[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, Swiss]Global Warming and Modern Environmentalism
from Fascism, Environmentalism, and the Third Way[/FONT]
July 30, 2002
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, Swiss]by Bernard Switalski
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, Swiss]Initial Publication Date: July 18, 2001[/FONT][/FONT]
At the core of Tertullian's teachings lay his bitter admonition that life in the 2nd century had become too extravagant, too wasteful, and that population growth had run out of control. Mankind was raping the Earth of its resources, he warned grimly "...we men have actually become a burden to the Earth ... the Earth can no longer support us ..." And, to escape total planetary destruction, mankind had to withdraw to the past and practice severe asceticism, living in a simpler more natural state.
Fast-forward 1800 years...
Below, a few snips from the "Heidelberg Appeal", an environmental policy statement signed to date by at least four thousand scientists - including 72 Nobel laureates - from 106 countries. Note the way these guys have skipped past all the technical details and drilled right to the core of the matter:
First, this general question: who decides which is the "correct" global temperature? By that I mean... environmentalists claim that the CO2 released into the atmosphere by our techno-industrial society has caused the global climate to warm, thereby portending catastrophic consequences for us all. Yet, over the eons, absent homo sapiens, the globe has experienced wide swings in temperature. Even during the pre-industrial historical era, there have occurred: the Medieval Warm Period, with temperatures much warmer than today, followed by the Little Ice Age, with temperatures much cooler. Therefore, one might ask, what point on the global temperature curve is the "correct" point? That is, which is the "correct" global temperature? And who decides these things?
Moving right along...
Also:
On the other hand, Al Gore, the self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet, claims the opposite to be true.
Let's see .... whom shall I believe... ?
But it takes only a single negative event to refute a hypothesis, and there’s the negative in Balling. That is, during the 67 years CO2 levels rose by 30 percent, global temps fell, and that fact alone knocks the pins out from under the CO2/global-warming hypothesis.
Therefore, to create the illusion of a scientific rationale for the Treaty, its authors have conjured up a computer model that purports to prophesy the global climate in the year 2100. Which is the propagandist's classic ruse, making a prediction about the future that can't be proved or disproved, but so dire as to demand immediate preventive action, and never mind collateral damage.
Note: You've got to read it to believe it. The Kyoto Protocol is 8,500 words of the most vague and incomprehensible gobbledygook ever contrived by the mind of man. I've had lots of experience writing and interpreting contracts (which is what treaties are), and if someone handed me this thing to sign, I'd fling him and his treaty out the door.
By some startling coincidence, politically active scientists often produce computer models that generate results amazingly concurrent with the scientists' political agenda. Dr. Carl Sagan did it. In the early 80s, Sagan (who was deeply involved in the peace movement) produced the (Turco-Toon-Ackerman-Pollack-Sagan (TTAPS) model that predicted a nuclear war would raise enough dust to blot out the sun and bring on a "nuclear winter". Nuclear Winter! Wow! The media ran with it, and you still hear the phrase used today. However, the media somehow failed to report on critics of the TTAPS model, of which there were many.
For example, Russell Seitz, Harvard Center for International Affairs, viewed the TTAPS model as worthless, revealing that, to achieve the results Sagan wanted, TTAPS had ignored factors such as the effects of day and night, clouds, rain, the continents, and the oceans. And George Rathjens of MIT dismissed TTAPS as, "... the worst example of the misrepresentation of science in my memory."
Later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, looking for a new home, Sagan - as did many others of his ilk - threw in with the eco-gang, where, during Desert Storm, he raced from TV network to network, predicting that smoke from the oil well fires would alter the climate enough to cause famine in India. Gee! I wonder how that prophesy panned out.
Besides Sagan, we have other eco-quack scientists, fellows like the oft-quoted Dr. Steven Schneider, who has thumped the doomsday drum for decades, and who has this novel approach to scientific integrity:
The case against the anthropogenic-CO2/global-warming hypothesis has grown so powerful that even a militant warmer like Hansen at NASA's Goddard Institute has begun to pull in his horns, now suddenly expressing reservations about the magnitude of the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on the climate and whether we know enough about the causes of climate change to make serious predictions about the future. (See Hansen's paper, "Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era", at giss.nasa.gov/research/intro/hansen.05)
Hansen hasn't always been so circumspect. On a blistering hot day in July of 1988, Dr. James Hansen testified before a Congressional committee that global warming had arrived, and as proof he predicted that 1988 would be the hottest year on record.
The media, right on cue, per the script, proclaimed:
GLOBAL WARMING HAS ARRIVED!
And you can trace much of the public's erroneous belief in global warming directly to Hansen's testimony. However, turned out that 1988 was not the hottest year on record. In fact, the lower 48 experienced record cold snaps, and Alaska had its coldest winter ever. Hansen had been dead wrong - a fact which, per the script, never made the headlines.
And, unless one understands a least a little about:
Kary Mullis, Nobel, Chemistry, observed:
Well...
Beginning in the late 1930s, what passes for the global temperature record took a slight (statistically insignificant) downward trend. Based on that minute dip, in the early 1970s the prophets of doom rang the alarm! A NEW ICE AGE IS COMING! A NEW ICE AGE IS COMING!
And the culprit? Industrialism! And its noxious effluents, dust and smoke, blocking out the sun, threatening to throw the planet into the deep freeze.
At the time, frights like these appeared in print:
Uh-oh!
Problem?!
No problem.
On a dime, without so much as an, "Excuse my elbow", the prophets of doom spun a one-eighty. By George! It isn't global COOLING that threatens life as we know it! By golly! It's global WARMING!
And the culprit?
What else?
Industrialism!
And its noxious effluent, CO2.
To illustrate how these characters did the eco-flip.... Dr. Steven Schneider (mentioned above) today speaks with a stentorian voice among the global warming apocalyptics, and, like Tertullian, threatens us with fiery annihilation, lest we change our profligate ways.
However, twenty-five years ago, Schneider was busy flogging the anthropogenic-aerosols/ice-age line of doom. At the time, a few scientists speculated that the theoretical warming caused by increasing CO2 levels might tend to offset the cooling effects of anthropogenic aerosols. In furious defense of his ice age, in a published paper, Schneider lashed back (note the categorical certainty of his tone.):
When global temperatures seemed to be falling, Schneider blamed the fall on industrialism, and he understood clearly that CO2 was an insignificant greenhouse gas.
But when temps began to rise, Schneider spun round and scrambled aboard the CO2/global-warming bandwagon, this time blaming the rise on, what?
Right!
Industrialism!
So, you see, it ain't about warming or cooling. It's about industrialism.
These guys don't like it. They wanna kill it.
Which leads to a most interesting question regarding eco-zealotry: why do environmentalists want to kill industrialism?
For the answer to that question, read Environmentalism's Tainted Roots.
Bernard Switalski
P.O. Box 486
Riverside, IL 60546 Voice: 708.442.7354
Email: switabern@juno.com
Please email any correspondence to switabern@juno.com
from Fascism, Environmentalism, and the Third Way[/FONT]
July 30, 2002
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, Swiss]by Bernard Switalski
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, Swiss]Initial Publication Date: July 18, 2001[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, Swiss]Editor's Note: This article on global warming, as well as separate articles on ozone depletion and the dangerous roots of the environmental movement, have been extracted from a very comprehensive work by Bernard Switalski documenting misinformation about global warming and ozone depletion as part of an overall strategy by international socialists, fascists, and "third way" proponents to seize power by creating public fear about the environment.[/FONT]
Doomsday grifters have run their scam a long time and they've never lacked for chumps to bamboozle. Hark!! One fine day in the year 156 A.D., in Phrygia (now part of Turkey), the prophet Montanus suddenly reeled round and round and keeled over into a trance in which he envisioned Christ's second coming and the end of the world. Thenceforward, Montanus roamed the dusty paths of Asia Minor, proclaiming to all who would listen that doomsday lay just round the bend. Montanus gathered many disciples, among whom was one, Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, Tertullian went on to become a champion of Monantism and a dynamic intellectual force and teacher in the early Christian church.
At the core of Tertullian's teachings lay his bitter admonition that life in the 2nd century had become too extravagant, too wasteful, and that population growth had run out of control. Mankind was raping the Earth of its resources, he warned grimly "...we men have actually become a burden to the Earth ... the Earth can no longer support us ..." And, to escape total planetary destruction, mankind had to withdraw to the past and practice severe asceticism, living in a simpler more natural state.
Fast-forward 1800 years...
Below, a few snips from the "Heidelberg Appeal", an environmental policy statement signed to date by at least four thousand scientists - including 72 Nobel laureates - from 106 countries. Note the way these guys have skipped past all the technical details and drilled right to the core of the matter:
"We are worried, at the dawn of the 21st century, at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development...
"We contend that the Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look toward the past, does not exist and probably never has existed... "We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet's destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudoscientific arguments or false and nonrelevant data."
Following are a few technical details re: "pseudoscientific arguments or false and nonrelevant data." "We contend that the Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look toward the past, does not exist and probably never has existed... "We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet's destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudoscientific arguments or false and nonrelevant data."
First, this general question: who decides which is the "correct" global temperature? By that I mean... environmentalists claim that the CO2 released into the atmosphere by our techno-industrial society has caused the global climate to warm, thereby portending catastrophic consequences for us all. Yet, over the eons, absent homo sapiens, the globe has experienced wide swings in temperature. Even during the pre-industrial historical era, there have occurred: the Medieval Warm Period, with temperatures much warmer than today, followed by the Little Ice Age, with temperatures much cooler. Therefore, one might ask, what point on the global temperature curve is the "correct" point? That is, which is the "correct" global temperature? And who decides these things?
Moving right along...
"Mean sea level has not changed in the past century, which puts a lie to the ecologists argument that global warming is melting the polar ice caps; atmospheric temperatures, though having up-and-down cycles, have not established a trend in either direction.... and the gasses in the atmosphere caused by human activities are insignificant."
- Dr. R.E. Stevenson, Secretary General of the International Association for Physical Science in the Ocean.
Got to love Stevenson - he flat out calls environmentalists liars. Which they are. - Dr. R.E. Stevenson, Secretary General of the International Association for Physical Science in the Ocean.
Also:
- For years NASA has claimed that the South Polar ice cap was melting. However, recently, NASA issued a newsletter suggesting that they might have misinterpreted the data and, perhaps, there had been little or no melting at all.
- Water vapor accounts for 98 percent of the greenhouse effect, and CO2 is only one of several other gasses that account for the remaining 2 percent. To investigate how variations in the levels of atmospheric gasses effect climate change, it would seem reasonable to begin with the most important gas, water vapor. Instead, environmentalists have locked on CO2. True, in the past century, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has risen from about 0.04 percent to about 0.06 percent - a 0.02 percent increase. But, based upon the environmentalists' own numbers, at most only about 15 percent of that increase can be traced to human sources, the rest being part of the natural variation in atmospheric CO2, the causes of which we have little or no understanding. 15 percent of 0.02 percent is 0.003 percent. Thus, environmentalists ignore the gas that accounts for 98 percent of the greenhouse effect to focus on the gas that accounts for three-thousandths of one percent, and they claim the three-thousandths of one percent as sufficient cause to trigger the wide-sweeping structural changes to the global economy that the Kyoto Treaty demands, and the consequences of which cannot be foreseen.
"There is almost universal agreement among atmospheric scientists that little, if any, of the observed warming of the past century can be attributed to the man-induced increases in greenhouse gasses."
- Dr. Hugh Ellsaesser, Participating Guest Scientist, Lawrence Livermore Labs and author of several books and over 100 articles on atmospheric science.
Ellsaesser, one of the most respected atmospheric scientists around, says that his crowd almost universally dismisses the anthropogenic-CO2/global-warming hypothesis as false. - Dr. Hugh Ellsaesser, Participating Guest Scientist, Lawrence Livermore Labs and author of several books and over 100 articles on atmospheric science.
On the other hand, Al Gore, the self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet, claims the opposite to be true.
Let's see .... whom shall I believe... ?
"[The] 70-90 year oscillations in global mean temperatures [correlate] with corresponding oscillations in solar activity. Whereas the solar influence is obvious in the data from the last four centuries, signatures of human [influence] are not distinguishable in the observations."
- Dr. K. Lassen, Danish Meteorological Institute, Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division.
Lassen's and similar studies deliver compelling evidence that variations in solar radiation effect the global climate in detectable ways - and you can throw in oscillations in the Earth's orbit, tilt, and wobble, not to mention volcanic activity, and its detectable effects. But when you ask the environmentalists to identify the anthropogenic CO2 signal in the data, they go mute. Which immediately demands a response to the request: please point out the difference between the effect of anthropogenic CO2 and no effect at all. - Dr. K. Lassen, Danish Meteorological Institute, Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division.
"There is absolutely no guarantee that any CO2-climate signal over the past century can be identified in [an atmospheric] system that has such a high degree of natural variability. ...[The temperature trend in the 20th century] ... is not statistically different from zero. We cannot say with confidence that there has been any trend in U.S. mean annual temperatures in this century! ... Though not statistically different from zero, the period from 1920 to 1987 has been dominated by a cooling of 0.13C (0.24F). Here we have possibly the best temperature data set for any area of the planet, and during a time (1920-1987) when equivalent CO2 increased by over 30 percent (from approximately 325 to 425 ppm), the temperature cooled slightly. If one accounts for the remaining heat-island effect and the effects of stratospheric dust, we may assume that any warming signal of the past century in the United States would be reduced even further."
- Dr. R.C. Balling, statistician, climatologist, and Director of the Office of Climatology, Arizona State - recognized internationally as an expert in global warming and the greenhouse effect and author of one book and dozens of papers on climatology published in leading journals.
The CO2/global-warming hypothesis asserts that: if the CO2 content of the atmosphere rises, then the global climate gets warmer. - Dr. R.C. Balling, statistician, climatologist, and Director of the Office of Climatology, Arizona State - recognized internationally as an expert in global warming and the greenhouse effect and author of one book and dozens of papers on climatology published in leading journals.
But it takes only a single negative event to refute a hypothesis, and there’s the negative in Balling. That is, during the 67 years CO2 levels rose by 30 percent, global temps fell, and that fact alone knocks the pins out from under the CO2/global-warming hypothesis.
"Besides the general prevalence of fudge factors, the latest [computer] models have other defects that make them unreliable. ... We must continue to warn the politicians and the public: don’t believe the numbers just because they come out of a super computer."
- Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, Nobel laureate, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies.
The Kyoto Protocol, formally entitled, "Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change", imposes upon technologically advanced nations a host of restrictions on the generation of CO2 (and other gases) as the cause of global climate change. Yet, in its text, the Kyoto Protocol: - Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, Nobel laureate, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies.
- Never claims that the climate is changing.
- Never claims that anthropogenic CO2 (or any other anthropogenic gas) has in any way affected the climate.
Therefore, to create the illusion of a scientific rationale for the Treaty, its authors have conjured up a computer model that purports to prophesy the global climate in the year 2100. Which is the propagandist's classic ruse, making a prediction about the future that can't be proved or disproved, but so dire as to demand immediate preventive action, and never mind collateral damage.
Note: You've got to read it to believe it. The Kyoto Protocol is 8,500 words of the most vague and incomprehensible gobbledygook ever contrived by the mind of man. I've had lots of experience writing and interpreting contracts (which is what treaties are), and if someone handed me this thing to sign, I'd fling him and his treaty out the door.
By some startling coincidence, politically active scientists often produce computer models that generate results amazingly concurrent with the scientists' political agenda. Dr. Carl Sagan did it. In the early 80s, Sagan (who was deeply involved in the peace movement) produced the (Turco-Toon-Ackerman-Pollack-Sagan (TTAPS) model that predicted a nuclear war would raise enough dust to blot out the sun and bring on a "nuclear winter". Nuclear Winter! Wow! The media ran with it, and you still hear the phrase used today. However, the media somehow failed to report on critics of the TTAPS model, of which there were many.
For example, Russell Seitz, Harvard Center for International Affairs, viewed the TTAPS model as worthless, revealing that, to achieve the results Sagan wanted, TTAPS had ignored factors such as the effects of day and night, clouds, rain, the continents, and the oceans. And George Rathjens of MIT dismissed TTAPS as, "... the worst example of the misrepresentation of science in my memory."
Later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, looking for a new home, Sagan - as did many others of his ilk - threw in with the eco-gang, where, during Desert Storm, he raced from TV network to network, predicting that smoke from the oil well fires would alter the climate enough to cause famine in India. Gee! I wonder how that prophesy panned out.
Besides Sagan, we have other eco-quack scientists, fellows like the oft-quoted Dr. Steven Schneider, who has thumped the doomsday drum for decades, and who has this novel approach to scientific integrity:
"... scientists should consider stretching the truth to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. ... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
Or one might cite Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the Grand Old Man of Eco-quackery, for forty years a most prominent doomsday campaigner, who has battled ferociously to promote global warming, making an alarming case for the immanent incineration of planet Earth. However, since the early Sixties, with equal conviction, Ehrlich has also prophesied: - The start of World War III on October 13, 1979.
- A new ice age. (More on the "ice age", later.)
- Massive starvation in India by the early 70s.
- Massive worldwide starvation by the 80s.
- Massive shortages of fuel and industrial raw materials by the 90s.
- The reduction of the population of the United States to 22.5 million by 1999 because of famine and global warming.
The case against the anthropogenic-CO2/global-warming hypothesis has grown so powerful that even a militant warmer like Hansen at NASA's Goddard Institute has begun to pull in his horns, now suddenly expressing reservations about the magnitude of the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on the climate and whether we know enough about the causes of climate change to make serious predictions about the future. (See Hansen's paper, "Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era", at giss.nasa.gov/research/intro/hansen.05)
Hansen hasn't always been so circumspect. On a blistering hot day in July of 1988, Dr. James Hansen testified before a Congressional committee that global warming had arrived, and as proof he predicted that 1988 would be the hottest year on record.
The media, right on cue, per the script, proclaimed:
GLOBAL WARMING HAS ARRIVED!
And you can trace much of the public's erroneous belief in global warming directly to Hansen's testimony. However, turned out that 1988 was not the hottest year on record. In fact, the lower 48 experienced record cold snaps, and Alaska had its coldest winter ever. Hansen had been dead wrong - a fact which, per the script, never made the headlines.
And, unless one understands a least a little about:
- The Medieval Warm Period,
- The Little Ice Age,
- The heat-island effect,
- What Pinatubo did to the data record after 1992,
- The utter corruption and unreliability of the surface temperature record,
- What NASA temperature-sensing satellites have found (the only uncorrupted data-set extant),
- How the North Atlantic Oscillation effects the climate,
- That, using the EPA's own numbers and simple arithmetic, one can calculate that it would take the internal combustion engine 5,000 years to double the current level of atmospheric CO2,
- The Van Zandt problem,
- How the Pacific Decadal Oscillation effects the climate,
- that North America, the Great CO2 Satan, is in fact a CO2 sink, and "undeveloped" nations are in fact net producers of CO2,
- How variations in solar radiation effect the climate,
Kary Mullis, Nobel, Chemistry, observed:
"The global warmers ... predict that global warming is coming, and our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple."
Mullis is partially correct; some do it for money and/or glory. But others do it for other reasons. What might those other reasons be? Well...
Beginning in the late 1930s, what passes for the global temperature record took a slight (statistically insignificant) downward trend. Based on that minute dip, in the early 1970s the prophets of doom rang the alarm! A NEW ICE AGE IS COMING! A NEW ICE AGE IS COMING!
And the culprit? Industrialism! And its noxious effluents, dust and smoke, blocking out the sun, threatening to throw the planet into the deep freeze.
At the time, frights like these appeared in print:
"The continued rapid cooling if the earth since World War II is also in accord with increased global air pollution associated with industrialism, urbanization, and exploding population..."
- Reid Bryson, longtime eco-deep-thinker, 1971.
- Reid Bryson, longtime eco-deep-thinker, 1971.
"There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about ever nation on earth."
- Peter Gynne, Newsweek, 1975
- Peter Gynne, Newsweek, 1975
"The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as the likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind"
- Nigel Calder, former editor of the New Scientist, 1975.
But then, smack in the middle of the campaign to stampede the proletariat into ice age hysteria, the global temperature trend took a slight (statistically insignificant) upward slope. - Nigel Calder, former editor of the New Scientist, 1975.
Uh-oh!
Problem?!
No problem.
On a dime, without so much as an, "Excuse my elbow", the prophets of doom spun a one-eighty. By George! It isn't global COOLING that threatens life as we know it! By golly! It's global WARMING!
And the culprit?
What else?
Industrialism!
And its noxious effluent, CO2.
To illustrate how these characters did the eco-flip.... Dr. Steven Schneider (mentioned above) today speaks with a stentorian voice among the global warming apocalyptics, and, like Tertullian, threatens us with fiery annihilation, lest we change our profligate ways.
However, twenty-five years ago, Schneider was busy flogging the anthropogenic-aerosols/ice-age line of doom. At the time, a few scientists speculated that the theoretical warming caused by increasing CO2 levels might tend to offset the cooling effects of anthropogenic aerosols. In furious defense of his ice age, in a published paper, Schneider lashed back (note the categorical certainty of his tone.):
"Temperatures do not increase in proportion to an increase in atmospheric CO2... Even an eight-fold increase over present levels might warm the Earth’s surface less than 2 degrees Centigrade, and this is unlikely in the next several thousand years."
Point: When global temperatures seemed to be falling, Schneider blamed the fall on industrialism, and he understood clearly that CO2 was an insignificant greenhouse gas.
But when temps began to rise, Schneider spun round and scrambled aboard the CO2/global-warming bandwagon, this time blaming the rise on, what?
Right!
Industrialism!
So, you see, it ain't about warming or cooling. It's about industrialism.
These guys don't like it. They wanna kill it.
Which leads to a most interesting question regarding eco-zealotry: why do environmentalists want to kill industrialism?
For the answer to that question, read Environmentalism's Tainted Roots.
Bernard Switalski
P.O. Box 486
Riverside, IL 60546 Voice: 708.442.7354
Email: switabern@juno.com
About Bernard Switalski- High school grad, 1953.
- U.S. Army lab tech, Bell Telephone Labs guided missile R&D, White Sands Proving Ground, NM, 1954-57.
- Railroad freight conductor, Chicago, 1958-63.
- Petroleum products quality/quantity surveyor, mostly in Venezuela, 1964-65.
- Blast furnace foreman, Chicago,1966-68.
- After that damn blast furnace put me in the ER, got into the heavy industrial construction industry, 1969. First job, laborer. Last job, general construction superintendent, contracted by a Spanish consortium to oversee the construction of a 4 billion dollar grassroots petroleum refinery in Sumatra.
- Retired, 1986.
Please email any correspondence to switabern@juno.com
