Guest post by Rud Istvan,
I reflected on some of my recent comments/posts both at WUWT and Climate Etc. A pattern became apparent that I want to try to elucidate. The motivation is simple. The climate/energy debate has advanced beyond he said/she said ‘facts’. Koonin’s new book Uncertainty (which I just finished reading and which originally inspired this guest post) does much to advance a more nuanced perspective by highlighting factual climate ‘inexactitude’ (aka wrong stuff) and related ‘uncertainty’ (aka unknowable stuff) in the climate debate. But his ‘science’ approach partly lacks counters to the extra ‘religious climate believer so science immune’ dimension touched on here, albeit Koonin does touch on it lightly in his ending chapters. This post intentionally isn’t such a ‘light touch’.
As an introductory example, ‘climate believers’ ignore the intermittency and lack of grid inertia that their renewable solutions (Green New Deal, GND) automatically introduce. This may just be from physical ignorance of alternating current electricity complex math (a+bi, using the square root of minus 1, physically indicating phase shift). But after many blog interactions, I now think it more likely comes from deliberate willful ignorance, which in US law is defined as ‘criminal gross negligence’… “knew, or should have known”.
There are many other examples of climate science ‘criminal gross negligence’.
For example Dr. Susan Crockford exposed the ‘polar bear experts’ who claim polar bears are endangered by (modeled) diminished summer Arctic sea ice, when in truth, about 80% of their annual feeding caloric intake depends on the spring seal whelping season—when nobody claims Arctic ice diminishes.
For example, claimed GAST temperature rise depends on ‘negligible’ (per BEST) UHI plus insufficient land based measurement stations infilled for global coverage. A classic example of the latter is BEST station 166900 (footnote 24 to essay When Data Isn’t in ebook Blowing Smoke). BEST 166900 is the South Pole’s Amundsen Scott, arguably the most expensive and best maintained weather station on the planet. BEST ‘automatic adjustment algorithm’ compared it to McMurdo, 1300 km away on the coast and 2700 meters lower in elevation. The BEST quality control algorithm concluded that the Amundsen Scott measurements for 26 extreme cold months must be excluded based on McMurdo—NOT. BEST automatically but wrongly warmed Amundsen Scott.
For example, Fabricius (NCC, 2011) claimed Milne Bay corals were declining from ocean acidification (OA). Her SI showed that her one barren (7.8 pH) seep was toxic because of H2S, as toxic to marine organisms as cyanide is to us— and for the same reasons. (Essay Shell Games in ebook Blowing Smoke, the first of two major illustrated and extensively footnoted examples in that ebook essay debunking the Seattle Times major series, “Sea Change”.)
There many other similar subsequent guest posts here and at Climate Etc.
So, how does this climate perversion of true science continue for several decades? What motivates obvious deliberate ‘criminal gross negligence’?
There are at least three answers as to why ‘climate gross negligence’ continues.
First is money, in the form of tenure and government grants. Go along to get along. Mann’s bogus 1999 paleo hockey stick is but one famous example. He got rich and tenured off a VERY bad paper, since thoroughly discredited. His bank account does not care.
Second is academic acceptance; peer pressure if you will. This is what drove Dr. Judith Curry from Georgia Tech’s Chair of Earth Sciences position, by her own explanation. Young climate scientists hoping to rise cannot be apostates, and she could not in good conscience counsel them otherwise.
Third is ‘being cool’. There is no other explanation for John Kerry as Biden’s ‘climate czar’. It is stupid and ultimately self-defeating, but definitely a big plus at any present MA cocktail party. AOC and her GND is a lesser example of the same ‘cool’ social phenomenon from Brooklyn in Congress.
So, what to do?
There may be some effective counters beyond ‘science’, to which true climate believers are apparently immune. The following three suggestions are all borrowed from Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’, long since used against skeptics labeled as deniers. My proposal is to counterattack, not by using the Marquis of Queensbury rules skeptics usually employ, but rather by using the Alinsky rules.
First is to freeze the enemy and then ridicule it. Mark Steyn did this very effectively against Mann with his book “A Disgrace to the Profession (volume 1)”. Unassailable, since Mann hasn’t yet responded and it has been now years since the implicit ‘Volume 2’ threat was made in writing.
Second is to make the enemy live up to its own rules about climate science. This was Koonin’s central point, made repeatedly in his new book.
Third is to go outside the expertise of the enemy. Renewable intermittency and lack of grid inertia are expertise examples previously discussed herein, which Greens ignore or do not even comprehend, because outside their expertise.
Concluding reflections
Many here at WUWT may have, as I previously did, thought that a ‘scientific’ rebuttal sufficed against warmunists (see footnote 22 to essay Climatastrososphistry in ebook Blowing Smoke for the precise derivation). It does not. They have a socio-religious belief system (Greta Thunberg being an example) that requires stronger counter measures.
Arguing with a True Believer on climate change is reminiscent of arguing with a devout Marxist, or a devout Jehovah’s Witness.
Or playing chess against a pigeon
Some of the proposals or even present implementations amount to inflicting pain on premise of unproven hypothesis, or even worse knowing that premise is false, in which case it is criminally irresponsible.
Climate scientists should be continuously warned that: It is invalid legal defence that defendants were “only following guidelines” and so are not responsible for their actions when advising those who eventually create and implement criminally irresponsible laws.
Like the German soldiers just following orders from their leaders. And the German public- most of it- claimed they were unaware of the Holocaust. Likewise, the public will in the future claim they were misled about the climate- not wanting to admit they were too lazy and/or stupid to seek the truth. (I had to edit this to avoid moderation having used a word- a name apparently verboten with WordPress)
Published science papers should be required to comply with the same legal standards that prospectuses for stock market investors have to meet.
That is, all uncertainties, risks in assumptions & statements MUST be clearly & unwaveringly stated, under pain of criminal charges & penalties.
Be careful what you wish for. These institutions of higher indoctrination, will invite the lawyers to the party and you will need a law degree in addition to a science background to translate the papers into anything close to readable but i take your point about hypothetical assumptions driving action without disclosure.
I spent spent many hours back in the ’70s debating with devout born againers. One of them always had an answer to anything I said. In the ’90s, he got arrested for ripping off some old people.
The point of the argument isn’t to change the mind of the alarmists.
The aim is to convince the public watching the argument.
So true. And my approach to the watching public as inspired by Judith Curry’s recent post:
This transformation of society seems to have caught fire across the globe, the Pope has published an encyclical, the UN and politicians, business leaders will change our working life, hybridizing capitalism with major social change, compressing this change into a 10 to 30 year period, with a highly confident expectation this climatization movement will make for a better, healthier and kinder world.
To believe in alarming climate change supported by leadership from all major western realms allows, no encourages, the blaming of our globe’s ills, and there are many, on a single simple cause, carbon dioxide, to which the solution is, to eliminate it. Not a day passes without a multitude of articles and broadcasts attributing climate change to be the cause or result of almost anything one wishes to name. Climate change can be blamed or credited for anything the woke folks designate, good and bad.
Climate certainly affects us all, but attributing its cause as man-made fails to account for climate over the millions of years before 1950, the year attributed to the commencement of the massive damage inflicted by humans. How can such attribution make any logical sense? Seventy years of human influence can overcome millions of years of natural variability? High on hubris seems closer to reality.
There remain massive knowledge gaps in our collective understanding as to what factors drive climate change – warming or cooling, drought or flood, sunspots or galactic rays, etc. It’s complicated, and certainly not simple, although the media and politicians try to convince us so. And sad to say, they have done a very good job of it. Vilifying hydrocarbons and pipelines is a major industry of radical environmentalism, western governments and business leadership. This is the new world order until western populations discover they have been hornswoggled by their elites.
Carbon dioxide certainly has its warming effect, but as a radiative gas it radiates not just in the direction of the earth’s surface, but to space as well. The concept of CO2 as a blanket that only warms on one side is simple, but inaccurate. Simple conceptions can lead to simple solutions that are totally ineffective and unnecessary. Nonetheless, the globe, less China, Africa, Russia and India, that is the West, believes fervently carbon dioxide is an enemy pollutant so powerful the world’s nations must band together to conquer this humanmade armageddon.
The major arbiter of right and wrong 400 years ago was the Roman Catholic church, a potent force even today, with its own dark view of climate change as human made, as described in the Pope’s encyclical, Laudato Si’. In the days of Copernicus who hypothesized Earth revolving about the Sun, and Galileo a hundred years later, these thinkers were met with derision, scorn and Inquisition trial. The most powerful organization on the globe denied the exploration of the theory, and even after proven as accurate, official church recognition took some 200 years after the fact.
Not much has changed today as countries are climate shamed and excoriated by western world leaders and their controlled international monetary funds and world banks. Climate agreements are seen as breakthroughs although not one signatory to the Paris agreement has met their targets or can be expected to reach them. Blowing more smoke, these same countries try to outbid the next with unattainable new sham carbon reduction targets.
Today, the United Nations, its myriad institutions, President Biden of the USA, the European Union and the Catholic church form an immense, moral, spiritual and financial force in the full belief that the carbon dioxide molecule is a dangerous pollutant; an existential threat as it were. These significant players have settled on a single simple cause factor, supported by the simple science of carbon dioxide as the control knob of temperature. If such was the case, the rise of global temperatures should never vary from an ever upward trend in concert with the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The solutions proposed and in the offing will neither be simple, sound nor satisfactory. But they will be enormously expensive and disruptive, all in the name of climatization.
The climate change narrative suffuses everything in our society today, and Biden’s recent speech to Congress underscores that very theme. Everything happens due to climate change nowadays, and thus our whole society must conform to its dictates and transform our society in the name of climate change, and its forerunner, global warming.
What do we do when the climate cools, as it will? A reverse climatization and burn more fossil fuels?
Great comment Keith.
But I must challenge this sentence –
“Today, the United Nations, its myriad institutions, President Biden of the USA, the European Union and the Catholic church form an immense, moral, spiritual and financial force in the full belief that the carbon dioxide molecule is a dangerous pollutant; an existential threat as it were.”
None of these people & institutions really believes the whole global warming / climate change conjecture.
But it is such an effective platform for them upon which to prosecute their main agenda – holding the reins of western societies – they will use it for all it’s worth.
“This transformation of society seems to have caught fire across the globe”
Only in the Western Democracies. The rest of the world is acting in a rational manner.
by our own understanding that will not work and that will mean we will need to adapt.
Well put!
And so… True believers are never fearful of the opposing argument’s consequences. For example, the Jehovah Witness is preparatory for a future cataclysmic event, the second coming. He is quite capable of thinking rationally about AGW. Let’s say he fears God and nothing else.
The JW is immunized against AGW hysteria, because he only takes his eschatology seriously. He won’t argue with a warmist, he’ll say it is a sign of the times (end). But he is perfectly capable of understanding the benefits CO2 fertilization and how UHIs have distorted the temperature record. The JW has a relatively open mind about AGW. But not about the second coming.
CAGW is a secular apocalypse. (Covid was played exactly the same way). The AGW priest-kings who speak in the name of authority (We follow the science – trust us) As Greta says, “I am not important, listen to the scientists, they are telling us what to do” Our problem is everyone, (JW types excepted) believes in science. It’s the only authority left. And science has no voice, no oracle to tell us what it all means. All science has is experiments and data. Real scientists don’t speak, their data is their voice.
And we are losing because fear is always deeply embedded in the human psyche. We are saying don’t be afraid of the coming apocalypse. Too late… They are already afraid.
As a scientist, I have slowly been watching and trying to understand the general erosion of science over the last 30 years and I have come to believe that “climate science” was the initial domino or injection point of the phenomenon. As other disciplines observed and noted climate science getting away with it, they thought “why not us as well”?
It used to be that if you had to retract (or correct) an article you published in Nature or Science, your career was over. However, now we are now living in an age where the New York Times has become the National Enquirer (or Pravda) and Nature is a caricature of one of the more dodgy scientific journals of the past.
And so I think the phenomenon we are all witnessing is a general “war on science” and the meritocracy that goes along with it. And the only reason I can think of is that the progressive segment of the population is simply discontented with the “human condition” in general. And if science reinforces this “limited view”, or constrains the Left, then it has to be undermined.
Thomas Sowell has devoted an entire book to this topic, the “constrained verses the unconstrained” visions of life:
A Conflict of Visions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions
For what it is worth…
We live in the Post-scientific Era.
Science (actual science) is the most effective antidote to fear based propaganda, of which CAGW and COVID are two glaring examples.
The corruption of science is no coincidence. There are forces at work who wish to gain absolute power. To do this they must be able to control populations through fear. But science, when done properly, can break through the fear. That is why it has been attacked and eroded (largely from within, but not by actual scientists). Is not dying, it’s being ki11ed.
Religion has become far more limited in its ability to control and instill fear into a society (The hypocrisy and criminal behaviors of its proponents has seen to this).
The climate crises is now the tool of choice as a vehicle for instilling fear this control of a society.
People are literally willing governments to remove more freedoms, rebuild socioeconomic systems ‘in his image’ and committing trillions of magical fairy dust dollars to better serve the climate crises prophets. It’s proponents are able to comfortably and systematically attack and destroy the careers of those who dare challenge the rhetoric! (Religion was able to exert similar control in terms of true scientific progress in Medieval times, which seems to be where we are headed again lol!)
California for instance is a great example of this new religion in action, rather than hold the state to account for the piss poor management of forestry and the associated fire risk, representatives are literally able to wave the ‘climate crises get out of jail free’ card and absolve any accountability!
It will not end well unfortunately
Excellent!
I think you’re spot on Rud. The younger people I work with have Marketing degrees, degrees in Communications, English degrees, etc., etc. When I try and lay out for them the things we know and the things we don’t know about the earth’s Climate, the response most often is ‘duh, science Doug’. It’s actually a fascinating phenomenon to observe. I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer to be sure but I’ve got a world class 4 year degree in Physics and I’m being scolded by Marketing majors on “science”.
This is a cultural and political movement that needs to be countered in those domains as Rud has correctly pointed out.
I’ve run into similar situations. I’m a meteorologist but when I begin to explain the flaws in the climate alarmism arguments, people think I’m trying to trick them. After all, they saw Bill Nye on TV warn them about ‘climate deniers’.
We’re battling large, societal forces that include academia, the media, politicians,, and advocacy groups. All we have are the facts. My suggestion would be is ask your English major colleagues to defend their beliefs. Instead of trying to convince them, let them try to convince you.
“Instead of trying to convince them, let them try to convince you.”
Excellent suggestion and I will use it given the opportunity.
The problem I find is the Appeal to Authority fallacy is not recognized as a fallacy by non-scientists. For this group of marketing and liberal arts grads, Appeal to Authority arguments were how they were taught science in college-university classrooms on subjects that required math (like differential calculus) they couldn’t fathom because they avoided those subjects in high school and college.
.
This is where the take-over of institutions like AAAS, NAS, APS, and AGU by those intent on pushing pseudoscience, data cherrypicking, and refusal to acknowledge uncertainties is so harmful to our society.
If it were just the few like Mann or Schmidt pushing junk science, the rest of the community would put them into professional exile. Instead the reverse is happening as Rudd pointed on Judith Curry’s experience.
“the Appeal to Authority fallacy is not recognized as a fallacy”. The problem indeed; absolutely perfectly summarized….
“We’re battling large, societal forces that include academia, the media, politicians,, and advocacy groups. All we have are the facts. My suggestion would be is ask your English major colleagues to defend their beliefs. Instead of trying to convince them, let them try to convince you.”
Excellent idea!
Good idea. I would ask them what scientific data convinced them and remind them that political data(consensus) and computer model data are not scientific evidence and appeal to authority is a scientific fallacy.
You are battling Nick…he is all in with clutched pearls.
THE science- as in THE Bible
The science as in the Twilight faith (i.e. conflation of logical domains, beliefs outside of a limited frame of reference, inferential or creative logic), the Pro-Choice religion (i.e. selective, opportunistic, relativistic), the liberal ideology (i.e. divergent), empathetic appeals, and threats of cancellation.
…. coupled with multiple voices in the head reaching a robust consensus.
Very well put. My go to strategy now is not to argue but simply ask those woke individuals to present their evidence that would convince me of their case. “Tell me why you believe that”. It doesn’t take more than a few questions before you get to the point where it is clear to me and to them that they have no scientific understanding of evidence to support their belief, they are simply repeating what they have heard from others and what they choose to believe out of laziness or a sense of unearned intellectual comfort.
So true. Fundamentally, their argument is entirely based on what they have been told by the MSM. Asked to present evidence for their beliefs, they flounder.
The most visible example of this was the president of the Sierra Club refusing to respond to Ted Cruz’s pointed questions on the data and simply repeating “We side with the 97%” over and over. It was clear he had no knowledge of his own and had no intention of examining the issue critically. It was quite horrifying to watch.
Rud, you should add this to your bag of tricks.
Just did. Hard to be all over all of this all the time. Noted.
You might ask these marketing majors what they think their lives would be like without fossil fuels…. IMO while many people may not budge upon hearing a science based counter argument, the vast majority would be horrified if they had to live out the rest of their lives like the Amish simply to ostensibly hold the worlds’ climate steady. That’s the key, I think, to defeating this whole climate change crusade – remind people of what they will have to live without if they choose to obey the Gretas of the world. Talk of figures, charts, graphs and the like will bore many people (especially if they don’t really understand them) but the idea of losing most all of the industrial age’s amenities will!
Yes – THIS. Those who bray the loudest about “climate change” tend to be clueless about the consequences of their own campaign of “action” to “solve [NOT!] the non-existent “crisis.”
It’s incredibly frustrating arguing with True Believers, but there is one technique which works. Point out to them that temperatures today are significantly LOWER than they were 1000 and 2000 years ago (Medieval and Roman Warm Periods). They will be unaware of these facts. Then ask them to identify any deleterious effects caused by the warmth.
More likely they will educate you that Mann proved that warm periods are never global. You can then show them 70 studies proving the MWP all over the earth, contradicting their claim, and they still won’t believe it, or even consider it. Because this is about tribal affiliation, not facts or science.
Their tribe believes in catastrophic global warming, socialism, and humans as a plague on earth. Their tribe automatically opposes anything that the other tribe holds dear, without critical analysis. My tribe rejects catastrophic global warming, embraces markets, and sees humans as the greatest resource for prosperity. But my tribe also automatically opposes anything that the other tribe holds dear, because we’re all flawed with the same human nature.
I neglected to mention another useful line of attack with CAGW cultists: ask them what disasters befell the Earth when CO2 levels were higher than they are today (most of Earth’s history, in other words).
Then they employ “But it’s different this time” and stick to it.
Graem & Rich:
How to talk with a true believer:
I attended a 2 day conference at ASU entitled “Polarization in Civil Society” which
mainly concerned the Right-Left divide in politics. But I think the take-home message also applies
to the AGW vs Skeptic chasm.
Precepts:
1- Believers of all stripes are not usually swayed by arbitrary facts.
2- Believers have invested too much social, intellectual & emotional capital to risk altering their view.
3- Believers think (or are taught to think) all those who disagree are evil, not just misinformed.
4- Due to #3 it is acceptable to silence, censor, and even dehumanize all those who disagree.
It is this last tactic that allows the two sides to talk past each other. Why bother to learn the other sides’
position when its easier to just call them names and ignore them? (Especially when it seems to be working!)
The solution was to try and develop some connection with the other person by making a list
of all the things that you two could/should agree on BEFORE discussing the areas of disagreement.
This puts your opponent in a new place since now you have a common set of principles that should limit
the dehumanization tactic, forcing them to (maybe) concede you might have a principled position. By acting
reasonable, showing humility, and even humor, you can make it more difficult to be dismissed. Adding short, poingnant stories to humanize the issues can also help.
For Climate Change my strategy is to start off by getting agreement on some general facts from which a discussion can commence. For example I say “Before we start you maybe surprised at how much we agree on. Like, over 90% of skeptics agree on these things: it is getting warmer; man-added CO2 since 1950 or so has likely warmed the planet; man can affect the regional climate; the most commonly referenced climate reports (IPPC, SREX, etc) are the ones I will be basing my statements on (ie not blog posts or newspaper articles); thermometers go back only 170 years or so; ARGO ocean data only from 2005 or so; … (I’m sure you can add many more but don’t do a “Gish Gallop” and overwhelm them. After getting concurrence on several facts, pick one topic and calmly & politely present your take on it. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know”, or “Skeptics don’t have the answer either”…).
And don’t forget that most people have not spent any time researching climate. They only know what they see/hear on the MSM. It is the “Dupes” that skeptics need to have these discussions with; the “Knaves” who profit from the climate hysteria are probably immune to this approach.
And here in Arizona we are having another fine weather day that is completely compatible with climate change. LOL
The IPCC’s Global Warming Potential (GWP) numbers need to be exposed and ridiculed. Unless I’m wrong and have successfully fooled myself as Dr. Richard Feynman warned, the GWP numbers are a farce. If methane increases by so many parts per billion and similarly CO2 increases by that many parts per billion, it’s obvious that the increase in global temperature caused by CO2 will be nearly nothing and the GWP number times nearly nothing is still nearly nothing.
So hold the climate crusaders to their GWP numbers claim, and ridicule them for trumpeting their misleading GWP statistic
That isn’t difficult, considering the specialized backgrounds of many who call themselves climatologists. However, their behavior, when shown to be wrong, suggests that most have no shame and, therefore, are unaffected when a normal person would be embarrassed.
I still like the idea of a Red Team, Blue Team debate.
I think we are past the time for a red team/blue team debate. The radical greens will just fill the air with their latest pack-of-lies.
Please see my post on this page, excerpted here:
To end 2020, the climate doomsters were proved wrong in their scary climate predictions 48 times – at 50:50 odds for each prediction, that’s like flipping a coin 48 times and losing every time! The probability of that being mere random stupidity is 1 in 281 trillion! It’s not just global warming scientists being stupid.
These climate doomsters were not telling the truth – they displayed a dishonest bias in their analyses that caused these extremely improbable falsehoods, these frauds.
There is a powerful logic that says no rational person or group could be this wrong for this long – they followed a corrupt agenda – in fact, they knew they were lying.
The global warming alarmists have a NO predictive track record – they have been 100% wrong about every scary climate prediction – nobody should believe them.
The radical greens have NO credibility, make that NEGATIVE credibility – their core competence is propaganda, the fabrication of false alarm.
Exactly, no credibility, no repercussions, and only secular lucre. Why would anyone, over a 60, 70-year lifespan not go along to get along and reap the rewards or at least mitigate risk of cancellation. Many, even a majority, will take a knee.
That is probably true. Which is all the more reason to have a public debate, moderated by unbiased referees, to demonstrate to the general public the level of depravity.
How else can we convince the public that they are being manipulated when irrational liberals control the MSM?
A scientific rebuttal might suffice, but all too often all we get here is name calling (‘warmunists’) and a reprint of a piece of science rebadged as ‘claim’ with no contradicting science based evidence.
this is increasingly an echo chamber for US Republican prejudice, not science or climate related
“with no contradicting science based evidence.”
This is precisely the problem I have with you and wokelings like you who have chugged the climate change kool-aid. How many times have I asked you to back up your claims with science-based evidence only to receive a response of total silence?
For instance: How long is your record, Griff?
Griff is just a driveby commenter now. He pledged to leave WUWT altogether some time ago because he was constantly humiliated by those far more knowledgeable than him (not difficult) but couldn’t resist coming back.
So all he does now is drop a comment and run. He thinks it’s clever if he never has to justify or reason. Like we’re all going to suddenly fall over at his pearls of wisdom.
The pest is seriously not worth bothering with.
You even don’t recognise science holding in your hands,so you can’t render a judgement about.
Meanwhile as usual you didn’t debate anything, just the usual empty windbag comments then run away.
I post regularly in forums about this stuff, even posted that fine post by Eschenbach about where is Climate Emergency, in one forum many warmist/alarmists COMPLTELY ignored the content of the post, instead attacks the source or the writer, that is what they now commonly do.
They are brainwashed and lying to themselves now, debate is no longer what they do, they are deep into the propaganda that they are ignorant and stupid.
This blog post remains UNCHALLENGED!
Sunsettommy, I read your discussion on that blog. Outstanding performance. Not one bit of science put forth to counter Willis’s post. Wear their insults as a badge of honor. You put forth solid science, defend it and yourself well, and the wokelings can’t stand it.
That is very kind of you, but it was Willis E. who did the hard work making the very fine post, I just defend it well because of it.
I worked out a while ago that “warmunist” is only ever used by bots and false-flaggers.
It’s so clearly ridiculous and insulting that it can only be used by those with no human emotions or those seeking to ridicule their own side.
No, just an observation of failed predictions.
It’s clear that you don’t know anything about science or engineering from your incessant stupid comments, griff. That part is clear. However, not even a science-illiterate like you can be ignorant of the fact that this blog has a strong participation from across the English speaking world. Many participants respond knowledgeably about issues in Great Britian, Australia, and many other places – people who may not give a rat’s clacker about the sad state of American politics. So, given that not even you can be oblivious to the world-wide insightful understanding of climate issues, where could your off base comment be coming from? You’re obviously
trying (fecklessly) to belittle the strong scientific, political, and sociological contributions of this site. Why? Is the discussion about worshipping the false God of climate religion striking too close to home?
People may not like your comment, but I think you are right. The “critical side” is not what it should be and is doing a poor job in “rebutting”. But I am going to change that once and for all. Here is a tiny little outlook to what science actually is.. 😉
Oh.. forgot to say, this is reflectivity of water (and absorptivity and emissivity respectively..)
“People may not like your comment, but I think you are right. The “critical side” is not what it should be and is doing a poor job in “rebutting”.”
Rebutting what?
This skeptic says there isn’t anything to rebut. It’s up to those who make claims about the climate to show evidence of their claims. If they don’t have any evidence, and a skeptic points that out, then that’s all the rebuttal a skeptic needs.
That’s what we have here now in climate science: We have a lot of unsubstantiated climate claims and skeptics say, “where’s your evidence”?, and the alarmists go silent because they don’t have any evidence.
And I say it is lazy. Why criticize when instead you could settle the science once and for all?
griff,
You’ve been challenged many times on this forum to present factual, peer reviewed data to prove your position, and I’ve yet to see you produce in a single instance. Posting links to data from others, which many/most times is either debunked or ironically runs contrary to your position is all I can recall. Feel free to step up something of substance in your copious spare time.
Also, would you try and convince the frequenters on this forum that it exists, in the many years it has, as simply a forum to parrot opinions of Republicans/Conservatives and completely deny the factual data that is presented by persons with impeccable credentials? That nothing posted/debated is true and backed up by real science? If yes to these two questions, then I’d say you’re doing a fine job of indirectly insulting people here without having to result to name calling.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for evidence from Griff. He doesn’t have any.
Bad advice. Scientific rebuttal doesn’t seem to work on you because you lack reason and honesty. You have the attitude of an immature, petulant teenager, caught in the act but repeating, nevertheless, the same lies over and over.
Oh please, Griff, your side, aka the Climate Liars started the name-calling, branding us as “climate deniers” or “science deniers” or simply “deniers”. So all we’re doing is returning the favor.
Also claiming that anyone who disagrees with you is in the pay of big oil.
Sort of like griff claiming that Germany is getting 60% of it’s electricity from wind and solar.
As to the label of warmunist, most of the leaders of the control CO2 movement have been quite open about their desire to over throw capitalism.
Perhaps another tact against the climate religion is for some skeptics to play the role of climate emergency missionary on steroids so much as to look totally nuts to ordinary people who aren’t familiar and never will be with any of the science pro or con- all they know is what they read in the MSM and what they see on mindless TV. Mix in with the excessive mockery some truth about the vast sums of money that will be needed to transition to a “clean and green” world. Say things like, “we shouldn’t mind that millions of acres of forests and fields will be converted to clean and green solar panels in order to save the planet and we should view them as beautiful”. And, “you shouldn’t mind having a 500′ tall wind turbine next to your home- it’s your obligation to save the planet”. The speaker or writer should seem extremely panicked- and say nice things about Greta Thunberg. Etc., etc.
Then again, this is what’s already happening by the alarmists and so far much of the public seems to love it- so the mockery has to go to a higher level. Uh… maybe do a video showing future folks living in huts with a donkey out front for transportation- while looking up as John Kerry and Ale Gore fly overhead in their private jets. And, show rich Chinese tourists driving by in big SUVs- and stopping to take pictures of the American and European serfs enjoying their clean and green living.
Unfortunately, I live in Massachusetts where you can count all the climate change skeptics on one hand.
Invade this [neighborhood], occupy that [city], operate a protection racket, but with actual liability? Who will, can stand in the way of [social] progress?
But at least we are not wanting for Jackasses….
It’s worth noting that the Believers refused to debate the Sceptics over 20 years ago.
That’s a long time for closed-minded bubbles to build their castles in the air.
Refusing to debate was the key moment when the Believers ceased to be Scientists and became Believers. It’s a very high level of certainty to say “We don’t need to consider that we might be in any way incorrect”. A level of certainty that is not based on observations or long-established science.
After 20 years it is now based on institutional authority. There are whole career paths that support each other even though there is no real foundation.
Environmental Journalists scrutinise Environmental Scientists whose output is promoted by Environmental NGOs and so influence Environment Departments of Governments who dare not cease funding the Environmental Scientists lest the Environmental Journalists turn on them.
Castles in the Air. They cannot be undermined by reason. They just need to fall out of fashion and the illusion will pop.
It is the rising powers of the East that will set the fashion in the future.
Pop.
“It is the rising powers of the East that will set the fashion in the future.”
In particular, a war with China!
Well, yes, if the communists don’t take a knee to the socialists. They should know their place. There can be only one.
“thought that a ‘scientific’ rebuttal sufficed against warmists. It does not.”
Useful insight and fully agree. Thank you.
The problem is that any normal person has an innate concern for the degradation of their environment. Alarmists use this and the precautionary principle to their great benefit, plus human fondness for tales of apocalyptic morality.
It’s very tough to fight emotion with “future” fact, as anyone with a teenage daughter with a dubious boyfriend can confirm…..
I think one important aspect is disparagement of debate. I blame the evolution crowd. They certainly won the debate against the intelligent design crowd, but they developed a sort of arrogance. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins both agreed not to debate prominent creationists. Eugenie Scott, who founded the National Center for Science Education coined the term “Gish Gallop” to denote running off at the mouth with more arguments than can be responded to. These give them precedents to avoid debate. This is basically a premise that the other side is not worth responding to. It’s sort of a form of cover for the argument from authority and ad hominem attacks. The big problem is that they keep major points of fact out of the discussion.
“Won the debate” against intelligent design? Have you followed any developments whatsoever in molecular biology? Every time we look, we see more intricate designs, machines, and information processing. Even the venerable Tree of Life fails to explain functional genomic systems, like echolocation, nearly as well as dependency graphs such as used in computer programs.
Creation or process? Science is, with cause, a philosophy and practice in a limited frame of reference relative to the observer. Evolutionary and extra-universal (“divine”) creationists each establish their beliefs with articles of faith (e.g. assumptions/assertions, trust). Ironically, the latter are, in principle, less influenced by secular lucre, consensus, and more likely to acknowledge a separation of logical domains.
n.n
No one of the ‘fishes’ going a bite there.
They know better by now.
🙂
Actually the belief in God is derived from philosophy. The premise of atheism, materialism, is a failure. Perception? Intentionality? Qualia? Crickets. The development of Information Theory even more destroys materialism. Note there is a creationist theory called “successive creationism” which speculates that God supplied the necessary information during the “evolutionary” process.
Very odd to miss the point entirely.
The GND is not from AOC, nor Kerry, nor Biden, but rather from Prince Charles of the U.K. as is well documented. It is his very own Great Reset, as clearly expounded on at the Davos keynote. Regime Change for the USA was announced at the FED confab by none other than ex Bank of England chief Mark Carney :
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/mark-carney-investing-net-zero-climate-solutions-creates-value-and-rewards
Net-Zero is from whom, pray tell?
Shadow boxing is hardly ¨stronger counter measures¨. This is hardly some teenager religious cult!
And after all Alinsky, the subject of Hillary Clinton’s thesis, is known to have had : “over-the-shoulder acknowledgment”, at the outset of Rules for Radicals, of Lucifer as “the first radical known to man”—someone who “rebelled against the establishment … so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom”.
Both Obama and Hillary used Alinsky’s methods. Look at the results!
The devil is in the details!
Rud – thank you for this paper.
For the record, Alinsky Rules are the progeny of Lenin and Goebbels propaganda tactics – calculated falsehoods and brutal thugism.
I won’t stoop to Alinsky Rules because they are inherently dishonest, and I think you won’t either, but telling the truths about the warmists and their decades of deceit is sufficient. My recent paper calls out these lying scoundrels and their 30 years of failed predictions of global warming false alarms.
CLIMATE CHANGE, COVID-19, AND THE GREAT RESET
A CLIMATE, ENERGY AND COVID PRIMER FOR POLITICIANS AND MEDIA
By Allan M.R. MacRae, Published May 8, 2021 UPDATE 1e
Download the WORD file
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/climate-change-covid-19-and-the-great-reset-update-1e-readonly.docx
[excerpt]
THE GREENS’ PREDICTIVE CLIMATE AND ENERGY RECORD IS THE WORST
The ability to predict is the best objective measure of scientific and technical competence.
Climate doomsters have a perfect NEGATIVE predictive track record – every very-scary climate prediction, of the ~80 they have made since 1970, has FAILED TO HAPPEN.
“Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.”
To end 2020, the climate doomsters were proved wrong in their scary climate predictions 48 times – at 50:50 odds for each prediction, that’s like flipping a coin 48 times and losing every time! The probability of that being mere random stupidity is 1 in 281 trillion! It’s not just global warming scientists being stupid.
These climate doomsters were not telling the truth – they displayed a dishonest bias in their analyses that caused these extremely improbable falsehoods, these frauds.
There is a powerful logic that says no rational person or group could be this wrong for this long – they followed a corrupt agenda – in fact, they knew they were lying.
The global warming alarmists have a NO predictive track record – they have been 100% wrong about every scary climate prediction – nobody should believe them.
The radical greens have NO credibility, make that NEGATIVE credibility – their core competence is propaganda, the fabrication of false alarm.
__________________________
.
.
Allan
If you don’t like Rules for radicals. I recommend Vaclav Havel’s, Power of the Powerless. Havel’s tactics are based on speaking the truth.
“To end 2020, the climate doomsters were proved wrong in their scary climate predictions 48 times – at 50:50 odds for each prediction, that’s like flipping a coin 48 times and losing every time!”
I think the climate change claim failures should receive a lot of attention.
One hundred percent climate change claim failure rates ought to give even the climate change religious fanatics pause. And the alarmists cannot refute the “100 percent wrong claim” because it’s true, provably so.
I have always thought the best counter would be a government pursuing real environmental policies and letting them do their work. Ignore the lure of renewables and invest in nuclear power. Try and make electricity cheap and reliable so people then use it to heat their homes. Change standards for insulation and building codes to make human structures more environmental. Ignore the religious aspects of of climate change and focus on environmentalism and then you would have an impact on climate change if it turned out we were all wrong and needed to do something, but at the same time all your steps would have been concrete, practical and pushed the human ball forward.
I know that some may argue that nuclear is either expensive or dangerous, but the problem with nuclear has always been political and bureacratic rather than scientific or engineering. It needs a political solution.
A government that moved in these directions could say things like, “we are not doing this because of climate change, but rather because it simply makes sense”
After all, look at examples like Germany where government that professes to be trying to improve things has to increase coal use.
Burning coal is bad for air quality and human life quality, it make sense to replace it with something that works and is clean.
Isn’t tha what the French have done with all of their nuclear power plants?
I thought they were talking about shutting theirs down – stupidity knows no bounds.
In fairness, modern coal plants with modern pollution controls aren’t “bad” for much of anything. Making things cleaner has merit, but one can go way beyond the point of diminishing returns.
Making things cheaper and more reliable, however, is always beneficial. The question is whether nuclear power, with the current state of technology and (perhaps more importantly) the current state of politics, is capable of that.
Coal produces high levels of radon gas even if well scrubbed. All I know is air quality has improved where I live as coal was shut down. We are 60% nuclear in Ontario and all our bad air comes from Michigan.
If you lived in a coal plant smoke stack, the levels of radon might get high enough to worry about. A few miles away from that smoke stack, the increase in levels isn’t enough to measure.
Since the 70’s there have been many environmental measures enacted. Claiming that everything you may or may not have seen was caused by the elimination of coal shows that yours is an emotional rather than a rational position.
I have found that true believers are impervious to truth and facts. They simply close their eyes, cover their ears, and scream so as not to hear what us deniers have to say. There is a lot of great information available that totally discredits the climate change hype, but the media will not report it and in fact, as evidenced by the reaction to Koonan’s book, will look to smear anyone with expertise who goes against the narrative – just like with Curry, Lindzen, Happer, likely you Rud, and many others. I fear that the only way enough people will wake up is for there to be a massive grid failure affecting millions of people with lot’s of deaths where the cause is so obviously due to over reliance of unreliables on the grid that the blame cannot be placed anywhere else. That will still not likely change the minds of the hard core true believers, but it may be enough to wake up large numbers of people who have not been paying attention. The left does a masterful job of creating fear to gain control and power – COVID is a perfect example. To be successful, we will need to figure out a way to create fear of unreliables and get the media to report on it. Mark Mills wrote another excellent article for the WSJ – Biden’s Not-So-Clean Energy Transition – WSJ – that highlights once again the massive mineral requirements for “clean” energy and the enormous environmental impacts mining for those minerals imposes.
In other words, we need more February Texas type events.
I heard Tucker last night blame windmills for the Texas rolling blackouts.
He also had a few other critical things to say about Human-caused Climate Change. He’s been talking to Dr. Koonin, I’ll bet.
It will be interesting to watch Tucker interview Koonin. That’s coming up soon. I hope we don’t have to subscribe to Fox News Streaming to see it. Make this available to the general public, Tucker, because it affects all of us, even those who don’t have a subscription.
Heh – I hadn’t scrolled down this far yet. ;-D
It just happened, if perhaps not on the scale you suggest, in Texas in February.
As I predicted the moment I heard about it, the media immediately flooded the communication “channels” with BS about how the blackouts had “nothing to do” with the amount of wind power relied upon by the Texas grid, which is of course pure nonsense – the wind power falling off a cliff WAS the domino that drove the blackouts. Yet the true believers lap up the BS from the “media” as fact and their “belief” system is unshaken.
As the North Vietnamese general says after his forces are defeated in the film “We Were Soldiers,” “many more will have to die – but the end result will be the same.”
Many more will have to freeze to death in the dark before people awaken from “the Matrix.”
Nitpick, but essential: i is not sqrt(-1), that is mathematically wrong. That would imply that i = -i, which is clearly not true. The correct definition is that i * i = -1.
i * i = -1
i^2 = -1
take square root of both sides
i = (-1)^(0.5) = sqrt(-1)
They are equivalent
In normal algebra, the square root of a positive number is always assumed to be positive, so that sqrt(4) = 2, not -2, although both +2 and -2 are solutions to the equation
x^2 = 4.
and nobody will contend that +2 = -2.
When solving a non-factorable quadratic equation ax^2 + bx + c = 0, the quadratic formula is expressed as
x = -b/2a +/- sqrt(b^2-4ac) / 2a,
If the discriminant D = b^2-4ac is positive, and there are two real roots, sqrt(D) is assumed to be positive, and the two roots are
x1 = [-b + sqrt(D)] / 2a and
x2 = [-b – sqrt(D)]/2a.
The square root of the discriminant is considered positive, and the +/- sign indicates that two roots are obtained by either adding or subtracting sqrt(D) / 2a from -b/2a.
If the discriminant is negative, the roots are complex, but then (-D) is positive and has a positive real square root, and sqrt(D) = sqrt (-1) * sqrt (-D) = i sqrt(D), if i = sqrt(-1) is considered “positive”. The two roots are then obtained by either adding or subtracting
i sqrt(-D)/2a from the real part -b/2a, to obtain
x1 = -b/2a + i sqrt(-D)/2a
x2 = -b/2a – i sqrt(-D)/2a
Saying that i = sqrt(-1) does not imply that i = -i. If we multiplied both sides of i = -i by i, we would get i^2 = -i^2, and if i^2 = -1, this would lead to -1 = +1, which is clearly wrong.
The concept of complex numbers is difficult for many people to grasp, because what does i mean physically? Is it the length of the side of a square whose area is -1 square units? Which is probably why i (and all multiples of it) are called “imaginary” numbers. Its real usefulness comes from solving second-order differential equations, which can result in solutions of the form y = exp(a + bi)x, where a and b are real numbers, and using the Euler relation exp(ix) = cos x + i sin x to generate oscillating solutions.
But when it comes right down to it, people don’t have to understand complex numbers to know that there are phase shifts between applied voltage and current in LC circuits, which can easily be demonstrated with an oscilloscope.
As for global warming theory, the problem is that most of the “expert” computer modelers are using non-physical equations to predict the effects of additional CO2 in the atmosphere, and ignoring very important effects. For example, there is no physical basis for the century-old Arrhenius equation
dT = K ln (C/Co)
used by the IPCC, since this results in practically unlimited warming at high concentrations, and removing all the CO2 from the atmosphere would result in infinite cooling (if C=0), which is physically impossible. The correct equation to use would be the Beer-Lambert equation, integrated over all IR wavelengths, taking into account interference by water vapor and the lapse rate.
Then there’s the assumption that relative humidity remains constant if air temperatures rise. Since warm air can hold more water vapor than cold air (according to the vapor-pressure curve of water), maintaining the same relative humidity requires increasing absolute humidity (mole fraction water vapor). Physically, this requires evaporating water out of the oceans, which requires heat transfer from the air to the water, which can negate about 50 to 70% of the warming effect of additional CO2 in the atmosphere (depending on temperature and humidity). Relative to atmospheric warming, this is a strong negative feedback, but where is this feedback in the computer models?
It’s possible to program a computer to do anything the programmer wants, whether to predict catastrophic warming, or shut down a crude oil pipeline, or steal an election. But if the equations used do not reflect physical reality, what good is the model?
Of course, the average non-meteorologist may not understand the inner workings of climate change models and why they are flawed. But the models can be proven wrong by simply comparing actual temperature change over the past 30 to 40 years with those predicted by the same models in the past, and arguing that if the models couldn’t predict the recent past, how can we trust them to predict the more distant future in the year 2100 and beyond? If the past temperature increases were less than predicted, perhaps we should apply a downward correction to those predicted by the models for the future.
Or if someone is predicting catastrophic sea level rises in the future, show that the sea-level rise in the recent past has been at a nearly constant rate, and extrapolate that linearly into the future, and ask whether future generations can deal with less than 1 foot sea level rise per century.
Of course, young people (like Greta Thunberg) who have little life experience can be easily fooled by disaster-mongers, just like they can be lured into religious cults who predict the end of the world for a few years into the future, or into socialist political schemes, not knowing that all past socialist regimes have been horrible failures. But older people, who have heard these disaster predictions for over 30 years with very little actual climate change, can point to past predictions and what actually happened, and ask people “Can you believe future predictions from people who couldn’t predict the past?”
This is why the climate fearmongers are trying to fudge the temperature data from the 1930’s downward (hide the decline), and modern socialists are trying to hide the past failures of socialism by deleting them from history classes. We who have experienced more history (both climatological and political) first-hand need to tell them the truth, which will set them free.
I never expected that a small math aside would lead to such math arcana comments at WUWT.
Now, as a math ‘addict’, my commenters can also ponder the following equation using all five ‘magic numbers’ using an Euler theorem (better, there is a whole book on each of the five ‘numbers’, the best being ‘The History of Zero’)…and then please add for your pleasure a sixth irrational number derivation/application book for fun Phi [the Golden Ratio]).
So for the first five magic number books:
e^(i*pi) +1 =0. Wow! AKA Euler’s identity theorem. Enjoy pondering.
That is demonstrably false using real (not imaginary) numbers.
2 is a square root of 4. That does not mean that – 2 =2.
Arguably, the correct term is that +/- i = sqrt(-1). Then debate whether i is the same as – i, and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
100% agree. In the debate about climate change, energy and environment. The radicals have been using “science” as a prop while ignoring all scientific principles and instead, propagandizing the populace with fear of fossil fuel Armageddon and promises of green salvation.
In contrast there are many of us who understand what the science actually shows and what engineering and lived experience promises us will be the spectacular failure of the current version of virtuous, green, renewable energy systems. We have tried to make our case largely through reason and science-based argument. It is like fighting off a rapid dog by reciting poetry.
When I try to describe the world we would have if we remove the fossil fuel energy infrastructure that made our current society flourish I tend to use more graphic descriptions than would be typical of a sober scientific discussion. I don’t think the description is an exaggeration but I hope that it may seem more real given the recent events stimulated by the rise of woke, social justice, magical thinking governance in western wealthy democracies.
Every living thing will become a source of food as the industrial agriculture we depend on collapses. This means the term “endangered species” is replaced by “dinner” and the word “endangered” becomes a needless adjective when applied to anything 8.5 billion humans can eat. Every stick of vegetation becomes fuel or building material. Forrests once again will be flattened and burned just to keep people warm and sheltered. Supply chains won’t reach more than a few miles from your front door (if you still have one). Conflict which we have been spoiled to live without for so long will become a daily life and death fight over resources that are rapidly disappearing. Never mind fear of rogue distant nations, your nearest neighbor will be you enemy. The rule of law will be replaced by the rule of force. The environment which is supposed to be the biggest beneficiary of the “green new deal” will look like a move set from Mad Max.
The recent events show a glimmer of what could come if voters don’t demand a different direction. We’ve seen the blackouts, the fuel line ups with the beginnings of violence as individuals fight over just the perception of a shortage, the rise in food, fuel and building matgerial prices, the rise in conflict in Israel, and the increasing international challenges to western democracies after the US votes in a passive, demented president who believes we can live without reliable energy.
The ability to convince voters using logic and reason that they are heading for disaster if they support the progressive agenda is severely limited. We know the science and observed reality are on our side but we need more than that to change direction. We need to highlight the very real danger to each and every individual of continuing on this path. We need to engage emotion and the sense of self-preservation in every one of us.
Fighting off rapid dogs is preferable to fighting off rabid ones
Oops.
Rules for radicals is very good.
Remember, sceptics are the radicals.
Big climate (aka marxists, socialists, radical environmentalists) is the common enemy.
Informing the public that they will lose their, cars, steaks holidays is a valid component In a multi pronged campaign against big climate.
Objective, rational, independent thinkers do care about learning science-based facts behind a debatable argument, whereas proselytizing alarmists supporting a meme as a means to gain wealth, power and/or control of others never have and never will.
N.B., a meme is defined as: an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
Correct ! socio-religious belief cannot be removed by facts. Especially not for persons like Greta Thunberg. She has asperger syndrome.
Typical for those kind of persons is an obsessive focus on one topic.
But how much of that is part of her legend? Her family are all actors and performers. She is molded and groomed for a potentially life long career as a goad. Asperger can be simulated, or empathetically “diagnosed” through something like Munchausen’s by proxy, or played by even a weak acting prodigy.
Correctly labeling her as having mental disorder or deficiency got at least one critic canceled as “thousands rose to her defense.” It is part of the mis-direction. Her personal incompetence is THEIR competence. Ignore it, or you’re making their point. It is like publicly jeering at stigmata. The CCP just fell for this yesterday.
Mortal gods and goddesses. A Twilight faith (i.e. conflation of logical domains). A Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, relativistic (“ethical”) religion. A liberal (i.e. divergent) ideology. Speaking facts to truth will only reach people who are not already subscribed, invested in green schemes, infested with social contagion, or forced to take a knee (e.g. journolism and the fourth estate, popular culture, the rarefied air in ivory towers, cancel culture, allegations of diversity). The problem is that even if you reach people… persons on one point, they will still bend to other special interests, and their better judgment will be overridden by peculiar interests. A progressive path and slope, smoothed with promises, hopes of secular, narcissistic returns.
You started off well, then made the same mistake. For over 80% or more of the “Alarmists” this is not a “Science” issue — it is a “religion” issue. I have precious formal training in “science” but do have a MDiv (clergy master’s degree). I recognize dogma and religion when I step in it. And what I hear is “dogma”. In a secular society that is now 2+ generations past the “everyone goes to church” phase of American history, they have no other religious training, and this fills that void in their lives. It as everything — human sin, end of the world scenarios, the need to atone, etc etc etc. Oh, and the most telling sign of a “religion” — insufferable believers who try to convert everyone, and want to burn the rest at the stake.
A faith or argument of trust, also a conflation of logical domains. A religion (i.e. behavioral protocol) including morality in a universal frame, its relativistic sibling “ethics”, its politically congruent cousin “law”. An ideology to realize them in practice. An organization to proselytize and normalize. A secular incentive to reach (or force) a consensus.
It’s very simple and it works with the race industry etc etc etc
As long as there is a problem, there are positions of influence, power and much funding to be had.
If these problems were solved tomorrow what would people like Mann, Oreskes and all the others do? They have a vested interest in ensuring nothing is solved, only prolonged.
Very good point. I am a physician working in the Canadian public health system. I think overall we have a good system but with high inefficiencies and over-consumption of services due to poor decision-making. I always felt that the duty of a health system is to make it self as close to redundant as possible by keeping people healthy from birth to grave. The goal is health, not health services. And yet I see the system I work in as largely oriented towards creating jobs and income for those who work in it, whether clinicians, support workers or the massive supporting industries of pharmaceuticals, medical devices and information technology. I don’t expect individuals to work for their own impoverishment, but someone in charge should be on the side of the patients and taxpayers. Where is that voice.
The climate change industry is trying to solve an apparently nonexistent problem with expensive and useless, if not dangerous solutions. It makes the health care system look spectacularly benevolent.
Healthy mother, healthy baby, healthy life. From conception to grave.
And that is with “socialized” medicine that supposedly leaves the “evil” profit motive out of it. As I like to say, the “healthcare industry” is not about “healthcare” at all; it is more correctly the “disease management” industry, again, like the “climate industry,” one with zero incentive to “cure” anything, because that kills the golden goose.
I’ve been thinking along the same lines for quite a while. Despite the quality of information here and at sites such as Climate Etc most of the climate crowd are either under qualified to understand it or choose not to understand it in the interests of personal gain or beliefs.
There’s none so blind as he who will not see…..
I don’t think that the argument can be won by using science (common sense) – it needs something more radical /basic.
The problem here, as with so many other issues of the day, is that a large number of people are living off ideals as opposed to real life. That has been encouraged and regularly rewarded so it’s a tough nut to crack.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying.
Gosh, welcome to reality!
Many realists have paid little attention to you and the lukewarmer WUWT since the early days of the revelations of unquestioned climate fraud–ClimateGate emails, Mann’s Hockey Stick debunking. Y’all danced to the tune of the barbarians sacking civilization while Rome was burning.
Experts on covert influence, covert action, subversion, and cultural destruction warned y’all that the Climate Cult were Politically Correct Progressives. You were warned that the PC-Prog mission was to destroy Normal America (and associated cultures)–specifically the American capitalist system, but the entire culture as well. You were warned that they did not care about real science and scientific methods, or facts.
WUWT response? You devoted increased energy to ever more detailed scientific refutations of the frauds. Extensive many-hundreds-of-thousands of words poured across the blog screen, with detailed intramural discussions on minute issues about “climate sensitivity” and “back radiation,” etc., etc. etc. You groveled to the barbarians:
“Yes, man warmed the climate. Yes, CO2 is bad. The only disagreement we have with the PC-Progs is the answer to the question: ‘How bad is CO2?'”
You deplatformed and ostracized many who had the courage to say: “The emperor has no clothes.”
You increased efforts to “publish papers” in the Cult’s “peer-reviewed” journals. In other words, you begged the barbarians for permission to critique their methods of sacking the city. Anthony Watts published a paper! Yee ha! What an accomplishment! Here we are, 10 years later. So what?
So, again, welcome to reality. The city has been sacked. It’s leveled. The ruins are smoking. The fire’s out. The barbarians sit on the throne.
What’s your plan now?
Lukewarmer???
So we imitate the warmers and start lying in order to support our position?
Rud, You might want to edit the title of Koonin’s book from “Uncertainty” to “Unsettled”.
My bad. Thinking his message, not the actual title. The hyperlink takes to the correct book and title.
I’ve started using “Natural Climate Change Denier” as in
Them: “You’re a (expletive) climate change denier!”
Me: “No the climate changes all the time, but you’re a natural climate change denier”
The discussion (ha!) has always been political, not scientific…
Many years ago I was dragging a dolly with my tools and a bottle of R-22 across campus at Wright State University. A young head full of mush came up to me and began to lecture me on the evils of “freon”
I asked him would he answer a few questions? Yes he says. I ask him do you have any youngers at home? Yes. Have they ever needed an antibiotic? Yes. I then stated refrigeration was part of the process that made the antibiotic. Would he have his sibling die for the cause of eliminating refrigerants? No answer. I asked do you have a refrigerator at home and would you give it up to eliminate refrigerants? I stated EVERYTHING you have in your life was made possible by refrigeration. Are you prepared to become a subsistance farmer in the name of eliminating refrigerants? After a few more such questions I wish him a good day.
He and the crowd that had gathered were silent as I walked off.
It was a good day!
30 some years ago when congress was debating whether to join the Montreal Protocols that banned freon, NASA suddenly came out with a press release announcing the discovery of a huge northern hemisphere ozone hole. The last few holdouts in congress caved and the Senate ratified the treaty.
A few weeks later, NASA came out with a small press release, that confessed that they had suffered from a data glitch and there was no northern hemisphere ozone hole after all. Oooops.
Even back then, NASA had become corrupted, willing to fiddle with the data in order to influence public policy.
The ones that concern me the most are the scientists or science populists who admit that they don’t know climate science, but they “know how to read a graph”. Examples in the UK include Brian Cox and David Attenborough.
I heard Brian Cox some years back saying that about the hockey stick – he was convinced by the climate crisis because it was presented as a graph, and his patronising assumption was the the general public wouldn’t understand the significance, but “as a scientist” he could see from ONE GRAPH that the problem was real. Never for a moment did he consider that the source of the graph might be suspect.
These so-called scientist experts are unfortunately trusted sources to the generally well-educated but non-scientific public.
And when someone who CAN read a graph raises doubts they are rapidly excluded from public view, as happened to Johnny Ball and David Bellamy.
And why should that graph be persuasive?
It went up and down before, why should it be expected to stop without man?
Yeahbut…
It would still go up and down before the industrial revolution without Mann!
“I heard Brian Cox some years back saying that about the hockey stick – he was convinced by the climate crisis because it was presented as a graph, and his patronising assumption was the the general public wouldn’t understand the significance, but “as a scientist” he could see from ONE GRAPH that the problem was real. Never for a moment did he consider that the source of the graph might be suspect.”
Well, you can see what Brian Cox is talking about when you look at the bogus, instrument-era Hockey Stick chart (below). It *does* make it appear as though the temperatures have been getting hotter and hotter for decade after decade and that we are now at the highest temperatures in human history.
That appearance comes from deliberate fraud on the part of the Climategate Charlatans and their Spawn. This bogus Hockey Stick is the ONLY thing the alamrists can point to that shows warming, and it’s all computer-generated science fiction created to sell the Human-caused Climate Change scam.
No unmodified regional surface temperature chart from around the world shows this Hockey Stick “hotter and hotter” temperature profile. They all show it was just as warm in the recent past as it is today. They put the Lie to the bogus Hockey Stick chart and its claim of unprecedented warmth today.
The Hockey Stick Chart is the BIG LIE of alarmist climate science.
Without this Lie, the alarmists would have nothing to point to, to make their case. That’s why they created it. They had to have something to point to as “evidence”.
Looking at the Hockey Stick chart, it is understandable that if you believed what you were looking at was valid, then you would think the world is in trouble from overheating. That’s the impression the Climategate Charlatans wanted to give and they did a good job of it.
The Hockey Stick chart is what Brian Cox and every other alarmist use to justify their fear of CO2. In fact, it is the only thing that says CO2 is detrimental to the Earth’s atmosphere.
But it’s all a BIG LIE.
No other unmodified chart on Earth resembles the Hockey Stick profile. They all show it was just as warm in the recent past as it is today, which means we are not experiencing unprecedented warmth today, as the alarmists claim, and if we are not experiencing unprecedented warmth today, then that means that CO2 is a minor player in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Here are a couple of examples of unmodified, regional surface temperature charts from around the world. As you can see, their temperature profile looks nothing like the bogus, bastardized “hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick chart profile. All the other regional charts resemble these two. The do not resemble the Hockey Stick chart. The Hockey Stick chart is an outliar.
Brian Cox ought to be studying his regional surface temperature chart. It might give him a different outlook on things.
None is so blind as he who refuses to see. Their identity is tied up in the idea that mainstream consensus can’t be too wrong. Why they believe that considering history is replete with instances of almost everbody being very wrong and very sure about what they were wrong about.
Chip away and pray.
Rud, it’s been my experience that even EE’s with no exposure to electric power systems or electric machinery understand grid inertia. Pretty much the same thing for lack of understanding of Demand Curves. Utilities in the 1920’s were painfully aware of probelms with depending on renewable (hydroelectric) generation, but those lessons were lost when hydro meant projects such as Hoover dam with years worth of water storage capacity.
EE’s deal with AC circuits all the time and we intuitively know that letting your signals get out of phase leads to problems.
We need to get the terminology ,I’m a climate believer I’m not a believer of AGW nor I’m i a climate skeptic I simply believe we have a ever changing climate, I think labels used by sides particularly in public debate to ridicule does no one any good.
Ridicule a street level activist, certainly not , if you suspect/know he or she is a activist, ignore put nothing there way ostracise them, spend no money with them ,don’t invite them round ,you have the upper hand, leave them guessing.
Professional activists,scientists, ect, ridicule, pressure them,show fraud, call out every opportunity.
China and India have entered into a thirty year cooperative agreement with Mother Nature to test the predictive capabilities of the IPCC’s climate models.
Those two nations, along with a host of other developing nations around the world, will be adding many gigatonnes of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere in a long term experiment to determine how well the climate models predict the future trajectory of the earth’s global mean temperature.
In return for her cooperation in supporting the experiment, Mother Nature will be granted a full time tenured position in the Real World University School of Earth & Environmental Sciences.
Although she was reluctant to accept the terms of the deal, it must be noted that Mother Nature was made an offer she couldn’t refuse.
What’s with oil industry executives?
Here’s one ready to play the climate game.
“Vicki Hollub CEO, Occidental Petroleum”
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/oil-industry-transition
“It’s been quite a tumultuous year for the oil and gas industry, from a historic pandemic that sent oil prices crashing to growing pressure and urgency for companies to align their strategies with the world’s escalating climate ambitions.”
(they believe) It’s in their financial interest to push the religion. If I were to have a criticism of capitalism I would start there.
Oil money is at the top of the list of who is pushing this crap.
How can it be in their financial interest if the goal of the alarmists is to stop all fossil fuels?
Imagine what they would say and do if unreliables were more profitable than fossil fuels.
Then study what is going on…
Hedging their bet. Per chance to profit in the short-term, to survive in the long-term. An optimal strategy in an unstable climate or hostile environment. Some people will find it more difficult to suspend disbelief until both their lives and livelihoods are at risk.
You can’t use facts and reason to change someone’s mind unless their opinions and beliefs are based upon facts and reason. When people’s beliefs come from feelings and are supported by groupthink, you have to change your approach.
I think somebody with experience successfully deprogramming cult members might be able to help.
Belief, faith (“trust”) are an issue. Another is special and peculiar interests. Another yet, is that people will agree on one point, will disagree on another, and will agree to disagree when there are overriding or alternative concerns. For example, Democrat minorities voted against normalizing marriage of couplets in California, but after demoracy was overridden by a transgender/homosexual judge, rather than stand their ground, they took a knee on this issue, and went along to get along for the sake of sustaining a consensus based on other, priority interests.
States will have to decide on their own how to proceed to protect their people. States can then form compacts with other similar-thinking states and pursue policies that will enable them to survive.
We shall see with S. 1
Is there a thing called Federalism? If so, will it work to stop the insanity…
According to the constitution, states can’t form compacts with each other without congress’s permission.
Sorry Rud, but as a common or garden layman, I have been saying for years on WUWT that countering the climate fanatics with science is futile.
They are also impervious to ridicule and most other tactics levelled against them.
There are only two things that will get to them, the first being restricting their access to money, which just isn’t going to happen.
The second is wishing for what no sensible climate sceptic wants; for the climate to take a volte-face, much as it did in the early to mid 70’s when it suddenly warmed (or at least that was my anecdotal perception) and begin to cool markedly over the coming 5 years relative to the Sun’s inactivity.
We don’t want it or like the prospect, but nothing else will stop the massive cover-up that’s going on at every level of government across the western world.
Do not underestimate the real raw human nature…as,
it never fails in the “end’ to uphold the self,
and it happens to be the most impossible to change.
cheers
Rud, the reason for John Kerry’s appointment is the same as Biden’s, your #1: the use of political power for financial gain. When a pol is part of an organization, he needn’t get paid personally, the cash just goes into the machine. There are at least two groups getting contribution and tribute from Kerry’s appointment, and one is their political party. As with criticisms of Greta on a mental hygiene basis, pointing out Biden or Kerry’s past shady dealings and profiteering gets you canceled, as thousands rise screaming to their defense. Skip it as playing to the opponent’s strength.
AOC isn’t so clean on financial gain. It can’t be brought up in this context, isn’t an argument, and undermines your better ones. Ridicule is the field where these opponents’ qualities should be played.
The other mythical point of the Death Cult is that carbon can be deliberately extracted from any process on Earth by technological means, which is fundamentally false. In the only place in the Universe where we know life exists, even anaerobic life is part of a carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen cycle. It is literally in our DNA, not as a catchphrase. There is no carbon free source of energy available to humans. Renewables use carbon. Fossil fuels are no different than other bio-fuels, and are based on extraction from once living plant and animal matter. Petroleum-based plastics are chemically similar to, and used along with biologically derived and naturally occurring plastics. The CO2 from burning fuel initially came from the atmosphere, put there by biological processes. A nuclear power plant depends utterly on technology using carbon as a fundamental component.
The only way that I can think to use this point is to go to the obvious weaknesses of ignorance and dishonesty. Wind and solar power are based on industries, practices, and labor all dependent on the use and expenditure of carbon, much of which goes into the atmosphere. An increase in the number of installed wind turbines or pv panels must be preceded and followed by the multifold increase in the emission of carbon just to support those devices.
The final point is hubris: even from the reviews of Koonin’s book, he seems to propose that there are useful actions that can be taken to secure the future against climate change. None of those things are real. No one has done this sort of thing before in any government or criminal enterprise. No one can predict the future. The only means available to anyone in the world to achieve these goals requires despotism and world government, much too easily corrupted, and on the record destined to failure. This is the faith-based fault in the climate cult religion, their mythical view of science as an omnipotent abstract can empower true believers to see the future, anticipate negative consequences, and manipulate fate, all of which are ridiculous in their own right. This is a fear response to the unknown, deliberately exacerbated by propaganda, and destined only to repeat past barbarisms.
Dear Rud,
Rules For Radicals? Is that the best you’ve got? Sorry, but that’s just pathetic. You (we) have to be a lot smarter than that.
You are correct, though, in this respect: arguing science with science illiterates is futile. Climate Realism (and conservatism in general) must grab the audience where they are most vulnerable. And I submit, though you may be appalled, the most vulnerable region is the hormonal one. We all have one, illiterates included.
Climate Realism has to be made sexy. That’s right, sexy. We need real models, the attractive kind, the appealing ones. You can’t sell soap with a pig; you need a lovely bimbo (I can hear the steam rising but it’s true).
Real men (and real women) like it hot. The best venue for Climate Realism is the beach — Bikini Land, Surfer Paradise, where the Beautiful People go to play. You don’t need an advanced degree to enjoy the sun.
Alarmunists and their ilk are ugly non-breeders. Everybody knows it. The sexy people are subconsciously repelled by all those -nists and -azis. Go with what sells. Climate Realists have the right stuff and it shows. We don’t need a Party; we need to party.
Not pathetic. This is reality. Alinsky merely set out in English, somewhat repetitively, a list of tactics to be imployed for financial and political gain. It is simple, to the point, and totally stolen from history and the oldest written records available. You are even playing to it in the rest of your comment, based in part, I’m sure, on marketing and advertising; a different aspect of the same thing. Propaganda works best outside of rationality. Climate change is profitable propaganda.
We moved from NH to FL back in 2018. I always give the reason for that move as “In order to get away from that terrible Global Warming up north!” Having studied the matter since 2006, my observation is that we are heading for the next ice age, perhaps even the next BIG ice age. (Has anyone noticed all of the cold weather lately?)
” He got rich “
Rud, seriously, Mann did not get rich off of MBH98.
He got rich ripping off the citizens of Pennsylvania and the citizens of America in general, he has never had a real job producing anything any person would actually pay him for.
Again Mr. 2hotel9 he did not get rich.
Additionally….. “producing anything any person would actually pay him for.”
People paid Mr. Mann for the book(s) he wrote
Micheal Mann’s newest opinions on saving the world are the same as his old opinions on saving the world: The New Climate War, Best Sellers Rank: #27,987 in Books
So, what you are saying with “27987” is that Mann hasn’t sold a lot of books?…… Thank you for proving my point that he is not rich.
And yet, he pays a team of lawyers for years in two countries for self initiated lawsuits with no problem. Which proves he is rich, unless you think lawyers work for peanuts.
Once again, Roger is wrong, twice, ignorantly taking both sides of the argument. Payment for books he wrote makes him moderately wealthy. Subsistence from green thermogeddonite supporters makes him independent of income. Speaking and appearance fees finance his expenses on climate evangelism tours. University tenure and department board membership make him more wealthy. Fraud pays him well.
If you can’t tell feelings or indoctrination from reality, you may be almost as good as a bot, but without the uncertainty of software.
Mr. dk_, “moderately wealthy” is NOT rich. University pay doesn’t make him rich.
I assume you have had sight of his bank accounts.
‘Rich’ is a relative term. I’m extraordinarily rich compared to a peasant on the Indian subcontinent, but by western standards, I’m no better than middle class.
Michael Mann is undoubtedly what I would consider rich. He has the means to sue people in court and risk handing over considerable amounts of money if (and when) he loses cases.
Perhaps he has a wealthy benefactor to pay for all that litigation, court cost and compensation, running into millions.
That makes him extraordinarily rich in my estimation. Could you afford to risk $millions mounting court cases against people?
HotScot, Roger is dishonestly taking the position that unless you have as much money as Musk or Gates, you aren’t rich.
Roger, thank you for proving that you have no intention of arguing honestly.
“moderately wealthy” was only the start of the argument. You ignore all of the other income streams that have taken him from moderately wealthy to rich.
Yes, he got money fraudulently.
The only reason why anyone bought his books was because of his fame.
He was famous for the hockey stick.
Keep beating that dead horse, swing away. He got rich ripping people off. And you are poor because you believe his lies.
Michael Mann is rich enough to sue multiple people in multiple countries for years on end for the pure pleasure of losing his cases. Some one paid for all those lawyers. If it wasn’t him, then someone is fronting the money for him, which is just as good as being rich.
Payng for lawyers makes him rich? Are the clients of public defenders rich too?
Oh, Roger, you are SO right!
Poor Mickey Mann’s net worth is only a measly one and a half million! How ever will he survive on his paltry college professor’s salary and speaking fees? Let’s not forget he also apparently received over a million in stimulus money according to the Wall Street Journal; he may have to subsist on franks and beans now that he is so destitute! Maybe you can send him some money to help him keep his GHG emissions down! Is there any alarmist lie you will not quickly swallow and then regurgitate ad nauseam?
You’re still lagging on the apology to us for your lies about Officer Sicknick’s tragic death from stroke; but then we’re getting used to you not apologizing for lying as you do SO frequently!
Roger,
You already let others do your thinking for you; you ought to at least have the energy to do some Internet sleuthing! It took me about 5 or 10 minutes to find the info, so I’m sure you shouldn’t have to spend more than an hour or so!
Stupid and lazy is a poor combination for success in life!
Once again, Roger shows that he is not capable of making an honest argument.
No, paying lawyers doesn’t make one rich. Having enough money to pay the lawyers makes him rich.
While he made no money off of MBH98, it was the key to his admission to the club. It was his membership in the club that enabled him to get rich.
Cause 4: It is a useful tool to spread socialism, fascism, and communism.
You have to distinguish between the useful idiots, corrupt scientists, and the international organizations interested in spreading statism by any means necessary. Lying is a feature, not a bug, for such people.
Geez Rules For Radical mentioned. How many have read that. If I had a nickel for every time I have referenced that book in the past 10 years as to why is such a phony war ( the scam sham of climate and weather weaponization for an agenda that has nothing to do with it) I would be rich man in terms of dollars. I am rich in other ways ( blessed) But Charles post here is heartening because maybe we will wake up and see all our hand wringing over “science” is not what this is about. But I think you all know that now
It will take much stronger medicine to cure this illness. Luckily such medicine has already been developed and tested. The cure will be available within a few days.
The society that grew out of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution has had a pretty good run for 250 years. And it’s spread far beyond the “western” democracies. Now it’s under attack, not from outside but from within.
The “climate/sustainability” movement has been around for over 50 years, and its themes of coming doom and “decarbonization” are now firmly implanted in most of our educational institutions, governments, corporations, mass media and “chattering class”. On that front, we’re in serious retreat. When universities have “professors of climate communication”, you can see how deeply this dogma is now embedded in our societies.
Our societies are also under attack on two more fronts that appeared relatively recently: the “gender/identity” and “racial/identity” movements. The one seeks to make us uncertain of our own sexuality, and the other seeks to make those of us with European ethnicity ashamed of our history and our race. Softening us up for the changes to come. The speed with which governments, academies and corporations have caved in to the demands of these groups is really remarkable; now their “climate change” and “sustainability” offices are joined by “diversity” and “inclusion” departments. Corporations are the worst, with their cringingly obsequious (and patently hypocritical) declarations of conformity to the new order.
Then there’s the movement by most of the mainstream media, and the social media giants to try and suppress dissemination of any ideas that don’t follow the new orthodoxy. And they are doing very well at it. In the UK, they even have police monitoring posts on social media, and “paying a visit” to offenders who dare to have thoughts of their own. Who’d have ever thought that the internet, with its promise of free exchange of information and ideas, could be a weapon to suppress that free exchange?
There doesn’t seem an evil mastermind behind all these encroachments on our energy security, our sense of who we are, our freedom of speech, even our freedom of thought (although George Soros is doing his best to be an evil mastermind). It’s more that there are diverse groups that all tend to move in more or less the same direction, towards some sort of collectivist future. Many of them are influenced by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, who postulated that Marxism couldn’t be achieved by revolution in the industrial democracies, but had to be realised slowly by infiltrating and taking over the “institutions” of government service and education. So far, Gramsci is making Marx and Lenin look like rank amateurs, with the progress his ideas are making.
It’s precisely the lack of an evil mastermind that makes it so difficult to fight against these forces. I’m reminded of Churchill’s 1938 speech “The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out“. There’s another paraphrased quote, very appropriate in our present troubles: “We have met the enemy and he is us“
More than pretty good — the Scottish Enlightenment is the source of real social revolution. Socialists, communists, and wreckers like Marx are the throwbacks — social neanderthals getting someone else to steal for them.
I believe it was Gramsci who coined the phrase ‘The long march through the institutions’, which summarises it succinctly.
If we are to slow the train wreck of Paris Accord and GND, I believe the focus should be based on challenging poor quality standards on science produced or promoted by government agencies. Your 2008 post “ISO-8000 Data Quality – something climate science could benefit from” was on target and there are OMB requirements that state government agencies are required to us good quality assurance practices, specifically warning against potential abuse of the Peer Review process.
A movement akin to that challenging the oil industry should be initiated to:
This should be done proactively rather than used to challenge, in court, the inevitable regulatory actions supporting the Paris Accord and GND compliance.
I was concerned by the statement of Amy Coney Barrett during her Senate testimony about the expectation of judges deferring to government scientists when ruling on issues involving science.
Years ago I was working with a manager of a landfill in California about the disposal of some waste. He made a statement which is applicable to climate change. He said, “You need to understand that what I do is 90% political and 10% scientific.”
This paper would seem to prove that Biden’s plan is grossly and criminally negligent.
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/24d5dfbb-a77a-4647-abcc-667867207f74/TheRoleofCriticalMineralsinCleanEnergyTransitions.pdf
“Today’s mineral supply and investment plans fall short of what is needed to transform the energy sector, raising the risk of delayed or more expensive energy transitions”
Whenever people tell me that the climate is going to self destruct unless humans “do something about it”, I ask them if they can control the weather for 30 years.
It always stops them dead in their tracks because they look extremely silly if they say yes and their argument is moot if they say no.
The only “something” that is ever offered is either obvious nonsense or blind panic: always great cover for violence and riot. Except when individuals slip, and then talk about mob levied fines, jail, slavery, lynching, or reeducation for denial; retribution and inquisition for climate unbelief and green apostatism. Remember the committees for public safety?
In the UK very soon a law will be passed that allows the police to break up a demonstration if its deemed to noisy, I kid you not.
It will be which riots they choose to break up that will be interesting. Funny how life imitates art, isn’t it? I recall the recent film of modern play written as Shakespearean tragedy called “Charles III.”
Were I in the U.K., I would emigrate. After all, even the wokest royals are getting the idea!
Through the plandemic anti government protesters were violently attacked by the cops including old ladies, yet woke protests were left alone or the cops dropped on one knee,
I would emigrate at a drop of a hat the misses wont ,parents ect, so I’m stuck unless something happens 😗
Happily for me, a maternal Great Grandfather last made that choice for me and most of my kin. At least superficially, what he left behind in 1890s Wales somewhat resembled your current situation.
Quietly, but seriously, look into the practical details. Perhaps the other situation will change, but if not, you might save a mate by knowing enough to persuade him to go. At least today you’ll know more about what to expect than my Great Grandad and his brothers.
I’m saddened by the recent changes. I’d hoped to spend some retirement time in various parts of various ancestors’ England, Wales, Ireland and Scottland. Now I can’t imagine the circumstances where that will ever happen.
I live in rural Wales 1hr away from the south wales coal field ,15mins from the old hard rock mines of mid west Wales, died out around 1890 . To holiday or not? Well every thing is here to see , not nice to go out in a city or town at night ,its become very commercialised because we really only have a service industry left , London is a ripoff for native ,tourist alike, if you walk the old industrial areas you can still get a sense of the past.id do it before its all gone, you can still find a old gaffer who will talk to you about the past,
If we can’t stop the rot in the US soon, emigrating may become an attractive option.
There are hundreds of trillions of dollars tied up in baby boomer’s 401K’s and survivors pensions and equal amounts in European retirement plans.
At the same time, the world debt is also hundreds of trillions.
Retiree’s die with unspent wealth each and every day. As a matter of course, they leave it to their children.
Governments, which have already spent this money “on credit” have finally figured out a way to balance the books. And that is to inflate away the debt while simultaneously charging higher prices and new taxes for everyone so governments can “SAVE THE PLANET”.
It’s a con game and always has been. Just write the checks and die broke. You won’t know it when you’re dead anyway. Tough luck for your proteges, but they believe all this nonsense anyways.
I started weighing-in in a public manner on the topic of global warming, then climate change in the late 1980s — just about coincident with that hot summer of 1988. I have yet to see it do an iota of good.
John Burnham pointed out in the mid-1980s that science was losing out, or maybe already had lost, to the return of superstition. His thesis was that the first battle lost was in the subject of health as first rate scientists stopped communicating directly with the public and left the task to the science educators, journalists and mediocre public health types. Or worse still, advertisers. Even the politicians are in the act now. People are not smart, but rather superstitious, and the fight to prevent its return in new form or even old ones has to be engaged every day.
I also note that the Gen Z and Millennials get everything they know from the internet or rather their Iphone. It’s the first place they turn with any question. Look at the biased and misleading information they are likely to find there. Can’t read a map, but Google will send them onto abandoned streets and non-existent roads.
Well Rud,welcome to the Bright Side.
Climatology has been political from the outset.
Created by Bureaucrats no less.
After The CRU Emails(Climategate) it was obvious the scientific method was not welcome in The Cult of Calamitous Climate.
“The Science” (Trademark) was front and centre.
As a full blown State Owned Religion.
For our Kleptocracy’s are all bankrupt,the only way for our parasitic overload to eat is to tax air..behold the “Carbon Tax”.
Catastrophic Climate has been a glorious way to steal from the many to enrich the few.
So thank you for conceding what many of us already have seen,no amount of evidence,will change the meme.
For reason is not at play.
Emotion has been the tool all along.
Once we tolerated our bureaus engaging in Policy Based Evidence Manufacturing,we lost “science” as a tool.
Measurements?
No value to the narrative.
Our “enlightened leaders” have “Computer Projection” to divine our future.
I now believe it is going to take an infrastructure collapse followed by actively banning members of Gang Green from our societies,before the herd smartens up.
The danger of a State Religion must now run its course..
Banishment or death appears to be the only cure for stupidity of this level..
For The Cult of Calamitous Climate celebrates Weapons Grade Stupid as “Virtue”.
And after decades of their shrieking,preaching and stealing,I want to give them what they demand..
I cannot wait to see a Carbon Based Life Form live a “Carbon Free” existence.
I insist these person live as they demand we must,free of fossil fuels,steel,nylon ,plastic..Of course most cannot go 5 minutes without their electronic tethers and completely melt down should signal be lost…But they demand their brave Old World.
So I doubt your proposed solutions will work.
They amount to word games with monkeys.
Truth with consequences is the only tool we have.
If our fellow citizens so hate our technologic luxurious civilization,let them do without.
As long as I can have the camera rights,using ariel drones to record their “living the dream”..For the children ..of course.
And they have set goals, made a plan and are working the plan in coordination. You only think your goal in treating the subject fairly will help society meet the goal you think they are debating. It may be unrelated. I ordered Unsettled in hardback April 26. Amazon is now promising by May 28, maybe. Bet it won’t be a bestseller if books are not shipped in quantity, but trickled out. So will get less attention. So will help meat their goal. Whatever it is…
I have to somewhat disagree with this approach to dealing with alarmists. The died-in-the-wool, fanatical, true believers cannot be reasoned with, since unreasonable people are unable to reason. The only approach for these true believers is to mock, ridicule and marginalize them in the eyes of those who have yet to drink the climate koolaid.
For those who have been deceived by Big Media, Big Government, and Big Green, but have yet to become members of the climate cult, you can use tactics 2 and 3. But those tactics will not work with the true believers of the cult.
I think you may have missed the fundamental lesson from Alinsky.
Always make sure what you are demanding cannot be met. And above all, make sure that if by some catastrophe the demand is met, that you are well away from any role in implementation. So we should welcome the California plans.
The Californian climate activists are about to find themselves in the disastrous position of having their demands accepted and the State Government seriously attempting to implement them.
The problem is when this happens that things have gone exactly the wrong way around. They were trying to use their ideas to organize around, which hopefully could take them to power, at which point they could forget about implementing them. What they needed was to be able to say, put us in charge and we will implement.
Alas, what is happening is the existing establishment has accepted and will implement them when they are as far away from power as ever. The establishment is going to be able to say, we did what you wanted, we tried. It failed. Or rather, they will say, you failed. See folks, these people do not deserve to gain power. Because that is what it is about.
Climate as a thing is of no interest to the activists. Its just something to organize around and justify taking power. Just like race and gender are of no interest to them, as policy questions. They are just something to make demands about, the more impossible the better. Don’t demand reform of the police. That could happen, or the establishment could try. No, demand their abolition. That is pretty certain not to happen.
You can only understand climate activism if you accept that the particular topics and controversies are not what its about. There is no point arguing the science or technology. Its not about that at all.
Actually, California may have got it right, without meaning to. Just as Minneapolis and Portland may have. By conceding to a demand which was made in the first place because it was ridiculous and unobtainable, they may have exploded the whole movement. Give it till the due date for zero carbon, lay in some popcorn, and watch the fireworks.
If I were a California climate activist, this is the point where I would be holding urgent meetings on the theme of how do we get ourselves out of this one. I expect they are.
It may not just be the California climate activists – many other Alisky-ite activists seem to be getting close to having their demands met.
I think Alinsky underestimated the chance of government giving in.
Another Alinsky tactic is to force the other side to live up to their standards.
Constantly ridicule any warmista who lives in the suburbs, especially if they have a standalone home. If they take anything other than mass transit, they are a hypocrite, even electric cars aren’t good enough, they are still wasting huge amounts of energy.
Drive, or worse, fly anywhere for a vacation, let them have it.
Force them to realize how unrealistic their demands are by forcing them to live their standards.
The Climate Juggernaut has to be attacked from all sides. We shall fight them on the beaches, and everywhere else, and we shall never surrender!
So just to be clear, the thousands of climate scientists around the world who disagree with Rud are all part of a global criminal conspiracy (“obvious deliberate ‘criminal gross negligence’”)
Maybe, maybe not, however the 10’s of thousands of actual scientists who disagree with the so called climate scientists are definitely not part of the conspiracy.
It’s not a conspiracy.
But if you have studied climate change, have a couple of Phd students to look after and no other specialisms… what are the chances that you will ever find that the climate sensitivity is too low to be harmful?
A thousand individual decisions make up an institution.
And an institution enforces its own survival.
There is no secret cabal. It’s just a blunder writ in past-funding-requests.
To me, it is clear that there is no “Greenhouse Effect”. That whole idea is simply not reconcilable with observations over any day, decade, century, millennium or millions of years. Earth has maintained a habitable environment for maybe a billion years. The reason is water over the surface.
Look at the current surface temperature across three tropical oceans:
All regulate the maximum to 30C give or take a degree. There is no ocean surface water cooler the -2C.
This result is not some delicate energy balance. That is just unscientific drivel. It is the result of powerful ocean surface temperature regulating processes.
Just leave the church of believers of”Greenhouse Effect” for a few minutes and contemplate an alternate view. Cloud formation over tropical oceans cause them to regulate to a maximum of 30C. Ice formation over polar oceans limit their minimum temperature to -2C. The global average temperature ends up at 14C give or take a degree. Oceans on average a tad warmer because there is more tropical ocean than polar ocean and land a tad cooler because it is on average 800m higher and in the presence of radiative gases guarantee a lapse rate set by gas law.
Forget all the hocus pocus of radiation and transmission (and, heaven forbid back welling LW radiation). Ice is the dominant radiating surface at ground level and in the atmosphere. It ranges in temperature from 220K to 273K so it is no wonder the average radiating temperature is 255K. No “Greenhouse Effect” needed.
I dare say most people here are true believers. They have taken the “Greenhouse Effect” bait hook line and sinker. They are as much of a problem as the dimwitted who think a global economy can be run from the sun and wind as the sole energy source using present technology. They have already conceded scientific analysis through their inability to really understand the energy balance on Earth.
There you go again,using the scientific method.
You will be certified a heretic and burnt as a witch,for you mock “The Science” with logic and reason.
It is pretty bizzare that water is so easily dismissed by Climatology ,when water is weather.
At least on a water world like earth.
It is sad to see so many people get tied up in this hocus pocus “Greenhouse Effect” and disregard simple observation for way more complex, tortured physics world of E-M energy going up gradient; photons like gatling guns going in all directions. You name it and climate “science” is the most tortured “science”. It leaves Ptolemaic astronomy in its wake by a long margin.
This is the learned response from Australia’s climate experts to the attached graph:
These incompetents are long past reality. It is so small in their rear vision that they no longer see it. As long as their model is middle of the road they are completely satisfied.
Absolutely, there’s nothing that they don’t understand better than a size 14 up the clacker ! Talking and whining is not an option with the warmunista.
I think this is why Curry posts more on psychology than direct climate science because these people are beyond being reached by science.
It’s collective madness.
Mockery is the tool
Dear Mr. Rud,
Many THX for your arcticle: I fully agree with you. My argumentation against climate alarmists is rooted in my past. I was born in East-Europe in a state of the so-called “democratic socialism”. I took part in the popular movement in 1989-90 to bury the “democratic socialism/communism”. The most important lessons learned from the collapse of the “democratic socialism” were:
—Natural laws could not be raped by political and ideological slogans, and at the end of the day the natural laws will prevail
—Distorting the market economy is very unhealthy, and sooner or later will lead to complete economical and social bankruptcy. Of course market economy is not ideal, however no any better alternative is known.
Based on these two practical experiences, I am optimistic concerning the final outcome of the fight between climate alarmism and climate realism. However, the way to neutralize the lies of the climate alarmism would be long and hard way, and will cost enormous amount of suffering for the mankind. However, the final outcome is clear. Example: If somebody would have told in 1989 that KGB would have had not more than 1 year, this person would have been sent immediately in a psychiatric ward. And the KGB would have been dissolved in 1990.
Currently I live in Germany, in one of the most “climate alarmist states” of the world under A. Merkel. However, a popular movement is on the way against the climate alarmism (supported officially strongly by the German state). In this early phase of the movement the best real scientists lead the climate realist movement. In the second phase the methods of the other side should be taken over. However, instead of indoctrination, a fact und evidence based elucidation of the masses (of the ordinary people) should be undertaken in a language which could understood also by ordinary people. The climate alarmism use very well known marketing methods to adress the masses by simply understandable messages of the climate alarmism. Maybe the WUWT community could produce similar “easy reading”-type climate realist messages. A first excellent example are the two presentations from Dr. Spencer on climate crisis. Another practical example: “97% of scientists say that there is a climate crisis, catastrophale globale warming,, etc.”. This statement has already been rebutted many times textual. However, the text of the rebuttals is long and not easily understandable by ordinary people. What about to create one picture (slide) to debunk this scam? One picture tells more than than thousand words. Another case: One of the main idea behind the “Great Transformation” to influence (to change) the climate by the mankind. What about to demonstrate graphically, that in climate/weather changes much bigger and stronger natural forces are involved than the current capability of the mankind? Here is a first such comparison table (in German). Maybe somebody could help with a good visualisation idea (unfortunately I am also more “text-driven”): I have seen a film to illustrate the distances and masses of the planets in our solar systems. Even children could see immediately that our planet is only a very small one in our solar system. Similarly a good visualisation could show even for ordinary people, hat mankind eventually can not influence the climate because much stronger natural forces are at work. The sites “everything climate” and “reference pages” of WUWT would be the right first steps, however the WUWT community should not remain at these first initial steps: The currently available cases should be improved, and the list of illustrated cases should be extended (and systemised) considerably: We should make us “campaigne capable”. Dear WUWT community: Could somebody help us on this field? Thank you in advance.
I recommend http://notrickszone.com/
regular reporting from Germany.
As regards the Wall, it was well known it would fall with about 3 months accuracy. The economy was imploding and the forecast at a press conference at Berlin’s Kempinski Bristol Hotel on Oct. 12, 1988 was right on the mark.
When the Wall fell, Kohl admitted they had no plan whatsoever for the eventuality.
No understanding of physical economics at either side of the Wall , then or now.
The other foot is about to fall now, and 2008 was just a toe in the water…
I would go about it in a completely different direction: instead of “follow the money” it would be “fight the bad influence of money”. Legislation is needed to enforce that grants to public research institutions (Universities included) must fulfill at least two conditions:
First: the grant cannot exceed a certain percentage of the institution’s budget (5%?), otherwise dependencies are generated which are very detrimental to science in general.
Second: any attempt to exert influence on the research priorities or the election (or dismissal) of staff of the institution via the grant money is strictly prohibited by law.
Something similar with respect to peer reviewed scientific journals would also need to be implemented.
A lot of “believers” are more like moths being pulled to a street lamp (the money). Without
these false incentives, a lot of them would be doing something possibly more useful.
So, you’re saying “there ought to be a law”, or words to that effect. This is the main premise of “progressive” government, which, as it continually moves leftward, is how we got to this point in the first place. I don’t pretend to know how this ends, but either the body politic pulls back from the abyss by eschewing centralized control over our lives, or the whole thing collapses into a collectivist heap with the worst on top.
You’re absolutely right. The best would be that no regulation is necessary. Unfortunately, these people have come to a point where they stand practically above our laws. A law is only useful if abuse is observed and only if it has the effect of stopping or at least reducing it. There are too many left wing billionaires out there throwing their money around for political motives. Earlier, philanthropists used their wealth for the public good, and not to take away our freedom.
Dr. Steven Novella has stated that the US could have 70% of US energy supplied by solar and wind by 2050. His blog (https://theness.com/neurologicablog/) constantly hypes magic batteries and claims solar and wind is the most inexpensive form of electricity production.
He claims oil and gas producers have received 4.3 Trillion dollars in government subsidies. Anyone who challenges his proclamations is called a fool. When confronted with Koonin’s recent book, he stated “Koonin is wrong!”.
The damage caused by a cargo cult scientist like Novella is incalculable.
Excellent analysis and conclusion!
We must not bring a knife to a gunfight, as a metaphor for the battle for Truth we find ourselves in. If the other side constantly plays dirty, give them a taste of their own medicine.
Honestly, endless logical arguments won’t persuade true believers in this “post modernism” climate.
Use ridicule and satire and as Gad Saad describes it invoke your inner “honey badger” to combat the wokists and DIE religion nutbars. (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) This applies to the Climate Cultists too who have succumbed to detrimental idea pathogens.
Here is an example of how to eviscerate a stupid belief with satire, using the very idiotic precepts that belief system espouses: (and I might add by using their exact language in ridicule of them, he never gets cancelled)
https://www.gadsaad.com/post/diversity-inclusion-and-equity-die-and-the-death-of-meritocracy
On being a “honey badger”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1BKOZi-oo4
And a longer talk on how to stand up and fight for your principles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQM6gu6jjNc
Gad Saad teaches that to end this madness we must all become “soldiers of reason” and fight back against these idea pathogens, not just acquiesce, or make timid arguments.
The ‘climate emergency’ is pushed by government, news media, big business, charities, academia etc… The public will go along with this in the short term because when people have no personal expertise they tend to believe what they are told by ‘respectable’ authority, hence are vulnerable to the ‘appeal to authority’ fallacy. Unfortunately scientific arguments such as those presented on this site have little or no impact because they are not widely reported and even if they were they are inevitably too technical for the non-scientist and we are back to the point above – who will people believe, the academic climate establishment backed by the government or a few eccentric dissenters?
I do believe that there will be a turning point however. Sooner or later the constraints inflicted on the general public will grow to the point that people will pay attention – the cost of energy, intermittency of supply, cost and convenience of transport etc. The public will start to take a more critical look at what is being pushed on them and why – is there really a ‘climate emergency’ and will the painful actions being inflicted actually avert it? Activists may enjoy a little self-denial but most people do not, especially if it is forced on them and they see little or no return from it. The Covid pandemic may have helped a little, people have had a taste of a restricted lifestyle, industries and economies have seen a contraction but there has been no measurable impact on CO2, so just how much sacrifice will it take?
Despite the apparent solid concensus, significant sectors of the press and politics will ‘change horses’ if it becomes provident to do so, it is therefore important to continue to present counter-arguments even if they gain no immediate attention – their day may yet come.
Rud ==> From Frank Fischer (2019) Knowledge politics and post-truth in climate denial:on the social construction of alternative facts, Critical Policy Studies, 13:2, 133-152, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2019.1602067
“In this understanding,science not does not stand alone; rather, it is part of what co-production calls ‘truth regimes’ that involve sets of norms and institutions constructed by the state. An idea advanced earlier by Foucault (1991), a society’s regime of truth constitutes its ‘general politics of truth,’ which specifies the kinds of discourses that are accepted and turned into carriers of what is taken to be truth, the mechanisms that enable people to differentiate true from false claims, the ways in which truth claims are legitimated and sanctioned, the procedures and techniques given value in the quest of truth, and the standing of those who are responsible for declaring what counts as truth (Rabinow 1991). As such, knowledge produced by the science of a truth regime is seen to carry particular meanings of the objects of investigations and therefore has a built-in social bias, including possible political intentions behind the construction of the object.”
IPCC produces a “truth regime” that enforces adherence to both a particular interpretation of “facts” and especially to the proscribed policy solutions to the created/imagined problem.