Exploitation of Environment and Climate for Political Agenda Reverses Education and Research Processes

Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

While preparing a list of witnesses for my upcoming trial in February 2017, I was reminded of a pattern that contradicts the natural order of education and research. The issue was triggered by a comment by Mark Steyn.

~Climate mullah Michael E Mann’s lawsuit against me has been stalled in the clogged latrine of DC justice for four years – indeed, it’s stalled so long that a key witness has died. So this month I filed a “Renewed Request for Expedited Hearing and to Lift Stay of Discovery” to get the buggers moving again.

The natural and necessary order is that students are urged to question. They should follow the advice of Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.

Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.

Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.

Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Of course, this is a doctrine that a totalitarian government or one pushing a false doctrine will oppose. It takes a very strong, self-assured, government to allow such a doctrine.

Students asking questions results in a necessary sequence of education. The older professors are the guardians of the prevailing wisdom, while the new students challenge the prevailing order with fresh new perspectives. Steyn’s comment about witnesses dying underscores what I learned about how this has changed. Now the students come in to universities or the world fully indoctrinated into the environmental view created by the exploiters. In this brave new world, the derisively labelled skeptics and deniers are the old experienced academics and scientists; as Steyn notes, they are dying.

The decision to create a scientific outcome to justify a political agenda required rejection of traditional procedures and proven methods. It resulted in a complete overturning of the natural and logical sequence of creating and advancing new ideas and understanding, especially in climate research. It was achieved by cloaking it in the traditional process of change, a paradigm shift

The climate agenda is part of the larger environmental agenda that currently directs, determines, and dictates western societies socio-economic and science. It began with the new paradigm of environmentalism that took hold in the 1960s. American physicist Thomas Kuhn defines a paradigm shift as “a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.”

The major new paradigm of environmentalism was necessary because it is logical to live within and not despoil natural limits. Self-inflicted wounds are stupid. However, like all shifts, it was initially hijacked for profit or politics or both. Chief among these exploiters were the members of the Club of Rome including Maurice Strong.

The ideas of environmentalism are not new. Almost all hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies practiced animism, a religious form of pseudo-environmentalism. Animism is defined in two parts;

1. the attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.

2. the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe.

It is based on fear like all blind belief systems. If you don’t respect the supernatural powers of nature, they will kill you. The concept of animism translated in the environmental movement into the Victorian and modern myth of the noble savage. It fuelled the anti-development and anti-human belief that lies deep in the movement.

David Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service, summarized the thinking.

“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line – at about a billion years ago – we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

He starts with a challenge to the US Constitution’s determination of a right to happiness. Only his definition is acceptable. He finishes with the likely source of Prince Philip’s idea of reincarnation as a killer virus, but apparently Philip decides who dies.

Environmentalism is also built into most religions, with the major difference being the amount of personal and group responsibility for the Earth. The modern Western scientific idea of environmentalism has roots in the works of Gilbert White, George Perkins Marsh, and John Muir. However, these were all idealists who never considered the impact of their ideas on most people. As a result, they are only heroes in retrospect.

A more practical approach began in 1958 with a conference and a book of the same title, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. This was organized by William Thomas as a growing acknowledgment of the change of humans from a passive to an active agent in nature. The change is not problematic unless you consider humans the problem. This was the view of Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who said,

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” “If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”

Less extreme forms of those sentiments took hold in the works of Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and others. However, the most insidious insertion in society came with its inclusion in government policy. Here it is in Section 3.1 of the 1994 conference on population,

The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development and Agenda 21, adopted by the international community at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, call for patterns of development that reflect the new understanding of these and other intersectoral linkages.

There is also general agreement that unsustainable consumption and production patterns are contributing to the unsustainable use of natural resources and environmental degradation as well as to the reinforcement of social inequities and of poverty with the above-mentioned consequences for demographic parameters.

It was a short, well orchestrated, jump from this to the textbooks and curricula of the education system in Western countries. The indoctrination of the youth was underway. Now they graduate from high school fully immersed in all the propaganda of environmental and climate science. They go to higher levels of education as the conservative, planet saving warriors, who only take courses from professors who say what they want to hear. It falls to the older classically trained, and through that, open-minded professors and academics, to fight for sanity, reason and the truth. Sadly, they are dying off as Steyn and I discovered as we try to test facts and logic in the last refuge where reason might prevail. This hope was tested and proven in the judgment of Justice Burton in the demand for balance beyond propaganda in the classroom by parent Stuart Dimmock.

The context and nub of the dispute are the statutory provisions described in their side headings as respectively relating to “political indoctrination” and to the “duty to secure balanced treatment of political issues” in schools, now contained in ss406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996, which derive from the identical provisions in ss44 and 45 of the Education (No 2) Act 1986.

Justice Burton did not ban showing Gore’s movie but did comment

I viewed the film at the parties’ request. Although I can only express an opinion as a viewer rather than as a judge, it is plainly, as witnessed by the fact that it received an Oscar this year for best documentary film, a powerful, dramatically presented and highly professionally produced film. It is built round the charismatic presence of the ex-Vice-President, Al Gore, whose crusade it now is to persuade the world of the dangers of climate change caused by global warming. It is now common ground that it is not simply a science film – although it is clear that it is based substantially on scientific research and opinion – but that it is a political film, albeit of course not party political.

Instead, he recommended showing a documentary presenting the other view, in this case, The Great Global Warming Swindle, and providing a list of scientific errors for the teachers to inform the students.

This underscores the point that alarmists and overlook. Skeptics and deniers are not asking people to believe their view. They simply want people to know there is another side. To hear what they are not learning from government, media or environmental groups for a variety of reasons, including deliberate suppression. As the judge ruled, let people hear both sides, then they can make up their minds.