RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the past decade legions of the gullible have been signalling their eco-virtue by candles’ glow, turning off the lights for 60 minutes as an offering to poor, overheated Gaia. It makes little sense, but promoters are delighted the faithful can still write cheques in the gloom.
World Wide Fund for Nature (Australia) is gearing up for its tenth idiotic Earth Hour at 8.30pm on Saturday, March 25. Once again it will be urging people to turn off lights (but not fridges, freezers, TVs, dishwashers, computers, aircons and smart-phones). If WWF is aware that satellite data shows no atmospheric warming for the past 18 years, that information figures nowhere in its literature.

Of course, any large-scale lights-off actually increases CO2 emissions because generators have to do inefficient ramping-up of power when the lights go on again. Such quibbles have never worried WWF.

Earth Hour is run by national manager Anna Rose. She is co-founder and former head of the Youth Climate Coalition, and spouse of Simon Sheik, former national director of GetUp, failed Greens candidate and, most recently, promoter of a fossil-fuel-free superfund.[1] Rose claims, on the basis of sample surveys from consultancy AMR, that a quarter (nearly 6m) of the Australian population took part in Earth Hour 2016.[2] That’s a big call. In 2015, she was claiming one in three Australians (7.7m) took part in 2014.

The media-savvy WWF has been theming its annual Earth Hours. Last year’s theme was “Protect the Aussie places we love” with sub-texts about global warming destroying the Barrier Reef by 2050 and other alarmist mantras (the Reef made it safely through previous eras of strong warming). The 2017 Earth Hour theme is “the voice of the future generation”, taking into overdrive WWF’s propaganda assault in schools.

WWF’s partner in the schools’ Earth Hour exercise is Cool Australia, a green/left outfit founded and run by Jason Kimberley of the wealthy Just Jeans clan. Cool Australia claims more than 52,000 educators whose lessons reached more than 1,050,000 students in 2016. (It is a national scandal that schools have become such hotbeds of green/left indoctrination).

The Cool Australia material has much in common with the views of the Left Renewal faction of the Greens Party, and its “fight to bring about the end of capitalism”. Cool’s anti-capitalism curriculum is based on the rantings of far-left Canadian author Naomi Klein and her agitprop book, This Changes Everything. Klein views conventional green policies as way too conservative. Her goal is to marshall a green activist horde to subvert Western civilisation at grassroots level.

Cool Australia offers Years 9 and 10 no fewer than ten lesson units based on the Klein book and video. One lesson, for example, is titled,“This changes everything – climate change vs capitalism”. Cool Australia counsels the kiddies, “…an opportunity for a new economic model that accounts for both people and the planet in a just and sustainable way.” The film of the same title has Klein saying, “I’ve spent six years wandering through the wreckage caused by the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there.” A title comes up, “Capitalism” with a voiceover, “We are going in completely the wrong direction.” It ends with a narrator’s question: “What if global warming is not only a crisis? What if it is the best chance you are ever going to get to build a better world? Change or be changed!”

Global temperatures’ refusal to rise has obliged warmism’s comfortably settled scientists to once again fiddle the data, something they do always with aplomb and no coherent explanation. Ah, but not so fast! One of the fulcrums on which they spin their latest legerdemain is absolutely worthless.
In the late 1990s, as the idea of global warming began to attract widespread public attention and research funding, the claim that recent warming was unprecedented and dangerous was conflicted by extensive evidence of a preceding Little Ice Age (LIA) and, before that, a Medieval Warm Period (MWP) that was as warm or warmer than the present. As later revealed in the Climategate email leak, leading proponents of the warming threat privately discussed a need to get rid of the LIA and MWP. Soon thereafter this was achieved by publication of what became known as the Hockey Stick graph (Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998), which purported to show no statistically significant trend in average global temperature over the previous millennium until a sudden steeply increasing rise over the 20th century. In the accompanying study the LIA and MWP were dismissed as only unimportant local fluctuations limited to north-western Europe.

The Hockey Stick was based primarily on estimates of temperature from variations in growth rings from a few dozen pine trees in two very localised and extreme environments. This data, presented as representing the global pattern, was analysed using a statistical treatment which has been shown to result in a hockey-stick shape even with random input data. In addition, a lack of any indication of ongoing warming in the 20th century part of the tree ring record was hidden by overwriting this portion with selected data from the instrument record. The whole hokey confection was published in a leading journal, received banner treatment by the news media and was subsequently adopted by the IPCC as the iconic image for their Third Assessment Report in 2001.

All this blatant chicanery has been thoroughly exposed, the infamous Hockey Stick graph being refuted by hundreds of peer reviewed studies, as well as numerous historical records which confirm the LIA and the MWP as having been real, distinct and global in scope. Even so, rather than just let the Hockey Stick graph die and be forgotten, the alarmists have chosen to make fools of themselves by vigorously, even viciously, defending it. They still argue for its validity, despite it having been no less discredited than Piltdown Man or phlogiston.

Now, having learned nothing from the Hockey Stick debacle, the alarmists are setting out to further their discredit by attempting to refute the so-called hiatus or pause in warming marked by no statistically significant trend in global temperatures for the past two decades. This new hokey hockey stick is being fabricated by “adjusting” the temperature record of the past century. It started with unannounced and unexplained “adjustments” to the records from weather stations. When noticed and questioned, the only explanation offered has been generic and hypothetical reasons for needing to make adjustments with no specific details as to what or why anything was done in any particular instance!

Although this approach has forestalled critical examination, an ongoing lack of warming is making it impossible to maintain any pretense of scientific credibility by continuing to adjust the temperature record from weather stations.

Even if you subscribe to the careerist encyclicals of warmism’s priesthood, only rank gullibility or the pointed blindness favoured by professional politicians could prompt the conclusion that the answer is solar and wind. They aren’t — unless the real goal is to pauper growth and prosperity.
I feel in my innards that climate alarm is a scam. I felt the same about bird flu and other exotic infectious diseases that have in recent years been regularly held up as threatening our species; though I admit that the HIV- inspired ‘grim reaper’ ads unnerved me at the time.

I can’t recall being persuaded by the Club of Rome alarmists of the early 1970s. British writer and publisher Tom Stacey (in a preface to Bob Carter’s 2010 book Climate: The Counter Consensus) commented on his firm publishing Blueprint for Survival in 1972. Population and resource-depletion Armageddon was predicted to occur before 2000. It was backed, he says, by “38 of Britain’s most honoured scientists, economists and environmentalists, including 18 professors, two Nobel laureates, and seven Fellows of The Royal Society.” I can find no record of these fine fellows being mocked and derided by their colleagues for their alarmist predictions.

One of the doomsday predictions was that “hydrocarbon fuel resources would [by 2000] be well exhausted.” Now that would have fixed anthropogenic global warming (AGW), would it not? But then global cooling was soon to come to the fore in the middle 1970s as a threat to humanity. It’s enough to give any grounded scientist ice age IIexperiencing this chain of authoritative predictions a bout of cognitive dissonance.

American writer H. L. Menken provided his own perspective on scares in 1918.

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

One hundred years’ later nothing has changed. Antibiotic-resistant germs and a life-giving gas are out to get us; as potentially are AI robots and aliens, if Stephen Hawking and other scientific luminaries are to be believed.

But hold on, AGW might be a real threat. My brain, as distinct from my innards, tells me that I don’t know. To me there is no fault in logic in explaining that burning fossil fuels produces CO2 and, in turn, water vapour; which, unless abated, results in catastrophic AGW. It is a science question of which I have no expertise. My concern, however, is that this particular piece of science seems tenuous to me as a layman (as I will come to) and is in process of subverting economic progress by undermining the production of cheap and reliable energy and, to boot, with no noticeable effect in reducing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I am told that the science is settled; apparently this is because there is a consensus among “climate scientists”. I have four problems. First, ‘settled science’ offends my working assumption that all scientific conclusions are forever up for challenge. Second, it is patently anti-scientific, and ignores scientific progress and the overturning of past consensuses, to accept a one-to-one correspondence between the truth and any prevailing consensus. Third, the currently prevailing consensus has important breaches, with numbers of well-credentialed maverick climate scientists taking a different view. Fourth, as I noted above, this piece of science is intrinsically tenuous.

I say it is tenuous because it is wholly based on modelling. To state the obvious, controlled experiments cannot be performed with the global climate. Therefore, my uneducated guess is that the vast preponderance of scientific inquiry bears not at all on the central issue of AGW but on a host of derivative issues; e.g., how GW affects the frequency and intensity of storms or how reduced ocean alkalinity, as a result of increases in CO2, affects particular sea life. None of this research establishes a link between CO2 and GW. It may live off that supposed linkage, but it neither adds to nor detracts from the modelling on which the linkage is based.