Guest Editorial: Dr. Tim Ball
I thought about making this my last article on climate for this or any other website except my own. I planned the action some time ago, but it was the recent headline in the Telegraph that triggered this penultimate move. It said, “Climate change is a risk investors can’t ignore: Black Rock latest to sound the alarm on environment.”
Climate change is not a risk factor. Current climate and climate changes are normal and well within the pattern of change over history, certainly the last 10,000 years. The world believes otherwise, despite efforts by me and others to make the correct information available.
This means that after 50 years (1968-2019) of trying to educate the public about the weather, global warming, and climate change I achieved little or no change in understanding, attitude, or most importantly, policy on the world stage. My attempts to counter the massive deception that began as human-caused global warming (AGW) and later shifted to human-caused climate change, fell short. The deception is now what people accept, although they don’t necessarily believe. Because of that it is now the underlying reason for all policy on energy and environment that are the mainstay of these business-world views, indeed all views.
The only risk is not climate, but the one that governments created by the pseudoscience of climate science. All elements of society from energy to the environment and from industry to business and daily living are based on completely unnecessary and expensive limitations. The sad irony is that the climate change risk the investors face is a shift to colder weather when all governments are warning them to prepare for warmer conditions. This false basis for society thinking and planning is so pervasive that it is unlikely to change.
I am frustrated by the success of the deception, but I am angry about the waste of time, money, and opportunities lost. I think about the trillions wasted on a non-existent problem while real problems go wanting. For example, it is likely that enough money was wasted to provide clean water and adequate sewage for the entire world.
Apart from my overall failure, there was one failure restricted to the skeptics that might create different results. Skeptics are people who recognized the false science used to create the threat of human-caused global warming. It’s a group that slowly grew in numbers over the years but achieved little impact in the wider community. A major reason is the division of that community into approximately 15% who are competent and comfortable in science and 85% who are not. While I achieved some recognition in this group of skeptics, I failed to convince them that the wider public would never understand climatology. Worse, I failed to convince them that even if they could identify all the bad science, manipulation of data, creation of false and misleading reports, and deliberate exaggeration of stories to amplify fear that they wanted, it would do little to spread the truth and correct the story. I failed to convince the skeptics that without explanation of the MOTIVE, people would not listen to their critiques and warnings.
Recently, I received the charge through my web site that I was just “another conspiracy theorist.” Other attempts to marginalize included the term global warming skeptic or climate change denier. These were effectively what I call collective ad hominems, but the fall back dismissal was usually that you are a ‘conspiracy theorist.’
It is encouraging that a recent article appeared on the WUWT website that proposes a motive for the misuse of climate.
But the Left seeks far more. In fact, its goal is nothing less than total control of every aspect of human life, which we call “totalitarianism”, justified by fear of climate change.
The types of commentary that article will engender are predictable. They will indicate why people have not considered motive in the discussion to date. It is a classic Catch 22 you must provide a motive and marginalized or don’t provide one and get no traction with the wider public. It is critical to remember that you are asking people to believe that a small group of people managed to deceive the world into believing that a trace gas (0.04% of the total atmosphere) was changing the entire climate because of humans. In addition, that group convinced many others to participate in the deception. The public view is that deceiving so many is just not possible. The trouble is it was possible. To paraphrase Lincoln, they effectively fooled most of the people and marginalized the few not fooled.
After 50 years of combating hysteria over climate change, it is time to take a new direction. I say a new direction because the last 50 years attempted to educate the people to the lie that is human-caused global warming and effectively changed nothing. It especially did not change the unnecessary, ineffective, and massively expensive energy and environment policies that control everything in the world. When I see a car advertisement identifying its low CO2 output as a major selling feature, I know how badly I lost. Millions of more people now believe in AGW than when I began. Now, most governments believe and act on the AGW belief compared to the few when I started.
The first 10 years of the 50 involved dealing with the threats about the end of the world due to global cooling. The last 40 years dealt with the same threats about warming. In recent years, I used the quote from Lowell Ponte’s 1976 book The Cooling to illustrate how similar they were.
It is cold fact: the global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.
Change the seventh-word “cooling” to warming, and it applies to the entire 50 years. What happens going forward? What are governments preparing for? Is it appropriate? Are we victims of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing? Will governments prove once again that they always make a situation worse?
In the 1970s I knew that the cooling trend would end because it fit the overall pattern. This included the longer-term emergence from the nadir of the Little Ice Age circa 1680 and shorter cycles since. The world warmed from 1900 to 1940, cooled from 1940 to 1980, warmed from 1980 to 1998 and has cooled slightly from 1998 to the present.
Fortunately, the idiots we call leaders did nothing about the climate when cooling was the trend in the 1970s. Unfortunately, after the 1980s they began to succumb to the lies, misrepresentations, and pressure of the eco-bullies; those who used the environment and later climate for a political agenda. We needed the paradigm shift to environmentalism because it doesn’t make sense to soil our own nest. However, as with all such shifts, a few seized it for the power and financial rewards it provided. They were able to obtain power up to the UN General Assembly. They introduced the full environment and climate change plans at the Earth Summit conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 as Agenda 21.
The movement appeared to falter at the international level when even Greenpeace announced that Rio +20 was a failure. This was not a falter but exactly as Maurice Strong and the proponents of Agenda 21 planned. The entire objective of Agenda 21 is firmly ensconced in all societies through the municipal level of government.
The climate plan that isolated and demonized CO2 through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was designed and implemented at the national level through every weather office in nations throughout the world. This puts the idea and control of those countries almost completely in the hands of the deep state and beyond the control of international and national politicians. They then promote the concepts of the environmental and climate plans through the Climate Action Plan imposed at the Municipal level. This puts the original plan of thinking globally and acting locally into practice at the lowest political level. A conference in San Francisco in July 2018 explains the objective.
California Governor Jerry Brown has announced that a Global Climate Action summit will be held in San Francisco in September 2018, in a challenge to President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord.
Nearly 200 nations have signed the 2015 agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are widely thought to be responsible for rising temperatures, and Brown is one of a number of local and regional leaders working to build coalitions without Trump.
Here is what one mayor wrote about what occurred in San Francisco.
The Global Climate Action summit in San Francisco began on Wednesday. This year’s goal: “Take Ambition to the Next Level.”
What is that next level? As part of the We Are Still In, Mayors Climate Alliance, and other city climate-action efforts, many U.S cities are creating their first ever climate-action plans; others are rewriting theirs to meet more ambitious goals. The next level is ensuring that these multi-year plans integrate equity considerations or risk perpetuating an unjust life for millions of already marginalized Americans.
The original intention of the CO2 pseudoscience deception was purely political as this quote confirms. Note the word “equity.” It confirms quotes that were around before the deception reached the world stage. Former US Senator Timothy Wirth who went on to head the UN Climate Foundation said,
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart said,
“No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits…. climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
What those quotes really mean is that we must use the climate for total political and economic control. If people continue to buy the false science story so much the better. For example, on April 13, 2019, US Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren promised,
Besides an executive order barring new fossil fuel leases on public lands on shore and offshore, Warren said Monday that she would work toward boosting U.S. electricity generation from renewable sources offshore or on public lands.
This is planned despite the failure of such actions everywhere they are applied.
The climate deception and the climate debate are complete and, though they will continue, they are irrelevant. The Paris Climate Agreement is almost dead. At the 2018 meeting of the Green Climate Fund, the Director resigned.
Howard Bamsey, an Australian diplomat who served as the GCF’s executive director since January 2017, resigned after a “difficult” meeting in which no new projects were approved, according to a statement released after the gathering in Songdo, South Korea.
There are many charges and warnings of corruption and misuse of funds against GCF. The institutions associated with climate change at the international and national level are collapsing. It creates an illusion that the skeptics are winning. It distracts from the fact that the entire focus quietly shifted to the municipal level and is infiltrating through the world. Much of the funding for the San Francisco meeting came from the World Bank.
I agree with the author who claims the misuse of climate was originally a left-wing agenda for control. However, I think the idea is so attractive because it is under the cloak of ‘saving the planet’ that it fits the platform of all politicians. They all want control. The only difference is in the degree and method. Of course, the ultimate irony is that the massive cost of this anti-CO2 system is only possible because of the one thing it demonizes, fossil fuels.
As a result of this train of events, I decided to stop trying to educate people about the global deception that is AGW. It is a firmly established false fact. Most skeptics know this because many are stunned by the strong hostile reaction they get when they state their position publicly. In many cases, they become ostracized in their family. The challenge now is to help people understand the differences between deceptively derived policies, and what is the best, most adaptive, most profitable, and most rewarding strategy for survival of the individual, business, or industry. In this age of the big lie, survival and success strategy is more important and challenging than ever. I want to help people bridge the gap between the false world of government and the real world. I will not achieve that through explaining the corrupted science but providing a credible motive.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” HL Mencken.
It’s no surpise that Climate Change became an urgent issue for politicians in the 90s, after the Berlin Wall fell.
With no more Red Scare to keep us in line, they produced the Green Scare, like a rabbit out of a hat.
Dear Tim, I used to be one of the crazy environmentalists falling for all predictions of doom. It was through you appearances on James Corbett’s reports that I began questioning my assumptions until I was certain I had been purposefully fooled. When I now present data to people showing the bollocks of it all, people inevitably start asking “why would they lie?”. I answer by talking about the Rockerfeller sponsorship of the UN, the Club of rome, the cfr, the trilateral commission, Maurice Strong and the UNFCCC and how the IPCC prior to 1992 didn’t actually support the idea that climate change was dangerous or man made. I tell people to look into agenda 21, agenda 2030 and visions 2050. They get it when they have a long enough attention span to read me. We indeed need to talk about motive. Conspiracy theorist is a weaponized term that should be a badge of honour showing you are capable of critical thinking. Much love, no effort is vain.
There is only one thing for it, go on the attack and make the Man Climate proponents defend their position.
Man Made Climate impact has now been around for 30 years. It seems a week cannot go by without a claim that a weather event has been impacted by man. Before I give credence to Climate model future projections I want my graph for the last 30 years that displays man’s impact.
The data is in, I want to see the graph with its changes over the last 30 years, be it temperature, rainfall, weather events, or sea rise. AND the graph to display the apportioned component caused or influenced by man.
If Climate scientists can confidently project 20+ years hence there should be no problem in displaying a graph clearly displaying man’s impact on our climate for the last 30 years.
If we are to pay for ameliorating climate change then I want my man impacting climate graph!
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled” – Mark Twain.
If researchers and companies receiving monies to reduce average temperatures had to sign an undertaking that they would refund every penny when they cannot shown real cost effective results, would they be prepared to do so? If not then they should receive no funding.
Yes, Dr. Ball, I feel the same way. Often dinner-time discussion about the CAGW deception ends with my companions looking at me as if I just told them I’m commuting to Mars in a shiny new spaceship. Confronting them head-on with facts doesn’t seem to work. Perhaps a more subtle approach, like saying on a cold day that some global warming would be nice.
I don’t know. It is very frustrating.
Dr Ball, take heart. There is nothing unusual about false beliefs. Eugenics and Hitler were at one time very popular.
Simply accept with good humour that god remains the biggest practical joker in the universe.
People want solar panels and windmills to work because they don’t like paying $100 every time they go to the gas pump.
This doesn’t mean they believe in climate change. They are simply looking for a way out, and global warming advocates announce every day that green tech will save the day.
But one only need look at the shift from liberal to conservative governments in Canada to understand that the underlying belief is economical not environmental.
Hmmmm. Just because one can’t exact another to change to ones point of view does not mean one should stop making intelligent conversation about it. I wonder if the esteemed post author laments his inability to more broadly affect solar discussion as well as AGW topics.
I will have to admit my dissatisfaction with a number of solar centered posts that was lacking in scholarship and thus quite unconvinced by them.
were…
A bit late to comment but, this struck a chord:
It’s a lot worse than that, Tim: this small group of people have managed to deceive the world on the principle that (maybe) only a tiny fraction of that trace gas – the bit ‘they’ say is down to ‘man’ – is responsible. So it’s not 0.04% of atmosphere, it’s more like 0.004% that is responsible (perhaps, maybe, could be, probably not).
One of my children, an engineer, says that climate alarmists have given no satisfactory answers to any of the key questions posed by unconvinced engineers. However, they often attack and belittle those questioning them without even giving an answer. Lazy journalists then publish their hogwash without any critical examination of their assertions.
The answer to Dr Ball’s dilemma lies in teaching our children the importance not only of asking questions but finding answers using careful reasoning and logic with close observation – something that has been woefully neglected in modern Western education.
Michael, a facility I learned in my professional life was to ask, ‘Why?’ – to the seventh. It can be quite enlightening when the need arose.
I believe the biggest problem for the proponents of the Climate Change theory is the statement, now used mainly by politicians who know nothing about science, THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED! (TSIS).
This is their Achilles Heel, because it represents the utter corruption of science by ideology. Corrupted science is a Real threat to humanity. TSIS is an abdication of the Scientific Method and threatens to return science to its 15th century status. So, don’t get caught up in arguments you cannot win with people who adhere to TSIS with true believer’s religious zeal. Start selling TSIS as the Real threat, because IT’S TRUE that it is a major threat. Do you want the medicines your sick child will be administered to save its life to have emerged for a scientific community that placed more value on ideology than scientific rigour? Remind scientists who Stalin’s Lysenko was.
‘Tee-Sis’ now has a name and could be turned into a potent resource in the struggle to defend science and expose the current climate madness that’s scaring the world to death.
We have various sciences with well defined areas of study like biology, chemistry, geology, oceanography etc.
Climate science is strictly speaking not one of these. It depends on inputs from various sciences. It draws from geography, physics, chemistry, oceanography, meteorology and to a lesser extent on others and not to mention how indispensable mathematics, statistics and computer science are.
When someone claims to be completely knowledgeable as a climate scientist, that person is misleading others . One may be clued up in organic chemistry in a way one cannot be in the study of climate – there are simply too many disciplines involved.
Wiki also misleads by its gross oversimplification: “Climatology . . . or climate science is the scientific study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time.” That is precisely why people whose expertise is in any of the above named disciplines is able to point out flaws in many of the claims of climate scientists.
Not only is climate a very complicated subject but so too is the study of climate.
Not only is the climate very complicated any computer model must be equally complicated. As a professor of computer science I “know” that every program (of sufficient complexity) has a bug. The shortest program that had a bug was one instruction long (it took two instructions to accomplish the desired task).
Computer models are subject to GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)
The climate models reflect the opinion of the designer of said models. If one scientist is confident that a small increase in CO2 will be a magnified by feedback his model will be wrong.
If the input data has been incorrectly adjusted, the model will be wrong.
If the models ignore a class of data as insignificant when it has a larger effect, the model will be wrong.
The largest problem is the hubris to think that human activity could affect the climate at all. We cannot control the Sun, we cannot control cosmic rays, we cannot control the major greenhouse gas — water vapor, we cannot control volcanoes, we cannot effect ocean temperatures since water is very slow to heat and very slow to cool, we cannot change the fact that cold water can contain more CO2 while hot water can contain less.
Climate changes over centuries, shorter cycles than that are weather cycles. (El Niño, La Niña is an example.)
If you, and all of us, stop speaking out, there is no hope at all.
Welcome to the history of the world!
Tim, a few thoughts:
First, history moves in slow motion. It takes decades, sometimes centuries for the efforts of the few are recognized for professing the truth when so many were profiting from the lies. You can’t conclude that you’ve made no difference today. 50 years from now when the madness has ended, your name will be mentioned frequently in the history books as they document the rise and fall of a false narrative.
Second, you HAVE made a difference. When you were writing mostly about the science, many of us learned valuable knowledge from you that we used to persuade others. Neither the history books or yourself will ever know how many people your worked convinced, but I think it is a much larger number than you can imagine.
Third, we ARE winning. The politicians may hew the alarmist line, but the bulk of them know the real truth. That’s why they push green plans, but the moment the harm to the economy becomes dire, they find a way to quietly back down.
Keep writing, please. But ignore the politics. Teach the science. Facts and the inexorable pace of history will paint you as one of the heros.
With a Federal election coming up later this year in my own country, Canada, I suppose I should endorse the importance of defeating the current AGW-maniacs federally. However, there is something of a more global nature that I think is key (and I’m not sure if any leading Canadian politicians have both the nerve and the influence to really help that much with it), and *that* is the ultimate defeat of the Paris Accord globally.
Famously, the current US President doesn’t support the Paris Accord, but the US still sends representatives to the meetings, so the Accord is definitely still a “thing”. Lately, I understand the Accord has fallen on hard times with some oil producing nations being basically unwilling to abide by any detailed rules set out under the Accord, but well, I mean, there it is, the Accord is still “there”.
Now, if my perception of things is correct, world level accords on climate/global warming, have always been a case of the “tail wagging the dog,” in relation to how many people in government have been willing to distort the climate science. The whole thing started really with the old Kyoto Accord (or even earlier), with the failed Kyoto being replaced by the newer and “better” (and more unfair, more stupid, etc.) Paris deal.
If this is the kind of thing that Dr. Ball means by his renewed emphasis on politics over pure science, then that much does make sense. We’ll know we’ve won the issue when the Paris Accord is abandoned, *and no fair any sneaky replacements*! Even biased lefty outlets like our own CBC here in Canada would likely cease to badger on about this if there were no great world agreement to defend, *and* they might even get some genuinely skeptical and/or balanced discussion going too, if there were no such political “baby” to protect!
One thing that does puzzle me a bit is the extent to which the globalist/marxist way of thinking seems to have been made into a religion of sorts. Some people will give all kinds of lip service to trendy ideas, it seems, but when it comes right down to it do most of the leftist people we hear from really believe that the earth is in quite that much danger, etc? My suspicion is that without the focus of a great Accord “shining from above”, the whole AGW thing is going to crumble, while hopefully encouraging some skepticism on environmental issues generally.
Persistence and patience are the only tools we have.
Most folks are ill-equipped to parse the climate change math and models. So they hear the authorities and compliant media and rely on trust, and their faith in that trust. The challenge is that the cycle to prove that their faith is misplaced takes decades. Nevertheless, agnosticism can come much earlier when it becomes clear that a) the apocalypse isn’t coming and b) the cost to avoid the apocalypse is exorbitant.
a) takes time, but b) can be proven by experiment. So let the experiments go first … California, Germany, Australia … but press to hold back elsewhere. Encourage the experiments to go whole hog. 100% renewables? Sure, go for it. May as well test the whole equation. It will rapidly become clear that the steps to full compliance are hugely expensive. That is the way to open minds and make them receptive to alternative thinking. They may not understand climate math, but they sure understand money math.
I disagree that sceptics have failed. Why, for example, do they pay so much attention to us and are so desperate to to get rid of us if no one is listening. WUWT is a must read by the AGW Team. Donald Trump was reached by us and he pulled the plug on the Paris agreement and the agreement is self destructing. Even the EU is self destructing. Donald Trump types are winning elections and filling parliaments with MPs.
Oh we are experiencing a crescendo of hysterical reports on the end of the world, tears and ugliness by climateers who are losing their grip, children’s marches, outlandish research results… all chicken-with-head-cut-off gymnastics in the throes.
Nothing of significance will be done about climate. Trump will get elected again, new EU defections from the climate industrial complex under anti-elite governments are in the works, Germany is switching to natural gas following Trumps economic miracle. The main climate change will be a thinning of climate science ranks, institutions, faculties, departments and a lot of segueing of these types out into neutral and even sceptical positions. It’s game over and they know it.
The battle has already been lost in California. Watch what happens here to see what is coming to the rest of the country eventually. The cost of living here is beyond the means of anybody but the rich because of environmental regulation, many of which haven’t even taken effect yet, but are legislated and coming in the near future. Energy prices are the highest in the nation, taxes (there are too many to list) on everything you can imagine (with more on the way), and the most stringent building codes that prevent anybody except the rich from building or living here. The largest population on welfare (1/3 of the entire U.S.) of any state, the largest population of homeless of any state, the largest population of street poopers (San Francisco) anywhere. Nuclear power is near dead (the last plant is scheduled to shut down in the next few years). This is the future.
RJ
I’m a Cali also and you are so correct. The Facebook postings of our new governor, doing exactly what most of the voters want, should make very clear that the battle has been lost (100% renewable are you kidding)?….but maybe not the war. Perhaps the PG&E bankruptcy combined with Trump’s soon to be commissioned Climate Commission will be a wake up call. Otherwise the PG&E bankruptcy will be trivial compared to the inevitable future State bankruptcy.
an attempt to understand climate activism
http://www.davdata.nl/math/piedpiper.html
Re. Tom ABBOT, April 21. Tom how other than Saul later to be known
as Saint Paul suffering a stroke , can you account for such a complete
change in his thinking.
He was a very strict believer in the orthodox Hebrew faith and he was
prosecuting the followers of the Jesus cult, which while only a very minor
variation from the very strict practices of the pure Hebrew faith, was
considered to be a threat to that established faith as it was practised by the
High Priests of the Temple.
Then he does in effect a 180 degrees change in his thinking, and comes up
with a story which was the very opposite of that as practised by the
High Priests.
There is a mention of how Saul later met Jesus’ brothers who violently
disagreed with his version of the Jesus story. So violent that Saul ram to
a Roman soldier and said that he Saul was a Roman citizen and asked to
be protected from the angry brothers.
I rest my case as I used to say.
MJE VK5ELL
The yellow vest of France and the Brexit party in the UK give me some hope.
Dr. Tim, never give up the fight.
Dr Tim, I admire the effort that you have made, but please don’t give up, just take a break. The Earth will eventually prove you correct by its refusal to behave as the climate enthusiasts predict. I am about the same age as you, so please take my advice – relax, smell the roses, enjoy a great evening of your life span, and with just a little good fortune you will see this matter settle itself.
To OLD GEORGE, April 20 the. . George Atheists have in my
opinion one big advantage over believers in a faith. Not having to carry
the baggage of other ways of thinking its easier to search for and
hopefully to seek out and to attempt to find the truth.
So please accept our right to think in a different way to your way of
thinking.
Regarding your comments about Nuclear, well of course Nuclear is the
answer, not because of no CO2, but its simply the best way to produce lots
of energy cheaply.
But just as with Hydro the Greens are violently against the most Green
forms of energy, which to me clearly shows that their long term goal is to
destroy the Western countries economies .
MJE VK5ELL
It’s a big business cartel. You need carbon offsets to make anything, and there are only so many for sale. So as population and demand rise the shortage of manufactures will cause high prices. And whenever the price of offsets goes too high only big firms will be able to buy them and make things. For high prices. So global warming is a smokescreen for a big business cartel.
Dr. Ball, I know you’re probably tired of the fight. I have no doubt you feel a certain kinship to Sisyphus, and I’m sorry for that. Please understand that you have a voice that most of us don’t possess. You may feel like your voice is too small and ineffectual, but it isn’t. You may think you haven’t made a difference, but you absolutely have. I’ve read your words avidly over the years as is likely of regular WUWT readers. There’s no way to know or measure the effect you’ve had on people, but I have no doubt that your efforts will return void. Rest for a bit, then come out fighting once again. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my heroes, the ever loquacious Winston Churchill.
“Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
“will NOT return void”
Sometimes I hate that there’s no edit capabilities.
The problem is not the Earth’s climate. The problem is the solution we are attempting. Humanity cannot possibly lower atmospheric CO2 quantitatively because the amounts are way too large. Just ONE ppmv of oxidized carbon is almost eight BILLION tons. Don’t believe it? Go to CDIAC, “Frequently asked Global Change Questions”. Today’s CCS negative emission technologies are working with MILLIONS. Lower one ppmv? Hundreds of years, astronomical costs.
Why these simple observations have been ignored is a mystery.