DAVID SOLWAY: THE NEW WEATHERMEN
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-new-weathermen/
Recently, pretty much on a whim, I decided to monitor the accuracy of radio and TV weather reports, since these affect our daily behavior in all sorts of different ways: what we wear, whether we go in to work or not, look to the repair of the shutters, go up on the ladder to check the rain gutters, don’t forget the sunglasses, etc. I gave the weather experts one week to prove their credentials and began keeping careful score.
The TV reports were terribly impressive. They were also impressively terrible. For all the intricate color charts, the high pressure areas and low pressure areas marked in bold, the sweeping curvilinear lines, the little puffy clouds extruding rain drops, the smiley-face suns, the luminous chromatics of competing “systems,” and all the rest of it, it turned out that the cocksure prognostications were as just wrong as they were right.
After the week had passed, my scorecard showed that the weather person had blundered grievously on three days, had been correct on three days, and was partially correct on one day when the rainfall forecast for the morning arrived only in the evening. A 50% success rate hardly qualifies as confidence-inspiring, seeing that it approximates nothing more convincing than the results of a coin toss.
It’s tempting to extrapolate from the quotidian to the planetary, from the small tomorrow to the big tomorrow, and inquire into the competence of our “official” climatologists, who have assured us that we are heading for meteoric catastrophe, noncompliant weather notwithstanding. Climate warm-mongers naturally try to rescue their hypothesis by dishing up vain distinctions, like the climate “expert” interviewed on CBC Radio’s As it Happens who, confronted with the fact of colder winters, claimed there is a difference between climate and weather!
The game works like this. If the weather is warmer than usual, it is an infallible sign of global warming. If the weather is colder than usual, it is an equally infallible sign — owing to some ludicrous formula straight out of an alchemist’s notebook — that the climate is heating up alarmingly and we must all go green, pass cap and trade, drive Volts, turn down our thermostats, and set up phalanxes of unsightly, bird-shredding, budget-breaking, and neurosis-inducing windmills that may, on good days, produce enough electricity to power a 40-watt bulb. A massive snowfall climbing over the window ledge indicates the approach of desert-like winters when parents will recount nostalgic tales of snowball fights of yore to their wondering children. The predictions, though, need not always be counter-intuitive. A dry season means the baking inferno is nigh. A wet season signals the onset of Noahide floods, rising sea levels, and the submerging of Pacific islands. An ordinary day is merely the ominous quiet before the impending storm. It makes no difference what the data may be, they always point in the same direction.
Quite frankly, we have, most or at least many of us, gone stark raving mad. Experience counts for nothing. Theory is everything. One thinks of the old joke: It’s fine in practice, but will it work in theory? Only it’s not fine in practice, in defiance of which the theory must be patched together and upheld at all costs.
Thus, increasingly unable to rely on the accuracy of their findings, which had the annoying habit of turning into fables, mainstream climatologists, like their colleagues in the political arena, were compelled to fall back on their next best option. If reality refused to cooperate, then all that needed to be done was to change the terminology. First it was global warming. When the earth decided not to play along and pummeled us with a series of colder winters and major snow storms, we suddenly discovered we were the victims of climate change. When it became evident that there were fewer rather than more hurricane events, as confidently predicted by Al Gore, we were now subject to global weirding, whatever that was supposed to be. When the latest substitution didn’t catch on, it became global climate disruption, an umbrella term big enough to shelter climatologists from the facts pelting down on them.
The technique of blatantly merchandising outright lies as uncontested facts was evident in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report claiming that the period 2002-2009 was “the warmest on record worldwide,” when something very close to the opposite was the truth (AP, February 8, 2010). Not content with passing off one whopper, the NOAA, which derives its evidence from the dubious NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, claimed that June 2010 was the warmest month on record and that Arctic temperatures had risen by close to four degrees from average. The problem here is that Goddard has no thermometers north of eighty degrees latitude and so projected their readings from their more southerly apparatus. “Really,” comments meteorologist Art Horn, who has closely tracked these facets of the climate fantasy, “they make it up.”
And that’s the truth. They make it up. Of course, making things up turns out to be a profitable business, generating all manner of perks, titles, offices, grants, and funds, an appanage without limit. Take UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who has recently been implicated in a conflict of interest, as he sits on the boards of companies poised to profit from the “climate change” industry. And when it comes to pure invention, let us recall that he was also the chief backer of the great “Himalaya melt” scare, which has now been shown to be based on an undocumented, unchecked, and unproven “speculation” of a single Indian scientist, Syed Hasnain, who was then recruited by Pachauri to his The Energy Research Institute (TERI). The IPCC’s 2007 report, vetted by Pachauri, said there was a 90% chance that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. This claim has now been decisively refuted. The Pachauri gang also had to admit that its 2007 statement that 55% of the Netherlands lies below sea level was in error — it is 26% (Big Journalism, February 13, 2010).
The plot thickened — or thinned — in late November 2009 when the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an anthropogenic global warming myth. This is an excellent instance of the Groves of Hackademe doing what they do best — misconceiving the world and then misleading it. “Warmist scientists,” wrote James Delingpole about the Hadley contretemps, “have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause” (Telegraph.co.uk, November 21, 2009). The CRU was clearly practicing counterfeit science. It had become undeniable that measurements were tampered with to paint the desired canvas, that counter-evidence was deliberately squelched, that character assassination against climate skeptics was an accepted tactic, and that experimental results were falsely replicated.
The notorious Wikileaks cable dump made it even clearer that the climate “consensus” was more of a political and fiscal gambit than a scientific project (guardian.co.uk, December 3, 2010). Mark Levin’s chapter “On Enviro-Statism” in his Liberty and Tyranny provides a compendious summary of the various stages of the global warming hoax and how it functions as an instrument of statist control of civil society. Similarly, Ottmar Edenhofer, former co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III, admitted in an interview with Germany’s NZZ Online on November 14, 2010, that “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”
There are many “big names” associated with what has become perhaps the greatest scam of our times. Aside from Pachauri, there is, for example, James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute and has been prophesying climate apocalypse for years now, looking more like a carnival fortune teller on meth than a serious scientist. Indeed, he makes Nostradamus sound like a comparatively sober futurologist. Hansen warns that if we don’t get our act together soon, New York City will be under fifty feet of water by the end of the century. Interestingly, Hansen was forced to revise his figures showing that the warmest decade of the 20th century was the 1990s — the warmest decade was the 1930s. He has now been outed by his former NASA supervisor John Theon, who told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that Hansen “violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it)…” (Inhofe EPW Press Blog, January 27, 2009). And Christopher Horner reports that Hansen may well be in violation of waiver requirements from NASA for private and lucrative “outside employment.” As of this writing, NASA has not yet released its “ethics-related records” pertaining to Hansen’s case. All that one can say at this juncture is “Hmmm,” a skeptical intonation that appears to be merited.
Then there is Canada’s own poster geezer David Suzuki, who predicted some 20 years ago that we had only 10 years to go before suffering environmental collapse. Seems we’re still around, if only to judge from Suzuki’s obstreperous presence. Addressing a McGill University Business Conference on Sustainability on January 31, 2008, Suzuki stated: “What I would challenge you to do is put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail” for not acting more quickly on environmental issues. (Hansen echoed the same totalitarian sentiment in an article in The Guardian for June 23, 2008, in which he urged that CEOs of fossil energy companies “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”) According to Suzuki, the world is falling apart, carbon-driven global warming will do us all in pronto, despite the fact that CO2 comprises a mere 380 parts per million of the earth’s atmosphere, not all of it anthropogenic, and even worse, polar bear colonies are on the verge of extinction. Actually, as biologist Mitchell Taylor, who works with the Nunavut Territorial Government of Canada, states categorically, their numbers in the Canadian north have increased by a factor of 25% (National Center for Policy Analysis, January 25, 2007; The Independent, February 10, 2009). This is only the tip of Suzuki’s melting iceberg. He appeals mainly to the vast cohort of the naïve and impressionable, that is to say, CBC television and the majority of Canadians.
And who can forget the illustrious Goracle, the Twelfth Imam of climate Armageddon? Until his recent embarrassment in a hotel room and subsequent marital problems reaching the Tipper point, Al Gore was well on his way to becoming the world’s first carbonaire. Gore has been making stuff up for as long as we can remember and doing quite handsomely in the process. He has been guilty of so many lapses and misdemeanors that one barely knows where to begin. A UK court ruled that his film An Inconvenient Truth contained at least nine salient falsehoods, that the film was scientifically unsound and little more than a form of “political indoctrination.” In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, he blames the Antarctic ozone hole for causing blindness in animal populations. Unfortunately, Chilean scientists investigating the phenomenon had already accounted for it as owing to an epidemic of pink eye disease (NewScientist, August 21, 1993).
As is becoming plain by now, Gore is not noted for practicing what he preaches but for urging what he breaches. Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, points out that Gore “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year” (Townhall.com, July 29, 2009). He enjoys the lifestyle of a pampered plutocrat, jetting about the world, purchasing and equipping lavish mansions, keeping his limousine idling, while demanding austerity on the part of others in order to save the planet he methodically exploits. He has, for example, no compunction buying carbon offsets from the company he co-owns and chairs, Generation Investment Management (Canada Free Press, March 13, 2007; The Citizens Journal online; WorldNetDaily.com, etc.). He is a partner in the capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which floated a $500 million special fund for “green investments” — the same firm, incidentally, that is behind Terralliance, an oil wildcatter that is about as nongreen as one can get (Fortune magazine, Brainstorm 2008 and VentureBeat Clean Tech, July 16, 2008). He draws royalties from Pasminco’s highly toxic zinc mine (The Tennessean, March 17, 2000, The Wall Street Journal for June 29, 2000 and March 19, 2007, USA Today, March 18, 2007, and many others). The list goes on, but space precludes.
Time to get real. Geologist David Dee, chair of the 2008 International Geological Congress science committee, asks: “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?” (WorldNetDaily, December 11, 2008). This brute fact does not disturb Al Gore’s ally, former Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth, who has gone on record justifying the kind of scientific fraud perpetrated by the IPCC. “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,” he said, “we will be doing the right thing.” For Wirth and his mates, the means justify the end, and the end justifies nothing — except, of course, their own orgasmic sense of importance and righteousness and the emoluments flowing into their coffers.
The facts argue otherwise. According to Christopher Booker in the Telegraph for March 16, 2009, reporting on that year’s Heartland Institute’s climate conference in New York, the satellite-measured temperature curve torpedoes the programmed, “hopelessly astray,” IPCC computer models and indicates that, given the present trend, the world in 2100 would be 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average. No matter. The facile doomsayers and what I like to call the photovoltaic sensibilities of the “climate community” are doing their utmost to propel us, in Walter E. Williams’ apt phrase, into “the wild green yonder” (Washington Times, May 13, 2008). And they’re having a great time while they’re at it. We recall the UN climate delegates toasting their buns in Cancun even as Europe endured a killer cold snap. The living is good in Climateland.
To return to where I started. If the weatherologists cannot be trusted, can the climatologists be far behind? If tomorrow’s forecast is problematic, what does this say about the horoscope for the next decade or century? Indeed, our weather people are much to be preferred since they are wrong only half the time and need not make things up to keep their jobs. They work with the information they have and often put on an entertaining show in the process. May they prosper. Our climatologists, however, are a different breed entirely. They are wrong nearly all the time.
Some are credulous do-gooders who truly believe in the delusion of global warming and will fudge or obscure the facts they find inadmissible in order to preserve their messianic agenda. Soothsayers with an ostensibly noble mission whose auguries are constantly trumped by reality, they are impervious to doubt or reason — just as in the 1970s when they were earnestly warning that the earth was about to freeze over and we should all stock up on parkas and Coleman heaters. These poor people stagger around like late-night party-goers with a pre-dawn hangover, squinting into the unaccustomed light.
But the majority, I suspect, are out-and-out schemers and defalcators who have stumbled on a growth industry and have no intention of getting off the gravy train, which they wish to render, as in a recent movie, unstoppable. They will not surrender the advantages and remunerations that accrue to their shady and canting profession and will fall back on every means at their disposal to stay in business. They will suppress countervailing data. They will slander their opponents. They will “disinvite” authoritative scientists from climate conferences. They will caulk the leaks continually springing in their theories rather than engage in reconsideration. They will cook the books. They will close the scientific journals to their critics. When challenged, they will simply double down in their dividends and gratuities like badgers comfy in their setts.
And they will do everything in their power to instill fear in the multitudes, resembling nothing so much as terrorists armed with improvised statistics. They will detonate data bombs to terrify the unsuspecting. They will lay ambushes on the road to truth. They will plant explosive media devices packed with spurious details to gain their objectives, all the while inundating us with propaganda. They will labor tirelessly to establish the dictatorship of the climatariat. And they will not be deterred from carrying out their subversion of truth, common sense, and society as we know it.
In short, they are the new Weather Underground.
David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, and is currently working on a sequel, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. His new book on Jewish and Israeli themes, Hear, O Israel!, has just been released by Mantua Books.
Comments are closed.
