Freeman Dyson blows up global warming alarmism

Freeman Dyson is one of the most highly-regarded physicists in the world. Wikipedia introduces its entry on him thus:

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism and a proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

He was one of the first scientific figures to recognize that environmentalism had become a religion in its own right:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

From "Environmentalist religion explained."

In 2011, The Independent published, "Letters to a heretic: An email conversation with climate change sceptic Professor Freeman Dyson."

World-renowned physicist Professor Freeman Dyson has been described as a 'force-of-nature intellect'. He's also one of the world's foremost climate change sceptics. In this email exchange, our science editor, Steve Connor, asks the Princeton scholar why he's one of the few true intellectuals to be so dismissive of the global-warming consensus.

In the interview, after concise explanation of why climate modeling is useful but not determinative:

My impression is that the experts are deluded because they have been studying the details of climate models for 30 years and they come to believe the models are real. After 30 years they lose the ability to think outside the models. 

Read the whole thing.

The Wednesday Library

Oh, just like every election, then: Dems Will Have To Lie About Their Agenda To Win, Poll Shows. Man, when even Harvard says this, you know you've got a problem.

James Hansen : Bernie Is Killing People In India

James Hansen is the originator of the infamous double hockeystick climate graph which has been found (including in courts) to have been deliberately falsified by Hansen. So when Bernie has lost Hansen, well ... .

Because, as Lenin said, the only objective of socialism is communism. An economic lesson worth remembering: Communism was pretty terrible. And the lesson?

A recent JP Morgan report attempted to determine how democratic socialism works in the real world. But the author ran into a problem:

With Nordic countries firmly rooted in capitalism and free markets, if I wanted to find examples of democratic socialism in practice, I’d have to look elsewhere.  … I couldn’t find any country that ticked all these democratic socialist boxes, but I did find one that came close: Argentina, which has defaulted 7 times since its independence in 1816, which has seen the largest relative standard of living decline in the world since 1900, and which is on the brink of political and economic chaos again in 2019. Here my journey ended, halfway around the world from Scandinavia where it began.  A real-life proof of concept for a successful democratic socialist society, like the Lost City of Atlantis, has yet to be found.

Dems: All your land are belong to us. The Democrats' Plan To Nationalize Land, Democratic Socialism In Action. The Democrats want to massively "gobble up private land (read: nationalize) and put it under government ownership, management, and political control." Because they hate the very idea of private property.

What Nietzsche had to say about Greta Thunberg. And I have to say, he nailed it. Wherein we also learn that, "The Thunberg phenomenon is apocalyptic religion for rich whites."

Where have we seen her before department. Ah, that's right. Here:

And yes, the Nazis were socialists to the core, from their beginning. 

But when Democrats do it, it's different. So shut up. Let's get real: Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in US elections. 

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

Do you have an IRA? Take heed! Actions To Take With Your IRA Before It's Too Late. From Forbes, and completely non-political.

To which one can only say, "Duh!": Australia PM adviser says climate change is 'UN-led ruse to establish new world order'. Tony Abbott's business adviser says global warming a fallacy supported by United Nations to 'create a new authoritarian world order under its control'

This is the truth, and they hate that, too. 

And finally:

Tuesday Time - let's talk about religion

There is no such thing as no religion. There is only a choice of which one. For in Europe, Christianity has been Routed by liberalism, and it is not an improvement.

As I have stated for many years, environmentalism is a religion in the full sense of the word, based on a Judeo-Christian template. It has now moved through apocalypticism to millenarianism, "the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed." Just read, "How to Join the Global Youth Climate Strike."

“September 20 is only the beginning,” reads the event’s website. “We must carry this energy to the 2020 elections, and beyond to ensure real, bold action is taken to address the climate crises. This is history in the making, and it’s time we take back the narrative to save our futures.”

More? Greta Thunberg's angry, teary appearance at the UN Climate Summit, where she yelled at the assembly and bluntly threatened,

'Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up and change is coming whether you like it or not,' she said to uproarious applause. 

That's pure millenarianism, folks. But really, isn't is already time to call "Enough with the Adolescent Human Shields"?

Finally, though, more and more ordinary people are coming to realize that climate science and climate alarmism are a con game, nothing but an enormous money grab. .

And no, the science is not settled: ‘Propaganda’: Top MIT climate scientist trashes ‘97% consensus’ claim -- in fact, the "consensus" on human-caused global warming is ... wait for it!  -- about one percent. 

So, the science is not settled. But its money stream is, and that's what counts. Climate Science’s Myth-Buster - It’s time to be scientific about global warming, says climatologist Judith Curry.

Dr. Curry "is a true climatologist."

She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently. “Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible,” she says. Do you mean that global warming isn’t real? I ask. “There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes,” she says. “The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”

And then some religions become cults. And right now, Greta Thunberg is a cultic center.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/04/22/the-cult-of-greta-thunberg/

https://quillette.com/2019/04/23/self-harm-versus-the-greater-good-greta-thunberg-and-child-activism/

https://spectator.us/problem-greta-thunberg-sea-crossings/

Children's crusades medieval or modern do not end well.

And by the way, Dr Mark Imisides, an industrial chemist, explains why carbon dioxide cannot warm the oceans or cause melting of icecaps.

The closing smile:

Gimme that Old New- Time Religion

Noted Physicist Says Multiverse Theory Of Creation Is Religion, Not Science

The very existence of the universe is so vexing to comprehend (see "anthropic principle") unless one posits a creator thereof, that determined atheists have come up with many ways to avoid a deity. That there are countless billions of universes, all existing apart from one another, is one proposition. Our universe only appears inexplicable without a creator because it is the only universe we apprehend. But universes are actually common and ours is just one of them; the rest are different and not anthropic at all. So they say.

But there is zero scientific evidence for the existence of any other universes. I remember reading an article some time ago by a physics professor of the University of Toronto, who said she believes that multiverses are real, but said it was time for scientists to state plainly that there was no evidence of them.

But wait! It's all unreal anyway! New Technology Makes It Plausible the World Is a Simulation. But that means the technology is only simulated, too, amirite?

But let's move on to The Most Post-Christian Cities in America: 2019

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds, who commented,

Six of America’s 10 most “post-Christian cities” are in New England, once the “City on a Hill” of the Puritans, and all 10 are in deep blue states, according to The Barna Group’s latest annual survey results for the top 100.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, seven of the 10 least post-Christian are in the states of the old Confederacy or border states that were culturally attached to the South. All of those, of course, are today either mostly or deeply red.

Which leads me to politics as religion, and who best to explain that (unintentionally) but Piers Morgan?

Piers, being from across the pond, might want to explain just what it is about Europeans that makes them so, well, enduringly European: Europe Considers The Nazi Idea Of Requiring Jewish Businesses To Identify Themselves On Labels. I only slightly paraphrase Goerthe: Inside the breast of every European beats the heart of a barbarian.

Speaking of new-time religion and Europeans, let's turn to environmentalism, the hip religion for people who want other people to make huge sacrifices in the way they live, but not themselves because hypocrisy, it turns out, is a status symbol among the environmentally woke.

And who knew that religious environmentalism (there is no other kind, though) is a religion of human sacrifice? Well, thousands and thousands of sacrificed Europeans did, and some may have figured out right before they died what altar they were being sacrificed on, because Environmentalists Killed More Europeans Than Islamic Terrorists Did.

A 2003 heat wave killed 15,000 people in France. And, in response, the authorities have deployed Chalex, a database of vulnerable people who will get a call offering them cooling advice.

The advice consists of taking cold showers and sticking their feet in saucepans of cold water.

Desperate Frenchmen trying to get into any body of water they can have led to a 30% rise in drownings. The dozens of people dead are casualties of the environmentalist hatred of air conditioners.

Only 5% of French households have air conditioning. Even in response to the crisis, the authorities are only deploying temporary air conditioning to kindergartens.

The 2003 heat wave killed 7,000 people in Germany. And, today, only 3% of German households have air conditioning. Germany’s Ministry of the Environment refused to back air conditioning as a response to global warming. 

Ending air conditioning in America has long been a goal of the American environmentalist Left, to which I say, Stop using air conditioning? Washington first! But that'll never happen.

The invention of global warming

A peer-reviewed Study Finds Temperature Adjustments Account For ‘Nearly All Of The Warming’ In Climate Data.

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.

Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.

The text of the full study may be read here. Its conclusion  is,

In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical GAST data are quantified. While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.

That was accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

As a result, this research sought to validate the current estimates of GAST using the best available relevant data. This included the best documented and understood data sets from the U.S. and elsewhere as well as global data from satellites that provide far more extensive global coverage and are not contaminated by bad siting and urbanization impacts. Satellite data integrity also benefits from having cross checks between UAH and RSS as well as with Balloon data.

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years
have been the warmest ever –despite current claims of record setting warming.

Finally, since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings.

Remember that an IPCC Former Chair Admits It's All About the Money.

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.

But I wrote that years ago in, "Environmentalist religion explained:"

But there is more than mere religiousity at work in religious environmentalism. H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." And that is the true foundation of environmentalism today: the desire of its gurus to regulate the way others live. Monbiot again:

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties.

Freeman Dyson wrote, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step from environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

IPCC Former Chair Admits It's All About the Money

Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.

Then there's this: "Diminishing solar activity may bring new Ice Age by 2030"

A lot more about that here: "What Happened to Spot? A Solar Update"

Solar image on May 31 of this year. Fewer sunspots mean a colder Earth.
This has been tracked going back hundreds of years.

The “Little Ice Age” was actually a significantly extended cool period lasting several centuries, and no less than FOUR extended minima occurred during its “tenure.” These include, in order, the Wolf, the Spörer, the Maunder, and the Dalton minima. These extended minima were not all of the same “depth,” in that the minimum numbers of sunspots were not the same across all of them — the Maunder was far deeper than the rest — but there are indications that we are hitting numbers in the range of the Dalton already.

Note that, during the Maunder Minimum, sunspots became so rare that a grand total of only ~50 were observed over 28 years — this corresponds roughly to two and a half solar cycles. In a “normal” cycle, we would expect to see around 50,000 sunspots in that same timeframe, some THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE MORE than were observed during the Maunder Minimum. Entire month spans went by with NO sunspots. Also understand that, when sunspots resumed, they did not pick up mid-cycle, despite the fractional-cycle timeframe; the extended minimum was, effectively, a reset.

I find it impossible to believe that the sophisticated computer global-warming models do not account at all for solar activity or for the increased cosmic-ray bombardments the Earth receives during solar minimums (because decreased solar strength means a weaker solar "wind" passing our planet). Not, surely it just can't be that global-warming "science" pays no attention at all to that fusion reactor 93 million miles away and what effect its output could have on the actual climate, not the modeled one.

But when all you want is Other People's Money, why bother with, you know, actual empirical data when GIGO works even better?

But moving on: "The Paris Climate Deal Was A 'Fraud' And A 'Sham' ... Until Trump Decided To Ditch It." It is amazing how many global-warming advocates fiercely opposed the Paris Accords - until Trump ditched it. Now we are all going to die!

Yet it was only a little more than a year ago that climate scientists and environmentalists were viciously attacking the Paris agreement itself. The goals were too low to make a difference. There was nothing binding any of the signatories to live up to their promises, and no enforcement mechanism if they didn't. It just kicked the can down the road.

James Hansen, the undisputed hero of the climate-change movement, called the Paris deal "a fraud really, a fake. … It's just worthless words. There is no action, just promises."

A joint letter signed by nearly a dozen top climate scientists said the agreement suffered "deadly flaws lying just beneath its veneer of success." These scientists complained that the agreement could actually be counterproductive, since it gave the impression that global warming was being dealt with when in fact it wasn't.

A study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Policy said that even if every country lived up to its CO2 emission reduction promises through 2030, the Paris deal would "likely reduce global temperature rise about 0.17°C in 2100."

And the WSJ: Trump Skips Climate Church -- Paris exists to provide an imprimatur to what politicians would do anyway. Funny about that "climate church" thing, since environmentalism long ago became a religion in its own right.

We are being played, people. But fortunately, not everyone is being rolled: MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: Believing CO2 controls the climate ‘is pretty close to believing in magic’

Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

The accumulation of false and/or misleading claims is often referred to as the ‘overwhelming evidence’ for forthcoming catastrophe. Without these claims, one might legitimately ask whether there is any evidence at all.

And just this year: 80 Graphs From 58 New (2017) Papers Invalidate Claims Of Unprecedented Global-Scale Modern Warming 

Last year there were at least 60 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals demonstrating that  Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable.

Just within the last 5 months,  58 more papers and 80 new graphs have been published that continue to undermine the popularized conception of a slowly cooling Earth temperature history followed by a dramatic hockey-stick-shaped uptick, or an especially unusual global-scale warming during modern times.

  

Yes, some regions of the Earth have been warming in recent decades or at some point in the last 100 years.  Some regions have been cooling for decades at a time.  And many regions have shown no significant net changes or trends in either direction relative to the last few hundred to thousands of years.

Like this chart of European summer temperatures over the last 2,000 years:

So what is the point of all this? As the IPCC's Edehofer said, We just want your money.

The whole climate-change enterprise is simply scientific prostitution.

Global-Warming Alarmists and their god of the Gaps

Global-Warming Alarmists, You're Doing It Wrong - Bloomberg View: 

The arguments about global warming too often sound more like theology than science. Oh, the word “science” gets thrown around a great deal, but it's cited as a sacred authority, not a fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly toward the truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction. I cannot count the number of times someone has told me that they believe in “the science,” as if that were the name of some omniscient god who had delivered us final answers written in stone. For those people, there can be only two categories in the debate: believers and unbelievers. Apostles and heretics.

It's nice to see people are finally awakening to what I pointed out (and I admit I was not the first) in my 2008 post, "Environmentalist religion explained." 

And there is this comment (not mine) I found elsewhere: 

It's interesting that "Climate Change" has become for the left just what the "enlightened" use to accuse theists for having - a "God of the gaps" ... no matter the empirical data, it is caused by "climate change".

Climate policy is not about climate

But that is no surprise to those of us who have studied Global Warmism for years. What is surprising is that a senior United Nations climate-policy official confirms it bluntly.

Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare

Have doubts? Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.

But he is not the first of his team to admit this. At a 2015 news conference in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.

As I wrote years ago,

H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." And that is the true foundation of environmentalism today: the desire of its gurus to regulate the way others live. Monbiot again:

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties.

Freeman Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step for environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live.

That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

Because it's religion for the Left and mere science for the Right

Study: Global warming skeptics know more about climate science

Are global warming skeptics simply ignorant about climate science?

Not so, says a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan. He finds that skeptics score about the same (in fact slightly better) on climate science questions.

The study asked 2,000 respondents nine questions about where they thought scientists stand on climate science.

On average, skeptics got about 4.5 questions correct, whereas manmade warming believers got about 4 questions right. ...

 The study’s author, Kahan, also says that the global warming debate has become so politically polarized that people pick their side based on politics rather than what they know about science.   

And all this, especially that last excerpted paragraph,  will make a lot more sense once you read my 2008 essay, "Environmentalist religion explained," in which I pointed out that,

[Physicist Freeman] Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. 

Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

And now, just this week, voila! "U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare"

The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man's stewardship of the environment. But we know that's not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.

At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. 

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Update: Thomas Sowell, "Global Warming Hysteria Has Problem: It Doesn't Fit With Facts"

And here is a prime example of such hysteria: "Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted." "Gloom! Depair! And agony on me! Deep dark depression! Excessive misery!"

Understand that absolutely no one of the global-warming hysteria movement, nay not even them, has ever said that all the ice on the earth will melt. There is not one climatology study that makes such a prediction, even at their funding-grubbing alarmist worst.

Why not, "What the earth would look like if all the liquid water froze?" After all, only 40 years ago were were supposed to be headed for a new ice age.

 

Were Oklahoma tornadoes caused by global cooling?

Back in 1975, scientists blamed the previous year's huge tornado outbreak on global cooling.

The entire scanned article is at the link, but here is the key part:

Fortunately, in our more enlightened age, we know that the problem today is neither global cooling nor global warming, but the fact the the climate is not granite stable. Yes, "climate change" is what messes up our world. 

As I posted in 2007, 

I've always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis. For the earth will either get warmer or cooler, but it definitely won't stay the same. 

A commenter on the FB page where I found the scans, above, said,

It's interesting that "Climate Change" has become for the left just what the "enlightened" use to accuse theists for having - a "God of the gaps" ... no matter the empirical data, it is caused by "climate change".

Which caused me to comment there a link to my 2008 post, "Environmentalist religion explained," in which I picked up and ran with renowned physicist Freeman Dyson's observation:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."] ...

My pickup theme was this:

The common themes of both scriptural Judaism and Christianity deal with deity, the natural world (existing first in a purity state), a corruption of the purity state (Augustine: "fall from grace,"), redemption and liberation/salvation. Then follows paradise. A prominent, though not universal, strain in both Judaism and Christianity is a looming apocalypse that in potential or in fact destroys enormous swaths of humanity.

Modern environmentalism has all these elements, with an emphasis on apocalypticism. I'll examine these religious elements in turn. 

Read the whole thing!

Professor Piven Gets Her 15 Minutes

So Sociology is finally having its 15 minutes of fame. Frances Fox Piven in The Nation laments the lack of revolutionary spirit in the current age. Where ARE those cannon fodder proletariat anyway.

The problem of how to bring people together is sometimes made easier by government service centers, as when in the 1960s poor mothers gathered in crowded welfare centers or when the jobless congregated in unemployment centers.

Could it be that maybe that’s not the droids we’re looking for? But wait, there’s more.

Second, before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. (Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by naming themselves "mothers" instead of "recipients," although they were unlucky in doing so at a time when motherhood was losing prestige.) Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.

Oh, yes, anger. That’s THE ingredient for the Revolution (along with Draino and Prell). After all, that’s been the scenario when Capitalism replaced the Agrarian Modes of Production. Marx and Engels Speak!

But Professors Altman and Taranto dissent and voice a distinct opinion (okay, Taranto is not REALLY a professor—in fact he did not finish college but he IS the opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal and that’s LIKE being a professor since he’s in a position where he doesn’t care if we don’t like him or not—is that like tenure?).

The uproar Frances created generated some angry attacks—apparently people consider HER to be a good target for THEIR anger! This was met by the Four Riders of the American Sociological Association (REAL Professors) professing THEIR support of their fallen angel and returning fire at those ANGRY under educated masses (the Proletariat?). In short, the academic world is turning out to do what they do best—hiss.

This is so much fun! It’s like being back in Gradual School! I get to watch really cool guys and chicks (er, professors) discussing REALLY high level stuff like Marx and Engels. They are oh so hip and cool. When I grow up, I wanna be a sociologist just like them! Still to this day, I wanna be a sociologist, too.



We could pretend its 1979 when all the cool professors were ex SDSers who had made it. And THEY can give over a really powerful sermon on the Gospels of Marx and Engels. REALLY worth your time and they can use the FTE's.

In seminar, the professors sit poised on the divan while we students merit the floor at their feet. Gracefully, Frances (it's her seminar) gives over the Truth of THE Manifesto according to Karl and Fred.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. [They ALWAYS add the italics and bold print when they lean forward to preach their points!]

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

So, we learn the Holy Word that The Revolution comes when members of the Bourgeoisie, like Prometheus, leave their Towers to teach the masses the means and modes of revolutionary technologies. After all, the Proletariat are not up to learning these tools themselves being unemployed factory workers and all.

But, wait! There’s danger in the fields. The wolves run wild in the cold Russian Winter Nights chasing lone horse drawn sleds filled with terrified children and their mothers where Grandmothers leap from sleds to be eaten to save the precious little ones from certain death! Grandma! Don't do it!

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

Frances leans forward and whispers that even though a massive coagulation of American humanity is coalescing about Tea Rooms—they are NOT the Revolutionary Ones. They are reactionary POSERS out to LOOK like a Revolutionary Class, aware of itself acting for its own self interest. Oh no! These are the ones trying to roll back the times to some Ancient Order—to a Halcyon Age when White Men gathered to throw off the tyranny of a King, another White Man. Yes—they want to bring back the ancient glory of the Constitution.

But, do not trust them, my pretties.

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

So this cannot BE those frequenters of Tea Rooms. No. The Revolution MUST be violent. That’s what our studies have shown. And, we KNOW.

At this point, the visiting professor, who looks real cool with his tweed jacket, leather elbow patches, thick brown tortoise shell glasses rimmed by his thin balding brown hair, bespeaks from his reclined place on the divan.

"But, Frances," he purrs. "Just what DO these proletariat look like? I mean, is it not an empirical question? Just what is the spark that sets this off? After all, Frances, would not one person’s Revolutionary be another person’s Reactionary? Would we even recognize what they look like? Are they like us just poor and unemployed or do they not bathe and reek of the odiousness of labor, street effluvia, and body odor? What would Frederick Engels say to get this Revolution happening?"

Good question and one that was asked to Frederick Engels over a century ago. His response is classic. But first some background.

The questioner was Isaac Hourwich, an economist and a jurist from Russia who taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia and periodically was an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He was also my great grandfather. [I come from several generations of Gentle Marxists and Marxettes.] He had been a rabble rousing Revolutionary in The Old Country and was sent to Siberia for the Cause. His sister translated the Manifesto into Russian for its first edition there. So, the family was pretty Red. His daughter told me about the wolves. When I teach the Manifesto, I always apologize on her behalf—my fault. I also blame Global Warming.

Anyway, Isaac wrote to Fred in 1893 to see if Fred could say a few things to encourage the Serfs of Russia to rise up against their Oppressors. Fred’s words to Izzie ring true still.

London, 27 May 1893
122 Regent's Park Road, NW

Dr. Isaac A. Hourwich

Dear Sir,

Many thanks for your interesting study on the Economics of the Russian Village, which I read, I hope, not without profit.

As to the burning questions of the Russian revolutionary movement, the part which the peasantry may be effected to take in it, these are subjects on which I could not conscientiously state an opinion for publication without previously studying over again the whole subject and completing my very imperfect knowledge of the facts of the case by bringing it up to date. But for that I am sorry to say I have not at present the time. And then, I have every reason to doubt whether such a public statement by me would have the effect you expect of it.

I know from my own experience of 1849-52 how unavoidably a political emigration splits itself up into a number of divergent factions, so long as the mother-country remains quiet. The burning desire to act, face to face with the impossibility of doing anything effective, causes in many intelligent and energetic heads an over active mental speculation, an attempt at discovering or inventing new and almost miraculous means of action.

The word of an outsider would have but a trifling, and at best passing effect. If you have followed the Russian emigration literature of the last decade, you will yourself know how, for instance, passages from Marx's writings and correspon¬dence have been interpreted in the most contradictory ways, exactly as if they had been texts from the Classics or from the New Testament, by various sections of Russian emigrants.

Whatever I might say on the subject you mention, would probably share the same fate, if any attention was paid to it. And so from all these various reasons, I think it best for all whom it may concern, including myself, to abstain.

Yours very truly,
F. Engels

[Source: Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishing Group Corp, 2004) Vol. 50 pp. 144-45.]

Now THIS is how a true Marxist Scholar SHOULD address the issues of the popular uprising in America:

Yo, Dude (or, Dudette as the case may be); I’ve haven’t the FOGGIEST notion of how this is playing out, who the players REALLY are; and I am the very LAST person on earth to ask about such matters.

Are Tea Room attendees the formation of the Proletariat revolutionary force or not? Are the twenty-first century technologies associated with the information the New Mode of Production that the Prophet and his Priest foretold in their visions? There are some social scientists who say yes, some say no, and eventually, when the facts are in, we'll all know a portion of the explained variance. It is, after all, an empirical question.

So, Frances, go back and study your sources and quit posing. You are far too established and Bourgeois to be manning the picket lines—you’ll have to give up your pension. As a sociologist, you may have something to offer but only after the facts are in. That's the problem with science. You have to wait until events have unfolded to assess whether or not your hypotheses are correct. As attractive as it is, the lecturn is not a bully pulpit.

No money in studying natural causes

Natural causes of global warming, that is.Writes Roy Spencer, Ph.D, climatologist and former NASA scientist,

Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that the only way they can get their computerized climate models to produce the observed warming is with anthropogenic (human-caused) pollution. But they’re not going to find something if they don’t search for it. More than one scientist has asked me, “What else COULD it be?” Well, the answer to that takes a little digging… and as I show, one doesn’t have to dig very far.

Read the whole thing. And in, "An Expensive Urban Legend," he concludes,

If you submit a research proposal to look for alternative explanations for global warming (say, natural climate cycles), it is virtually guaranteed you will not get funded. Is it any wonder that scientists who are required to accept the current scientific orthodoxy in order to receive continued funding, then later agree with that orthodoxy when surveyed? Well, duh.

Climate science is more heavily politicized than any area of inquiry. As I explained before, global warming is a religion of political absolutism much more than a supported scientific theory.

Global warming religion

Australian geologist Ian Plimer says that global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. ...

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites. ...

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth's climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.

Plimer is not the first to observe that environmentalism is a religion rather than a science, nor even the first scientist to say so. No less a physicist than Freeman Dyson says so, too.

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [from, "The Question of Global Warming."]

Although, if you read the article, Dyson somewhat approves of the religiosity of environmentalism. Plimer's other point, that "global warming" conveniently provides governments with an "issue that causes public anxiety" is also well taken. As I wrote in March ("Crisis is the health of the state") and July ("Emergency driven central planning"), the most common feature of Western governments today, especially that of the United States, is the invention of crises or the exploitation of real ones to solidify government's control and regimentation of the lives of the people.

This is what is really behind religious environmentalism. H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." And that is the true foundation of environmentalism today: the desire of its gurus to regulate the way others live. British editorialist George Monbiot wrote:

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties.

Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step for environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Update: Don Blankenship writes, "... 'global warming' is neither a reality nor a religion. It is instead a "superstition." ... A "superstition" is a fear founded on irrational feelings and marked by credulity -- i.e. a willingness to believe in the improbable or the marvelous. "

Also, see, "British Judge Sees Belief in Global Warming as Religion."

Torture still endorsed by US government

Geologist Professor Ian Plimer, describing the computer models used by global warming alarmists:

‘I’m a natural scientist ... collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.’

Meanwhile, two US scientists have explained the severe shortcomings of computer climate models.

Gary Strand, a software engineer at the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), admitted climate model software “doesn't meet the best standards available” in a comment he posted on the website Climate Audit.

“As a software engineer, I know that climate model software doesn't meet the best standards available. We've made quite a lot of progress, but we've still quite a ways to go,” Strand wrote on July 5, 2009, according to the website WattsUpWithThat.com.

Strand's candid admission promoted WattsUpWithThat's skeptical Meteorologist Anthony Watts to ask the following question:

“Do we really want Congress to make trillion dollar tax decisions today based on 'software [that] doesn't meet the best standards available?'”

Meteorologist Watts also critiqued the current climate models, noting, “NASA GISS model E written on some of the worst FORTRAN coding ever seen is a challenge to even get running. NASA GISTEMP is even worse.

Another Plimer quote:

Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.

See my own post, "Environmentalist religion explained." As I wrote then, it's appropriate to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Update: What about 55 million years ago?

A runaway spurt of global warming 55 million years ago turned Earth into a hothouse but how this happened remains worryingly unclear, scientists said on Monday.
Previous research into this period, called the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, estimates the planet's surface temperature blasted upwards by between five and nine degrees Celsius (nine and 16.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in just a few thousand years.

The Arctic Ocean warmed to 23 C (73 F), or about the temperature of a lukewarm bath.

How PETM happened is unclear but climatologists are eager to find out, as this could shed light on aspects of global warming today.

I blame the cave men. Don't try to object that there were no cave men 55 million years ago. Doesn't matter. It's still humans' fault.

Oh, and did you know that the earth has had polar ice caps for only about 20 percent of its age? "Normal" temps, on geological scale, are those too warm to support polar ice.

All bow to Mother Gaia

On Earth Day 2009, I invite everyone to read my long essay about how environmentalism long ago became a religion in its own right and what is its religious template: "Environmentalist religion explained."

Who says so? Well, not just me. Freeman Dyson says so, too.

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

A teaser from my essay:

Modern environmentalism was born in the West, whose cultural heritage and common languages are steeped through and through in Christian tradition, which was itself a daughter of Judaism.

The common themes of both scriptural Judaism and Christianity deal with deity, the natural world (existing first in a purity state), a corruption of the purity state (Augustine: "fall from grace,"), redemption and liberation/salvation. Then follows paradise. A prominent, though not universal, strain in both Judaism and Christianity is a looming apocalypse that in potential or in fact destroys enormous swaths of humanity.

Modern environmentalism has all these elements, with an emphasis on apocalypticism. I'll examine these religious elements in turn.

So, go read!

Global warmingism religion

Michael Barone on the administration's budget component of carbon cap-and-trade. "It would take some $600 billion out of the private sector economy in order to avoid an environmental crisis that is supposed to arrive in -- oh, some time around 2055."

We are dealing here with something more like religion and less like science. We are told that all argument about global warming must end. We must have faith! But it is religion that asks us to have faith; science presents us with theories that can be tested by observation and produce replicable results -- and the results for 2055 aren't in.

We are told that we must repent of our misdeeds, for driving SUVs or (unless you're Al Gore or a Hollywood liberal) flying in private jets. And we are told that we must atone for our sins, by paying more for every bit of energy we use and remembering to recycle.

It is religion that asks for repentance and offers rituals for atonement; science suggests ways we can adapt and cope with change. It makes sense to understand how the physical environment may be damaged by changes in climate and to prepare for repairs that may be needed, and we are already doing that. It makes no sense to cripple a struggling economy in order to prevent damage that may or may not occur many years from now.

I've said it before, and I'll keep on saying it. Environmentalism long ago became a religion in its own right. Environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step for environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

Religious environmentalism & California's decline

In a wide-ranging essay at newgeography.com, Joel Kotkin writes in, "Death of the California Dream,"

Green politics came early to California and for understandable reasons: protecting the resources and beauty of the nation's loveliest landscapes. Yet in recent years, the green agenda has expanded well beyond that of the old conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt, who battled to preserve wilderness but also cared deeply about boosting productivity and living standards for the working classes. In contrast, the modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a "cancer" that needs to be contained. By their very nature, the greens tend to regard growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.

You can see the effects of the gentry's green politics up close in places like the Salinas Valley, a lovely agricultural region south of San Jose. As community leaders there have tried to construct policies to create new higher-wage jobs in the area (a project on which I've worked as a consultant), local progressives — largely wealthy people living on the Monterey coast — have opposed, for example, the expansion of wineries that might bring new jobs to a predominantly Latino area with persistent double-digit unemployment. As one winegrower told me last year: "They don't want a facility that interferes with their viewshed." For such people, the crusade against global warming makes a convenient foil in arguing against anything that might bring industrial or any other kind of middle-wage growth to the state. Greens here often speak movingly about the earth — but also about their personal redemption. They have engaged a legal and regulatory process that provides the wealthy and their progeny an opportunity to act out their desire to "make a difference" — often without real concern for the outcome. Environmentalism becomes a theater in which the privileged act out their narcissism.

I long ago explained how environmentalism morphed into an actual religion in its own right (not an original idea with me, but I did explain the template better than anyone else, I think); see "Environmentalist religion explained."

What Kotkin's essay illustrates is the idolatrous nature of environmentalism. In the California fringe of the movement, the ultimate end of idolatry has matured. The earth itself, Gaia, has been replaced as idol-in-chief with that which all idols are finally replaced: the self. All idolatry is projection of self worship onto another object, but it never lasts. The self demands an unmasking. Hence, as Kotkin inadvertently explains, environmentalism is simply the latest way by which self worship is carried out. However, God is not mocked.

Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me? Let them proclaim it, let them declare and set it forth before me. Who has announced from of old the things to come? Let them tell us what is yet to be. Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one.

All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit; their witnesses neither see nor know. And so they will be put to shame. Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good? Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame; the artisans too are merely human. Let them all assemble, let them stand up; they shall be terrified, they shall all be put to shame. ...

They do not know, nor do they comprehend; for their eyes are shut, so that they cannot see, and their minds as well, so that they cannot understand. No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment... .

Is it any coincidence that the decline of California coincides with, among other trends, the idolatrous narcissism of California elites? I think not.