Skepticus Maximus

In the comments section of the article below on the DT website, someone called Skepticus Maximus said (and it includes some really amazing figures):

I read a (re-purposed) quote the other day re the climate alarmist conspiracy which went something along the lines of “....if someone repeats something loud enough, long enough and often enough, sooner or later the masses will accept it as fact...” – And this is precisely what has happened re AGW, esp with the mass media censure of any real balanced debate. Gormless Brown, Nic Sarkastic, Al Bore and all those other gullible idiots have either, (at best), picked up the undetermined fag end of an issue several years ago and decided to run with and champion the liberal do-gooder / “save the planet” element to win public vote, with save drowning polar bear approbation. As the politicos naively thought this was an open and shut case (and didn’t bother to acid test the motivations (let alone data) of ego-maniacal eco “experts” (and in which many science “experts” are often ego-nuts with esteem issues, bent on proving themselves right and being “cleverer” than their peers in my experience), who are gravy-train grant funded precisely to seek out confirmation bias to support the empathised political agenda / hand that feeds).

Or, at worst, (just as likely), the political elite didn’t even care about the “inconvenient truth” of this being emperor’s new clothes, but knew it was yet another of those golden, once-a-decade opportunities to distract and dupe the proletariat whilst achieving command and control with addition direct and stealth taxation and power gain.

A concept covered in depth in Naomi Klein’s interesting, (but flawed, rather verbose (could’ve been a mag article) and also a bit too militant left-wing for my liking, “Shock Doctrine” book – which can be summed up nicely (via someone else’s’ review words) in one para as:- `...a book about shock. About how countries are shocked - by wars, terror attacks, coups d'etat and natural disasters . And then they are shocked again - by corporations and politicians who exploit their fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy. And then how people who dare to resist these shock politics are, if necessary, shocked for a third time - by laws, police soldiers and prison officers...'

But it’s a perfect analogy. Climate Change is an “unnatural disaster” now all of a sudden. Mankind controls the planet, such is our scientific pre-eminence (despite not even yet being able to cure the common cold). So just drop the following into the government controlled left wing news media in regular doses:- “...the earth is melting. FACT. Another 3 degrees (which doesn’t sound much given most of the sheep listening turn their car AC up and down by double that) and London & NY WILL be underwater and everywhere else will be desert – FACT. It’s all down to man – FACT (here’s a picture of a chimney belching out smoke – you’ve all seen a chimney right?, and there were four days of relatively warm weather in June right?, so it must be true. FACT). Plus here’s a list of 1,000 scientists you’ve never heard of (all left of centre sympathisers on research grants), who say it must be so. So it must be so. FACT – though you’ll never get to hear from the other 1,000 scientists with a neutral or opposing view as we and their peers will see to it they never get print or air time (apart from the odd loon we’ll roll out to ridicule and prove a point every now and then). And, before you know it, the earth is flat again! – FACT. And you, cowering, fearful, guilty and responsible children of the apocalypse, will have to pay for it in extra taxes to file down those sharp corners, revert to a mediaeval lifestyle for five generations and also keep schtum re any creeping doubt or slight dissent for fear of public ridicule, being made a social pariah or just plain fines or good old arrest for heresy.

What really galls me, is the machiavellian deviousness of the AGW acolytes. To the extent, JUST like religious fundamentalism, they are so arrogant, narrow minded and corrupt they don’t want to entertain any balanced debate whatsoever or have an open mind, but seek to crush and ridicule any opposition to their gravy train and eco-jihad by resorting to spoiler tactics and outright lying.

It’s also rather pathetic that in the process of brainwashing themselves and the mass public, CO2 has been turned into some metaphor for smog, soot - practically coal itself - being emitted from cars, planes and even our mouths. When in fact it is an invisible, tasteless, odourless, non toxic gas found naturally in the atmosphere which plants and trees feed on. But it has been wrapped up with blurred concepts of smoke, dirt, lethal carbon monoxide, rubbish, toxic pollutants et al. Something most AGW fanatics tend to forget when happily drinking fizzy water, beer, coke et al whilst enjoying their cold hemp and gravel salad by torchlight.

Real pollution by man and damage to the environment, de-forestation, destruction of natural habitat, accelerated extinction of species, using the oceans as a waste bin, food chain and ecology bastardisation et al, is not in debate, is not acceptable and needs to be dealt with, it’s a fact. That the planet has warmed is also not in debate. It does this, and cools down, all by itself on a regular basis – and has done, for millions of years. That’s also a FACT. (Though the AGW posse like to gloss over the fact is was rather a lot warmer, for a LONG time, only a 1,000 years ago in the mediaeval warm period, when the Vikings had settlements on grass meadows in Greenland, and to the best of my knowledge, they didn’t get there by EasyJet). But what should be in debate is that it is NOT a FACT that man-made C02 is causing any appreciable global warming or climate change. It’s a hypothesis, nothing more, and a pretty dubious one at that, with lots of shaky data obtained and massaged by nefarious means into shock and awe graphs to serve a political purpose.

Here’s a REAL fact to end with, which even the AGW lobby can’t dispute (well, unless they start providing “evidence” that the 78% nitrogen in the atmosphere is produced from toasters).

• Man made carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere each year – 28.5 billion tons p.a. - Sounds quite a lot.....until....
• Natural (plants, volcanoes, hot springs, oceans, animals et al) C02 emissions – 255 billion tons p.a.
• Amount of C02 at natural equilibrium in the atmosphere – 21 trillion tons [Mahdi: Allah Akbar! We humans are so insignificant. Can a drop in the ocean poison the entire ocean?]
• Total volume of atmosphere – 5.5 quadrillion tons
• Percentage of all man-made C02 as additional gas in entire atmosphere – 0.0000518% [Mahdi: Allah!]

And yet the climate alarmist experts can, with a straight face, confidently predict that a “catalyst” such as C02 (already naturally and safely found in volumes 1,000x mankind’s entire annual output) can, by an additional dose of a further 0.0000518% alone, be responsible for a planet-wide increase in temperature of between 20-50% (3-6 degrees over the 15c avg for past 1000 yrs, if alarmists extrapolations are to be believed), and the resulting total cataclysmic change to every known environment (down to the precise amount of sea-level change), in a linear extrapolation for the next 50-100 years, when meteorologists with supercomputers consistently fail to get the local 48hr weather forecast correct on more than 60% of occasions, every single day. But they suddenly have the skill, science and equipment to form a prognosis based literally on the effects of a drop in the ocean.... yeah, right.....

[Absolutely brilliant]