The End Game

Puffs of Smoke

Long ago, the issue of global warming passed out of the realm of scientific research and inquiry into the realm of propaganda.  A core part of the propaganda campaign to bolster its credibility was to assert scientific (that is, empirical and factual) warrant for global warming being caused by mankind.  But between the assertion and the reality fell the shadow.

Some sceptics have argued that in retrospect anthropogenic (man caused) global warming will be seen as the greatest hoax perpetrated upon human history in the name of pseudo-science.  The key reason for this claim is that the sea of data upon which SS Global Warming sails is largely fabricated.  It is true that such an assertion sounds like a barmy conspiracy theory.  But conspiracies exist.  The question is whether one exists in the case of global warming.

Already there has been evidence.
  In the case of the UK, data being gathered at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia was exposed by leaked e-mails to be polished up and subject to a good bit of lily gilding.  Remember "scientist" Michael Mann's infamous Hockey-Graph.  Pseudo-scientists were conspiring together to achieve a certain data outcome.  But the global warming propaganda machine rolled on.  But now there is more uncertainty.  Satellite temperature readings--by far the most accurate dataset of atmospheric global temperature--show no global atmospheric warming over eighteen years.  Readings from earth based temperature stations do show an increase over the same time period. Why?

The reason lies here: the land based temperature data is significantly manufactured and massaged.  It is fiddled with.  This, from Breitbart London

Temperature readings from the Arctic and Antarctic used to estimate the effects of global warming are nothing more than guesswork, a climate researcher has said. Dr Benny Peiser heads up the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which last month announced its intention to launch a wide-ranging review of the data underpinning claims on global warming.

The review was launched primarily in response to interested parties flagging up major discrepancies  between data gathered from weather stations, which marked 2014 out as the hottest year on record, and data gathered from satellites, which showed no warming for over 18 years. The scale of the discrepancy lead to accusations that weather station data had been “adjusted”, thereby exaggerating the effects of global warming, something which the Foundation is keen to investigate.

The review panel, headed by Professor Terence Kealey, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, will be taking submissions for evidence until the 30th June, but Dr Peiser has said that questions and concerns have already been raised about how the discrepancy could have come about.

“There’s a lack of clarity, a lack of transparency and a growing concern about what is going on,” he told the Express. “Given these concerns, we thought there must be a better way of answering these questions.  “This is not about anthropogenic or man-made climate change, this is about whether the gatekeepers of the data, the meteorological agencies, are providing reliable information.”

Dr Peiser raised concerns that some researchers who contribute to the temperature records have been outspoken in their views on climate change, saying: “People ask why they are the gatekeepers of the data if they have such strong opinions. Should they really be the guardians of data quality and high standards?  “As in every scientific venture, there should be quality checks just to make sure people know exactly what is happening. In a way, this inquiry is a quality control exercise.”

Naturally, the conventional establishment has hit back.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, admitted that some temperature records had been altered, but argued that the changes were insignificant.  “The adjustments make no significant difference to the obvious upward trend in global average temperature over the last century,” he said.

“The Foundation is a political lobby group, and funded by secret donors, not a transparent scientific organisation.  I suspect that it simply wants to manufacture doubt about the temperature records to create a distraction while countries are negotiating a new international treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, to be agreed at a summit in Paris at the end of this year.”

Bob neglected to mention that the Grantham Research Institute has been funded by one Jeremy Grantham, an ardent believer in anthropogenic global warming.  Bob is hoist on his own petard.  Nevertheless, he continued by dropping another line of argument, claiming that the work of his Institute is audited and cross checked by the British Met Office--a paragon of scientific rigour and neutrality.  But, as Breitbart's correspondent, Donna Rachel Edmunds points out:

Ward insisted that the alterations were legitimate as they were monitored by outside bodies, amongst them Britain’s Met Office. But the Met Office has itself been unequivocal in its support for the belief that human activity is driving catastrophic climate change.  On its website, the Met Office states: “There’s overwhelming and growing evidence that the warming is due to vastly increased – and still increasing – quantities of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.”

The Met Office is the the hen house in which the proverbial fox is welcomed as a feathered friend.  The extent to which global warming has become a propaganda cause, rather than a scientific one, was demonstrated recently by an article exposing how certain language constructs have been deliberately and artfully deployed by advocates of global warming speculations to attack the critics.  This from an environmentalist website:

The word "denial" -- meaning refusal or withholding -- entered the English language from Old French hundreds of years ago, but it gained linguistic muscle with A.A. Brill's translation of the Austrian father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in the early 20th century.  Denial, or Verneinung in Freud's German, came to mean refusing to acknowledge a painful or uncomfortable truth, despite overwhelming evidence.

In politics, there was "Holocaust denial," "moon-landing denial" and "evolution denial" -- all flowing from Freud, with its implications not only of untruth but of mental illness.  And now the word's in the center ring of the global warming fight: "climate denial."

This exposes anthropogenic global warming to be a mere propaganda exercise.  Science long ago ceased to be of any importance whatsoever.  Scientific warrant for global warming has become a starting assumption, not an evidential foundation.  If the hard, measured data is inconsistent with the premisses, it must be dressed up to be more respectable. The self-important, grandiloquent cause of saving the planet took over, science be damned.  

But in 2013, "denier" pulled ahead of "skeptic" in news references, and it is still on the ascendant.  In 2000, "denier" was referenced 10 times in the English-language press.  In 2014, it appeared 3,183 times.  "Ultimately, this is all about having an upper hand in the war of words," said Kert Davies of Greenpeace U.S. "And it's proven out now that it actually does hurt to be called a denier."

Yup.  Global warming is a vast propaganda campaign--little more.  It is a coalition of the gullible, the greedy, the monied, the statists, and those seeking fame, fortune, and notoriety.  It is replete with hypocrites and the self-serving.  When in doubt, make the "facts" up.  We think that it is probably true that it will indeed go down as the greatest scientific scandal yet seen.

Already the steam has gone out of the cause.  Politicians are shuffling sideways.  The public are less convinced than ever.  When it comes out that the "scientific" data upon which the whole edifice has been constructed is thoroughly and comprehensively fiddled, the cause will go up in a puff of smoke--C0₂, of course.