Re: Living in a state of politicized fear.

The Highlander wrote:
On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 08:29:46 +0100, "Douglas Clark"
<dgdclynx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"The Highlander" <micheil@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:a4eh93tff6uvqctiqcvitels5uldosbvoj@xxxxxxxxxx
When I was a youngster, we lived in an atmosphere of confidence and
the knowledge that no matter what happened we could contain its
consequences. We had just fought a second world war and had emerged
somewhat scathed but unbowed. The Empire was still intact and apart
from rumblings from Russia, we were ready to enjoy the fruits of
peace.

From then to now the western world's perceptions have changed
completely. We live in constant fear of new disasters; global warming;
carbon dioxide increasing; dangerous weather patterns; new diseases
from Asia and Africa; inadequate pensions; attacks by religious
madmen, worries about the economy; fears of resources running out;
changes in the make-up of our countries as aliens pour in; threats to
our ways of life; crime; germs; chemicals; additives; pollutants;
worries about nuclear war; cancer; - in other words, everything that
gladdens the heart of a disaster junkie.

Why is this?

For example, I have been doing some serious reading about global
warming and am slowly beginning to think that it is pure nonsense.

Everything I can find that comes from a "reputable" source suggests
that we are in the middle of a natural warming trend which has been in
business since 1850, following a 400 year-long cold spell known as
"The Little Ice Age". Examples are the Great Frost of 1683-4, when the
River Thames froze over and a fair was held on the Thames ice. The
last great frost occurred in 1825 and this engraving below shows
people walking on the River and again holding a fair:

http://www.georgeglazer.com/prints/citytown/thamesfrost.html

I think that there now exists an alliance between science and politics
which is not to our advantage, but very much so to politicians and
scientists. Not all scientists have caved in to political pressure -
Hans Blix, the UN inspector who swore that there were no WMDs in Iraq
and was promptly rubbished as incompetent; Dr. Kelly who told
journalists that the evidence for WMDs was being cooked up by the
Blair government and was leaned on so heavily that he committed
suicide, but people who depend on government grants for their research
are very vulnerable to suggestions that their funding might be cut off
unless they go along with political perceptions.

Who does this benefit? Well, just think about the draconian reactions
to terror attacks like 9/11. The US swarming with beefed-up and new
aggressive police agencies like Homeland Security; British civil
rights essentially tossed out of the window as police and spy agencies
combine to paint a terrifying picture of bombers on every bus; much of
it thwarted by your eagle-eyed government springing to your rescue,
but forced to impose certain rules and remove certain rights for the
protection of the realm. Rights like the right to proceed about your
lawful occasions without let or hindrance by the police; now the
subject of an insane ID system which had cost billions and still isn't
working.

Back to the pensions funds for more money to spend on the problem!

Am I an alarmist? I don't think so; a cynic would be a much better
description. I don't think politicians are wonderful; my view is that
most of them couldn't find their own arse without a map, and whether
Cicero was correct in saying that politicians are not born but
excreted, most seem to be full of what the elder George Bush called
"doo-doo".

Politicians thrive on ordering other people around. It's what the job
is about. Do you walk with the aid of a cane? Some politician will
eventually cram through a law saying that you must register it at the
post office as a potentially deadly weapon.

Does your malt whisky taste peatier than usual? Another five million
will be laid aside to study the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on
peat, while your whisky will be "unavailable" until further notice.
Government-approved scientists will wallow in the trough for as long
as the bounty lasts before emerging to reassure the public that their
peat is safe and they can resume drinking Talisker.

Phew! Saved again by science and our friends at Westminster!

I have taken note that those scientists who claim that global warming
is crap, are also those who have retired and no longer need to worry
about grant renewals. Meanwhile, the media shows pictures of ice-free
Arctic regions with no explanation that such "leads" as they're
called, are and have always been commonplace. Would you believe that
Antarctic ice thickness is increasing? And have you noticed how many
environmental agencies there are, constantly asking for funds to
support their huge staffs?

The fact is that governments now use fear to control their citizens.
Afraid of microwaves giving you cancer? Your government has ordered
microwave oven manufacturers to cure the problem. You are now safe as
never before! Guess who you vote back into power at the next election.

The whole Iraqi scam has been a classical example. Saddam made one
mistake while trying to impress his neighbours with what a big mover
and shaker he was; he spoke about being able to fire rockets into
Europe.

Instant reaction from Europe - "Stop Saddam at any price!" The UN
says, "Hold it - we'll make sure Saddam is telling the truth!"
Inspectors work night and day and find nothing - Saddam cooperates
fully; he is already aware that he went a step too far and could be in
serious trouble. He may have been a ***, but only a guy with lots
of street smarts stays in power as long as he did in a country like
Iraq.

The UN says, "No WMDS!" but Bush isn't listening as he wants to avenge
the attemptyed assassination of his father during the celebrations in
Kuwait after Desert Strom, while Blair sees his chance to be another
Winston Churchill. Saddam pays for his boast with his life; Blair get
tossed out of power for being Bush's poodle and Bush is now being
nailed to the cross as the man who's responsible for the deaths of
3,610 American as of this morning.

9/11 was a different matter. In the US, paranoia is a way of life.
Bush announced that Canada is seething with terrorists, all desperate
for a chance to blow up the United States. Fences are built to keep
out Mexicans and people from unfriendly countries. The US Airforce
runs bombing exercises on the very edge of the International Boundary
between the US and Canada. Festung Amerika (Fortress America) is
established. When the US government shouts "Jump!" 299 million
Americans jump with the promise that the one million radicals who
don't will be dealt with later... The citizens are totally under the
thumb of the Administration.

The UK can't command quite the same response. Three car bombs fail to
do their job; the English keep partying in the same neighbourhood; in
Glasgow, a Scottish hero is born and the Scots say, "Bring 'em on,
Osama; we'll do the bastards!" Thirty years of IRA bombing have
hardened the Brits as far as terrorism is concerned.

Even so the governments in both countries keep raising and lowering
the danger levels like a whore's knickers at a Shriners' convention
but the effect is wearing off. We haven't heard from Osama for a
couple of years now and there's an excellent chance that he's no
longer with us. Of course, it's in no one's interest to make that
official; Al-Qaeda keeps issuing threats and the various governments
keep responding. Eventually it will all come to an end when the public
gets bored with the whole charade, but in the meantime, a wonderful
time will have been had by all.

If only rhat other Blair - Eric, aka George Orwell, could have lived
to see his prophesies come true...

The Highlander
Tilgibh smucaid air do làmhan,
togaibh a' bhratach dhubh agus
toisichibh a' geàrradh na sgòrnanan!
Highlander's credibility goes down a chunk for me with his views on global warming. Even the FT devoted its Saturday magazine to explaining the situation a few weeks ago. That issue seemed to be based on Fred Pearce's book which I recommend.

This may be of interest:

------------------------------------------------

EARTH IN THE BALANCE

Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.

BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric
Science at MIT.
Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for
"a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea
levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical
disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.

Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel,
proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were
right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences
of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore
assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."

That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George
Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk.
What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there
really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and
then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it
has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first
place.

The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global
warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed.
Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been
lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even
Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he
made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr.
Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best
estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in
his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists
"don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one
way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists
"don't know. . . . They just don't know."

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet
their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not,
into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill
alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly
inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these
include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs
have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far
suggests that the Greenland ice *** is actually growing on average.
A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the
coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in
Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are
perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since
the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries
before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped
retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't
know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated
on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was
once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in
Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too,
vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to
be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on
multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of
the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in
hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.

Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't
attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure,
there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be
global warming because he can't think of anything else. While
arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common
in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of
weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.

A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously
ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are
always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change
as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that
fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues
over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual
science.

A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the
environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the
scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring,
and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate
system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has
never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed
since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order
of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen
significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the
early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially
flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in
the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no
question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a
greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should
theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept
equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more
warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed
increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a
natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm
rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that
the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide
has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of
climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there
has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising
impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was
accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported
ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human
influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for
Kyoto.

The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has
become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what
mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some
deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an
alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy
makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of
the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account
the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the
last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse
gas concentrations."

In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief
(15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It
again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the
report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The
changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due
to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part
of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This
was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that
the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is
real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."
Well, no.

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist
Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge
Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global
climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts
supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social
scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913
of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the
remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view.
Several actually opposed it.

Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush
administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research,
declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the
climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What
exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming
should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures,
and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979.
The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data
could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between
observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should
look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest
at least three points.

First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with
understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types,
environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such
claims also serve to intimidate the public and even
scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics.
Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot
be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes
nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious
beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a
"moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific
methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was
accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we
may have farce--if we're lucky.


The Highlander Tilgibh smucaid air do làmhan, togaibh a' bhratach dhubh agus toisichibh a' geàrradh na sgòrnanan!

Have you collected your $10,000 US yet?

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/03/aei-letter/

--
"For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed." - William Topaz McGonagall
.