2011 and climate alarmism.

Posted by Pointman on December 30, 2011 · 22 Comments 

We’re nearly at year’s end and in the fight against climate alarmism, it can only be called a vintage year. This was supposed to be the year when they thought they would regain the initiative but it’s only served to confirm how jaded people are with it all.

Al Gore’s Climate Reality Event was intended to catapult it back into the headlines, like in those glory days of but a few years ago but it failed miserably. The mainstream media (MSM), apart from a few of the true dyed in the wool propagandists, weren’t even interested in getting involved in the pre-event hype, never mind reporting on the actual thing itself. Predictably, the major politicians stayed away. It got a bit of blogosphere coverage, although that was mainly on a video of an experiment that had been “helped”. They were caught yet again rigging the science. There was also a rather feeble attempt to big up the embarrassingly low number of hits on Al’s site, which had been specially created for the event but of course, the blogosphere uncovered that one too.

One day, they’ll learn that the climate realists in the blogosphere are watching every move they make. If the MSM cannot bring itself to do the investigative journalism, then we will. There were so many examples of that this year that I don’t intend to run over them all, except to give one that is pretty representative of all the others. A patently ludicrous claim by the UN’s IPCC about renewables supplying 80% of the world’s power by 2050, was traced back to a very wishful study funded by Greenpeace and the renewables industry. The Greenpeace employed person who helped to write it was also the same one who was the lead author working for the IPCC, where the claim mysteriously worked its way into the supposedly peer-reviewed IPCC report. A slight conflict of interest, to say the least. There were many other instances of supposedly “scientific” findings being traced back to propaganda handouts by activist groups.

Apart from the more rabidly propagandist organs of the MSM, such as those symbiotic twins the Guardian and the BBC, there was a distinct feeling they were repositioning themselves away from global warming. It was part of the general trend this year towards less and less reporting of alarmist propaganda in the MSM but this was more a reflection on the times, rather than the MSM. People, in the main, have more immediate concerns over jobs and money rather than any looming thermogeddon and there’s also what’s called in journalistic circles, “climate fatigue”. You can only scare the hell out of people so much and after enough of it, they begin to ignore you.

Things are looking a bit bleak for the MSM itself. They’re losing market share to the internet. The news for them was all bad; corporate losses climbing steadily and staff layoffs seemed to be the norm. Things are looking even worse if you consider the trend amongst the younger audience, who would naturally be the next generation of consumers of the MSM product, not to buy newspapers or even watch mainstream television. They’re bored with the product because they rightly sense it’s just a monolithic loudspeaker with only one official and predictable point of view on almost any significant topic. They see it as a wishy-washy liberal worldview, which has no relevance to their immediate concerns about important things like how hard it is getting a decent first job. In the meantime, the internet gives them a choice of opinions on whatever they’re interested in, without the boring preachy overtones.

Climategate 2 (CG2) was the big event and the timing was perfect, not only to put the boot into the already on the ground Durban climate convention but also in terms of totally undermining all the whitewash investigations of the original climategate (CG1). They’d all ground their way to the predictable conclusion of exonerating everyone of everything and CG2 provided fresh examples of the behaviour the investigations had just cleared them of. If there are to be further investigations, I imagine they’ll have difficulties staffing them because who’d take the risk of looking like a complete fool if the climategate whistleblower (FOIA) decides to release Climategate 3, straight after any new investigations?

The Durban conference, like the Climate Reality Event, was the widely predicted non-event that everyone expected it to be.

The cherry on top of the pre-Christmas present that CG2 truly was, just had to be the three-hour Gestapo-like raid on the climate realist blogger Tallbloke by six detectives from three different police services, for what appears to be the comment left on their blog by FOIA, giving the download link for the CG2 archive. The blogosphere rallied en masse to Tallbloke’s defense, quite rightly seeing the issue as being one about restricting the dissemination of news, rather than a climate specific issue. The catastrophe was further compounded by a couple of warmist bloggers penning articles on Tallbloke that placed them firmly into the libel zone. One article has been withdrawn completely and the other rewritten. Whether Tallbloke will proceed with further legal action is unclear.

For politicians, global warming is now a pariah issue around the world, the sole exception to this being Australia, which has just passed carbon tax legislation. That political aberration will be sorted out in their next general election, which may very well prove to be a near death experience for the coalition of parties that foisted it upon Australia, especially after explicitly promising not to do any such thing. Everywhere else, politicians are simply not mentioning global warming any more and quietly cutting the subsidies and financing of green projects. Budgets are being cut in every country and the money earmarked in previous years for green policies, looks increasingly like the folly of better economic times and no longer affordable.

Many of the new generation of politicians are mentioning global warming but from a skeptical perspective. Just as the previous generation rode the wave of hysteria about it into office, these young Turks will surf the growing wave of disenchantment about it into office just as naturally. That’s simply the way politics works. The notable success of this tactic in last year’s mid-terms in America has been picked up on and you’ll see it again in the upcoming 2012 presidential election. The Democrats are hamstrung with an incumbent president who saddled himself with a greenish label in his election campaign three years ago. They cannot throw the tatters of their lingering commitment to green policies overboard in the election without seeming to undermine their own leader but they’ll abandon them all after the election defeat. Again, that’s just how politics works.

In so many senses, the climate alarmists are now the ones in deep denial. There’s no longer any votes in global warming, indeed it’s now perceived as an electoral liability, so the politicians are not interested in it. There’s no money to be made in it, so the moneymen have moved on to more profitable sectors and that all happened by the middle of last year. The governments of the world, being broke, no longer have the money to indulge it, so they simply won’t. The MSM are dropping it because the product no longer sells. Nobody but the most gullible believes a word of anything a climate scientist might say and the rest of the science establishment have quietly backed away from them, because they can see there’s blood in the water and the sharks are circling inwards.

The climate activists will not allow themselves to see the simple truth in any of the above statements, so they’ll keep on pressing the alarm button even harder, especially because nobody is listening anymore. As a strategy, it’s precisely the wrong thing to do but they’ll do it and keep on doing it because they simply can’t help themselves. In the long-term though, it’s game over, Norwegian blue, all gone, zapped, finis, kaputt.

For the global warming movement, the prognosis is death but it’s with a long drawn out whimper into the political wilderness, rather than a big bang.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman :

Some thoughts and some questions about the Climategate 2.0 release.

The death of journalism and the irresistible rise of the blogosphere.

Skeptic blogger raided by the police because he was sent a link to the Climategate 2 release.

The Durban debacle awaits …

 

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Al Gore, CG2, Climate Reality Event, Climategate, Climategate 2, Durban, FOIA, Greenpeace, Laden, MSM, Shahan, Tallbloke