A Statement for Advocates of Climate Stasis
Do I need to explain my intense skepticism about claims of Global Cooling, now that they have mysteriously morphed into claims of Global Warming?
I will try once again to sum it up into seven points.
First, it is not as if this is the first hoax the Green-colored Reds have pulled. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twenty times, shame on me.
There has been one hoax or another blaring from headlines every season since the day I first picked up my first newspaper. All were fake. All.
Let me jog the memories of the young:
- Global Cooling.
- DDT — banning has led to countless deaths via pestilential insects.
- Alar.
- Overpopulation — predicted mass starvation in India in the 1980s.
- Shortages of Tin, Iron, Zinc, Coal, Oil, etc.– Julian Simon made a famous wager with enviro-scaremonger Paul Erlich about the decrease of certain irreplaceable natural resources. Simon won the bet.
- SST threat to ozone layer.
- Three Mile Island — The most famous disaster in history where no one died and no one got sick.
- Cellphones or powerlines causing cancer.
- Irradiated foods — would have improved food safety, but it was scared off the market.
- Mercury in swordfish and tuna.
- Cyclamates banned for causing bladder cancer.
- Red dye #2.
- Pesticides aldrin and dieldrin, suspended in 1974.
- Chlordane and heptachlor. Banned in the 1970s.
- Acid rain.
- Agent Orange (dioxin).
- Asbestos in schools and other buildings.
- Ethyl dibromide (EDB).
- Ozone hole.
- Nuclear Winter.
The only real pollution problems this nation ever had were solved during the Nixon Administration. The air over LA is smog free, the Cuyahoga river fire is out, and the Chesapeake Bay has clams and crabs again.
If the problem of Global Overpopulation now Global Cooling now Warming now Changing now Crisis now Catastrophe now Extinction Event were real, it would have one name. The goal posts and claims would not be an ever shifting maze of smoke and mirrors and mote-and-bailey arguments.
But note that one thing never changes in the changing mists of deception.
It is the second thing all the line items on the list above share in common, aside from the fact that they all turned out to be junk science. Namely, the fact that that the resulting solution, proposed or enacted, was always the same:
More government. More state bureaucrats intruding more intrusively with ever more bureaucracy. Bigger Big Brother.
Which brings me to my second point. Even if the alleged crisis of Global Whatever were not an obvious hoax in a long string of hoaxes, Big Brother may be willing, but he is not able to solve it.
Leviathan is an awkward brute at best, an unprofitable servant and a fearsome master. The government does everything it does badly.
Yes, everything, say I! Even the things the government does well, it does badly.
As every servicemen knows even police and military institutions are run very inefficiently, with goldbricking, SNAFUs, and the Peter Principle hindering everything, not to mention Sgt Bilko.
The N in SNAFU is the cream of the jest: it is the normal way the services operate.
But, fortunately for the police, crooks are even more inefficient. Fortunately for our bold sailors and brave soldiers, tangled as they be in mazes of paperwork, they face foreign navies and armies ensnared in bureaucracies just as entangled.
I am not opposed in principle to some small government role, but the main brunt of solving any societal ill is through the voluntary efforts of small and local organizations, as we have always done things in the Land of the Free.
Are the factories in Baltimore emitting stink and stench? Let Annapolis handle the matter, or, better yet, the Baltimore mayor. It is no one else’s business unless the fume carry across the river to Virginia.
I trust people like Boy Scouts and hunters who want to preserve wilderness areas for future generations. The measures they recommend have a rational relationship to ameliorate the problems alleged.
Those measure are usually private, going door to door, asking for contributions to fund clean up drives. The Scouts do not march on Washington, not as often they sell popcorn to raise funds.
Scouts, at least, do not have a long history of telling outrageous lies, whipping up hysteria, and demonizing any who voice calm skepticism.
I trust conservationists. Because conservationists do not rely only on political solutions. Boy Scouts pick up litter, or do in my town.
As I never tire of saying, an alarmist who is not talking about nuclear power as the best, if not sole, replacement for fossil fuels, is simply not serious, nor honest. He is Professor Harold Hill, but with not with something fun and harmless to sell, like marching band gear, but the one idea that has ruined, tortured, and ended more lives than any other single thing in all human history, the plague named socialism.
Not even the Angel of Death, wading the bloody Nile, cloaked in clouds of locusts and trailed by myriads of frogs, whose mortal shadow fell across the wailing multitudes of Egypt during Passover night ever slew as many as has socialism. Such is the wage of abandoning the Living God for idols of man’s vain imaginings.
Third, even if the hoax were real, and even if a modest government intervention were possible, the Red always recommend only the most far reaching and frankly socialist institution as the sole solution. This is exactly backward.
Look at the pollution in China. Socialism is the main cause of pollution in the world today.
If you want to clean up the environment, privatize.
Or put the Boy Scouts in charge …
Fourth, even if the hoax were real (it is not) and even if the government could handle the matter (it cannot) and even if socialism were the answer (it most certainly is not) none dare trust the political Left, the Reds, who lust for power as vampires lust for blood, with the position.
We have seen the Reds and how they act in small things. Not even a saint could be trusted with the wide sweeping and arbitrary authority over human industrial activity such a wholescale reinvention of our entire economy would needs must entail.
The sole government solution that would be meaningful is a world socialist order controlling all energy use, that is, all human industrial activity and most non industrial activity.
The political power would have to be worldwide, a New World Order, or else it would be meaningless. It would of necessity trump hence erode local and national sovereignty, and abolish self rule.
Even if I trusted Cincinnatus with such power, why trust a Bolshevik?
Fifth, there is no scientific consensus.
The statistic everyone by now has heard repeated to death is that 90 or 97 percent of scientists believe human activity is the primary cause of dangerously accelerating rates of global warming.
What humbug. Have you ever talked to scientists? I have. You cannot get 97 percent of any of them to agree on what to have for lunch.
The number of 97 percent is bogus and has been as entirely debunked as anything can be. I will repeat the facts for those of you who do not know:
Cook et al. (2013) ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature‘ searched some 11,944 abstracts of scientific papers published between 1991-2011 in an online database called The Web of Science for the phrases “global warming” and “global climate change”
Without reading the papers, nor even the sentences in which the key words appeared, Cooke the activist found 97% of the abstract of the papers examined contained the key words sought.
From this, and nothing more, Cooke et al., and concluded and reported that some 11500 of the papers, or 97%, must be endorsing the idea of human activity as primarily responsible (that is more than half of the contributory cause) for global warming, and that the levels of global warming are dangerous. Note that this is paper, not authors. There were 29,083 authors listed on the 11,944 papers.
In reality, a more honest review of the same database by real scientists found that only 65 papers (0.5%) explicitly said humans contributed some effect to global warming. Almost none said the human contribution was the primary cause, or that it was dangerous.
To add insult to injury, Cooke’s emails were leaked to the press, and before he ever began the so called research, he explicitly says what result he seeks to find, and says it will be used as a public relations gimmick.
Sixth, even if there were a scientific consensus, it would mean nothing. Science does not work by consensus. The scientific consensus before Einstein was Newtonian, and before him, the consensus was Copernican, and before that, Ptolemaic.
Seventh, even if science worked by consensus, and even if there were a scientific consensus, and even if the Reds could be trusted with the powers of the sort of socialist totalitarian world order necessary to control all human industrial activity, even assuming such a world order were the sole option, and assuming no private and no technical solution were feasible, and assuming the whole thing were not a hoax to begin with, and the danger is real and huge and soon, and in fact is an extinction level event coming within a decade …
… I would still take my chances.
Let us be blunt: You or I or anyone is in less danger from an extinction event than from putting these lunatic socialist losers in charge of the world.
Merely look at the population numbers of nations suffering a drought or famine compared to the death toll in Maoist China or Stalinist Russia.
We let them take charge of San Francisco and Detroit. Sewers are cleaner, and bombed out war zones safer. Imagine that on a world scale. Imagine a boot trampling a human face forever.
Better to let the world burn than to let that nightmare of the Twentieth Century, totalitarianism, take root again. I jest not, but take the words of Patrick Henry as my oath. If socialist chains were the only way to save the world itself from death, then farewell to earth.
Finally, Reds are liars. It is built into their political philosophy, their epistemology, their ontology, their metaphysics, their whole way of life. Falsehood is nectar to them, and truth is wormwood.
I realize that, technically, this last point was the same as my first, but since it was so important, I thought it worth saying twice.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
