What we have in global warming is a phenomena that is exceedingly complicated via so many variables reduced by politics to one-liners which are treated as unconditional undisputed scientific fact, often like percepts of a faith. These disparate groups on the Left united by green politics pretend to have the upper hand for the reason that climate is changing, and is probably being directly affected by fossil fuel emissions. There is a consensus among scientists worldwide that global warming is occurring through man-made industrial output much like there was a consensus among scientists earlier last century that there was a medium of ether in space to account for the transmission of light, electro-magnetism and gravity before Einstein’s special theory of relativity made this moot. Consensus of course is not proof. Like Marxism or Pyschoanalysism, it is a theory with no falsifiability. If you challenge their conclusions and political demands as a result of this consensus, even if you are some of the brightest scientists in the world, (i.e., Dyson, Lomborg, Koovin, Deutsch, Curry, Wunsch, to name just a few), you’re in the pay of corporate America, or a friend of the captains of industry or just crazy. If you challenge the dogma, you will soon see that the propaganda machine will go into action against you. (Remember what happened to Semmelweis). To a great extent, the environmentalists unduly influence the media class and are overtly Platonic. They are after political power. If you do not have political cover from conservatives, they may well destroy your career and make you look like a madman. Often it seems that they don’t want an open scientific debate: they want action and you should get out of their way if you can’t see it in their light. "There is a key difference between a 'scientific consensus' and a 'consensus of scientists.' A scientific consensus is a relatively stable paradigm that structures and organizes scientific knowledge. By contrast, a consensus of scientists represents a deliberate expression of collective judgment by a scientific institution or a group of scientists, often at the official request of a government or other organization." (Quoted from Climate Uncertainty, see Currie above).
Never have political elites who so passionately want to expand the state and attack the market economy seen such a worldwide opportunity. They are excited. Only Christians and libertarians on the Right stand in their way. Collectivism rings in their ears, they’re dancing, and for heaven sakes, after all, they’re just trying to save humankind from themselves. Not since the Avengers has a more heroic group of super heroes joined together to fight the evil of the world. Closer to the truth might be that the Left is so dishonest that the whole movement is cloaked in modern myth. I mean conservatives are bad enough hypocrites -- what can we say about politics? -- but the Left is just downright scary when it comes to environmental issues. Literally a shutter passes through a honest hard-working person at the thought of it, the David Suzuki’s and Robert Redford’s of the political class, ugh, the size of their estates are all you need to know.
I think there should be a billion more trees on this home of ours; splendid trees in large beautiful clumps and with animals big and small protected on their borders. Two billion, three. Plant trees by all means. BTW: don’t pee in my river. Oh wait. It’s not my river, it’s The Tragedy of the Commons. Don’t pollute my air then. Oh wait, I can’t use legal recourse as an individual to stop the state, car manufacturers or industrialists. Well then, don’t destroy my lake. Aw, same problem. The Left looks after all that with big government. What am I thinking? Who would want those conservatives and libertarians slowing progress in the name of property rights? Why be skeptical of the state? When has the state ever let humanity down? Leftists love everyone, (except libertarians, conservatives, folks with ability, fundamentalist Christians, classical liberalism, especially over-achieving minorities, economists sympathetic to the free markets, business people, scientists who disagree with them, old white accomplished guys, the rich, and I’ve probably left a few groups out, like Jews and the Bourgeoisie – but not to worry) and they just want what is best for humanity. So the First Law of liberalism is “The Bad Guys” are conservatives and libertarians, (i.e., probably the entire Right), and “The Good Guys” are the liberals and the socialists, ah, the quintessential inspired caring Left. So let’s begin with the catechism lesson. The progressives are non-historical. It doesn’t matter that they are collectivists, statists and Platonists–many are totalitarians -- in America over 15% of the social scientists are Marxists. They are all filled with love even for the hard working "deplorables". It doesn’t matter that libertarians are individualists, capitalists, rationalists and want limited government with a strong emphasis on law and order. They are haters. The Right's patron saint is Donald Trump not Julian Assange or Edward Snowden. They are traitors to the inevitable united march of the progress of humankind, which is that the universe ends with the death of all galaxies and what is left is the egalitarian darkness.** Whenever I have warm thoughts about the Left, I always like to reflect back on Noam Chomsky denying the killing fields of Cambodia, (25% of the population -- two million -- were murdered by the Khmer Rouge Communists). At the time he regarded it as a propaganda coup of the West and as a myth of right-wing capitalists manufacturing consent against the Left in the democracies. That always brings me back to reality.
How Dare the Stars Shine So Brightly?
The Left are fierce opponents of censorship, (except for Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, rich people, the Right, critics of minority cultures like Aayan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Thomas Sowell, Walter E Williams and if you don’t have the right scientific or medical state credentials – why should you have exposure?, but other than that – of course the unscientific holistic nutritionists should shut up as well – if you want to watch and discuss the hockey-baseball-basketball-football-franchises, and porn movies too), you are certainly free to do those things. After all, it’s the West and your human rights are sacrosanct and the liberty to mismanage your life at other people's expense is guaranteed. The Left believes in liberty even while working overtime to destroy it in its every fundamental aspect, but especially with state education, socializing the money supply and demanding the nanny state for our cradle to grave needs. They have you covered. If you see the contradiction and end up on the conservative side of the political spectrum, well that’s because you’re too selfish to make the leap of faith and save humanity from themselves. They find their intellectual enemies deeply offensive, accusing them of harvesting the biblical idea that humankind can endlessly exploit and pollute nature. They denounce the Right in its totality as dumb religious cynics.
Climate change is the perfect event for the Left. They relish it as they never have before, that is, the coming of the American socialist government, and one of their biggest deceptions is that global warming has no legitimate opposition. John Oliver is funny, however he knows he'd never make fun of the Left. It would be the end of his career. Why? The Left are certified astrophysicists and know exactly the spectacularly complicated cycles of ancient earth. The earth is likely heading into a long cold ice age, or maybe not. But they pretend to know absolutely that we are not. We don’t know the results of carbon emissions on the topsoil and forests of the planet. They make us believe they know 100 percent. We don’t know if the cycle of the sun’s lengthy rotation around the Milky Way will cause our planet to cool as it so often has in our history: there have been at least five of them of which we know, some more severe than others. Many scientists attest that we are currently in one. They -- the Left -- imagine they know what will happen next. It takes 226 million years for the earth to rotate around the Milky Way. We have gone around nearly twenty times so far in the 4.5 billion years the earth has existed. No adequate scientific theory has any consensus to account for the past’s glacial cycles. They act as if there is absolute knowledge on the topic. The cyclical cause of ice ages might be related to many concurrently occurring facts: long term ocean currents, recurring solar flares, astronomical cycles, atmospheric composition, plate tectonics, planetary alignments, all perhaps in some complicated combination, but the Left, like the Marxists and Neo-Marxists before them of recent history, make-believe that they’re scientists and not political pundits. They know all of this on faith. They are irrational, devout, dangerous, and should be fought on all counts. They are after a power grab and out to destroy the market economy!
Two Kinds of Sceptics Exist Today in the World
Those Who Deny Progress
And Climate Change Skeptics
Let us go forward with what we do know: “Yes, indeed, climate is changing; getting warmer, and yes, it is probably being directly affected by fossil fuel emissions increasing carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. The earth has limits to the absorption of it before dire consequences occur in the future. Science must intervene to reduce and even halt it. We can all understand the danger even without having the whole picture; solar energy, carbon convertion and planting billions of trees. I'm in. It is not easy to quit smoking, but you can do it without voting for Al Gore. These are problems we have caused by our successes. We must live the solution to these problems just as our inheritors must live their solution to new problems and so forth. The gloom & doom ideology see our civilization and earth as a static event when it is in fact peopled with a dynamic event: us! We have reason, innovation, science and nearly eight billion brains and problem solvers on our side, we can find solutions to our problems. Don't Panic! (BTW: Problems will always be with us and that's one of the reasons increasing individual wealth is so important as it insures more and more people have time and are put to purposeful thinking). If you understand Hayek, Popper and Mises correctly, you know that there are ideas out there that cause calamity: the biggest one being that the future should be systematically mapped out by intellectuals and executed by governments, this way is the wrong way and leads to much human suffering. And always remember this: many intellectuals hate life and will bend the truth for their agendas!
Power to Save the World: "Curiously, I discovered that the same environmental activists who implicitly believe in the models of global climate disruption that have been derived from probabilistic risk assessment [PRA] nevertheless distrust that same methodology when it is applied to nuclear safety." See also, "Why I changed my mind about nuclear power."
The rest (the political part) is built on the big lie. It has worked for the intellectual class so many times in the past, and I tell you why. They have no respect for middleclass intelligence and hate the market economy. They are the elite political set, the philosopher kings of the West and lies are justified to make the people do what is necessary for what they deem our best interests. We are apathetic and the Left are our Platonic champions. They recognize no opposition. Their enterprise is built entirely on faith as are all evil collectivist dreams. Fight them! Write letters. Make fun of them. Urge them to explain themselves. They have nothing but lies. They are righteous as a suicide bomber who has never read an atheist tract in their short teenage life. They don’t need to read any of their enemies’ works. By definition their enemies are fascists, crazy, irrational . . . well you get the picture. Their arrogance knows no limit, and remember, dear reader, they have no Skin in the Game. Many leftist intellectuals have never had a middleclass job and offer third party opinions, often to groups who do not care for their observation or interference. They are a protected member of the political class, subsidized by the hard-working, over-taxed masses and are after raw political power to experiment with the earth itself. Empirical evidence means nothing to them: they're CNN stupid as surely as many of their enemies are FOX dumb-down.
It’s the same thing with selfishness, ambition, individual incentive and our “Human Nature”. We are what we have evolved into from natural selection over millions of years, the imperfect sensual creatures that are current homo sapiens, and the Left, like the Platonists (i.e., Neo-Platonism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Existentialism, Phenomenologism, Linguisticism, Analysism, Positivism and many other manifestations of Platonic doctrines such as Bentham and Mills' Utilitarianism and Mohamed’s Jihadism) hate us for it, and often hate life as well. In this regard, intellectual and property rights are intimately connected. The creative thought is the actualization into real-time possessions. To separate them has many dire practical consequences in the present, the least not being that making one’s way in the modern market economy without guaranteed constitutionally-protected property-rights is that it is impossible to achieve human individual wealth. This explains the failure of the Native “Reserve” regime stateside and in Canada which allows little individual property rights to its constitutes on Reserves and wonders why there’s no heat, running water and paved roads to their constantly deteriorating shacks despite their enormous subsidies on every level of government. Their Catholic Liberationists and Neo-Marxist “Chiefs” don’t understand their John Locke and probably have never heard of him. To them conservative and evil are as synonymous as socialist and goodness. Most of their ills are blamed, just as Black American Leftists do, on white racism and capitalism. If you subsidized the immigrant Irish population, there would be a pub on every other corner, all filled with off-duty-cops and union stewards drinking and singing late into the night; oh wait, they’ve already done that without government subsidy, let alone if we look at such minorities as Jews, Japanese, Greeks, Italians, new-found middleclass Blacks and other groups who came to the party with nothing and got somewhere superior than “there” over the last century. It's no joyride, but it's better than from where their parents departed, voluntarily or otherwise.
I can’t stress how much the Left hate middleclass values. It’s not just an intellectual inheritance from the Marxists and Neo-Marxists hatred of the Bourgeoisie. It is fundamental Platonism writ large on the world stage since the birth of Christianity! It’s their total fatal disrespect for human beings and our human nature. They don’t like sensual female and male. Period. They’re not of the otherworld, no, many are atheists, but they are of the even more detrimental, impossible utopian state-created “new-world” man. They delude themselves that they’re cool. To them Human Nature doesn’t exist. Humans are inherently pliable, and with a little bit of state coercion can be amended into an ideal version of “Human”. They want to experiment and the GREEN thing—the environmental modern myth—is their brand spanking-new opportunity. But remember. They truly sincerely hate you and your petty middle-class ambitions, dreams and aspirations. That’s why you must fight them. Don’t turn your back on the state. If you do, it’s the end of Western Civilization, and what will replace it will be autocratic brutality, the Putin type!
END
For a rousting defense of the West, see, Idea and Culture.
NOTE: The coming threat of mass extinction of wildlife around the globe is the direct result of overpopulation and loss of wildlife habitat, (see: Pandemics, Nuclear Warfare and Over Population). On the upside, colonization of the Moon and Mars will take, if it’s ever to happen, a huge population base.
Matt Ridley: "The bigger cities get, the more productive and efficient they become, in terms of their use of energy to create improbability, just as the bodies of animals do: a whale burns proportionately less energy than a shrew and so lives longer, has a bigger brain and behaves in a more complicated way. London proportionately burns less energy than Bristol, has a bigger collective brain and behaves in a more complicated way. The same is true throughout the economy. Those who say that indefinite growth is impossible, or at least unsustainable, in a world of finite resources are therefore wrong, for a simple reason: growth can take place through doing more with less. . . . Much ‘growth’ is actually shrinkage. Largely unnoticed, there is a burgeoning trend today that the main engine of economic growth is not from using more resources, but from using innovation to do more with less: more food from less land and less water; more miles for less fuel; more communication for less electricity; more buildings for less steel; more transistors for less silicon; more correspondence for less paper; more socks for less money; more parties for less time worked. A few years ago Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University discovered the surprising and unexpected fact that the American economy has begun ‘dematerializing’: using not just less stuff per unit of output, but less stuff altogether. (Chris Goodall had already spotted the same to be true of Britain.) By 2015 America was using 15 per cent less steel, 32 per cent less aluminium and 40 per cent less copper than at its peaks of using these metals, even though its population was larger and its output of goods and services much larger. Its farms use 25 per cent less fertilizer and 22 per cent less water yet produce more food thanks to better targeting of fertilizer and irrigation. Its energy system generates fewer emissions (of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides) per kilowatt-hour. In the ten years from 2008, America’s economy grew by 15 per cent but its energy use fell by 2 per cent. . . . This is not because the American economy is generating fewer products: it’s producing more. It is not because there is more recycling – though there is. It’s because of economies and efficiencies created by innovation. Take aluminum drink cans. When first introduced in 1959 a standard aluminum can weighed 85 grams; today it weighs 13 grams, according to Professor Vaclav Smil. This has a counter-intuitive implication: those who say growth is impossible without using more resources are simply wrong. It will always be possible to raise living standards further by lowering the amount of a resource that is used to produce a given output. Growth is therefore indefinitely ‘sustainable’." How Innovation Works.
* The global warming idea is composed of three propositions which proceed from two facts. The first fact is that carbon dioxide is one of a number of so-called greenhouse gases (the most bundant being water vapour). The second is that the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by around thirty-five per cent from pre-industrial times . . . . Increased carbon dioxide, together with other greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, has caused global temperatures to rise. In the words of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, ‘It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past fifty years over each continent (except Antarctica) . . . [And] Left unchecked, rising global temperatures will cause immense damage to the environment and humanity. (Quoted from The Age of Global Warming, R Darwall).
* The scientific evidence for global warming is based on several markers. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased. Current CO2 concentrations, of over 400 parts per million, far exceed the 170–300 ppm recorded over the last 800,000 years. The concentrations have increased by 100 ppm over the last 200 years, and primarily in the last fifty. This compares to an increase of approximately 90 ppm over the previous 6,000 years. The rise coincides with the release of 1.3 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. Key temperature indicators have increased: air temperature over land, sea surface temperature, marine air temperature, ocean heat, temperature in the troposphere (the active-weather layer of the atmosphere, closest to the earth's surface), and humidity. Each of the last three decades was warmer on average than any other since 1850. According to the World Meteorological Organization, fourteen of the fifteen warmest years on record have occurred in the twenty-first century. (Quoted from The Age of Stagnation, S Das).
For a scientific and non-political overview of global crises, including climate changes, see the last two chapters of Upheaval by Jared Diamond. Despite what he professes and predicts though, I sincerely believe that it will be a worldwide economic reckoning due to global debt which will seriously modify downwards First World consumption to more sustainable norms. See also, The Cloud Mystery, As well see, Weakileaks NASA climate change documents. To see a short description of the timeline of "Big Bang" from beginning to end by acclaimed astrophysicist, V J Stenger, see Endnote, Imagine No Faith.
Freeman Dyson: "There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, [that] the despoiling of the planet . . . is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children . . . all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion."'