When Lies Are Told Based On Falsehoods, It Comes Back To Haunt You.

Telling ‘Noble Lies’ About Climate Change Will Backfire

Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is a serious mistake

by
TOM HARRIS

Bio

April 18, 2014 - 12:14 am

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Over the past twenty years, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of catastrophic climate change forecasts, prophecies that would put Moses to shame. Coastal communities will be submerged due to rapid sea-level rise caused by soaring temperatures and glacier melt. Record heat waves, droughts, floods, insect infestations, and wildfires will result in millions of climate change refugees fleeing their ruined homelands. Competition over increasingly scarce water resources will lead to armed conflict. About all that has been missing from these doom and gloom predictions is alien invasion.

Like Moses’ warnings to Pharaoh in the Bible, we are told there is a high price to pay if we are to avoid climate change-driven “death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods,” to quote from the March 31 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We must reduce our carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 70% by 2050 to keep so-called global temperature from exceeding 2° C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC claims.  This will require massive cuts in our use of coal, oil, and natural gas, the sources of 87% of world primary energy consumption. What’s also needed, according to yet another IPCC report, Climate Change 2014 –Mitigation of Climate Change, released on April 12, is nothing less than:

a tripling to nearly a quadrupling of the share of zero‐ and low‐carbon energy supply from renewables, nuclear energy and fossil energy with carbon dioxide capture and storage [CCS, a technology the IPCC admit is currently problematic], or bioenergy with CCS by the year 2050.

Former Vice President Al Gore tells us that “the survival of civilization as we know it” is at risk if we don’t take these kinds of actions.

While historical evidence increasingly suggests that cataclysm really did follow Moses’ prophesies, modern-day forecasts of climate Armageddon are not coming true. The reports of theNongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) reveal that there is nothing extraordinary about late twentieth century warming, a temperature rise that stopped over 17 years ago. The NIPCC explains that ice cover “is not melting at an enhanced rate; sea-level rise is not accelerating; and no systematic changes have been documented in evaporation or rainfall or in the magnitude or intensity of extreme meteorological events.”

Contrary to the IPCC’s warnings, the NIPCC report released this month, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, shows that long-term warming and CO₂ rise are benefitting nature and humanity, “causing a great greening of the Earth.”

Faced with such good news, what are global warming activists to do?

The latest IPCC reports demonstrate that many are following a strategy taught in law school: “if the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the facts are not on your side, pound the table.” In their February 24, 2014 paper “Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements” published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Chinese professors Fuhai Hong and Zhao Xiaojian explain:

The IPCC has tended to over-generalize its research results and accentuate the negative side of climate change. Following its lead, the mainstream media has gone even further.…Analyzing a sample of print, broadcast and online media coverage over a three-month period between 2005 and 2006, Ereaut and Segnit (2006) concluded that climate change was most commonly constructed through an “alarmist” repertoire as “awesome, terrible” and “immense,” characterized by “an inflated or extreme lexicon.”

On the surface, this strategy appears to work. Hong and Xiaojian conclude that, when the climate change threat is not very severe, as the NIPCC demonstrates is the case today, exaggerating the dangers tends to increase public concern and so their countries’ participation in international climate change agreements. Gore clearly supports this approach, admitting in 2006,

I believe it is appropriate to have an “over-representation” of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.

Taken to extremes, this approach can backfire. Fully one-third of Americans now believe that the media exaggerates the climate change problem, according to research reported on in Public Opinion Quarterly. In a U.S. Gallup poll conducted in early March, global warming ranked 14^th out of 15 issues respondents were asked about. The survey showed that people care far more about unemployment and the economy than they do about climate change. After years of overplaying their hands, climate activists now find themselves tuned out by a large fraction of the population.

So supporters of climate change mitigation are increasingly resorting to the “Noble Lie,” a political concept introduced by Plato in The Republic. Plato believed that most people lacked the intelligence to behave in ways that are in their own and society’s best interest. Therefore, he advocated creating religious lies that are fed to the public to keep them under control and happy with their lot in life. False propaganda to enhance public welfare is completely acceptable, Plato argued.

Whether the real underlying purpose is to reduce pollution and energy consumption, or to promote foreign aid, crop biotechnology, alternative and nuclear energy, or even personal fitness, social justice, and world government, use of the Noble Lie has become common in the climate debate.

Leading the pack is Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s commissioner for climate action. She told the London-based Telegraph newspaper in September 2013 that, even if the science backing the climate scare is wrong, the EU’s climate policies are still correct as they would, according to her, lead to more efficient use of resources. Hedegaard asks, “Would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change?”

Former U.S. Congressman and long-standing president of United Nations Foundation Timothy Wirth spelled out this strategy in 1998 when he said,

What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

Christine Stewart, the Liberal environment minister who negotiated in Kyoto on Canada’s behalf, went even further, asserting,

No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.

There are undoubtedly many advocates of such objectives who doubt, or are agnostic about, human-caused climate change. However, they see benefits to promoting, or at least going along with, the climate scare because it furthers their objectives in other fields that they regard as beneficial to society.  One of Canada’s top climate modellers said in private communications that, even though he did not believe that today’s computerized climate models made reliable forecasts, he would continue to promote them as if they did because he thought this would encourage the expansion of nuclear power, which he supported.

But this seemingly pragmatic approach is a slippery slope.

As the mistakes in the science backing man-made climate concerns become increasingly apparent, the primary rationale used by governments, environmental groups, and the press for energy conservation and other sensible actions evaporates. It is like teaching a child to behave well because Santa will otherwise cross them off his list. When they discover that they have been lied to about Santa, their behavior may quickly deteriorate. Similarly, the public naturally become cynical about conserving energy and protecting nature when they realize that they have been misled about climate change, currently the primary justification for environmentally conscious behaviour. Crying wolf over a non-issue eventually erodes public confidence in authorities and the reputation of sensible environmentalism and even science itself is damaged.

Earth Hour, observed across the world on March 29, is a case in point. The event was created by World Wide Fund for Nature, Australia, working with American advertising company Leo Burnett Worldwide to increase awareness about the supposed climate crisis. Many people who normally would support energy conservation oppose Earth Hour because they recognize the climate scare to be unfounded. Some even intentionally increase their energy consumption during Earth Hour, partly as an act of defiance and partly to focus attention on the importance of inexpensive energy to our civilization. The International Climate Science Coalition has called for Earth Hour to be replaced with Energy Hour and carried out for the right reasons: to promote energy policy that will keep the lights on.

Telling the Noble Lie that the science of climate change is “settled” so as to encourage moving quickly on “solutions” is also counterproductive. If the science is so certain, the public are bound to eventually ask, why should we fund climate research at all? We supposed know what the future holds in store for us, so public funding of climate research can be terminated. In reality, the science is so immature that we do not even know if warming or cooling lies ahead. So continuing climate research is important if we are to eventually develop the tools we need to predict climate change so as to prepare for whatever nature throws at us next.

The lie that we know the future of the climate and how to control it has resulted in a situation where, of the approximately $1 billion a day spent on climate finance across the world, only 6% goes to helping real people today adapt to the climate threats they are facing, however caused. The rest goes to the vain goal of trying to control the climate to be experienced by people yet to be born. People from across the political spectrum are starting to realize the immorality of such an approach.

Finally, the current focus on the impossible objective of “stopping climate change” has obscured the fact that we do indeed face a long-term energy crisis. It is that, as world usage of hydrocarbon fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—continues to rise, such inexpensive and plentiful sources of power will eventually become increasingly scarce and so more and more expensive. Planning for such a scenario requires that we engage in carefully planned, long-term research, not only to continue to improve the way we use hydrocarbon fuels, but also to develop alternatives that someday may actually be cost effective. Irrespective of the validity of climate change theories, there are good reasons to develop alternative sources of energy, but climate concerns is certainly not one of them.

Yet, because of the current obsession with lessening CO₂ emissions to solve the supposed climate crisis, billions of dollars are wasted on useless projects such as CCS and the widespread deployment of unsustainable technologies such as wind power. This impoverishes society, making us less able to afford the important research effort we need to eventually develop sustainable alternatives that actually have the potential to enhance long-term energy security.

In the long run, the climate scare will be revealed as the most expensive hoax in the history of science. Statements such as that by Hedegaard, “why not create a world we like, with a climate we like — while we still have time?” will be seen as ridiculous and opportunistic.

Scientists and others who knew this but promoted the deception for what they considered good reasons will be disgraced. Then no one will believe them when wolves really are at our doors.

Climategate Gets More Damning!

We never were believers in man-caused global warming and I am sure there will be some who will disagree but as we continue to read more email communications from the promoters of this junk science, our viewpoint is becoming more vindicated. 

The reasons for our doubt is based upon a couple issues.  The first was, who was promoting the idea . When you have former Vice President  Al Gore making millions on this scheme while still driving SUVs, flying private planes and living in  massive houses with out any retrofitting to benefit the climate, our hypocrisy meter jumps sky high.  Someone who really believed what he was promoting would LIVE it, Gore isn't.

Additionally, when the world leaders of the global warming movement went to Copenhagen in hundreds of private planes and arrived at their meeting in limousines, it showed me the whole group was involved in a scam!
 I am not a scientist but I have some basic scientific questions. As I understand it, a model must be 95% accurate as to be considered predictable. The model that has been used to predict the dire environmental events is only 90% by ICCC admission. This is a significant difference.

Another basic tenant of the global warming fear crowd is that the icebergs will melt, flooding lower lying areas around the world.  This might be right if one ignored basic science. Fill a glass with ice, pack it to the top and let it melt. The glass does not overflow. There is one main reason, ice takes up more space than water. If the icebergs melt, it will take up less space and therefore will not flood the earth. The false argument is ignoring basics. Why?  People are basically ignorant of basic science and the story pulls at the heart strings.


So when we read the emails, I am not surprised at all to read that the promoters had secret concerns. If the "hockey stick" increase in temperatures was proven to be false, their whole argument would be damaged significantly.  So they arbitrarily "adjusted" the data to match the argument. Not very scientifically pure, but they have other reasons.

We believe they want to hurt the developed nations by transferring trillions to the non-developed countries through schemes like "cap and trade" which really is a transfer of pollution credits from one nation to another. It does nothing to reduce the pollution, just moving dollars.

Here is the latest on Climategate, enjoy it and let me know what you think.

Conservative Tom


Climategate (Part II) – A sequel as ugly as the original.

(A small snippet redacted from an extensive, in-depth shocking analysis)

BY STEVEN F. HAYWARD



The Weekly Standard, DEC 12, 2011

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=2357

… Climategate I, the release of a few thousand emails and documents from the CRU (Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University) in November 2009, revealed that the united-front clubbiness of the leading climate scientists was just a display for public consumption. The science of climate change was not “settled.” There was no consensus about the extent and causes of global warming; in their private emails, the scientists expressed serious doubts and disagreements on some major issues. In particular, the email exchanges showed that they were far from agreement about a key part of the global warming narrative​—​the famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to demonstrate that the last 30 years were the warmest of the last millennium and which made the “medieval warm period,” an especially problematic phenomenon for the climate campaign, simply go away. (See my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009.) Leading scientists in the inner circle expressed significant doubts and uncertainty about the hockey stick and several other global warming claims about which we are repeatedly told there exists an ironclad consensus among scientists. (Many of the new emails make this point even more powerfully.) On the merits, the 2009 emails showed that the case for certainty about climate change was grossly overstated.



More damning than the substantive disagreement was the attitude the CRU circle displayed toward dissenters, skeptics, and science journals that did not strictly adhere to the party line. Dissenting articles were blocked from publication or review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requests for raw data were rebuffed, and Freedom of Information Act requests were stonewalled. National science panels were stacked, and qualified dissenters such as NASA prize-winner John Christy were tolerated as “token skeptics.”



One thing that emerges from the new emails is that, while a large number of scientists are working on separate, detailed nodes of climate-related issues (the reason for dozens of authors for every IPCC report chapter), the circle of scientists who control the syntheses that go into IPCC reports and the national climate reports that the U.S. and other governments occasionally produce is quite small and partial to particular outcomes of these periodic assessments. The way the process works in practice casts a shadow over one of the favorite claims of the climate campaign​—​namely, that there exists a firm “consensus” about catastrophic future warming among thousands of scientists. This so-called consensus reflects only the views of a much smaller subset of gatekeepers. … Definite examples of political influence have emerged already from a first pass over a sample of the massive cache.



No amount of context can possibly exonerate the CRU gang from some of the damning expressions and contrivances that appear repeatedly in the new emails. More so than the 2009 batch, these emails make clear the close collaboration between the leading IPCC scientists and environmental advocacy groups, government agencies, and partisan journalists. There are repeated instances of scientists tipping their hand that they’ve thrown in their lot with the climate ideologues. If there were only a handful of such dubious messages, they might be explained away through “context,” or as conciliatory habits of expression. But they are so numerous that it doesn’t require an advanced degree in pattern recognition to make out that these emails constitute not just a “smoking gun” of scientific bias, but a belching howitzer. Throughout the emails numerous participants refer to “the cause,” “our cause,” and other nonscientific, value-laden terms to describe the implications of one dispute or another, while demonizing scientists who express even partial dissent about the subject, such as Judith Curry of Georgia Tech.



These are only a few of the many problems with the climate models on which all of the predictions of doom decades hence depend. It will take months of careful review to sort the wheat from the chaff, but there is enough evidence already to support the conclusion that the climate science establishment has greatly exaggerated what it knows.



… If Climategate II does poor box office, it won’t be because the various internal reviews exonerated the CRU from the narrow allegations of fraud in Climategate I, but because the whole show has become a crashing bore. The latest U.N. climate summit that opened last week in Durban, South Africa, is struggling to keep the diplomatic circus on life support. … Yet there is one more tantalizing detail that has been largely overlooked in the commentary so far. According to “FOIA,” the online name of the hacker/leaker behind the release of these emails, there are another 220,000 emails still out there, blocked by a heavily encrypted password that “FOIA” vaguely threatens or promises to release at some future date. Stay tuned for Climategate III.



Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the Almanac of Environmental Trends

More Evidence That Global Warming is a Farce

Ever since I heard the initial rumors of global warming, I was intrigued by it but was wondering where the evidence was. It did not make sense to me.  Every fact the "warmers" used, just brought more questions to mind of which I never got answers. 

Now with the announcement by Wikileaks that the global warming proponents were lying about the evidence and were manipulating the data to make it look like there was a problem. It became worse with the latest dump of emails.

The evidence of fraud should be enough to dump the enterprise and expose those participants to legal actions. 

The following article from National Review Online gives even more details.  What are your opinions?

Conservative Tom
Scientists Behaving Badly - More nails for the coffin of man-made global warming 
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE ^ | November 28, 2011 | Jim Lacey 
Posted on Mon Nov 28 2011 17:58:44 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time) by neverdem
Scientists Behaving Badly
More nails for the coffin of man-made global warming

Global-warming skeptics spend much of their time knocking down the fatuous warmist claim that the science is settled. According to the warmists, this singular piece of settled science is attested to by hundreds or thousands of highly credentialed scientists. In truth, virtually the entire warmist edifice is built around a small, tightly knit coterie of persons (one hesitates to refer to folks with so little respect for the scientific method as scientists) willing to falsify data and manipulate findings; or, to put it bluntly, to lie in order to push a political agenda not supported by empirical evidence. This is what made the original release of the Climategate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia so valuable. They clearly identified the politicized core of climate watchers who were driving the entire warmist agenda. Following in their footsteps are all the other scientists who built their own research on top of the fraudulent data produced by the warmist core.
Last week over 5,000 new e-mails, already dubbed Climategate 2, were released. Anyone still desiring to contest the assertion that only a few persons controlled the entire warmist agenda will be brought up short by this note from one warmist protesting that his opinions were not getting the hearing they deserved: “It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.” Over the years this core group, led by Phil Jones at East Anglia and Michael Mann at Penn State, became so close that even those inclined toward more honest appraisals of the state of climate science were hesitant to rock the boat. As one warm-monger states: “I am not convinced that the ‘truth’ is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.” Silly me, how many years have I wasted believing that the very point of science was to pursue the truth in the face of all obstacles. On the basis of this evidence the scientific method must be rewritten so as to state: “Science must be as objective as possible, unless it offends your friends.”
Unfortunately, from the very beginning, the core group at the heart of Climategate had no interest in “scientific truth.” As one states: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.” In other words, let’s decide on a conclusion and then use only evidence that proves that point, discarding everything else. One scientist who seems to have been slightly troubled by these methods wrote: “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.” In another note to Phil Jones, this same scientist complained: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.”
Of course, nothing of the sort was done. As one e-mail states: “The figure you sent is very deceptive . . . there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change].” Too bad these so-called scientists felt they could tell the truth only to one another and not the public at large. Some of the other truths they shared only with one another are astounding. For instance, one writes: “I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!” So, despite having no confidence in any of the models the IPCC was using in its reports, this scientist was ready to support the IPCC findings to the hilt. And why didn’t he believe the models? Easy: They were designed to tell the big lie. For example, when confronted with the problem that if all the data were included, the warming disappeared, Phil Jones turned to a novel method: He used only “[time] periods that showed warming.”
At one point, Jones admits that the “basic problem is that all of the models are wrong.” Of course, there is a simple reason for this. When the models do not show what the warmistswarmists resorted to changing the data.
The most efficient method of corrupting the models was to use data only from time periods when there was warming and discard others, as Jones admits to doing. This method helped one scientist reduce the cooling in the northern hemisphere between 1940 and 1970, so that he did not have to make up an excuse blaming it on sulphates, which could not be proven. Another complains that no matter how much he fiddles with the data, it is “very difficult to make the Medieval Warming Period go away.” Solving this problem in the modern era was much easier: The warmists merely changed the temperature readings for much of the 20th century and threw away the original data.
Why? One e-mail clearly explains what was at stake: ”I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.” In other words, all the scientific lying was a result of scientists trying to give their political masters a major issue they could use to control people’s lives and justify wasting trillions of dollars. Success, as one warmist stated, rested on somehow convincing the public that “limate change is extremely complicated, BUT to accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.” In other words, climate science is too complex for the simpleton voters, who must be made to believe that unless we wreck the global economy the planet will bake. As Michael Mann says in one e-mail: “the important thing is to make sure they’re losing the PR battle.” Moving even further away from their original calling as scientists, the warmists spend considerable time discussing the tactics of convincing the masses that global warming should be a major concern. For instance, one states: “Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions — bad politics — to one about the value of a stable climate — much better politics. . . . the most valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as possible.”
To win the public debate nothing was out of bounds. For instance, Mann, incensed that some skeptics had trashed his work, wrote to Jones, saying he had “been talking with folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre . . . perhaps the same needs to be done with this Kennan guy . . . I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them.” Steve McIntyre and Doug Kennan are well-known skeptics. In fact, McIntyre’s work was crucial in proving that Mann’s infamous “hockey stick graph” — the heart of the United Nations’ IPCC-3 report — was a fraud. Rather than contest McIntyre’s findings with evidence and data, Mann decided that his best alternative was to smear his challenger’s reputation. Skeptics always had to be on the watch for Mann’s spiteful attacks. But what is interesting is that many of his fellow warmists had a low opinion of his work. Despite this, they were slow to criticize Mann — partly because they did not want to give the skeptics any more ammunition, but also because they were afraid of him. As one warmist wrote to Jones, Mann was a “serious enemy” and “vindictive.”
Worried that their e-mail discussions might turn a spotlight on their fraud, Jones and others were constantly advising one another on how to hide the evidence. For instance, Jones once sent out an e-mail stating: “I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.” To which one warmist replied: “Phil, thanks for your thoughts — guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in the open.”
Still, none of this deception would be possible without the active collusion of much of the global press, which has swallowed the warmist agenda hook, line, and sinker. As one BBC journalist wrote to Phil Jones after running a piece slightly skeptical of the warmist position:

I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP [Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol] in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats.

What is even more troubling is what appears to be the active collusion of government agencies charged with looking out for the public welfare. In one Jones e-mail, he discusses hiding data, making it clear that the U.S. Department of Energy was an active participant in his fraud: “Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get — and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.” I hope someone in Congress is interested in why the Department of Energy was involved in hiding climate data. One might assume that it would be harder to make an investment in Solyndra if the global-warming threat was proven a fraud.
My favorite quote of all those uncovered was from the climate criminal who asked his colleagues what would happen to them if it was discovered that climate change was “mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation,” as much of the evidence shows. He answers his own question: “They’ll kill us probably.”
— Jim Lacey is professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College. He is the author of the recently released The First Clash and Keep from All Thoughtful Men. The opinions presented here are entirely his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or any of its members.