“It is not often realized how much those of us who dare to question the Party Line are made to suffer, and how much is spent on making us suffer.“To take one example, in October 2009 I made a speech in St Paul, Minneapolis, revealing in the peroration that the then draft Copenhagen climate treaty was proposing to establish a global ‘government’. The word ‘government’ actually appeared in the treaty draft. Someone at that well-attended talk filmed the last four minutes of my speech and posted it up on YouTube. Within a week, it had received some five million hits, spread across several YouTube channels. Then the hit-counters stopped rising. I had naively assumed that everyone who had wanted to hear me had heard me.
“Then I took a call from a professor at Texas A&M University, who said that the university’s monitoring had established that the speech would eventually have reached 20 million hits, but that someone had paid a lot of money to set up a dozen bogus pages full of gibberish, but tagged with ‘Monckton’ and related tags, to divert all traffic away from the genuine channel. I asked how it was that those pages had attracted more hits than the genuine page. The professor explained that the major search engines had been paid handsomely to prioritize the bogus pages over the genuine page. I asked how much that exercise had cost. The professor said the cost was, at minimum, $250,000, and probably a great deal more, just to silence one speech.
“It is significant, then, that the attorneys for two cities in the Sunstroke State decided that they could more easily impress the judge in the oil corporations’ case by making personal attacks on our reputations than by trying to answer the two scientific points we had raised: first, that the supposed scientific consensus amounted to no more than 0.5%, and secondly, that climate panic was based solely on a significant scientific error that we had recently discovered.“It was by reputational attacks that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century established themselves and neutralized their opponents. It is by reputational attacks that the totalitarians of the 21st century seek to do the same. But the totalitarians of the 21st century have made the same mistakes as the totalitarians in the 20th. They have gotten the science wrong, wherefore whatever harm they try to do to us in the short term will rebound on them with heavy interest in the long. They have the money, the power and the glory, but we have the truth, and the truth will prevail.”
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I visited a museum (The William Seward home) and there was a picture of the guy who tried to kill him the night Lincoln was shot. That night while surfing the web an ad came up (clickbait really)–“Can you identify these historical figures? Take the quiz” and the picture they showed was this same guy (who I had never seen before). The odds of this by chance seem to be nil and it really creeped me out.
WordPress wouldn’t publish this with the word a**assin in it, which is a**inine.
I really hope the Monckton, et.al. feedback analysis holds water, but I can’t tell. It seems logical that there is always feedback in a complex system like climate, so it’s likely that there was feedback in play in 1850-1950. However, it seems unlikely that the feedback is linear as presented in the Monckton testimony (if I’m reading this correctly). It’s also possible, as Roy Spencer points out, that by modelling all the underlying mechanisms correctly, all feedback is accurately simulated in the models (very unlikely IMO).
That said, regarding this amicus response, I think Monckton addressed most of the ad-hominem attacks, but I was left concerned by the Obama birther thing. I read the Monckton affidavit on the Obama long form birth certificate, here:
http://www.wnd.com/2015/03/affadvit-white-house-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/
and I have to say that I feel his analysis is very weak.
Avoiding too much detail, he assumed “discrepancies” in the original memo are independent, when it seems probable they are not. (e.g. line spacing and letter spacing irregularities as well as coding errors could all be due to an inexperienced typist, etc.) Since the events described are potentially not independent, the combined probability is not a product of the individual probabilities.
Second, by assigning a probability to each “discrepancy” Monckton creates a false choice. In each case the options are not “random error” vs. “document not genuine” and analyzing only those options shows bias. Further, the assumption that evidence of an electronically assembled document implies the document is “a forgery” doesn’t follow.
The result, IMO, indicates a willingness to participate in bad thinking to achieve a goal, something I generally associate with alarmists. While this doesn’t mean that the same lack of rigor exists in the climate feedback analysis, it leaves me skeptical.