Our secret weapon.

Posted by Pointman on June 15, 2012 · 18 Comments 

There are three elements to be considered when formulating a strategy; the ultimate objective of the strategy, the resources you have available to achieve that objective and the way the resources are to be deployed to take and then hold that objective. Obviously, our objective is to destroy the political credibility of climate alarmism.

Identifying and enumerating a resource or asset, is a more tricky business. It may be something as concrete as a pile of money or something as intangible as an idea. At certain points in a campaign, a resource may have little utility but go on to be very important, or the reverse. Some resources you may have control of, some you may not. The most subtle type of resource, neither side has control of, but it can act at different points, to the advantage or detriment of either side. Some resources nominally belong to the opposition, but even then, there may be ways you can make use of them. A resource is rarely a static thing, it acquires a life-cycle within the plan and can even influence the utility of other resources. Above all, the resources you have at any point in time, must be sequenced and configured to react optimally to how you calculate the opposition will be deploying their own resources or reacting to yours.

When you stop to think about what resources are available to us climate realists in the fight against alarmism, there are not many. They still have the politicians, token though that support is rapidly becoming, establishment climate science, all of the mainstream media (MSM) and a multitude of well-financed environmental groups. We haven’t really got much in the way of resources, I’m afraid.

I suppose the big answer is that we know we have the truth on our side, but while that may be satisfying in some higher moral sense, it isn’t actually of much practical use in the short-term, since they control all the means of disseminating the truth to a mass audience, and they certainly aren’t about to let us have any access to it in the near future, though that day will come. However, as I hope you’ll see, it’ll eventually become an important asset.

One resource we do have, is quite a number of determined and very knowledgeable people. Each in their own way, uses their skill and expertise against different aspects of the cult of global warming, and despite what the green propaganda machine says, they all work for nothing. If you believe a single dedicated person can make a difference, which I do, then having many such individuals on your side, makes it a very strong asset. When it comes to them, the old adage about one volunteer being worth ten conscripts, applies with a vengeance.

Another resource we have, is that we’re so often up against fanatics, strange as that may sound, but a weakness in your enemy, becomes your asset, if correctly utilised. The useful thing about a fanatic, is that they simply don’t see themselves as being excessive, so you can always rely on them to go too far. Always. They make a video blowing schoolchildren into gory pieces of meat, because they don’t believe in global warming, launch the thing in a blaze of showbiz publicity and are then genuinely nonplussed by the horrified reaction to it by the ordinary person. As their belief system folds, they’ll fight harder and harder to keep it alive, inevitably resulting in more disasters like that video. It’s really a point resource, to be exploited as and when it occurs, but it is still a resource and it will be occurring more frequently.

In terms of a concrete asset, the internet, in the shape of the skeptic blogosphere, would appear to be our most usable one. The as yet unrestricted freedom of it, allows us to analyse the politics, point out the financial absurdities and pick apart the science. That’s all, of course, good stuff but at the end of the day, we’re still talking to a very small audience and though it will have some effect on the debate, it can only have a slight effect on broader public opinion.

In the coming years, as the traditional MSM continues to contract and internet access and availability becomes universal, I think the effect of a mature blogosphere on public opinion will increase to a point where it will become significantly more influential, but that’s for the future. If we had some bacon, we could have some bacon and eggs, if only someone could scrounge up a few eggs.

So yes, the internet is a valuable asset, but at its current stage of evolution, it can’t be considered as being of decisive value to us in any larger context. However, I’ve always considered we had an asset that was far better than the internet or anything else for that matter.

That asset is time.

Time is our friend and as it gradually passes, their increasingly implacable enemy and I’ll tell you exactly why I think that is so. On a very simple level, climate alarmism is all about making dire predictions of what’ll happen in the future. The bijou problemette they’re increasingly having, is that the predictions are simply failing to materialise.

The Polar bears stubbornly refuse to go extinct, indeed the buggers are thriving, the glaciers don’t appear to be disappearing, sea levels have stayed boringly level, we haven’t been subsumed by hordes of desperate climate refugees, the polar ice caps haven’t melted, the Great Barrier Reef is still with us, we haven’t fought any resource wars, oil hasn’t run out, the seas insist on not getting acidic, the rainforest is still around, islands have not sunk under the sea, the ozone holes haven’t got bigger, the world hasn’t entered a new ice age, acid rain appears to have fallen somewhere that can’t quite be located, the Gulf Stream hasn’t stopped, extreme weather events have been embarrassingly sparse in recent years and guess what? The world isn’t getting any warmer either. Indeed, it’s stayed roughly the same, or arguably become slightly cooler, in the last fifteen years.

Of course, they still insist all these things are happening anyway but it’s becoming increasingly obvious to the common person that they just simply aren’t. They were safe predicting stuff would happen in a century or two, but as the level of hysteria started to die down, they inadvisedly tried to ramp it back up by saying it would all start to happen sooner and sooner and be worse and worse. Sorry Al, but the North pole just hasn’t melted, but on the bright side, there’s one more year to go for your prediction of it melting away completely by 2013 to be fulfilled.

They’ve constantly been tempted to draw back the timeframes and what they’ve forgotten is that we’re now very close to or in some of those predicted dates and nothing has happened nor even appears to be starting to happen. At this stage, it’s all getting a bit embarrassing for them on the prediction’s front. When you add in the fact that the last few winters have been long, bitterly cold and accompanied by heavy snowfalls, the common person is pretty tired of the constant warnings of the coming global warming, which never actually seems to arrive. After the last few winters, they’d probably welcome it.

It’s becoming obvious to everyone that the predictions were wrong. All it needed was time.

When you examined the green policy proposals being put forward for things like renewable energy, it was apparent that despite the highly optimistic view of their future prospects, they were simply not viable, from neither the financial nor the engineering viewpoint. If they really were, then they would have been financed by the private sector, rather than the government. It’s a lot easier to take a big gamble with other people’s money, which is to say the taxpayer’s, than with private capital, because the private investor always looks at the prospectus without any rose-tinted spectacles. Now that those policies have been in place for a few years, their abject failure to deliver on the glowing promises, is starting to become painfully apparent to governments. All it needed was time.

In Germany for instance, where they’ve sunk 100 million Euros into renewables and closed down all their nuclear plants in the wake of the anti-nuclear hysteria provoked by Fukushima, the alarm bell has started to ring in government circles. This was caused by their Federal Network Agency warning them last month, that the national power grid was in a precarious state, if not on the brink of collapse. Once you get past the bureaucratic speak, the message to the government, via not a private memo but most tellingly a press release, is explicit. Next winter, there’s going to be power outages across Germany and we’re handing over the problem to you. You regulated us into this position, so you regulate us out of it. Your problemo now Angela.

For the ordinary person in Germany, where power bills have soared and a record number of people are having their electricity supplies disconnected, the true cost of renewable energy is now apparent. If they end up sitting in darkness in unheated homes next winter, energy policies will be changed and quickly. The political landscape in Germany, with regard to green policies, will be changing radically in the next year. If it can’t go on, it won’t.

You can continue to throw good money after bad, until the inevitable moment arrives when you run out of money or political capital. For Germany, hastened by its rash decision to close all its nuclear plants, that moment has arrived early, but it will occur in other countries in the future. All it needs is time.

Policies to create a green economy and green jobs have failed miserably, as we worked out they would and tried to tell people many years ago. In Spain for example, where they invested billions of Euros into that particular mirage, all that happened was that two jobs were destroyed in the real economy for every green job created and only one in ten of those green jobs created would ever be permanent. The renewables industry there has collapsed with the cash-strapped government’s withdrawal of subsidies, dumping people doing the green jobs onto the unemployment line, which now amounts to nearly 25% of the workforce. Mi corazón va a usted, mis amigos.

All these failures in prediction, the economic bankruptcy of green policies and most especially the soaring power bills, speak to the electorates in a way the skeptic blogosphere could never hope to do. They are doing the required job on public opinion and all it ever needed was time.

But the decisive blow I always knew that time would eventually deliver, was bad times, and it did.

In the midst of an extraordinarily long fifteen year economic boom, people and a whole generation of politicians, forgot that old but cruel saying; boom times are always followed by busts. Their mindset was they actually assumed the good times would somehow just continue on indefinitely. Such times never have and they never will either. It was bound to happen at some point and the longer it took to arrive, the harder the crash was going to be.

The global warming mania was something that could only have come about in the prosperity of such times, because it seemed to be a harmless and affordable craze to most people, but times are very different now. As always happens in a recession, the frivolous spending commitments of the boom times will get cut back or dropped completely, because money is tight all around, especially in government coffers. The world is now facing real and immediate problems for a change and saving the planet from some possible global warming just isn’t on the agenda anymore. The subsidies are already being phased out, the stimulus packages withdrawn and the deluge of research funding for climate science will gradually turn into a trickle. Without the state money, which flowed as a result of political patronage, the future is bleak for the movement.

The inevitable recession was always our ace in the hole. I take no pleasure in saying that, as I know a recession wrecks lives and is always hardest on those already at the bottom of the economic heap.

As time passes, the simple truth of so many things, that we’ve been saying for so long, will become more and more apparent. You see, time was always our secret weapon, and it’s the weapon that was always destined to win the war for us in the end. To borrow a phrase from The Stones, time is on our side.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

How policies get dropped and positions reversed.

Some thoughts on fanatics and how to fight them.

The death of the AGW belief system.

Green Myths : Polar bears going extinct, yawn …

The sun is setting on solar power, the money’s gone and nobody’s asking any questions.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Alarmism, Blogosphere, Fanatics, Fuel Poverty, Global Warming, Politics, Predictions, Renewables