Have you heard the story of King Canute? Lord and Master of the Northmen a thousand years ago, a wise and humble ruler, a man who had that rarest of qualities in a leader: he did not let the adulation of his subjects go to his head.
His swooning soupy sycophantic courtiers worshiped the man, and thought no deed beyond his powers. An absurd and sickening state, because why? Because functionaries who believe their leader is a god are not going to understand the true cause of things and thus they will not make good decisions.
So the King, disgusted by these attitudes, had himself conveyed to seaside at low tide. Posing majestically, he bade the ocean to remain where it was, for the tide to be still. He was King! His word was law! The oceans must not rise!
Henry of Huntingdon, a contemporary historian, tells us what happened. “[C]ontinuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.’”
Times change. Only a few days ago, our leader, President Barack Obama, had himself flown to Alaska. There he stood at the base of a great glacier, which has the curious and prophetic name Exit. He bade the glacier that it
should not melt, that it should not retreat from the summer sun.
Yet Exit continued its exit. It would not obey.
There the parallel with King Canute ends. Because the President’s courtiers still believe the man has the power to stop the titanic block of ice to do what ice naturally does when it is hot outside. Indeed, the President himself believes he has these powers. How do we know?
When our leader gained first victory, he posed as his own historian and spoke these words about his ascendancy to the secular throne: “[W]e will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment - when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Also the moment glaciers ceased melting in the sun.
We have come to an odd moment in history. People used to accept changes in tides and weather as the Way Things Are. Some years were hot, some cold. Some years were wet, some dry. The only constancy was inconstancy. People coped or adapted and prayed.
King Canute represented a time in which men looked beyond themselves for ultimate explanations. But as men turned to themselves as the answer to all questions, they decided that changes in the world could no longer be explained naturally, that instead all change must have at its root men themselves. So that when the globe began to warm, as it sometimes did and was once seen as normal, it was concluded the base cause of this must be man and therefore the change was abnormal. And when glaciers melted, that too must have been caused by man and was also abnormal.
Exit has long been melting. The National Park Service said that, for instance, Exit retreated 935 feet between 1894 and 1899, and that it has been in consistent flight since 1814. It is still retreating, but at a much slower rate today. Even stranger is that its edge is now in the same place it was shortly after King Canute left us. Mankind didn’t cause the old melting, but somehow we’re causing the new.
The main difference from 1814 and now was that then nobody much cared if the glacier melted. Didn’t glaciers always grow and retreat? Wasn’t the great state of Michigan, for example, once entirely covered by glaciers? Aren’t the Great Lakes, the most glorious bodies of water on earth, muscular puddles formed from retreating ice?
The question “Is mankind better off with or without glaciers?” was never really asked because people knew that there wasn’t much they could do about the situation one way or another. It isn’t so much asked now, either, but the implicit answer, about change in glaciers, climate, or anything in the environment, is always that “no change is good.”
In a way, this is cheering. It contains within it the kernel of knowledge that man is in a fallen state. Why? Because if you accept that all change is at base caused by man, and then also say all change is bad, you are saying man is corrupting. This is a sober truth.
The problem is that the solution to man’s corruption is believed to be men who are more than men, men who have somehow risen and have shed this corruption. The winds and tides would not obey King Canute, but somehow they will be subservient to Enlightened Man.
Climate science has become a politically-corrupted, agenda-driven, federally-beholden science-industrial complex; along with a military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 farewell address.
As he stated: “The prospect of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of scientific-technological elite.”
Estimating that as many as half of all medical studies are wrong, Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton of The Lancet, a leading peer-reviewed international medical journal notes that medical science “has taken a turn towards darkness.”
He attributes this circumstance to research “afflictions,” failings which can also be observed to infect many U.S. and U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.
Included are small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance.
As in the case of highly sensationalized IPCC reporting, Dr. Horton admits that scientific journal editors “aid and abet the worst behaviors” in order to gain a maximum “impact factor.”
He charges that “In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their theory of the world.”
A May 22 New York Times article agrees. Titled “What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?” authors Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky discuss how leading scientific journals have been duped into publishing bogus studies which reference nonexistent data. (Like Cook etal).
Again, this results from pressure to double down on that all-important “impact factor” of influence determined by the likelihood studies will be referenced in subsequent “downstream” articles.
Given that most all climate research funding comes from public alarm-dependent agenda-driven government sponsors, and their ideological green activist acolytes, there should be little surprise that so many researchers bend objectivity and science to oblige.
As the late Stephen Schneider who authored important parts of three U.N. IPCC reports has explained, “like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change.”
Schneider argued that, “To do that, we need 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 the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Very recent evidence of this agenda-driven “biased finger on the scales” balancing problem is revealed by attempts of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists to re-write surface temperature records prior to the late 1990s downward and inflate temperatures since then in order to tell the warming alarm story they wanted.
More accurate atmospheric satellite data reveals that there has been no statistically significant global warming over the past 18 years and counting.
After global warming (which hasn’t occurred since today’s high school students were born) was rebranded as “climate change” (which it always does), Obama administration alarm sirens now warn us about an “extreme weather” trend attributed to human CO2 emissions.
Yet simple fact checking would show that it’s been nearly a decade since the last major hurricane named Wilma made landfall in the U.S. in 2005. Meanwhile, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires - along with polar ice and sea levels - are in line with or improving in regard to historic trends.
Prominent University of Manchester professor emeritus of chemical thermodynamics and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry Leslie Woodcock blames powerful green lobbies for creating a “do-good industry” premised upon unwarranted climate alarm.
As quoted in interview with Britain’s Yorkshire Evening Post, the prominent scientist said: “If you talk to real scientists who have no political interests, they will tell you there is nothing in global warming. It’s an industry which creates vast amounts of money for some people.”
My friend, former EPA analyst Alan Carlin, who blew the whistle on IPCC junk science used to advance fossil fuel regulatory agendas observes that “The global warming scare is a textbook example of what can happen when politics and ideology guide environmental policy rather than science.”
Important skill sets of agenda-driven climate scientists and politicians obviously share much in common.
As Winston Churchill explained, “Politics is the ability to fortell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year, And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom"(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012).
President Obama and his UN, Big Green and Climate Crisis Industry allies insist that we need to “fix our climate” - because carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions are overheating the planet and causing “unprecedented” weather, sea level and drought disasters. There isn’t an iota of truth to any of these assertions. From my perspective, what we DO need to fix is the climate of fraud and corruption in the global warming and renewable fuels bureaucracy and industry.... and their destructive policies that kill jobs, dreams, birds, bats and people.
My article this week explores these issues, and offers solutions to the morass we have gotten ourselves into.
Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to you friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
Climate issues we do need to address
We need to fix the climate of fraud, corruption, and policies that kill jobs, hope and people
Paul Driessen
Reeling stock markets across the globe hammered savings, pension funds, innovation and growth. US stocks lost over $2 trillion in market value in eight days, before rallying somewhat, while the far smaller Shanghai Composite Index lost $1 trillion in four days of trading, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Battered economies continue to struggle. Investment banks are pulling out of developing countries. An already exploding and imploding Middle East now confronts a nuclear arms race and human exodus.
Complying just with federal regulations already costs American businesses and families $1.9 trillion per year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute calculates. That’s more than all 2014 personal and corporate income tax receipts combined - and Obama bureaucrats issued 3,554 new rules and regulations last year.
EPA’s 2,691-page Clean Power Plan is designed to eliminate coal mining and coal-fired power plants - and minimize natural gas substitutes. The CPP requires that gas use can increase by only 22% above 2012 levels by 2022, and just 5% per year thereafter. On top of that, new natural gas-fueled generating units that replace coal-fired power plants absurdly do not count toward state CO2 reduction mandates.
That means millions of acres of new wind and solar installations that generate expensive, unreliable electricity - and survive only because of subsidies, tariffs, anti-fossil fuel mandates, and exemptions from endangered species, environmental impact and other requirements that block fossil fuel projects.
Anti-energy, anti-growth policies imposed in name of preventing “dangerous manmade climate change” impact everything we do. For minority, elderly and working class families, they bring soaring electricity costs, rising unemployment, unproductive lives on government assistance, diminished health and welfare, and shorter life spans. They hogtie economies and kill jobs, prolong and worsen economic quagmires, crush aspirations and opportunities, perpetuate poverty, and foster anger, unrest and conflict.
None of these hard realities seems to bother President Obama, though. In fact, he is determined to use the December climate conference in Paris to lock the United States into binding treaty commitments to slash the common folk’ fossil fuel use, CO2 emissions, economic growth and job creation even further.
Anyone who cares about living standards, lifting billions of people out of abject poverty, and reining in the power of unaccountable US, EU and UN bureaucrats needs to pay attention and get involved.
Earth’s climate is doing pretty much what it always has: responding to powerful natural forces, changing, and driving atmospheric patterns and weather events that benefit some, harm others and sometimes wreak devastation. It is not doing what gloom-and-doom computer models and headlines predicted.
We do not need to “fix” or “control” the climate. We couldn’t if we tried. We do need to fix the climate of fraud, corruption and destructive policies that kill jobs, dreams and people. We need to realize that most countries will not commit economic suicide. They may sign a climate treaty - but for reasons that have nothing to do with environmental protection ... and only if their obligations are distant and ephemeral.
Mr. Obama has said from the outset that he would use executive decrees to “fundamentally transform” the United States and ensure that electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.” He has kept his word.
He and his friends in the UN, EU, Big Green and Climate Crisis Industry have also made it clear that they intend to use the Paris conference to negotiate the future distribution of the world’s wealth and resources, determine what economic growth and living standards are “ecologically feasible,” and transform the global economic development model: replacing sovereign nations and free enterprise capitalism with global governance and decision-making based on “sustainable development” and “dangerous manmade climate change” mantras. 1992 climate conference organizers even said saving the world requires that they cause “industrialized civilization to collapse.” They intend to keep their promises.
Impoverished people in developing countries reject this agenda. They want sustained development, not sustainable development. They want decent jobs and modern houses, hospitals and living standards.
Thus, under the proposed Paris treaty, only developed countries will be required to slash fossil fuel use. “Poor” nations (including China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and Russia) will not be obligated to reduce their carbon-based energy use or carbon dioxide/greenhouse gas emissions by any specific amounts or dates though some say they “intend to try” to reduce emissions or may present non-binding targets some years from now. Most will dramatically increase their oil, gas and coal use, and CO2/GHG emissions.
The real bribe to induce poor nations to sign a new treaty is a binding commitment that increasingly less developed, less energy-powered, less rich countries will give “poor” nations (or at least their ruling elites) $100 billion per year in climate adaptation, mitigation and reparation payments. That’s to cover damages that developed nations have supposedly inflicted on Earth’s climate. FRCs (Formerly Rich Countries) will also be required to give “poor” nations advanced energy and other technologies, at no cost.
Even more insane, the entire basis for this agenda, this treaty, these commitments and non-commitments, is bald assertions - driven by garbage in/garbage out computer models and deceptive, fraudulent science - that humanity faces “unprecedented” global warming, rising ocean, weather and other calamities.
About the only unprecedented event in the past century is that no category 3-5 hurricane has hit the USA in nearly a decade. Climate alarmists refuse to discuss that. Their other assertions are pure fiction.
Claims that 2014 was the “hottest year on record,” and July 2015 was “the hottest July” since “at least 1880,” are based on city and airport temperatures that are always several degrees higher than those at nearby rural sites. (Satellite data show no warming for 18 years.) The “superheated planet” alarums involve hundredths of a degree: less than the margin of error. They are based mainly on only 1,200 measuring stations for Earth’s entire surface - with few in the coldest regions, and millions of acres of missing data simply extrapolated from urban numbers. The “hottest ever” charade also assumes reliable temperature data exist for the entire USA and planet all the way back to 1880! It defies belief.
(For more examples of climate scare deceit, see Climate Hype Exposed, Heartland’s Top 10 Global Warming Lies, the Aussie temperature scam, the Gore-a-thon analysis, and much more.
Imagine your life without electricity, or only when it’s available, or costing so much you can’t afford it and your now-bankrupt former employer couldn’t afford either. Imagine the EPA and UN controlling the juice that powers everything in your life: transportation, manufacturing, communications, entertainment, life after dark, life in hot and cold weather, the enormous infrastructure and energy demands that feed your smart phone. No wonder Google scientists finally admitted renewable energy is a pipedream.
Too many environmental laws no longer focus on protecting the environment. They have become bureaucratic weapons to protect chosen industries and destroy those connected to carbon-based fuels.
Denying people access to abundant, reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy is immoral and often lethal. It is an unconscionable crime against humanity to implement policies that pretend to protect the world’s energy-deprived masses from hypothetical manmade climate dangers decades from now - by perpetuating energy deprivation, poverty, malnutrition and disease that kill millions of them tomorrow.
Letting this climate fear mongering continue also means fewer jobs, more welfare, lower living standards, and deteriorating health and welfare - except for ruling elites. But so far too few politicians, candidates, clergy and business leaders have shown the courage to speak out - even as every Democratic would-be successor to Mr. Obama seems hell-bent on going even further than he has on all these policies.
Our next president and congress must focus on job and economic growth, and overall human welfare. They must review and roll back destructive regulations, root out the fraud and corruption, and restore honesty, transparency and real science to our political and regulatory system.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.