Climate: The Great Opportunity to Pull Down America

Tom Halla …. where have you been hiding!! You just hit the ball outta da park!!
Very interesting posting in Fabius Maximus blog on the subject of The Elites. Effectively, you Americans are looikng at a Meritocracy, if not an outright Plutocracy, if you vote-in the egregious Clitno-woman.
Two thoughts:
1. The French got it right in the 18th.C. (and that started over weights & measures if my [abysmal] knowledge of history is correct).
2. My feeling that — as a general observation — to save one’s own personal skin, stick to a ‘middle-of-the-road’ position, philosophical & by life-style. When an ‘outlying’ segment of society gets big-enough, pissed-off-enough, and militant-enough, the machetes will come out, and there will be Revolution.
Were I American, I wd have to hold my nose to vote for Trump, but I think he has interesting potential for a revolution that kicks The Establishment out. (Wdn’t it be nice if he could intelligently articulate this thesis, rather than rabble-rouse it?) My only concern is that he may be replace one Establishment with Another in his own Image (Heaven help us! Methinks we’d get another Putin.)

Me too, Walter, me too. The rest of the world is sharing a bit of our wake up. Britain and Australia are starting to reject climate alarmism insanity. Canada, while still reliably socialist, nevertheless remains committed to mining its oil sands and building common sense pipeline infrastructure. There IS a strong conservative religious aspect of the migratory Latinos. Maybe one day they will wake up to the fundamental hostility of world socialism toward religious freedom. When Greenpeace professional paid protesters finally lose their credibility, the environmental “movement” will take years to recover and reset. I only hope that day comes sooner rather than later. This will damage the broader One-world government socialist movement, but it will not destroy it, nor can that particular political malignancy ever be be destroyed. When a callow youth, I used to believe in the promise of a world-wide government. Now I see it as a horror to be avoided at all costs, at least until human economic, political, cultural, religious and ethnic divisions homogenize and harmonize to a vastly greater extent.

You can’t call it “the science” all you want, but it isn’t science, or most of it isn’t. If you mix a bit of apple sauce in pig shit, it doesn’t make the result apple sauce.

Climate science rejection is in the main a political stance, advocated on the basis of political beliefs

Well Griff, as usual there is some truth in what you say. There are a significant number of such people, and we see plenty of them here (where ideas are freely exchanged; a feature that WUWT doesn’t share with a lot of alarmist sites).
The reason that politically motivated sceptics have a voice that needs to be listened to, is due to the efforts of a relatively small group of (mostly) scientists who have looked at the colossal edifice of “climate science” and the policies that derive from it, and have found that the underlying hypotheses of “climate science” are really shaky and would not stand up to a serious and objective scrutiny. What we (I’m reasonably happy to be one of them) see when we look at “climate science” is a muddle of physics that nobody seems to have ever tested in a laboratory setting,cherry-picked data, “adjusted” data, computer simulations that appear to have input parameters that guarantee the outcomes, and poor logic. That’s actually a rather charitable description. Climate Science’s three big blind spots appear to be (1) not taking account of the role of water vapour in discussing the greenhouse effect, and not properly accounting for clouds, (2) asserting that natural climate change stopped some time around 1960 and (3) not even looking at the Sun, which is the source of essentially all the warmth that makes our planet liveable. And apparently not caring about these monstrous omissions.
What I (as a geologist) see when I look at climate science is an inability, unwillingness (or possibly an outright and dogmatic refusal) to accept the following observations about earth history:
1.. The earth’s climate over most of the last 550 million years (it gets too fuzzy before that because of the lack of fossils) has been stable over long periods, and much warmer than today.
2. We are living in an ice age and global temperatures have been up and down like a toilet seat for several million years.
3. within the ice age, glacial periods occupy about 90 percent of the time (based on data for the last 700,000 years) and those glacial periods have been really cold.
4. We happen to live in an interglacial period (or more likely, we are who we are BECAUSE our civilisation became possible during an interglacial..
5. Not all interglacials (actually, the 5 we have semi-reliable data on) have been equally warm. The present one that we call the Holocene appears to have been not as warm as the previous one (now called the Eemian), during which the Greenland icecap probably mostly melted.
6. Within the current interglacial (the only one with high enough resolution of the data) there have been colder periods (stadials) and warmer periods (interstadials) that appear to have a roughly 1,000-year periodicity (based on eyeball analysis without benefit of Fourier transforms or deconvolution filters, which, in the interest of compete disclosure, are a bit beyond me).
7. Not all interstadials have been equally warm. In fact, there appears to have been a progressive decline in maximum temperatures over all the interstadials since the Holocene Optimum. That the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago was warmer than today (the Modern Warm Period) is well documented by written records in China, written histories and archaeological evidence (no proxies needed thanks). Assertions to the contrary are just that – assertions that are only supported by selected data. Ice-core paleothermometry indicates that the previous two interstadials (Roman and Minoan Warm Periods) were both warmer than the MWP.
8. We are now about 200 years into an interstadial. Whether or not we are at or near the peak will not be apparent until after the peak has passed. Since the start of the industrial age coincides closely with the transition from stadial to interstadial, it has got warmer by a degree or two.
9. Within the current interstadial and probably during the latter part of the last stadial (called the Little Ice Age) there appears to be a 60-year cycle in global temperatures (eyeball deconvolution at work), which is widely accepted and equally widely attributed to the effects of the AMO and the different ways it controls the movement of hear from the Caribbean towards the Arctic. Before that the data just aren’t good enough, but there’s no reason to assume that the AMO wasn’t effective over long periods.
10. Computer Simulations of climate (“models”) manage to attribute the slight cooling from 1949 to 1960 to industrial pollution and volcanic aerosols. They also depend on volcanoes to temper the post-1970 warming to only twice the actual measured warming. But their projections of accelerating warming from 2000 on (which REALLY don’t match observations) contain NO VOLCANOES. So we are asked to accept that, not only did natural climate change stop in 1960, but the volcanic activity ceased after Mt Pinatubo. Those positions are so obviously wrong that ridicule seems to be the only appropriate response.
I look at all this and I think “what’s all the fuss about”. Quite possibly adding previously sequestered CO2 to the atmosphere may have a modest effect on climate. But I see no cause to worry about it. Really, what was wrong with farms in Greenland or vineyards in Yorkshire?). Climate alarmism does not answer those questions. Really: it’s a very important question – what was wrong with warmer climates in Medieval and Roman times? It’s a rhetorical question; no need to answer it.
Scepticism is not an arrogant challenge to “accepted” theory or “settled” science. Scepticism is the proper attitude of all scientists to all theories, hypotheses and principles, however narrowly or however widely they may be accepted. That’s how science works, and that’s how science has given us the technologies that make our lives comfortable. The alarmist stance appears to regard that material comfort as somehow immoral, and in this it shares a lot with the humanity-hating movements like Calvinism, Wahabbism, Maoism, Pol-Pot-ism and all their more or less extreme variants. Like them, climate alarmism seems to want to take away joy and comfort from the world. (but slowly and incrementally, so we won’t feel it until it’s too late).

A lot of polls don’t even include it as a question, so I guess that helps frame it as a purely political creation with some scattering of data and unsupported publication efforts and talking heads.