My belated condolences. I always enjoyed reading his posts and will miss his insight and wide ranging views. May hew…
Climategate 2 – yes, they’ve been lying to you.
You’re appalled, you’re outraged, you’re stunned and you’re angry about the whole climategate emails thing.
And now you’re most likely out here in the blogosphere because the mainstream media in the country you live in is either not mentioning them at all or have relegated it to a small-print footnote at the bottom of page ninety-nine, with a blatant propaganda spin that would be an egregious insult to the intelligence of a retarded chimp with a lot of other things on its mind.
Yes, the emails are genuine. Yes, they were making it up all along. Yes, you believed them. Yes, they betrayed your trust. Yes, they betrayed science. Yes, they betrayed their own integrity. Yes, there is a news blackout on it. Yes, yes and yes again. Yes to the whole damn lot.
Welcome to the resistance, the underground, the outcasts, the Maquis, the holdouts, the last best hope, Fort Apache. Welcome to the fellowship of the skeptics, you’ll find we don’t have horns and pointy tails and all those dreadful stories about us chasing our thirteen year old inbred first cousins are not all true. Em, that last bit didn’t come out quite right but you know what I mean; let’s just move along.
I know exactly how you’re feeling because like nearly all the sceptics, I used to be more than sympathetic to the environmental cause myself. In my own case, I was a committed environmentalist back in the days when that meant simply not trashing nature. It wasn’t me that changed, it was that environmentalism mutated into a green monster. We all had our dreadful moment of realisation somewhere on that road to the green Damascus and slowly became skeptics and will therefore burn in green hellfire.
Green fires are carbon neutral, by the way. They simply have to be because they’re green, so Greenpeace are funding a few scientists to prove it’s true. They’ll peer review it amongst themselves and pass it on to the IPCC, where their mates will make sure it gets into the next report. Their mates work for the WWF so there won’t be any problems there. Wink, wink, nod, nod. While they’re busy thinking about exactly how to do that research, you might as well have the press handout of the results so far. They’re very promising and they’ll make a good article for you. No need to wait for them to get the right result because we already know what the right result has to be so they’ll come up with the right result. Right? That’s called post-normal science, the new and improved version of the old fuddy duddy normal science.
That’s the sort of science those guys are discussing in the emails.
If they sound like a gang of school bullies, it’s because in a sense, that’s precisely what they are like, with climate science being the school yard. The more you read the emails, the more you recognise the usual types. The macho leaders of the pack, the sycophants, the mad dogs, the groupies, the wannabees on the edges and the weak ones who’ve decided it’s safer to be inside the gang than outside it. They’re all there, every single one of them.
You got Big Dawg for starters. He doesn’t take any “bullshit and optimistic stuff” from anyone. They used to call him the vulture at school because he’d got that funny way of sitting at his desk but nowadays, he’s a real tough guy. He never declines to give any jerks he doesn’t like a bloody good hiding. He’s pretty good with doing the same thing with data but that pales into insignificance compared to the gelding he can do to an email archive. One hard glance from him and the scrotums of every email server in a twenty-five mile radius shrivel.
Speaking of hiding, there’s Manny the Magician, who disappeared a whole frigging medieval warming period and still found time to prod some churnalists with his hockey stick to dig the dirt on Stevie “the swot” McIntyre, just because he was so much better at sums than Manny was.
You got the wannabe on the fringe, whingeing because he knows “the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group”. He should “beat the crap” out of that scrawny little skeptic kid over there, trying to look inconspicuous in a corner of the playground. That’d move him up a few notches in the pecking order.
All jokes aside, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s probably a duck. From the viewpoint of the scrawny little skeptic kid, read skeptic climate scientist who’s just had a working over by them, they are just a bunch of thugs.
The question is; what’s next for you?
You’ve come this far, so about now you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do from here on out. Like in the Matrix movie, you’ve got the choice between two pills; the blue pill or the red pill. Take the blue pill and keep on dreaming the green global warming dream like you’ve been doing for so long or go for the red and take a walk on the skeptic wild side. If you decide to pop the red, I’ll tell you exactly what you’ve got coming at you because in all fairness, you deserve to know what that decision will mean.
You might as well have the bad news first, so suck it in Buster, pucker that butt and grit your teeth because I’m going to give it to you right between the eyes.
You’ll become a denier, which the “educated” ones among them will carefully explain to you, just means you deny stuff but all the grownups in the room know it really means you’ve just dropped down the morality ladder to the level of a holocaust denier, which you’re being likened to. The not so educated ones usually stick to simpler names like climate criminal because the alliteration makes it easier for them to remember it.
No matter what your actual politics are, you’ll immediately become an Aryan Nation CommoNazi gun-totin’ redneck retard who blames the “guvvermint” for everything and knows it’s all a conspiracy by the New World Order to prise your trusty old Remington double o from your cold dead hands.
You’ll also automatically become a paid flunky of Big Oil or Big Pharma or Big Coal or whatever Big is required to misrepresent whatever you’re saying as just shilling for the Big whatever. The wages are distinctly modest by the way; that’s to say, not a cent, a sou, a nickel or a dime. There’s not a penny in it but that doesn’t matter, you’re still going to be a paid lackey. A minor break is you don’t have to declare it as income on your tax return.
Whatever judgement, education, insight or learning you were fortunate enough to accumulate in your life will be as naught as you’ve just become an unthinking anti-science knuckle dragger. That applies even more if you do happen to have a knowledge of science.
It gets tougher I’m afraid. Your own particular mainstream media in the shape of ABC, CBC, NBC, BBC and all the other Cs, will not only make sure you never get on the air but also make sure your viewpoint will never be represented there, never mind represented fairly. Pretty much, the same goes for all the big newspapers and journals. If your views aren’t welcome to them, then you can imagine what chance your comments stand on any of their content. They’ll get censored to hell or you’ll just get banned outright. Pretty soon, you’ll learn to think of such routine events as yourself earning yet another Purple Heart. It doesn’t matter because after a while, you’ll even stop trying to comment anyway.
It goes a bit further than that though. Not only can they black you out but they can also black out news about inconvenient things like Climategate 2, which is a hitherto unknown ability I suspect a lot of new visitors to this site have only just found out about. If they don’t report on it, it therefore doesn’t exist.
You’ll become some sort of weirdo who’s spending a little too much time on your computer. To be fair, there’s some truth in this particular slur because as time passes, you’ll come to realise independent journalism has pretty much died in the mainstream media. If you want all the news, the blogosphere is the only place you’ll get it, irrespective of whom it’s inconvenient to.
The bottom line is that since you’ve come to have a doubt in the Church of Climatology, you’ll be excommunicated and marginalised to all of the above stereotypes, because that’s the sort of dehumanising labelling all fundamentally intolerant movements do to any who would presume to question them. It all gets very personal, very fast, so you better not be a sensitive type.
There, you have been warned.
The good news is; you’ll be joining a community made up of people who’ve mostly been through the meat grinder I described above. They’ve seen the Elephant.
It’s made up of individuals who do ask the awkward questions and won’t give up until they get to an answer that makes sense to them, irrespective of where that’s going to take them. It came into being because there simply weren’t any forums anywhere else to try to get some answers to the questions or at least raise an honest doubt. It’s made up of blogs like this one and despite our paid lackey status, they’re all free and nobody is making a red cent out of them.
Every man and woman is a volunteer, prepared to give up their free time for something they think of as worthwhile and every one has their own particular motivation for doing so. On balance, you’ll always be more likely to get an honest answer from someone who’s not being paid to come up with an answer but that may just be my quirky opinion.
They’re diverse, each with their own flavour. Some do the science, some do the news, some do the politics, some do the mix and some, quite frankly, are just doing the funky chicken. The quality varies from the barking mad sub-literate raving maniacs to some blogs where you’d better have your deep thinking cap on as well as your favourite pair of running shoes, just to keep in touching distance of some of the conversations.
On a good blog, you’ll learn as much from the comments as you’ll learn from the topics they’re posted under. I do. You’ll soon sort the wheat from the chaff and find your regular haunts; I hope here will be one of them.
The best thing is, I’d have to say, we skeptics are the sort of people who like a beer and a laugh and probably throw much better parties than the alarmists.
Well, I hope I’ve helped you make your mind up. So which is it going to be, blue pill or red pill?
While you’re thinking it over, I’m going to pop out for a moment. Just spotted a cousin o’ mine and I don’t want to give her too much of a head start. She’s one of the speedy ones.
©Pointman
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Fantastic run of blogs the last few days, Pointman.
& a warm welcome to all new medieval warm period affirmers!
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I popped the red pill years ago.
Keep up the excellent work, better than Le Carre even though his writing was fiction (but based, no doubt on his covert experiences).
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…….and some, quite frankly, are just doing the funky chicken.
OK Pointman – you got me!
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Do you mean caught up with or got, cousin Mel? LOL…
Pointman.
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Pointman,
You’ve certainly covered all the bases; distilled the essence of Gangrene fraud and theft and packaged it up neatly in those little coloured capsules.
While the corruption of science is the basis for this process, it’s the utter corruption of Politics and the blatant betrayal of entire nations that has me gulping handfuls of those little red pills.
Here in Australia it has gone much further than even the recent introduction of a crippling tax on carbon dioxide. We now have the same Gangrene corruption hijacking our water supply – in fact entire river systems.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/water-reforms-to-cost-29000-jobs-farmers-warn/story-e6frg6xf-1226208633701
Based on phony ‘science’, outdated reports and impossible computer models, if the Greens get their way on the hijacking of our nation’s lifeblood, our food security will evaporate and much of our rural landscape will turn into ghost-towns populated by broke and broken-hearted farmers.
This issue isn’t about the weather any more – this Environmental Movement, with its voracious tentacles in every facet of our lives, has become a giant parasitic octopus wrapped around the face of our nation.
More power to you Pointman.
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My heart goes out to you and all Australians, Blackswan. “Giant parasitic octopus” indeed. Is there any hope that reality might intrude down there?
My swan sends greetings to yours.
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G’day creeperoo,
Greetings to you and yours – good to see you here.
When I first saw your avatar I tried to make out what was slung over your shoulder and thought “Nah, it couldn’t be …” LOL Aussie swans are wild feisty critters highly unlikely to get so familiar with even the nicest people.
Reality has hit us right between the eyes. Even the most cynical of us never quite expected the level of corruption that has permeated the highest levels of public office in the land. Our people are held in utter contempt by the cabal of Hucksters and Fraudsters whose backroom deals have hijacked our Parliament.
How all this will play out remains to be seen, but one thing is certain …. ordinary hardworking Australians will never again regard this as the Lucky Country. Have we been too easy-going, too complacent, too trusting, too apathetic? We’ve been asleep at the wheel. It has taken a truly colossal wake-up call to give us the impetus to reverse the damage that has already been done.
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That swan was NOT friendly. I have holes in the sleeve of that jacket to prove it. Did you know swans have claws on their webbed feet? I didn’t either, until the day I carried H25 from his cage to the edge of a local marsh. Our Dept. of Natural Resources released five swans that day and I was fortunate enough to be able to carry one of them to freedom. You’d have thought he’d have been a little more grateful for the liberation.
He was big, he was feisty and he was beautiful. That was a banner day.
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Just found this site, and it’s like I’ve found home. good stuff Pointman.
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They’re still lying to you.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/most-dire-global-warming-forecasts-unlikely-study-finds/2011/11/27/gIQAz2er4N_blog.html
Free translation: Now that last set of numbers we gave you wasn’t too good but this new one has stuff you can believe in. And it’s still gonna be bad…real bad.
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Hi Creeperoo. That article does make me laugh. In the light of the “scientists” frank comments in CG2 about the uselessness of the models, the “as predicted by our model” bit begins to look extremely silly. They’re using models to criticise other models. All the models are inherently useless.
P
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Another good post TB. Must say, you’ve got a nicely wry sense of humour there fella.
Let’s see what comes up in these emails. I’ve got the feeling that the releaser is doing it this way to give ‘them’ plenty of rope. Though this makes the tacit assumption that there IS more damning stuff to be released.
It’s certainly how i’d play it once i’d realised the ‘normal’ route was not a go-er.
As for the recent batch, i think as you stated, it confirms the impressions from the first round and undermines the explanations. Certainly from my field of biotech, they’d be cause for dismissal. Pays to have friends in high places i guess.
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Realism amongst the dross and the hype.
We ain’t saying the planet hasn’t warmed, it has and thank heavens for that, we are the luckiest generations, the current 7 billion of us. If it were not for a glorious warming period since the last ice age, then most of us wouldn’t be here and life would be tough to ‘Cunard’.
What we do say is this, the planet is 70% covered and dominated by water, water, water and more water. Water is in the atmosphere and the oceans, into this blue planet the big driver is the Sun, our lives and planet are subject to our heliocentric odyssey around it’s golden embrace.
In perpetuity, does our Earth strive [as do all natural forces] to reach balance and equilibrium, a mathematical beauty and a wonder in itself. Atmospherically [in very simplified terms], the Earth spins, this causes a coriolis effect and this combined with the Oceanic conveyor acts to cool the Earth down – air conditioning for the planet. The physics and actual mechanics of our Atmosphere are vaguely understood, we do not know the whole story, in fact far from it.
The external forces at work, are gargantuan, elemental and impossible [as yet] to quantify or to imagine [yet we still try]. Internally, the molten core of the planet is still very active, the ground you stand on is a ‘living thing’ and all over the world are signs that our planet is very much alive and breathing fire.
Geologically speaking, our beautiful planet has been around for 4.7 billion years, human beings not so long, about 200,000 years, we need to ‘see’ and appreciate our place and compare it to the scale of geological time.
We’ve come on some since hunting and gathering, some would say we’re not much past that stage and some others would have us return to that ‘golden age’. Man certainly produces CO2, however, CO2 and O2 are the life building blocks, to name, even infer that one is a poison – is to refute the natural order and then, who is the denier here?
To aver that, we are causing this planet to alter climatically and in a deleterious fashion, is overstating and overestimating our place in the natural order, that is why I call myself a realist, because realistically speaking we are ‘merely scraping the surface’.
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Hello Ed. Reading your comment reminded me of a question and a possible answer I’ve been mulling over for a few years, so I might as well kick it into play here and see what people think.
Q. We’ve come further, faster in the last 100-150 years in terms of technology, lifespan and certainly individual prosperity (even if the latter is mainly confined to the developed world), than we did in the preceeding 200,000 and by a huge margin of acceleration. We were stone, bronze or Iron cultures for hundreds if not thousands of years. We went from the first powered flight to putting a man on the moon less than a century. Why is this, why now?
A. Is it just that in those last 150 years, there’s been the greatest ever worldwide population? Do more people equate to a greater chance of ideas being hatched or processed or simply thought about? I can find no other explanation for the thing. Ideas folks?
Pointman
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Pointman,
Some months ago you wrote a terrific post about the success of Man as a species (sorry, I can’t remember the title) wherein you suggested we developed because of our ability to cooperate with each other; for individuals in a group to supply the various needs of the whole.
Could the acceleration of Progress in the past 150 years be because formal education and dissemination of information has become more universal? If we think of agrarian peasant populations or the remote tribes of the Amazon, their education usually addresses issues for their sustenance and immediate survival.
With literacy has come the ability for the exchange of ideas from around the world, philosophy that encourages thought, to spark that inherent capacity for innovation, to address and supply the perceived needs of the community as a whole. In previous eras education was the preserve of the elite or the clergy – it was in their interests to keep a drone population of tithe-paying functionaries, serfs, peasants or slaves to whom education was forbidden.
IMHO, that is on the agenda for our new powerful elite – downgrade education standards, controlling the use of Energy that liberates us and restricting the information that is fed to us. Our only value to them is as consumers – of debt, of goods and services and as taxpayers. They will decide what is in our best interests, who will survive; anyone superfluous-to-needs will not.
They are trying to turn back the clock – it is our responsibility to keep it ticking forward.
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Swanny, if you can, would would you repost your reply under slackman’s reply where we’re kicking the idea around.
P
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150 years of free people engaging in capitalism.
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Pointman,
I have been a lurker for many months following your blog since you stopped commenting on Delingpole at the DT (although it did take me some time to find you).
I now have to fully take the red pill and increase my efforts to spread the word.
You deserve praise for your writings, which are always highly readable, as you nail it every time.
Keep up the good work.
Bob
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Hello Bob and welcome. Those DT days do bring back some memories, good and bad! It’s a bit more sedate around here but there’s no DISQUS so we can actually discuss things. Enjoy yourself here.
Pointman
ps. Pass my regards on to anyone at the DT who remembers me.
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P
I’m sure all the good guys still do…. not to mention most of the trolls there as well !
Cheers
Bob
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Ah, the troll wars at the DT, I remember them fondly. I’ve still got my collection of troll’s ears from that time …
Pointman
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There is a either a whole new batch have hatched of late or many have changed avatars
Cheers
Bob
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And so the dance goes on
Among the flotsam and the jetsam of the ship that will not sink
There is a mutinous muttering from those who start to think
So the whispers in the wind start to shout and roar
As us poor slaves to debt are chained still to the oar
The destiny of this vessel had always been set in stone
The course to disaster assured , a travesty of flesh and bone
To take the craft and aim it at the distant rocky shore
To rape and pillage with glee and shocking gore
The admiral the captain his mates and the drummer man
Had a common purpose and a really cunning plan
To wreck the ship of the multitude of humanity
They would use wind power to sail us into calamity
The good ship reality has smashed into rocks and was foundering
Yet against all the best expectation is now recovering
Despite the best laid plans of the sinister Durban pirates
The freedom of information was not and will not be silenced
Now up to our guts in watery green slime and crazy lies
Remarkably the cold splash of realism sees our spirits rise
Will we sink into the depths of wet death depravity?
Or will we win the battle for the destiny of humanity?
NoIdea
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***********************************************
Hello Ed. Reading your comment reminded me of a question and a possible answer I’ve been mulling over for a few years, so I might as well kick it into play here and see what people think.
Q. We’ve come further, faster in the last 100-150 years in terms of technology, lifespan and certainly individual prosperity (even if the latter is mainly confined to the developed world), than we did in the preceeding 200,000 and by a huge margin of acceleration. We were stone, bronze or Iron cultures for hundreds if not thousands of years. We went from the first powered flight to putting a man on the moon less than a century. Why is this, why now?
A. Is it just that in those last 150 years, there’s been the greatest ever worldwide population? Do more people equate to a greater chance of ideas being hatched or processed or simply thought about? I can find no other explanation for the thing. Ideas folks?
Pointman
********************************
@pointman
That’s one interesting question, and one I’ve thought about a heck of a lot!
Whilst it could be argued that some ideas and development simply need a critical mass of people to even get started, Leonardo could invent the helicopter, but he couldn’t get it out of his sketchbook, for instance, I’d say the most critical factor has got to be the mindset of the society discussed.
The Romans, they say, could have got their own industrial revolution going, they certainly had the brains for it, so why didn’t it happen? They were so reliant on slavery during the period in which they intellectually flowered that there was no impetus to develop any further.
China, it was smelting more iron than the UK until surprisingly recently. It was a powerhouse, and hundreds of years of stability, plus a population of 400 million people 200 years ago. That’s almost the same as Europe today guys. Why couldn’t they get it going?
India, almost the same story as China, but different, in that they were significantly less unified than the Red Dragon.
If an area has the population and it has the resources to really kick in to the modern era but it doesn’t happen it just has to be because of mindset.
The renaissance: the throwing off of the shackles of religious dogma, meaning we could break the rules other societies couldn’t. The flowering of philosophy, thoughts that life could and should get better planted in to guys heads. The development of the scientific method, creating a methodical and innovative way to look at stuff that we’d previously considered to be mundane. Then coming back to the slavery thing, free societies. Societies where guys could achieve a fair amount in a given field if they chose to, so prejudice free societies count for a lot.
I’d say you definitely need a hell of a lot of resources for some of the modern research, take CERN breaking the speed of light for instance, but the ball got rolling by a smaller number of guys living in a newly fertile environment.
And the thing about ideas, even the ones that seem most obvious to us now were hard to discover. How long were we rocking around for before some caveman invented the wheel, or the paved road? But, once discovered, everyone knows about it and civilization advances. The advances of the last couple of hundred years have planted the scientific method in almost every culture on the planet, so it seems highly unlikey we’ll let up now!!
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Hello and welcome Slackman.
Perhaps it’s not just brute population numbers, which is obviously just the number of minds, but also those minds have to be bouncing the idea around. What I’m moving towards is how many of them have had some education, if only literacy. That makes them aware of the nascent idea or perhaps other ideas that might suggest or lead onto the new idea.
Pointman
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Thanks for the welcome Pointman! I just love your blog here, I’ve been slowly going through a lot of your past posts the last three or four days, there’s a lot of good stuff to read.
The thing about literacy, is again it depends on mindset. The west wasn’t the first place to have a rigorous education and exam system; those Chinese, I heard they had a gruelling exam system for 1000 years, and mega cities.
So it’s got to be about what you read and write not just being able to.
One last thing, would it be too much to ask you to stick the original question you asked somewhere nearer my post, I spent quite a while writing it, and now see it’s kinda orphaned?
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No problem, pasted it in front of your reply.
Agreed, it isn’t just literacy but access to to ideas contained in books. The idea or foundation ideas have to be in common circulation in a crital mass of minds. Numbers matter.
Was it Newton who said he was “standing on the shoulders of giants” when he came up with his Laws of Gravitation, Calculus, Optics etc etc ?
Pointman
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Pointman,
Some months ago you wrote a terrific post about the success of Man as a species (sorry, I can’t remember the title) wherein you suggested we developed because of our ability to cooperate with each other; for individuals in a group to supply the various needs of the whole.
Could the acceleration of Progress in the past 150 years be because formal education and dissemination of information has become more universal? If we think of agrarian peasant populations or the remote tribes of the Amazon, their education usually addresses issues for their sustenance and immediate survival.
With literacy has come the ability for the exchange of ideas from around the world, philosophy that encourages thought, to spark that inherent capacity for innovation, to address and supply the perceived needs of the community as a whole. In previous eras education was the preserve of the elite or the clergy – it was in their interests to keep a drone population of tithe-paying functionaries, serfs, peasants or slaves to whom education was forbidden.
IMHO, that is on the agenda for our new powerful elite – downgrade education standards, controlling the use of Energy that liberates us and restricting the information that is fed to us. Our only value to them is as consumers – of debt, of goods and services and as taxpayers. They will decide what is in our best interests, who will survive; anyone superfluous-to-needs will not.
They are trying to turn back the clock – it is our responsibility to keep it ticking forward.
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@ Swanny.
“If we have one survival trait in the face of these forces, it’s not our intelligence. It’s our ability to adapt to what’s coming at us. Our unique specialisation as a species is – we are born with no specialisations at all. We come into the world as a blank canvas on which is gradually painted over a decade or more, the knowledge of how to survive in the particular habitat we’ve happened to be born into. It may be a metropolis, a desert, arctic tundra, equatorial Africa, the Andes or perhaps one day, off world somewhere in outer space. We pay the price for it too. A human being has the longest and most vulnerable childhood of any species by a huge margin.
We don’t have fangs or talons but we can make sophisticated weapons. We don’t have a pelt to protect us from extreme cold but we can make clothes. We can’t run particularly fast but we can make machines that can go faster than any other animal. We can augment our capabilities in these ways, again not because of our much vaunted intelligence but because of the other unique thing we do as a species; we work together and cooperate to a degree that is unprecedented. We pool our newly learned specialisations to create artifacts for all that no single one of us could make.
This synergy between initial non-specialisation and then highly integrated cooperation is what has made us an extraordinarily successful species. Nothing else”
From https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/the-steady-state-environment-delusion/
I think letting ideas free out of the exclusive grasp of the priveliged and somewhat educated elites and into the common man’s mind has to be a part of it. If you look at so many of the big ideas and where they came from, they’re certainly not from the nobility. List your top ten ideas men and women of the 20th centuary and they’re the offspring of the taxi drivers, seamstresses and ditch diggers or at least one generation’s hop away from them. Look what a fully trained teacher who couldn’t manage to get a teaching job and so became a patent clerk, did to physics.
The more I think about it, sheer numbers really must have a major effect here. It’s not as if we as a species have got suddenly smarter 150 years ago.
P
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Thinking it over, perhaps it’s a bit more than just the idea or foundation ideas being in circulation in a certain number of minds to form a critical mass to birth a new idea. Those minds must have the leisure time think about things other than just life’s neccessities. This implies the political structure of a society is such that it benefits the common man and therefore produces such leisure time. That can only happen if the common man has a say in the politics.
Real Democracy? Is that what produced this massive acceleration?
Pointman
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Pointman,
Thanks for the opportunity to revisit the Steady-State Environment Delusion again – was it really back in February? Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?
Just goes to show – you toss those messages in bottles out into the sea and they’ll eventually come bobbing back in with the tide.
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Mindset and communication, the ability to spread a good idea round. Was the inventor of the wheel alone or did it occur to many people at the same time? How long would it take before the idea got round the world if one man made it, six men saw it and tried it out for themselves, a hundred men saw those etc. etc.
Obviously more people means more chance of someone coming up with the idea in the first place but the news has to travel for it to be utilised.
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Hi Mel.
I suppose one way for an idea to travel is for it to be in a book. That also means the idea can survive after its originator has expired. It then plays into the literacy rate because that’s the only way it can be accessed by any number of people.
Perhaps the non-invention of the wheel by the pre-columbin civilisations, is explained because the idea could not get across the the oceans to another continent.
Pointman
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One important factor that should be included in any analysis would be the discovery of cheap energy supplies, such as coal, initially, and then oil. Without them the steam engine and the combustion engine would not have been invented. And without the added productivity of mechanised agriculture and manufacturing there would have not been the prosperity which allowed the research and development of so much else.
Another would be the long gestation period in which the ideas undergirding our industrialised society were discovered, refined and extended to the point that the industrial revolution could take off. Such things as binary arithmetic and Boolean logic, starting as intellectual interest but utilised initially with punched-cards on the weaving looms, are necessary building blocks for today’s digital revolution. Chemistry and physics unlocked the power of chemical reactions and the release of the energy in today’s fossil fuels, supplying the cheap energy on which our industrialised societies depend and making financially possible their schools, universities and increasingly complex work vocations.
Also, the fundamental beliefs of people have had as much to do with the flowering of the scientific method as any other factor. Much as today’s scientists wish it otherwise, the Christian belief was a powerful catalyst in the process, as can be seen in such luminaries as Bacon, Copernicus, Boyle, Newton and a host of others [see [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science]List of Christian thinkers in science[/url] all of whom helped incubate the knowledge and methodology in use today. The organised Church, too, played a role in the development of the school, the university and as the patron of the sciences. The dichotomy between faith and science is not a true one, as should be very evident in today’s dispute over CAGW where basic beliefs colour the discussion even more than the known science.
Paul
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@pgtips91
Hello Paul and welcome to the blog. My apologies for not noticing your comment had got stuck in the spam filter. Enjoy yourself here.
Pointman
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@Paul.
Yes, all the technology and developments you mentioned certainly played their part but stepping back from them, they were all ideas/concepts and the trend seems to be that they’re occurring to us faster and faster. It’s an accelerating phenomonon. The last 150 years, it’s accelerated at an unprecedented rate. What’s driving that?
Pointman
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Pointman just discovered this site and am loving it ! I think the UN is under siege ! Report in the BBC technology site of more hacking, this time the UNDP. Totally different tone. Deliberate ?
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Hello and welcome to the joint Sleuth. Glad you’re enjoying it. Is that the same BBC who’ve been going on for years about the climategate hack rather than leak? LOL. Anything from them has the “possibly/almost-certainly compromised” warning stickers all over it.
Pointman
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Great stuff Pointman, you’re on fire dude. 😉
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While the climate industry has been about power and poiltics it has recently taken a new turn.
The lawyers are getting involved.
a Dr Trenberth started the ball roling by saying that climate change is beyond doubt, so the burden of proof should be reversed.
This now starts opening the door for lawyers to make civil claims against any company/group that has lead to global warming.
If one is to let ones imagination loose here it gets very frightening. Imaging the Billions of dollars that will be claimed ,due to Extreme weather events caused by our energy providers. With the lawyers taking a percentage of the payouts they will be lining up 100s deep.
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Tom Nelson, wow Pointy…………now – no getting big headed with yersel:>)
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You know me better than that old friend. Doomed to forever chase that lonely impulse of delight.
Pointy
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A lot of “skeptics” says that climate skeptics are just paranoid conspiracy theorists. Most of them are, truthfully, but it is the genuine climate skeptics that are getting things done, and why AGW is becoming less and less credible.
Pointer: Don’t ever let yourself become Alex Jones or Aaron Russo. That way, if warmists do attack, they won’t use the conspiracy card.
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@Swan The reason education wasn’t around was because there weren’t enough books or sources. Pinning it on this “elite” is a bit paranoid, if you ask me. When universities started popping up around Europe during the Middle Ages (ironic, no?), knowledge became popular. It was almost always about wealth, not keeping education away from people. Knowledge was not forbidden, nor ever was. That is a baseless claim. Knowledge had to be discovered and to be earned.
If knowledge was forbidden as you say, why could people think? Why were they allowed to live? Why were books printed? Why did the printing press come to be if knowledge was forbidden? When people think and question their world, it is knowledge. In a sense, knowledge can never be forbidden, because it is something impossible to restrain in the first place.
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CG-3 is out.
Cheers
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Reblogged this on pdx transport.
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