Thank God.
Poor countries walk out of UN climate talks as compensation row rumbles on, we heard from the Guardian and many others earlier in the morning. These 132 countries were apparently expecting that they would be paid “compensations for extreme weather events"”. It seems that they took this meme (so radical one that we haven’t even heard much about it in the richer parts of the world) for granted and already demanded a new U.N. bureaucratic body to ‘oversee’ the compensatory payments.
Many of the countries are governed by shamans who believe that thunderstorms are created by witches. Almost all of these countries are dominated by folks who just don’t grasp science, not even at the elementary level. The IPCC was produced to support these beliefs that Exxon creates hurricanes, McDonald’s creates typhoons, the Great Devil is responsible for the floods, and the Little Devil (renamed to the rabid dog by the mullah-in-chief today) brought the wildfires to the world. And everyone will be living in a happy paradise once the assets of these villains are confiscated and redistributed.
Well, science says something different. All these weather events much like the Earth and the Solar System have been around for 4.6 billion years. Up to noisy fluctuations and some potentially understandable, mild, regular, persistent climate cycles, not necessarily periodic ones, nothing has detectably changed about the frequency or probabilistic distributions of these events in the last several thousands of years. If we improve the theory by the glaciation cycles, nothing has changed for one million of years.
The qualitative nature of the climate has been really the same for 4.6 billion years although in details, it was always changing. But there has never been an era in which extreme weather events were absent. There has never been any “paradise on Earth”. And the weather without extreme events wouldn’t be a paradise, anyway. Many of the higher life forms wouldn’t even arise and evolve in such a “paradise”.
A part of the climate industry is powered by greedy opportunists like Al Gore who once saw the opportunity to benefit. Many of the others are however classic leftwingers who just believe in the redistribution schemes. They don’t know whether they believe that the richer nations are “guilty”; they want to believe it because it’s their strategy to benefit.
Nothing essential has changed about these international conferences on redistribution for decades, perhaps centuries. Richard Feynman once attended such a conference (the overall theme was “fragmentation of knowledge") which has used the “threats of war” to advocate a global wealth redistribution. He wrote:
There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.
The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.
The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking! You’ve gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don’t take it so seriously. Back away a minute and look at what it is.” So I thought about the conference, how crazy it was, and it wasn’t so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in something like that again, I’d shy away from it like mad -I mean zero! No! Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.
When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!
Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge of our group has the nerve to say that since we’ve worked out so much, there won’t be any time for public discussion, so we’ll just tell the public all the things we’ve worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn’t think we had worked out a damn thing!
Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines our second basic “problem” - I said that I noticed something interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”
Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”
“Uh, well, as a general principle, or… I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?
There were a lot of fools at that conference- pompous fools - and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools - guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus - THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.
Good that there was no IPCC half a century ago and that Feynman wasn’t forced to attend the conference of these pompous fools because their pomposity and stupidity has grown so significantly in the last 50 years that Richard Feynman wouldn’t have survived the conference.
The silver lining is that at least the Warsaw climate conference was capable of de facto ending sharply and cleanly. But the richer nations that assured the looting nations that they wouldn’t get anything now suggested that things might change after 2015. So it’s very likely that these attempts aren’t over and the pseudoscientifically justified witch hunts will resume in a foreseeable future.
A British terrorist who could have been shot during her/their terrorist attack in the Arctic but instead, she was saved and now released on bail, probably because Putin found her cute. Do you think that she’s grateful that her life that she was ready to sacrifice through her unlimited stupidity was saved?
Update Thursday: Poland sacked the very environment minister who hosts the talks, with the apparent intent to accelerate the fracking revolution and destroy the remainders of the Warsaw conference. The lame duck may still finish the COP meeting.
By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times
The year 2013 has been a great year for global agriculture. Record world production of rice and healthy production of wheat and corn produced strong harvests across the world. These gains were achieved despite continuing predictions that world agricultural output is headed for a decline.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that world rice harvests for 2012/2013 were a record 469 million metric tons. Corn and wheat harvests were also strong, following record harvests for both grains during the 2011/2012 season. The USDA is now projecting world record harvests for corn, wheat, and rice for 2013/2014.
Enlarged
These numbers cap a 50-year trend of remarkable growth in world grain production. Since 1960, global wheat and rice production has tripled, and corn production is almost five times higher.
For decades, doomsayers predicted that food production would fail to keep up with the needs of humanity. In 1972, Donella Meadows and others of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published The Limits to Growth, which asked the question, “Do these rather dismal statistics mean that the limits of food production on the earth have already been reached?” Paul Ehrlich wrote in The End of Affluence in 1974, “Due to a combination of ignorance, greed and callousness, a situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death.”
But Norman Borlaug’s development of disease-resistant, high-yield strains of wheat and rice had already revolutionized twentieth century agriculture. A few years before Meadows and Ehrlich warned about coming famines, Borlaug’s wheat and rice were introduced into Latin America and Asia with astounding results. Mexico’s wheat production soared six-fold by 1970 from levels in the 1940s. India’s wheat production jumped from a huge deficit in 1965 to a surplus only five years later.
Food production continues to grow faster than population. Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations shows a 30 percent gain in the per capita agricultural production index from 1980 to 2010. World citizens have access to more grain, meat, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables. Even fish production is climbing with large gains in aquaculture fish farming.
The increased availability of food reduced the undernourished portion of the world’s population from 18.6 percent in 1990 to 12.5 percent in 2010, according to the FAO. A total of 868 million people are still classified as undernourished.
Today’s leading agriculture alarmists are proponents of the ideology of Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. Earlier this month, a leaked draft report from Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that man-made climate change would reduce global agricultural production yields by up to two percent per decade throughout the twenty-first century.
Lester Brown’s Earth Policy Institute has long been a predictor of agricultural collapse. His website states, “...climate change is heightening the likelihood of weather extremes, like heat waves, droughts, and flooding, that can so easily decimate harvests.” Even the USDA warns that man-made climate change threatens US agriculture.
Yet, one must wonder when the climate-damaging effects on agriculture will appear. The IPCC states that 1983-2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period in the Northern Hemisphere of the last 1,400 years. Certainly we should have seen some negative agricultural impact by now?
Maybe rising agricultural production is like rising polar bear populations (at record highs) - the decline begins tomorrow.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
WARMISTS CAN’T STOP THEMSELVES
By WALTER STARCK
Quadrant Online 11/15/13
Climate alarmists’ tactics—exaggeration, misrepresentation, smear and scorn—have hurt the movement more than helped it. No surprise there. Cultist are always the last to recognise the folly of their ways
When the idea of dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW) from fossil fuel emissions arose it found strong resonance across a variety of important interests. For researchers it meant funding and recognition. With the media it was attention-grabbing drama. To activists it was the mother of all eco-threats. Business saw huge profits to be made, while bureaucrats recognised the potential for massive increases in power and control.
For politicians it was a no-brainer, with strong popularity on one side and only denigration on the other.
An impressive AGW bandwagon soon assembled and fired-up a luxurious hundred billion dollar gravy train. In late 2009 everything was on track for a glorious triumph by AGW forces at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, which was to have been the gateway to the clean, green new world promised by the eco-prophets.
Then came Climategate and the wheels started to come off.
In reality the whole vast AGW structure was built on a flimsy foundation of highly dubious prophesies by a small coterie of third-rate academics whose reputations and careers have been based almost entirely on dramatic claims about climate change which have proved to be either wrong, doubtful, or at best, yet to be verified. The description of their being “third rate” is used with due consideration. The attention-grabbing claims concerning AGW have been both fraught with uncertainty and subject to diverse unrefuted criticism. Well-founded credentials and reputations in research are not based on iffy speculation and un-verified predictions. Competent scientists avoid such speculation and take care to clearly qualify the limits and uncertainties involved in any opinions or predictions they may offer.
With rare exception, all of the leading scientific proponents of catastrophic AGW have been unknown academics until they climbed onto the climate change bandwagon and began to make dramatic predictions of imminent catastrophe. The few exceptions with established reputations outside of climate catastrophism seem to have been already committed to a catastrophist view of other environmental threats for which AGW is only the latest, greatest and most popular. It also has boasted the added attraction of being by far the most rewarding.
In addition, climatology was a little known, highly interdisciplinary area of study in which researchers from almost any field could participate and call themselves climatologists. Doing so and offering some dramatic claim about AGW virtually assured widespread news coverage with anointment by the media of status as an “expert”. Generous grants were sure to follow.
For an academic with only a meagre reputation to risk, the temptation would have been hard to resist especially so for those suffering from that common academic malady, an inflated opinion of one’s own importance and intellectual ability. The opening of a shortcut to fame and fortune while bypassing the normal and tedious slog to recognised expertise was surely too right to have been just luck. It must have been meant to be and has accordingly been defended with all the ferocity of true believers.
In climate alarmism the perceived righteousness of the cause has led to a wholesale abandonment of what had previously been considered to be proper scientific practice. In climate research it has become widespread and accepted practice to refuse to reveal methods and materials, ignore opposing evidence, misrepresent findings, exaggerate confidence, suppress publication of conflicting findings and use personal denigration to discredit anyone who dares to raise questions about the latest and endless streams of claims and assertions. While such malpractice has become pervasive, it will usually involve just complex technical matter at a time, requiring a considerable level of background knowledge if arguments are to be fully understood.
However, the fundamental ethical issues are something everyone can understand and it is here where the alarmists have done the most to discredit themselves. Whenever clear evidence of dishonest behaviour by AGW proponents has been exposed, instead of simply condemning it they have followed a pattern of first trying to deny it then, when that fails, attempting to justify it. Finally, when mis-information has been thoroughly exposed, they seek to trivialize “mistakes” as being of no importance in any case. In doing this they have make it clear that any regard for truth is subordinate to the righteousness of their cause.
Before widespread systematic scientific misconduct began to be exposed in climate research, science enjoyed a high level of public trust. In abusing this trust, climate alarmists gained a short-lived advantage. However, the inevitable exposures have inflicted serious and long lived damage to both their own cause and to the reputation of science itself. This will be difficult to repair.
Now, it seems that all of the dire predictions about warming temperatures, species extinctions, extreme weather, melting glaciers, accelerating sea levels, epidemics, crop failures and sundry other climate catastrophes are starting to be seen as having failed. Having denied any possibility of natural variability in the modest rise in global temperature observed in the latter part of the 20th century, the alarmists are now finding it difficult to explain why their most certain hopes have not materialised. That they might have been wrong all along is, of course, unthinkable.
In the face of an ever increasing departure from unfolding reality their response has been to simply ratchet up the level of alarm and claim more certainty than ever. This seems a bizarre strategy, especially from a group which purports to be composed of scientists of the highest calibre. They must deem reality itself to be subordinate to a dubious theory ratified only by group consensus.
From the outside it looks like a retreat to the bunkers for a last stand by fanatical adherents of an extremist cult preparing for martyrdom in a final paroxysm of righteousness. Perhaps it’s the prophesied battle of Armageddon featuring the righteous hosts of postmodernism vs. the Satanic idea of an objective reality independent of anything one might choose to believe. Or could it just be that the constant misrepresentation of reality that is now the norm in climate research has become so ingrained that adherents have difficulty differentiating reality from fantasy, not unlike the condition psychiatrists used to call Pseudologia Fantastica?
However it is characterised, the current tactics of climate alarmists in public debate are doing nothing to restore their credibility, serving only to make themselves look ever more foolish and untrustworthy.
If they are really as certain as they profess to be, the best thing they could do at this point would be to shut up. If they are right, reality should prove them so soon enough. And if the science is settled, as they claim, there is no need for more research anyway. Of course they won’t do anything of the sort. Shutting up would mean giving surrendering all that flattering attention and funding they have come to accept as their just due.
So, in all probability the show will continue, not as a debate but as a farce, with the lead characters making ever-bigger fools of themselves until the public tires of paying the bills and finds something better to do with its tax money.