My belated condolences. I always enjoyed reading his posts and will miss his insight and wide ranging views. May hew…
Points of Divergence.
Like most people, I’m diplomatic in my everyday dealings with others since it’s only common politeness and makes obvious sense after all. You say whatever but sometimes what you’re actually thinking might be slightly different. Their bum may actually look a bit bigger in that new outfit but you can see they’re really chuffed with it and they’re looking pretty fetching anyway. Once in a blue moon, you’re obliged to be more direct because the particular circumstances won’t allow the latitude for any dissembling.
One of the few luxuries of writing a blog anonymously, but also one that’s temptingly easy to abuse, is that you can speak your mind. Some of the articles here are a bit too full on for some people’s tastes and for a variety of reasons. Possibly they don’t agree with my take on things, the manner in which it’s being expressed or they simply find me an objectionable character on general principles – all of which are fair enough as far as I’m concerned. Blogging on the skeptic side is after all an unpaid and voluntary activity, despite what the alarmist propagandists say, so don’t start bitching on about it when you start taking some flak. Just lash it back and anyway, you always know where the exit door is.
I started blogging a number of years ago and in that noble skeptic tradition of upsetting people, no doubt upset people. The sensitivities of the alarmists, I couldn’t give a damn about not only because they’re on a permanent victimhood hair-trigger but also they’re irrelevant to why I blog. As they’re impervious to reason or appeals to any vague notion of simple human compassion, I have no interest in interacting with them publically because quite simply it would be a waste of effort. The only use I have for them is ruthlessly utilising their excesses to the detriment of the “cause”. Degüello will always be the bugle call in any of my dealings with them.
They are not and have never been the target demographic of this blog. That has always been what I categorised as persuadable people. I’m looking to snag the passive believers who always assumed the science was as legitimate as one would expect, but have of late begun to entertain some doubts for whatever reason. By the time they might get to here, they’ve usually found the more technical sites and are perhaps looking for a bit more context.
It’s a peculiarity of the climate wars that the road to Damascus and a conversion to climate skepticism appears to be one-way. All the conversions appear to be from passive belief to some degree of climate scepticism, and seemingly never the other way around. Look around the bios of the major skeptics – every man Jack, and every woman Jane as well, all travelled that road. That’s why aiming at that particular audience demographic is a reasonable use of blogging effort.
If you’re going to be a blogger, and a campaigning one on an issue that isn’t feather weight, you need to think about two things before ever putting quill to parchment; who you’re talking to and why are you talking to them. The first one is your target audience. Get a clear image in your head of who they are and then talk to them. Talking to people who already share your viewpoint has a certain egomania about it, so why bother. The reality cold shower is that almost nobody reads blogs except people with very specialist interests, so you gotta aim to snag the ones you’ve decided to go after – anything else is vanity blogging.
The second one, the why, means you feel you’ve something to say to them that all the other two hundred bloggers of a sort of similar attitude aren’t, otherwise why are you doing it? They are what I call the points of divergence. Depending on how far those points are from the mainstream or the centre of the little fishy pool you’re dealing with, it’s going to be a solitary business. You’ll be on your own with lots of people standing around watching you and doing nothing. A few pals may help out but it can be a lot to ask of any friendship, so you try not to. It’s a long game.
This blog is designed, written and aimed at that ordinary person looking for a plain English discussion of not so much the science, but the politics and I say it unashamedly, the ethics over the very real human impact involved in changing our primary allegiance from humanity to some new-age Earth goddess.
In the beginning I feel I made some sections of the skeptic community uneasy, because I was addressing aspects of the thing they were not really comfortable with. Five years ago, making the moral argument for a realistic approach to environmentalism that didn’t involve killing the poor was too alien an argument that nobody wanted to touch. People were happy as Larry with their evening hobby of squabbling over science papers. The murderous collateral damage of environmental politics on the developing world – which the alarmists would never acknowledge – was also out of the skeptic comfort zone. It was all a bit too close to real-world for the skeptics hygienically ensconced behind their keyboards. There’s never any blood spray on a keyboard.
If you’ve read the about me here, you’ll know it’s why I blog and I also happen to think it’s by far the most powerful argument we can make to the ordinary person, because it’s all about real people suffering preventable hardship and death this very day, not some nebulous century in the future. Anybody can relate to that. However, I soon decided to steer clear of any such arguments for a variety of very practical reasons.
The first one was that at the time nobody was actually interested in it, because it was an obsessively inward-looking community. You may disagree with that assessment but that was the reality at the time. The second one is that the community was comfortable with the quantitative arguments against environmentalism in the form of bickering over the science, but the qualitative arguments, no matter at what level they were pitched, had absolutely no traction. The third reason was it’d be too easy to get pigeon-holed as some moral supremacist pontificating from atop his blogging holier-than-thou pulpit, and that’s a suit of clothes a Rufus Roughcut like myself wouldn’t get away with for very long.
In short, the time just wasn’t ripe to advance that type of argument. In the last year, I’ve seen the emergence from obscurity of the ethical arguments against environmentalism become mainstream in the sceptic blogosphere. I think that’s a sign of several things; its growing maturity, its wider base of representation and the community’s readiness to engage with the real world rather than stay safely embedded in the cyber one.
A very subtle factor that’s concentrated people’s mind on the damage being done to vulnerable people is the growing scourge of fuel poverty on our own poor. Nobody saw that one coming but looking back, it was inevitable. Finding an elderly person fully clothed in bed for the winter in a house they can no longer afford to heat is a real bloody attitude adjuster. All those people raking in their wind farm and solar panel subsidies are freezing the very life blood out of our most vulnerable. I can only hope they one day end up in the same situation.
I bitterly resented being forced off that ball, especially as the skeptic community seemed to have thrown up their hands and ceded without even a decent fight any moral authority to the alarmists, who to my mind were the ones actually rearranging the macro-economics in such a way as to bring about the slowmo genocide in the developing world, which would pander to their Malthusian over-population concerns. I’d bite it back, do my best to keep my powder dry but by Christ the day would come when I’d just come back harder.
A less controversial argument was that the climate wars had little or nothing to do with science – it was all about politics, which is to say power and money. That was never a minority viewpoint but I think it’s a journey that a lot of newly converted skeptics go on. Some skeptics are welded to the “point out the flaws in the science” approach and they’ll do a few mea culpas and amend their ways, as well as retracting all those crap papers. That’s never once happened. Not once, not ever, and it never will either. Yes, they’ve occasionally been forced to do it but it was always against their will.
There is obviously a place for keeping the science honest but by now most skeptics have noticed the slightly OCD aspects of a lot of skeptic activity. Yes, it’s great ripping the ass out of the weird paper by that rather obscure Prof. Okie from the University of Muskogee, or Dr. Oongo of U of Wallawoora or Phil Witless of the University of Easy Access, but seriously, how many years of that loop are we going to do? Like Richard Lindzen said, they’re all third raters – easy meat. Occasionally I do get the feeling that they’re just cannon fodder being fed to the skeptic blogosphere just to keep it busy, rather than doing something effective in the real world.
The last point of divergence, and the one I think hasn’t really budged in the last five years, is the opinion that alarmist climate science is essentially a criminal enterprise.
Now that I’ve got your attention, just hang on to that adjective “alarmist”.
Every time the make some doom-laden claim, they get given more money. As each prediction fails, it gets pushed on twenty years and nobody cares, because everyone knows you can’t go up against the la cosa nostra verdi. Every time they get caught out saying one thing in public but exactly the opposite in private, they weasel out of it. They do a criminal things like identity theft, and appear to be above the law. They intimidate anyone who stands up to them and get away with it too, and if they can’t get you, they’ll go after your family.
Attempt to speak out about them in the media, all the strings get pulled and whatever platform you were silly enough to imagine you had just disappears beneath your feet. You can kiss goodbye to ever getting anything published again. Stand up to them, you’ll lose not only your reputation and career, but also your livelihood.
Every time we find a flaw in the science, it somehow always seems to err towards a warmer Earth. That could be an honest error but seriously Boys and Girls, we don’t need to be experts in the bell curve to realise something is up. On any reasonable balance of probability, you’d expect something a bit roughly fifty-fifty. You don’t need to be Descartes to see that one. You sit down at a poker table with someone who is crushing all opposition with every hand all night and there’s one thing you know for sure – they’re cheating.
It’s premeditated, deliberate and totally cynical. Science is their whore, they’ll ride her as they see fit.
We’re into end of days with climate science and a few incidents of late should have disabused you of any lingering hope of any fig-leaf attempt at practising anything vaguely recognisable as serious science. The Karl et al paper was quite frankly a reversion to pulling the entrails out of some small animal and reading the portents for the planet.
It’s the new paradigm, theory now mugs the facts.
How anyone could have put their name to such an abomination is beyond me. Just to top that depth of degradation, the Royal Society on being challenged on why no global warming for nearly two decades, finally conceded that fact but smugly replied the pause would have to extend to fifty years before they started to entertain a doubt.
Get your head straight about these people, they’re nothing better than just cheap street-corner hoods in thousand dollar suits pretending to be respectable.
©Pointman
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Pointman,
While you’re right about the catastrophic consequences for the poor of the Third World, there is great collateral damage much closer to home. For example ….
“THE head of NSW Fire & Rescue says people need to talk about the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning, as an elderly woman recovers after bringing an outdoor heater inside….
In the past two weeks alone, 13 people have required hospital treatment after burning such things indoors, according to the NSW Poisons Information Centre.”
http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/carbon-monoxide-poisoning-hits-surry-hills-woman-who-dragged-outdoor-heater-inside/story-fnii5s3x-1227415814092
What none of these journalistic flunkies will mention is that, in the depths of winter, people have resorted to these measures simply because they can’t afford to turn on an electric heater as their power bills soar ever-higher, or they might have already had their electricity disconnected for non-payment. Nor will the MSM whores draw any connection between this collateral damage that has already cost people’s lives and Climate Hysteria that keeps driving electricity costs up.
For the Media, it’s the victims’ ignorance that has brought this calamity upon themselves.
Where CAGW morals and ethics were once considered to be a distracting tangent, the lines on the graph will inevitably merge as more people die.
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Its sad that this has become a “Climate war” not a Climate discussion
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Colin – “discussion” is what you have in debating the merits (or otherwise) of any proposal or theory that has life-changing consequences for millions of people.
“War” is what erupts when corrupt ‘scientists’ are used by politicians to justify enacting financial and societal-control legislation to the detriment of entire populations in supposedly free democracies.
What’s really sad is people dying needlessly; used, abused and designated “expendable” by Criminal Climate Carpetbaggers.
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That’s the problem, Alarmists aren’t prepared to discuss because “the science is settled”!
I’m fed up with the way the BBC manage to slip ‘Climate Change’ into every programme they possibly can…….my TV is suffering from impact dents now (and I can’t afford a new one). I knew it was getting serious when, like Pavlov’s dogs, ‘Himself’ took to ducking every time the dreaded words were uttered.
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So too the ABC down under. I turned on the car radio this morning and got the last 3 minutes of The Insiders. This is one f their ‘current affairs’ programs, but not the one currently getting all the flak. They were busy congratulating themselves that “Climate Change” would soon be widely discussed by the general public, which would cause lots of pressure on the Federal Government to ratify any agreement reached at the forthcoming Paris Conference.
The general public couldn’t care less about climate change; anybody I speak to is quick to say it is rubbish. The ABC people live in their own little world, patting each other on the back. They are like the Millerites who believed the World was about to end, originally between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. Then it was April 18, 1844, followed by October 22, 1844. Some then predicted different dates—among them April, July, and October 1845. By this time many members had joined other sects or given up and returned to their normal routine. But substantial numbers kept going, and their descendants the Seventh Day Adventists are still going. So these gullible warmists are likely to be dismissing the pause until 2187AD at the earliest.
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A case in point, this morning Andrew Marr and the ‘National Treasure’ David Attenborough.
“all we have to do is make ‘renewables’ cheaper than coal”
Stand by for more Carbon Taxes!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33303042
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To me the very phrase “the science is settled” reveals the fraud and ignorance of those that claim it: at any given point in history our science is only the best approximation of the truth that we have to date. For instance, in this centennial year of the the publication of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity Mr Wiki’s entry on the subject concludes—
“General relativity has emerged as a highly successful model of gravitation and cosmology, which has so far passed many unambiguous observational and experimental tests. However, there are strong indications the theory is incomplete. The problem of quantum gravity and the question of the reality of spacetime singularities remain open. Observational data that is taken as evidence for dark energy and dark matter could indicate the need for new physics. Even taken as is, general relativity is rich with possibilities for further exploration. Mathematical relativists seek to understand the nature of singularities and the fundamental properties of Einstein’s equations, and increasingly powerful computer simulations (such as those describing merging black holes) are run. The race for the first direct detection of gravitational waves continues, in the hope of creating opportunities to test the theory’s validity for much stronger gravitational fields than has been possible to date. Almost a hundred years after its publication, general relativity remains a highly active area of research.”
Whilst many a scientific viewpoint has been discredited, never likely to return, such as the Phlogiston Theory, others long discredited return, usually in a new and improved form, such as the Pythagorean Astronomical System that whilst it failed to describe a heliocentric model at least accepted (in certain variants) that the Earth was spherical and that it revolved around some other point and was not the static centre (it failed to recognise the rotation of the Earth also). To me the Geocentric model is a good analogy for the science of climate catastrophism because it is founded on erroneous assumptions, uses inaccurate observations, constantly revises its modelling and simulations when it fails to make accurate predictions and stubbornly resisted being discredited by defending itself with political argument and authority (which at the time took the form of the Roman Catholic Church, now that’s a coincidence!) rather than evaluation through the scientific method.
To adapt a phrase from Alistair Kershaw—”I may not have an all knowing mind for climate science, but I have an unerring nose for bullshit.” The bullshit of CAGW has attracted the largest and most diverse swarms of Muscoidea ever in the history of Earth.
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I was always a skeptic but it was the combination of Climate Gate and Copenhagen in 2009 that startled me into realizing it was a criminal enterprise headed by the bastard politicians using a handful of motivated so called scientists who are very happy to be used. Watching the idiotic pope climb onto that bandwagon to the screeching acclaim of a pile of arrogant atheists was an emetic.
Like you I watch and participate in the science ping pong and reference ratcheting but it is sterile in terms of changing minds. It is the politics and economics that matter and for that you need numbers. That is what has changed more and more quickly. The number of skeptics is increasing because not one of the horrible things, and they are always horrible despite the bell curve as you say, has come to pass. If you go on believing despite none of the predictions coming true it is a religion, faith based, and that’s just bullshit.
Onwards and upwards Pointy, the fight is being won one convert at a time and you add to that river of dissent.
Bravo!
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Reblogged this on Petrossa's Blog and commented:
Nothing to add.. Couldn’t have said it better
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It is really interesting to find out how others discovered that global warming theory as promulgated by the IPCC and the MSM just doesn’t stack up and scientific observation is making it less and less likely. I started looking at it during the devastating Queensland floods in early 2011 and it amazed me that our Australian Bureau of Meteorology was not investigated for its poor forecasts when there was a massive La Nina event occurring similar to the 1973/4 one. All the scientific information is available on the web for anyone interested and it quickly became very obvious to me that alternatives to CO2 were far more likely as a source of warming.
What intrigues me most is that other supposedly well educated people rely on what they are told in the media by authority figureheads and politicians when we all know from experience that they lie through their teeth to further their own agendas. I would have thought that anyone in a trade or profession where you have to get things right would understand that you can’t rely on what others tell you and you need to check it for yourself. As a green young surveyor I was often told that my work was wrong when I had done my own checks and I spent hours re-surveying only to find that the person making the accusation hadn’t checked his own work and I was right. With experience if an accuser couldn’t show me his own checks I would tell him to go jump.
I guess you need an inquiring mind and a few bad experiences in life to realise that our so called democracy only works if enough people are prepared to say that “the Emperor really doesn’t have any clothes on” and we all know it. I’m still wondering Pointman who the Selwyn was in your sickening encyclical post?
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Hello Selwyn. It’s a reference to a tragi/comedy program called Oh no, it’s Selwyn Froggitt.
He tended to come up with slightly ambitious plans, which through sheer bad luck or other people’s stupidity, crashed and burned with monotonous regularity.
As Selwyn sadly stared into his beer down the pub, and wondered at what could have been – inevitably one of his friends would comfort him with the words “never mind Selwyn, never mind”. They were being kind because so often they felt guilty.
P
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Thanks Pointman,
I don’t think we ever saw that series in Oz though for most of that period my family and I were in Hong Kong. It is an unusual name over here and as I enjoy reading your blog I couldn’t resist a comment, not picking up the local connotations that your UK readers would.
I must admit that we have many like him here with grand plans but little ability to bring them to fruition. Keep up the good fight! There are many of us watching and biding our time.
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Some things you have to share. This reminds me so much of discussing the countryside with Greens who’ve never actually been there.
Pointman.
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Thanks for the larfs P.
Reminds me of schools where teachers spend so much time and care growing ‘kitchen gardens’ to teach children that carrots and potatoes are actually dug out of the ground – that Life doesn’t begin plastic-wrapped in a supermarket.
A pity those same teachers happily teach the same kids that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” responsible for climate change that will destroy the planet, a message constantly reinforced by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Lie” which is still mandatory viewing in Australian government schools.
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Religion works in a similar fashion, do as the priesthood say or you will burn in Hell, pay your dues or you might be burnt as a Witch, smite the non-believers and you will be rewarded.
At least religion produces a lot of nice buildings, and a lot of good laughs. Climate alarmism has produced nothing of benefit, which is probably one of the reasons why Joe Public ignores it.
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