“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.” – Voltaire
Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
The big lie that humans are causing climate change spreads as it is promoted by those with a political agenda and their use of a familiar technique to ensnare high profile people. This practice is a fallacious form of argument called Argumentum Ad Verecundiam defined as
…an appeal to the testimony of an authority outside the authority’s special field of expertise.
The latest well-known person exploited in this way is documentary producer Sir David Attenborough, who was taken in by the false story of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). It appears he let his socialist views over-ride any sense of science he might have. The trouble is he doesn’t appear to have any science training. He is an English Grammar School graduate who identifies himself as a naturalist. This is like the practice of people identifying themselves as environmentalists. The truth is that we are all naturalists and environmentalists. It simply denotes that a person cares, but it is not a measure of their knowledge or understanding.
Unfortunately, if you don’t know or understand it is very easy to fall for the biggest lie in scientific history, especially if you are politically and emotionally disposed. The question is, how could Attenborough spend all that time looking at the geology of the planet and not see the extent to which climate changes naturally throughout 4.5 billion years? If he looked, it is startlingly apparent that the current climate situation is well within that natural range. You can only conclude that his lack of scientific objectivity and human response to hero worship, made him easy prey to purveyors of a false message.
Will somebody in contact with Attenborough, preferably someone who claims to know about climate, show him the latest lower Troposphere temperature graph. The data is available to anyone who wants to check it, as David Archibald recently did in his article “Climate: In Case You Were Wondering” (Figure 1). It shows 41 years of no temperature increase, a period that covers most of Attenborough’s adult life and the period when he travelled the world filming nature. During that time, CO2 levels continued to rise in complete contradiction to the original theory. The red line in Figure 1 marks 2004, the year that creators and promoters of the big lie tried to ignore the evidence that showed their theory was wrong. Proof that they knew is in the fact that they changed the name from global warming to climate change.
One option when a big lie is exposed is to admit it; however, the nature of the lie prevents that happening. You understand that when you learn of the original historical definition and objectives of the Big Lie.
Figure 1 from Archibald’s essay
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”
The definition is by Joseph Goebbels and describes the big lie of Nazism with its ultimate goal of a Third Reich to rule the world for a thousand years. It applies just as effectively to the big lie about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) with its goal of establishing a world government through the UN.
The AGW promoters knew from the start it was a lie. Climatologist Stephen Schneider was set the tone when he said, in Discover magazine in 1989:
On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but& which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
Just four years later Senator Timothy Wirth, said it didn’t mean both.
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
The creators and promoters of the big lie began by narrowing the number of variables to a few of little importance. Then, with the false assumption that an increase in CO2 would cause an increase in temperature, it told the big lie, cloaked in the mystique of a computer model projection. They were wrong because in the historical record temperature increases before CO2; therefore, it does not and cannot cause global warming or climate change.
The only place in the world where a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase is in the computer models of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is the main reason why the model predictions are always wrong. However, the objective of a big lie is to override the truth for as long as possible. One way to do this is to confuse the message by creating a different language or, “Newspeak,” as George Orwell referred to it in his 1949 book 1984.
Newspeak was a language favored by the minions of Big Brother and, in Orwell’s words, “designed to diminish the range of thought.” Newspeak was characterized by the elimination or alteration of certain words, the substitution of one word for another, the interchangeability of parts of speech, and the creation of words for political purposes. The word has caught on in general use to refer to confusing or deceptive bureaucratic jargon.
Every day you hear words and phrases about the weather, climate, and climate change used incorrectly or inappropriately. All of it is part of the deliberate plot to use science for the political agenda and blame humans for what are natural climate conditions. It was deliberately orchestrated to create confusion, and language was at the heart.
The IPCC created the confusion by examining human-caused climate change but let the public believe they were studying all climate change. They didn’t have to do or say much because most people don’t even know the difference between weather and climate. The media constantly confused them.
Weather; is the atmospheric condition at a single place and at a specific time. When you stand outside, it is the sum of everything from cosmic radiation from space, to heat from the bottom of the ocean, and everything in between.
Climate; is the average of the weather over time or in a region. It is a statistic and best summarized by Mark Twain’s astute comment that “climate is what you expect weather is what you get.”
At this point, the discussion requires the context of history because the development of learning about weather and climate was not logical. Today most people are more familiar with meteorology than climatology, and with meteorologists than climatologists, but meteorology is a subset of climatologist. Climate came first, but few know that.
Climatology is the study of climate, a word that originates from the Greek word for inclination. The Greeks understood that the temperature at different latitudes is a function of the angle at which the Sun strikes the surface at noon and how it changes through the day and the year (Figure 1).
Figure 1
From this knowledge, the Greeks determined three climate zones, the Frigid, Temperate, and Torrid in Figure 2.
Figure 2
Aristotle wrote a book titled Meteorologica that was not about meteorology, although that was a small part of the concept. Rather, he was talking about the Greek view of the total Cosmos with its dividing line at the Moon. His student, Theophrastus, addressed the practical side of climate in his book On Weather Signs. This is a collection of folklore about regular events that are climate because they evolved from long-term observations of the weather. The Greeks also examined the relationship between human physical traits and personality and geography and climate. They believed that geography created environmental determinism and climate created climatic determinism.
These ideas prevailed through Montesquieu (1689 – 1755) and others into the 18th century. As one history commentator wrote,
In his famous book, “The Spirit of Laws,” French philosopher Montesquieu proposes the controversial theory that geography and climate can influence the nature of men and societies.
These ideas wandered off into the miasma of Friedrich Ratzel’s book Anthropogeographie (French version), that became the evil basis of Hitler’s ideas on the superiority of people from cold climates over those from warm climates. Meanwhile, the shift was away from climate and back to weather. Ratzel’s life from 1844 to 1904 spanned the transition. Airplanes were invented and by 1914 were a major factor in warfare. They needed detailed and short-term weather forecasts that changed the emphasis from the statistics of climate to the physics and mathematics of the atmosphere. It evolved as Meteorology: the study of the physics of the atmosphere, something considered essential training for weather forecasters. Meteorologists continued to work after the war, initially only working at airports, but gradually being built into the media triumvirate of News, Weather, and Sports. This continued until after WWII when they became synonymous in the public mind with weather to the exclusion of climate and climatologists. Until recently meteorologists received little or no climate training, which is why so many of the media presenters were so misinformed about the global warming issue. Since they were the major source of the public information, confusion reigned.
After WWII very few people, with Hubert Lamb and Reid Bryson being dominant, were even looking at climate. Both of them realized that if you are going to improve forecasting, you must first build an extensive database in space and time. Their work gained no attention because the global cooling from 1940 to circa 1980 only had political implications for groups like the CIA who produced reports on the impact of cooling on food production failures and social unrest that follows.
That changed after 1988 when Senator Wirth and others invited James Hansen of NAAS GISS to produce the scientific lie necessary to promote the big political lie that human CO2 is causing runaway global warming that is destroying the planet. Now the terminology that distorts, distracts, confuses, and limits understanding begins.
The Earth’s atmosphere does not work like a greenhouse, so there really is no Greenhouse Effect. For example, in the greenhouse, the glass blocks 100% of Ultraviolet (UV) light. In the atmosphere, the UV interacts with oxygen to create Ozone (O3), but a portion reaches the surface. The major movement of energy in the atmosphere is by conduction, advection, and change of phase of water. Only conduction occurs in a greenhouse. The greenhouse is a closed system; that is, heat can only leave if you open a window, door, or vent. The atmosphere is always open to space. However, the term was appropriate because it fit the political narrative of Global Warming. This incorrect theory was based on the false assumption that an increase in atmospheric CO2 would cause a temperature increase. Despite the efforts of the creators of the big lie to hide the truth, the lack of warming became blindingly obvious.
In 2004, across the media, the term global warming was replaced by the term climate change, when talking about the work of the IPCC and the threat to the world. In that same year, leaked emails between “Nick” at the Minns/Tyndall Centre, and the group involved in handling PR for the people at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), identified their dilemma. Nick wrote,
“In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media.”
Swedish alarmist and climate expert on the IPCC, Bo Kjellen replied,
“I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming.”
Many people noticed the change in terminology, but all it did was create more confusion. Runaway global warming was an aberration, so the idea that humans were to blame was an easy sell. However, many people knew that climate changes, so the claim of human interference became less plausible.
The truth of Climate Change, something that has occurred throughout the Earth’s history, was, as Goebbels predicted, the enemy of the big lie.
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