How tropical storm Sandy became a Frankenstorm …

Posted by Pointman on November 30, 2012 · 17 Comments 

Infowar uses propaganda, which is directed at a population to give them a worldview which accords with your own political beliefs. There are a lot of propaganda techniques; disinformation, censorship, misrepresentation, character assassination, lies, intimidation and the rewriting of history, to name but a few. Used properly and pervasively enough, it easily controls the general population and cowers any resistance.

Any piece of propaganda is either directed to promote something or against something.

Where it’s directed against a portion of the population, it’s usually done for one of two reasons. The first and more usual one is to isolate that portion of the population, who are resistant to indoctrination. The second reason is to use a particular segment of the population as a hate object. By blaming them for any or all ills effecting the general population, it unites all the rest against a simple visible foe. Within the context of the global warming question, the alarmists blame the skeptics for the plunge of belief in it. As Henry Louis Mencken observed “For every complex problem, there is a story which is simple, neat and wrong.”

The trend this year has not only been to continue with the holocaust denier smear by association into academic papers, but has escalated to questioning our basic sanity, as well as to whether there’s a connection between climate skepticism and paedophilia. New depths, last visited by the likes of Julius Streicher, are being plumbed and as I’ve said before, it’s probably going to get even more vile. At this stage in the death of their belief system, there isn’t a lot of thinking going on, just venting.

While calling a group of people, who don’t share your viewpoint in a discussion, deniers, insane or child molesters might make you feel good, what’s actually happening is the more extreme you become, the more you’re losing any support you might have had with the unaligned majority in the middle ground. In other words, the net effect of the policy, is to become an intellectual pariah amongst the educated classes following the debate, in this case and most especially what might be termed the scientific establishment. You might be winning the screaming match, but you’re losing the war.

That unaligned majority will reach a point where they’ll be forced to speak out against what looks increasingly like unjustifiable alarmism dressed up as science. That trend has become more visible this year, with for example the Nature editorial warning that the days of it being used as a launchpad for alarmism based on questionable science papers were over, and even the Mann et al (2012) paper, being pulled apart by people in his own field. When you read a phrase like “speculation this bald could give dendrochronologists a bad name” from a fellow dendrochronologist, you know the times they are achanging.

When you read of Sandy, which was actually categorised as a tropical storm by the time it came ashore, being progressively labelled a hurricane, then a perfect storm, then a mega or monster storm and finally a Frankenstorm by the mainstream media, you know you’re dealing with propaganda to promote the idea that it was somehow an unprecedented event and even more importantly, it was directly caused by global warming.

The reality is that not only are extreme weather events like Sandy well within the normal parameters of weather patterns, but also, we’ve had unusually few of them over the last decade. There’s also not one shred of scientific justification to causally link extreme weather events with any putative global warming.

What’s interesting about the spin on the reporting of Sandy, is how little support it attracted from the science establishment. Once you discount the habitual alarmists, the notion that it was all caused by global warming received absolutely no scientific support, because there simply is no science backing up any such assertion.

Sandy was actually a pure propaganda offensive, based entirely on lies. It had to be, because there’s nothing else left to use. The alarmists have been so thoroughly elbowed off the science football, they no longer have that authoritive card to use.

We’ll be seeing a lot more propaganda events like Sandy, and they’ll all be based on lies.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The death of the AGW belief system.

An assessment of current alarmist propaganda.

Some thoughts on fanatics and how to fight them.

The Nigger Word.

The real bastards.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Alarmism, Fanatics, Frankenstorm, Infowar, Propaganda, Sandy