational corporation and every intelligence operative uses these techniques on a daily basis.
…And the moon landings were fake, and George Bush created 911 and, and……please take your medication, your overdue..ONLY the left is pushing the Glo.Bull Warming Fraud !
In the case of climate, it is pretty much about Republican vs Democrat. And no one has suggested that Republicans don’t use similar tactics on other issues, so that’s a straw man.
..JFK was a Democrat, the party now is nothing but liberal socialist ! Democrats no longer exist …
All this nonsense based on estimations-
This is how bad it is in Africa- one fifth of the world’s land mass-
WMO – “Because the data with respect to in-situ surface air temperature across Africa is sparse, a one year regional assessment for Africa could not be based on any of the three standard global surface air temperature data sets from NOAANCDC, NASA-GISS or HadCRUT4 Instead, the combination of the Global Historical Climatology
Network and the Climate Anomaly Monitoring System (CAMS GHCN) by NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory was used to estimate surface air temperature patterns”
so there we have it- one fifth of the world’s land mass in just estimated.
Throw in less than 3% of the oceans. Yet accurate to .1 C when calculated as a global annual mean.
If you gave scientists the sparseness of the GISS raw data and asked them to solve for GAT, you would not only never achieve 97% consensus, you would have a hard time getting any of them to stop laughing.
Many of the sensors being used to measure the earth, aren’t accurate to 0.1C. Even if all siting issues were eliminated.
Add to that Antarctica, another 10% of the earth’s land mass. Very few monitoring sites there.
That’s 30% of the land surface and 97% of the oceans being estimated.
add on the WMO give a fat 0 for quality for temp data in urban areas and 27% of the world’s temp stations are in Urban areas,
Must be a weird world to be a climatology estimator. Spending all day looking at data that isn’t there.
Parts of US, southern Canada and parts of Europe are adequately monitored. The rest of the world is not even close.
Fear tactics typical of Chicago thug apparatchiks. The unfortunate thing is that such a relative few in the electorate see them for what they are. Who was it that said that tyranny would next come wearing a pleasant smile and nice clothing?
This has all be orchestrated. Obama & Trudeau. (sheesh) A community activist and part time drama teacher. They are both experts on the climate? I think not. Who is whispering in their ear, telling them what to say, as they pull the puppet strings?