NOTE: Heartland Conference: The Heartland Institute’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-7) will take place in Chicago, Illinois from Monday, May 21 to Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at the Hilton Chicago Hotel, 720 South Michigan Avenue. The event will follow the NATO Summit taking place in Chicago on May 19-21. The Theme is Real Science, Real Choices. Open to the public, registration is required.

See Alan Caruba’s post on a Fighting Mad Heartland Institute.
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By Art Horn

In 1949 George Orwell published his now legendary book 1984. The book told a story about a world run by three super governments. Those governments had complete control over the lives of the people who lived in them. In the county of Oceania where the story takes place “The Party’ was the absolute ruler and made all laws and wrote all “truth”. The Party would simply write whatever it wanted to about anything so as to keep control over everything. All private property had been confiscated. There were no privately run companies. All of the so called truth was published and broadcast from the “Ministry of Truth”. In reality whatever truth was really out there was never published or broadcast. In effect there was no real truth, only convenient truth. The truth could be changed from day to day even hour to hour depending on how the Party wanted the “truth” to serve them.

There are interesting parallels in today’s world. Just because some of the warnings Orwell sounded back then didn’t appear to materialize in 1984 doesn’t mean he had the wrong ideas. His timing was just a little off. For instance today the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA (can you say The Ministry of Truth) declared on Monday, December the 7th (Pearl Harbor Day) that carbon dioxide represent a serious health threat to all Americans. The justification for this declaration came from a 2007 Supreme Court decision calling carbon dioxide pollution and is therefore covered by the Clean Air Act.

Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA is making use of something Orwell called “Doublethink”. In the book doublethink is “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” It is now convenient for the EPA to label a trace gas that is beneficial to all plant and animal life as a pollutant. She is well aware that carbon dioxide is not pollution. Submariners live under water for months with concentrations of carbon dioxide up to 10,000 part per million with no ill effects. Current atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are at 392 parts per million. Actually carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant gas and not classified as toxic or harmful.

The EPA might argue that too much carbon dioxide in the air, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, will cause global warming and thus represents a serious threat to people and the environment and therefore justifies calling it pollution. One can die from drinking too much water but that doesn’t make water pollution. It simple means someone had too much of a good thing. By employing doublethink the EPA can simultaneously know that carbon dioxide is not pollution but declare that it is if it suites their needs at the moment. It may not be the strict definition of doublethink but it sure is close.

Another interesting parallel to the book is how “the truth” about something can be changed to suite those in power. In contemporary context this could be the climate of the past. In 1984 the Party slogan proclaimed “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”. In the book “The Ministry of Truth” was responsible for all propaganda (contemporary examples: carbon dioxide is pollution or the world is warming rapidly) and would re-write any historical fact to agree with the thinking of The Party. Orwell wrote “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth” Orwell’s book was probably intended to be a warning for free people to be on the lookout for such revisions of history that can be used to satisfy the desires of those in power. Today, sixty three years after the book was published it appears that science itself is being re-invented.

The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is a division of NASA located on the campus of Columbia University in New York. In 1999 it produced a graph of United States temperature anomaly from 1880 to 1999. It clearly showed that the year 1934 was much warmer than the next warmest year, 1998. The anomaly showed that 1934 was 0.6 degrees Celsius or 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 1998. By the time the graph of United States temperature anomaly had undergone several “adjustments” by the Goddard Institute the 2010 version showed that remarkably, 1934 had “cooled” 0.3 degrees Celsius or 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit and equally amazingly, 1999 had warmed 0.4 degrees Celsius or 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit! Now in the new reality 1998 was warmer than 1934. These “adjustments” to the temperatures were not done all at once. They were done in tiny steps over a period of 11 years. Does this sound familiar? “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth’’. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. By cooling the past gradually and warming the present the new truth will show that the earth is warming much faster than it actually is.

A striking example of a large institution changing the past climate to suite their own agenda took place at the end of the 21st century. Prior to its 2001 meeting, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had acknowledged and published in their reports on climate change, a graph that showed a Medieval Warm Period from about the year 1000 to 1350. It clearly showed that for a part of that warm period the average temperature of earth was warmer than today. The graph also showed that there existed a Little Ice Age from about 1400 to around 1900. The average temperature was significantly colder than today and that the temperature of earth had been slowly warming for over 300 years.

In their 2001 report the IPCC decided that this history of the earth’s climate for the last 1,000 years would not be helpful in propelling the agenda they had in mind. That agenda was and is total control of the climate change debate and then to use that control to accelerate their goal of redistributing the worlds wealth as they see fit. Then they found the “Hockey Stick” graph. It showed almost no temperature change over the last thousand years until the 20th century when the graph showed the temperature shooting upward. This pleased the IPCC and it was adopted as “truth”. By accepting a completely new history of the climate they simply erased all the research that had conclusively determined that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age existed. In Orwell’s book there is a section where Winston Smith, the principal character, says “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say that this or that event, -it never happened- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

If everyone accepts the new truth as reality than the Orwellian warning will be missed. Fortunately some brave men have stepped forward and are speaking out. Some 49 former NASA employees and Astronauts have written a letter that strongly recommends that NASA and GISS refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. The entire letter is here in Energy Tribune.

Those who currently control the climate of the past can manipulate the data. In doing they make past and current trends in temperature, sea level rise, ice melt, frequency of tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts and anything else they can think of look unusual and alarming. All of this is of course caused by the use of fossil fuels. Everyone alive on this planet is subject to weather and climate changes. Controlling what the data says about those changes can be critical in forming policies that attempt to control the climate and therefore the people and industries that are allegedly causing those changes.

In the book 1984 the Party attained complete and total control over everyone by taking control of everything. Controlling the people and industries that are (supposedly) destroying the climate of the future is a powerful tool in controlling everything and everyone. If you’ve never read 1984 you should. If you have, you should read it again. You’ll find a lot of insight into how global warming “science” and politics works today in nineteen eighty twelve.