An End… and a New Direction

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.

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Coach Springer
April 22, 2019 6:54 am

As timeless as witch doctors and village elders.

Bert Corbett
April 22, 2019 7:01 am

Dr. Ball,
You wrote “I failed to convince the skeptics that without explanation of the MOTIVE, people would not listen to their critiques and warnings.”
I believe you need to look back farther than 50 years to explain this failure.
Even before Darwin began to publish his work, there was an undercurrent of thought that God could not have created the world as He said, out of nothing and by the power of His word. People began to look for other explanations and Science was beginning to develop thoughts on Naturalism and Evolution that could explain Origin without the need for God. Science became the authority and society accepted these two explanations of beginnings, even though they are neither physically nor mathematically possible. Very similar to today’s acceptance of AWG.
With God no longer the source of Origin, He became unnecessary as a moral lawgiver. Truth became relative and morality was left to the desire of the moment. Hence, lies and deceit have become commonplace and they are a strong force in shaping today’s beliefs.
That is why you’ve made no progress in 50 years and why it’s unlikely that your new direction will bring the results you’re hoping for.

Broadlands
Reply to  Bert Corbett
April 22, 2019 7:25 am

Bert…I disagree. When the public, the politicians, the policy-makers realize and accept the true immensity of the solution they are currently seeking …the quantitative lowering of atmospheric CO2, then a new direction will be the only sensible thing to do. Admitting that the current plan to remove carbon is misguided and impossible, is what is likely to be difficult to hope for. A huge turnabout in thinking about the management of climate?

Paul Penrose
April 22, 2019 9:55 am

The best answer to the problem of climate hysteria and attempts at global governance (aka tyranny), is to get rid of the UN. It does far more harm at this point than any good it ever did/attempted to do.

KaliforniaKook
April 22, 2019 1:29 pm

I am not good at convincing people of my position on global warming. So, I, too have given up. This doesn’t mean I don’t some some influence on relatives and friends that do (or did) have a strong belief. The difference is that I don’t burden them with my facts. I just <b<ask questions:
1) Why do green house keepers so often pump CO2 into their green houses? What level of CO2 do they like to maintain on those green houses? Why would they be trying to kill or limit the growth of the plants therein? Don’t ask me – look it up on your smart phone.
2) The Jurassic Age was so cool! Gigantic beasts everywhere, and lush tropical forests. They must have had really low levels of CO2. What does your smart phone have to say about CO2 levels and temperatures then? Once they have the answer to that, wonder why that combination didn’t result in thermal runaway.
3) If they accept that plants require CO2 (not a given until Q1 is explored), what is the lowest level of CO2 required to support plant life? Is it worrisome that our current CO2 levels are so near the bottom end of the scale compared to the Jurassic? I don’t remember. Look it up on your smart phone.

I supply none of the answers. That would be preaching. I don’t get attacked. I don’t even ask them to tell me what they learned. If they tell me, I just respond with a slight frown and a “Hm”. I sometimes recommend Wikipedia despite their support of AGW. Wiki still provides enough data to shake one’s confidence in the AGW “facts”. I don’t have to win the argument. In fact, when we go our separate ways, I’m sure they haven’t changed their minds. I just want to make them think. And I have been shocked. People are not as stupid as I often think. (Politicians, reporters, and climate scientists excepted.)

I am sometimes blown away when I overhear them later asking the same questions of their friends. You have to be careful asking such questions of children. Remember their grades and peer group require adherence to AGW theology.

Winning this argument should not be the overt goal. People don’t like to lose or be wrong. If they develop their own conclusion based on new knowledge, they tend to become aggressive proponents of their new insights. I don’t get any credit (it was their research) and I don’t need it.

Broadlands
Reply to  KaliforniaKook
April 23, 2019 5:58 pm

Kook… “Winning this argument should not be the overt goal. People don’t like to lose or be wrong. If they develop their own conclusion based on new knowledge, they tend to become aggressive proponents of their new insights.”

That is only likely to be true if their salary, their livelihood, their family, depends on them NOT losing their job. Those who are retired or self-employed are exceptions. Upton Sinclair….“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! ”

But, if the new knowledge brings new insights, with new conclusions and new direction…as Tim desires, it might create a dramatic shift. The risk is not the climate, it is the solution being promoted, an intensive CO2 mitigation, technological capture-and-store, which is impossibly large, lengthy and expensive. A new direction, a new paradigm is the only viable solution. Do the math.

Neal Heidler
Reply to  Broadlands
April 25, 2019 7:48 am

If we use your reasoning, EVERY sort of professional who is paid to do highly technical work that lay people don’t have much of a clue about, and who has an work-related views or opinions that are somehow related to getting their salary is suspect. “They’ll say anything to keep their job” is so GD dopey it’s hard to believe you people keep trotting out this nonsense.

Brain surgeon:
“We need to operate on your aneurysm immediately”
“This is standard practice in this kind of situation.”
Broadlands:
“You’re just following the recommendation of a corrupt status quo! You’re just trying to make money for the hospital and yourself. I don’t need surgery. I know how I feel.”

Pediatrician:
“We need to get your kid’s vaccinations up to date”
Broadlands:
“You get commission money from the pharmaceutical company that makes those vaccines and charge for those services, don’t you? Don’t you know about thimerisol?? Forget it!”

This sort of thinking could get you killed.
Skepticism is fine, but here you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll venture that you are expert in none of climate modelling, paleo-climatology, the economics of green energy vs. coal or nuclear power, etc., etc. None!

In your case, trusting the experts is a good impulse. Try it!

Broadlands
Reply to  Neal Heidler
April 25, 2019 11:44 am

Neal… It doesn’t matter what the experts say about our dismal future, unless we act now to do something. Just one ppmv of oxidized carbon is almost eight billion tonnes to capture and safely store. . CCS negative emission technologies are required and they operate in the millions when billions are needed. I’ll venture you didn’t know that? Let us know how long it will take to return to a “safe” 350 ppm…now at 60 ppmv. that’s 60 times 8 gigatons. Do the math.

1sky1
April 22, 2019 2:55 pm

When municipal governments and even schoolchildren start taking positions on a complex scientific issue, it should be absolutely clear that popular delusions and the madness of crowds are mightily at work. The only remaining question is: cuo bono?

While a notorious craze a few centuries ago benefited tulip growers and some savvy speculators at the expense of the small investor, the current AGW scare benefits only politicians and their fund-grabbing lackeys at the expense of the ordinary people the power-seeking globalists pretend to represent. What is different now is that the public is risking not only its investments, but its livelihood. The habitability of the planet will remain just fine. Ultimately what’s being threatened, along with public sanity, is our very freedom as an advanced civilization.

Dr. Ball is quite correct: motive is the key. I only add: the hypocrisy is unprecedented.

April 22, 2019 4:35 pm

Re .Kalifornia Kook, April 22 nd. a very good comment. Just nibble
away at their previous belief about Warming and climate change. Two
suggestions, the properties of CO2, in that it does not store heat, but simply
re -radiates it.

Second point out that when someone says that windmills are now cheaper
than coal, ask (A) if so why do they still require sub sadies, and (B) then
why is it necessary to force the fossil fuel generators utilities to accept
this varying supply of electricity, and to also act as a back up power supply
to the windmills when there e is no or little wind. That means two power
systems hence twice the price of electricity to the user.

Point out that is why we are all complaining about the high cost of living
, as its not just your own electricity bills, its effect is right through all of
the businesses, so they have to raise their prices.

Go for the “”Hip pocket nerve””.

MJ E VK5ELL

Paul Rossiter
April 22, 2019 6:34 pm

Dr Ball, sounds to me like you are becoming weary of a lone fight against the stupidity of AGW and this is completely understandable given the enormous effort you have made over the years. Is there a possibility of sharing the load through support of one or existing organizations like the Heartland Institute, following Tony Watts, or some other? Or maybe this is already the case and you have just had enough?

April 23, 2019 7:27 am

This article, coming from such a consistently
good writer, is too pessimistic, for no logical reason.

It is counterproductive for the cause of good science,
because “giving up” in the fight against climate junk science,
guarantees a loss.

Dr. Ball, you’ve done FAR more than the typical
skeptic to advance real science, and to point out
that “climate change” is junk science in support
of a large expansion of government power.

You’ve earned “retirement” from writing about
this subject, at age 80 — I only hope I live that
long, and still think clearly, which you certainly
still do.

But don’t let this pessimistic article be the last
one you leave here at WUWT — ask the website
owner to delete it, and leave us with many dozens
of consistently good articles in the archives.

I hope your pessimism is not from character attacks
by hostile leftists.

I’ve been writing a climate science blog since 2014,
summarizing articles and studies I read, as a hobby
( I started reading climate science in 1997 )

I only wish leftists would
character attack me !

But they character attack only those people
who have been most successful at
refuting their science fraud ( and exposing the
underlying leftist politics, which you do better
than anyone else whose articles are here ).

Character attacks are like “war medals”
for climate change skeptics, so you
may now be a “three-star general”
of the skeptics !

Of course it’s almost impossible to change
a leftist mind on climate change — that’s
true of all their beliefs.

It would be easier to teach algebra
to your cat !
.
.
But think of all the good news we’ve had
on climate change in the past 15 years:

(1)
Imagine it is early 2003, and I told you there
would be no global warming for the next
15 years (or less warming than the measurement
margin of error) — that would have been a
wonderful dream of any climate change skeptic
in early 2003.

Well, it actually happened !
.
.
(2)
And how about only +0.6 degrees C.
of global warming since the age of
fossil fuel CO2 emissions “began” in
about 1940 ( + 0.077 degrees per decade )
– a warming rate of only 1/4 of the
average computer game predicted
warming rate !
.
.
(3)
Surveys find that Americans rarely
include climate change in their
lists of the top ten problems they face !
.
.
(4)
And I’ve saved the best news for last:
Imagine in early 2018 that skeptics hatched
a devious plan to convince Democrats to
propose radical government mandates,
equivalent to a Communist Manifesto,
to be delivered by a complete dingbat !

Well, that happened too !

The Green New Deal, delivered by
Alexandria Occasionally Coherent,
is so ridiculous, infeasible
and extreme, that it will
become an albatross
around the neck of many
Democrats running for
office in 2010.

YOU may be pessimistic that
“climate change” is a lost cause.

But I am optimistic that the lack of
warming since early 2003,
and the almost insane “Green Ordeal”,
will significantly hurt the
climate change “religion”.

And I’ll do whatever I can to help
refute the science fraud,
as long as I’m still breathing !

My climate science blog:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com

C Earl Jantzi
April 23, 2019 5:18 pm

2Jan2015
At a news conference [22Jan2015] in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework be adopted Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity, but to DESTROY CAPITALISM. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said . Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will at change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors DOTcom/ibd-editorials/021015the Paris climate
-738779-climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism.htm#ixzz3RXh5Tujn

IPCC official, Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010: “But one must say clearly that we redistribute, de facto, the world’s wealth by climate policy. … one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute, de facto, the world’s wealth…” “This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy, anymore.” http://www.nzzDOTch/aktuell/startseite/klimapolitik-verteilt-das-weltvermoegen-neu-1.8373227

The Buffett Rule
The billionaire was even more explicit about his goal of reducing his company’s tax payments. “I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” he said. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
Think about that one. Mr. Buffett says it makes no economic sense to build wind farms without a tax credit, which he gladly uses to reduce his company’s tax payments to the Treasury. So political favors for the wind industry induce a leading U.S. company to misallocate its scarce investment dollars for an uneconomic purpose. Berkshire and its billionaire shareholder get a tax break and the feds get less revenue, which must be made up by raising tax rates on millions of other Americans who are much less well-heeled than Mr. Buffett.
This is precisely the kind of tax favoritism for the wealthy that Mr. Romney’s tax reform would have reduced, and that other tax reformers want to stop. Too bad Mr. Buffett didn’t share this rule with voters in 2012.
From the WSJ

Poland Bans Wind Turbines in 17 years
Now we have the nation of Poland examining the health damages of Wind turbines. They have discovered that the low frequency noise given off by wind turbines, affects cellular development and mimics heart problems. They are going to force REMOVAL of ALL wind turbines in 17 years! Check this out, https://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=poland+%2Cwind+turbines and read to the end and check the comments of Sommer, and watch the youtube video for a real education in the subject.

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