The Tangled Web of Global Warming Activism

Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote,

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”

There were several actions required to create the tangled web of deception relating to the claim that human-produced CO2 caused global warming. It involved creating smaller deceptions to control the narrative that instead of creating well-woven cloth became the tangled web. The weavers needed control of the political, scientific, economic inputs, as well as the final message to the politicians to turn total attention on CO2.

Their problem was the overarching need for scientific justification, because science, if practiced properly, inherently precludes control. Properly, you go where the science takes you, by disproving the hypothesis. However, before the planners could get to the science, they had to establish the political framework.

The framework was built around the need to prove the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (AGW), which held that global warming was inevitable. The assumptions, required of any hypothesis, were that;

· CO2 was a greenhouse gas that slowed the rate of heat escape from the atmosphere.

· An increase in CO2 would cause a global temperature increase,

· Atmospheric CO2 would increase because of human activity,

· Industrial development achieved by burning fossil fuels was the major source of human CO2, production

· Industrial development would increase,

· Temperature increase was inevitable in a ‘business as usual’ world.

Politics

Maurice Strong orchestrated most of the early action because he knew how to set up the bureaucratic structure necessary to control the politics and science. Neil Hrab wrote in 2001 that Strong achieved this by:

Mainly using his prodigious skills as a networker. Over a lifetime of mixing private sector career success with stints in government and international groups…

He began with the 1977 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment Stockholm Conference. As Hrab explained:

The three specific goals set out by the Secretary General of the Conference, Maurice F. Strong, at its first plenary session—a Declaration on the human environment, an Action Plan, and an organizational structure supported by a World Environment Fund—were all adopted by the Conference.

From there Strong created the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) with two main streams that provided the Political faction and the Scientific faction (Figure 1).

Figure 1

The overall objectives of Agenda 21 (details here: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/outcomedocuments/agenda21 ) are masked in platitudes and the moral high ground of saving the planet, but the reality is to use the environment in general as the basis for a political agenda. As Elaine Dewar explained in her book, Cloak of Green:

Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.

It is part of the move to total government control that people voted against in the Brexit.

At the political level, they saw the need is for broad, malleable policies. For example, the precautionary principle is the standard fall-back position of environmentalists – shouldn’t we act regardless. This is built into Agenda 21 as Principle 15.

In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

Source: http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm

They make all the decisions.

· determine which states are capable,

· when a threat is serious,

· when a threat is irreversible,

· what is “full scientific certainty”

· when it is used as a reason for acting

· when it is used as a reason for not acting.

Science

The next political objective was to narrow the science to CO2. This was achieved by limiting the scientific target through a definition of climate change produced by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This eliminated almost all natural causes of climate and climate change for a predetermined result.

“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 considerable time periods.”

This definition allowed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to limit 100 percent of so-called greenhouse gases (GHG) to the four (4) percent that is CO2.

The IPCC tell people they do not do research; they just gather facts. However, this is part of the public deception because they leave people to believe they are studying all the facts and doing research, otherwise why would they make predictions. Instead, they gather a few selected facts and put them in a computer model constructed to produce a predetermined result. As Henri Poincare said,

“Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house.”

They didn’t heed Thomas Huxley’s advice.

Sit down before facts as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

The IPCC sits down before facts with notions totally preconceived and restricted by the definition of climate change and the political agenda. The IPCC is divide into Working Group I (WGI) that produces the scientific evidence achieved using a predetermined outcome system. As Steve McIntyre pointed out the ‘hockey stick’ formula that produced the paleoclimate record necessary, produced a ‘hockey stick’ even if the input was random numbers. The computer models are the only place in the world where a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase.

The WGI ‘proof’ that an increase of human CO2 was almost without question causing a temperature increase became the sole basis for the Impact, Adaptation and Vulnerability Studies of Working Group II (WGII). Again there was a bias to produce a predetermined result was implemented. They only examine the costs but never the benefits. The British government commissioned the Stern Review, which was designed to reinforce and exaggerate the negative impacts. It did this by saying there was no hope unless you accept the entire science and act immediately and extensively.

The findings of WGII became the basis for the recommendations in the Mitigation Report of Working Group III (WGIII). Ottar Edenhofer, co-chair of WGIII from 2008 to 2015, explains the real objective.

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy,” “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

And that requires constant focus on CO2.

Economics

From the first report in 1990, IPCC predictions were wrong. It quickly endangered the objective of blaming CO2 and required a different more controlled approach. The response was to change from predictions based on climate variables to creating projections that put CO2 at the center. Economist David Henderson, who provided the earliest and best analysis of IPCC economics explained.

At the beginning, projections of global warming are largely based on projected atmospheric concentrations of CO2, which in turn are based on the projections of CO2 emissions which emerge from the SRES; and the emissions figures themselves are linked to SRES projections of world output, world energy use, and the carbon-intensity of different energy sources. In these latter projections economic factors are central.

In 2003 he published an article with Ian Castles titled “Economics, Emissions Scenarios and the work of the IPCC. They wrote,

‘That they have so far held aloof, and left the handling of economic issues in the IPCC process to others, is surprising as well as unfortunate. An article in The Economist (15 February 2003) that commented on our critique noted that, in relation to issues of climate change policy, “vast sums are at stake”. Yet the questionable treatment of economic issues in … the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, which as independent outsiders we have drawn attention to in this and our previous article, seems not to have been noticed by a single official in a single finance or economics ministry in a single country.

This comment shows the IPCC realized that scientists and researchers outside of climate studies were asking questions about the validity of their work. It appears they avoided economists because they knew they would not produce the results they wanted. This parallels the criticism of the Wegman Report concerning the use of statisticians

With clinical trials for drugs and devices to be approved for human use by the FDA, review and consultation with statisticians is expected. Indeed, it is standard practice to include statisticians in the application-for-approval process. We judge this to be a good policy when public health and also when substantial amounts of monies are involved, for example, when there are major policy decisions to be made based on statistical assessments. In such cases, evaluation by statisticians should be standard practice. This evaluation phase should be a mandatory part of all grant applications and funded accordingly.

The IPCC decided that the SRES was problematic but only because it was exposed by economists. They acknowledged the problem and brought in a replacement called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). It didn’t change anything because it guaranteed what they wanted namely that human CO2 production would increase. A recent article by David Middleton titled, “Part Deux: “The stuff nightmares are made from” references earlier studies by Judith Curry and others about the shallowness of the entire project. As one commentator explained

These RCP’s are used by policymakers to decide what actions are required to sustain a safe climate for our own and future generations. The information they are using, presented by the IPCC, is nothing more than science fiction.

Each year the amount of human produced CO2 increases, and while it may be true, the amount is controlled by the IPCC. They produce the annual estimates of anthropogenic CO2 using inventory guidelines. Here is how they describe the inventory Guidelines including human CO2 production.

How does the IPCC produce its inventory Guidelines?

Utilising IPCC procedures, nominated experts from around the world draft the reports that are then extensively reviewed twice before approval by the IPCC. This process ensures that the widest possible range of views are incorporated into the documents. See http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/ for full details.

What it ensures is that they control the process from the nomination of experts to produce the reports and final approval of what the reports say.

Final Reporting

The final control that keeps the focus almost exclusively on CO2 is the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), a shorter version for media and politicians of the Synthesis Report.

The SPM is written by a separate group of a few carefully selected ‘experts’ to produce a narrative that is not substantiated by the scientific analysis in WGI. Again the Wegman report warned of the part of the problem.

Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers.

This includes those who wrote the academic papers but also produced the final report including the SPM. As David Wojick wrote,

Glaring omissions are only glaring to experts, so the “policymakers”—including the press and the public—who read the SPM will not realize they are being told only one side of a story. But the scientists who drafted the SPM know the truth, as revealed by the sometimes artful way they conceal it.

What is systematically omitted from the SPM are precisely the uncertainties and positive counter evidence that might negate the human interference theory. Instead of assessing these objections, the Summary confidently asserts just those findings that support its case. In short, this is advocacy, not assessment.

Summary

The total effect of the control of CO2 from beginning to end allowed them to reach the conclusions they desired for Assessment Report 5 (AR5).

Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.

This sounds unequivocal, but they are the slick carefully selected words of a spin doctor. Human influence is only clear because the IPCC made it so. Recent climate changes have had a widespread impact on human and natural systems, but that was always the case. Tell me something I don’t know!

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.

Nobody has argued that the climate systems didn’t warm since 1950, but this is only part of the warming since approximately 1680 has the Earth emerged from the Little Ice Age. It is natural for snow and ice to diminish in a warming world and when that happens for sea level to rise. Again, tell me something I don’t know! But that is not the problem because the creators of this controlled pseudo-science now that most of the public don’t know. They created a tangled web that forces their deceptions to higher and more ridiculous levels. At some point, a majority become aware, which coupled with a sense of something wrong causes a reaction. Anthropogenic global warming was ostensibly designed to save the planet but is part of the deception to impose globalization as Maurice Strong planned. A majority of people in Britain didn’t necessarily understand globalization but recognized how they were losing control of their lives and voted no.