https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/12/still-taking-water-in-the-alarmist-archipelago/
The woke and the dumb, the self-interested and the careerists, those who know better but go along — taken together they form a loose but the powerful alliance that stands athwart attempts to begin the long, slow reversal of climate insanity’s grip on public policy.
Some years ago I wrote a review for Quadrant of Rupert Darwall’s excellent book The Age of Global Warming: A History. The book was a history of how the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) had come to be accepted science, accepted policy and accepted popular belief all over the globe.
My conclusion was that the period of writing would in the future come to be seen as the end of global warming as a ruling ideology. This would occur despite the efforts of global warming believers, who would never go away but would simply come to be seen as an irrelevance.
Six years on, it is now clear I was both right and wrong. The believers have decidedly not gone away, indeed they prosecute the climate wars ever more intensely. But they clearly are not yet an irrelevance, a spent force. On the contrary, their efforts indeed continue to bear much fruit. They occupy the commanding heights of government bureaucracies, academia, mainstream media, supranational bodies, corporations and the indoctrinated minds of schoolchildren. Their theories have divided conservative parties across the West, especially in Australia. They have achieved the unbelievable outcome of getting left-of-centre parties once owned by the working class to adopt, holus bolus, policies which massively disadvantage and impoverish those parties’ once principal constituents. The climateers have managed this despite the fact that what they propose as theory is embarrassing nonsense, actually gibberish, and can be seen to be such by a reasonable person after a single minute’s reflection.
The argument for “climate action” so widely embraced is based on a handful of highly questionable empirical propositions linked by such non sequiturs as would be immediately apparent to any Logic 101 student. The CAWG position is, essentially, that one, the earth is warming; two, that this is recent and considerable; three, that it is largely caused by human activity; four, that it is dangerous; five, that we (humans) can do something about it; six, we humans should do something about it; and seven, we must mitigate rather than adapt.
Every one of these propositions is open to massive conjecture. To take just the first and second – that the earth is warming considerably – Anthony Watts of WUWT fame and Jennifer Marohasy, closer to home, have demonstrated time and again the tricks performed in the measurement of temperatures, the re-positioning of weather stations into areas exposed to urban heat islands and the re-jigging of raw data to achieve apparent warming. The whole shebang is held together by mathematical computer models, not by verifiable, readily replicable (therefore testable) empirical data. CAGW attempts to explain a highly complex, dynamic, uncertain, multi-dimensional natural systems through simple models that make a mockery of the dynamism and complexity of nature.