The Season of Madness Is Upon Us Again

Grounded in Unreality

Hah.  You can always tell when the Game of Junk Science is going to make another appearance across our media.  It has been deemed necessary to the survival of the human species to have an annual global conference on the greatest known threat facing the human race--global warming.  About two months before, the frothing and hyperventilating begins.  Climate change is real.  Climate change is evil.  Climate change requires vast expansions of state powers to ensure that it does not happen.  The survival of the human race is at stake, etc.

Yet virtually everywhere public opinion surveys are showing that global warming is regarded as the least of our problems.  The issue has been thoroughly lost on ordinary people.  The reason is that it is a manufactured crisis. It's a made-up bogey man.  It is bereft of any foundation in science. Yes, we make that claim deliberately.

After all, the essence of science is to have recourse to a certain rigorous, empirical heuristic method.  That method demands that propositions be verified empirically, which is to say--at once--that all scientific hypotheses, propositions, and conclusions must be subject to empirical falsification.  If a proposition cannot be subject to empirical falsification, it simply cannot be part of a scientific exercise.


Of course, that is not to say that it something is thereby wrong or false because it is unscientific.  Far from it.  Science deals only with matter--electrons, quarks, and the bosun of Higgs.  Therefore, its field of methodological competence when it comes to truth is limited.  But global warmers have always sought to rest their case on science.  They have lusted after empirical certainty and thereby claimed that "science" supports, establishes, proves global warming.  But, then, the bureaucrats and the pollies and the PR gurus decided that global warming was too narrow and too easily refuted.  When a season of record cold temperatures shivered a community to the bone, it was rather hard to convince them that the world was warming and the end of the human race was nigh.  So a deft PR-wonk driven change was made.  The real threat to the world was not global warming: it was climate change.  Then, even record low temperatures could be reconciled with global warming.  Now cold conditions were all part of the "evidence" for global warming. 

It is at this juncture that science and the cause of global warming parted for good.  Climate change can never be falsified empirically: therefore, whatever else it is, it is not a scientific, empirically robust issue.  That which can never be falsified empirically is unscientific by definition, period.

But there is (other people's) money involved, along with huge expansions in government rules, regulations, and controls.  Then there is a feel-good factor of seeing oneself on a moral horse capering around saving the planet.  These high matters satiate the lust for amour propre.  So the charade persists and the show must go on.  Every year.  At least once a year.

We are bold enough to offer a prediction.  In fifty years people may well be shaking their heads, wondering how our generation could be so stupid and dumb.  How could our generation have been so easily duped?  Easily really.  It always happens when civilisations are in the "decline and fall" stage.  When men applaud the telling of lies--as our Western culture does--they become oh-so-easily gulled.  Thus passes the chattering classes and the Western Commentariat.

They say that the easiest person to sell something to is a salesperson.   The easiest cultures to deceive are those that make untruth a virtue.  Global warming (er, sorry--climate change) is a classic illustration of the syndrome.  But the lowly man-in-the-street is much less easily fooled.  His daily grind makes him wiser, more grounded in reality.