Tuesday, September 24, 2019

September 24, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Climate Strike, Greta Thunberg, and “The Village of the Damned”

Friends,

Some of you may be old enough to remember the psychological horror film “Village of the Damned.” It was released to theaters in 1960 and created something of a buzz, even a scandal, when it was first shown. When it appeared at select movie houses nearby I remember I wasn’t allowed to see it: I recall that there may have been an age requirement, and I didn’t qualify (in any case, my parents were adamant and didn’t permit me to go). I did have some older friends who saw it and were greatly struck by it. They related the story to me, and a few years later I did manage to view it.

And they were correct: Back then it ranked alongside films like “Them!” (1954) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) as stretching-the-boundaries, mind-bending horror cinema that pushed the limits of science, integrating supernatural elements, or perhaps better said, the diabolical.

As the story line goes, in the English village of Midwich,
As the children grow and develop at a rapid rate, it becomes clear they also have a powerful telepathic bond with one another. They can communicate with each other over great distances....Midwich was not the only place affected; follow-up investigations have revealed similar phenomena in other areas of the world….the children are precocious physically and mentally, the equivalent of children four times their age. Their behavior has become even more unusual and striking. They…always walk as a group, speak in an adult manner, and behave maturely, but they show no conscience or love, and demonstrate a coldness to others, causing the villagers to fear and be repulsed by them. The children begin to exhibit the power to read minds and to force people to do things against their will…. the children's inhuman nature becomes clear….
This past week as I viewed snippets of the so-called “young peoples’ climate strike,” with literally millions of eyes-glazed-over elementary and high school children (and many pre-schoolers, as well) demonstrating and holding aloft placards and banners demanding immediate action on climate, or else “we will all be dead in ten years,” I remembered vivid scenes from “Village of the Damned.”  Hundreds of obliging school administrators let their students out for this madness…you can bet all the money in your 401 K that they would not do that for a demonstration against illegal immigration! No way.

Even more striking was the purported inspiration of this madness: one Greta Thunberg, a sixteen-year old Swedish activist who would fit right in to the cast of “Village of the Damned.”  Oh yes, I realize any criticism of Ms. Thunberg is met with cries of “How dare you criticize a child! She has Aspergers Syndrome…you can’t attack her! If you do, you are hateful and bigoted…against the handicapped!”

Even weak-kneed Fox News, once again bending to the further Left, publicly apologized for comments made by guest Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire (“The Story,” September 23, 2019) when he suggested that Thunberg was “mentally ill.” Yet, irrespective of her physical or mental condition, Thunberg’s “speech”—in fact, a totalitarian rant—at the United Nations on the climate “crisis,” can truly be characterized as an illustration of fanatical lunacy by a child who has been indoctrinated and poisoned by a venomous and heartless ideology. She has become the mouthpiece for those dark forces—forces behind the curtain as in “The Wizard of Oz”—above her who in the most callous and insidious way use children to make their case for total control of our lives and destiny. And when we complain, they employ “the children” as their shield and prophylaxis. It is that outrage—and not the comments by a Michael Knowles—that merit the severest condemnation.

What should be readily apparent to those who actually read and examine the issue of climate change is that it is being employed in a highly ideological manner, that it is an hysterical global effort which is 90 % political and only about 10 % to do with any settled and real scientific data.

I don't know a single person who doesn't care about our environment in some way. Obviously there are some actions that go beyond the pale, where certainly I think most rational people would agree, e.g. those major industries that would pollute or unnecessarily destroy our environment. No one wants dirty drinking water, and, indeed, no one wants to breathe smog constantly....or destroy all our woodlands.

But the problem I would suggest is that the "90 % political" aspect of this issue, what I would call "climategate," has taken control of much of public mentality on this question, and that this is how most people now see the issue, even with the very best intentions. For the issue of "climate change"--in fact, "climate hysteria"—is used widely in our schools and colleges, by our media, and by ideologically-motivated "scientists" to shape an agenda that is at base very political and necessarily implies eventual governmental control over nearly every aspect of our lives.

The vast majority of so-called "studies" and reporting on this topic are part of a very tendentious, ideologically-shaped agenda, in which scientific study is usually manipulated to produce the required results, and then pushed by our media as undeniable truth. It is predictive research that forms the backbone of this narrative, that is, the computer data which is entered by human beings, who select what data to enter and who choose the algorithms employed to produce the results. Recall Carl Sagan from over four or five decades ago? Dr. Sagan assured us all that within thirty years we would be "entering a New Ice Age." Not only that, he produced generated predictions based on "observation" and his own extrapolations. Of course, as we know, those "predictions" came to naught. Then, again, remember Al Gore's charade, his "inconvenient truth" that he so ballyhooed (and made millions using). Within a decade we would all be under water and frying like roast pork....so he said!

What I am saying here is that the predictive method involves human beings and selected data, and, well, you know what that often entails. Even reported observations (e.g., Polar ice-cap melting, where I can cite quite very divergent studies) often are contradictory and can be explained by non-human-related causation.

There was a major scandal several years ago involving the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and leaked messages. The IPCC has been involved in practically all the mainstream efforts to convince us of the imminent arrival of "climate disaster." Most major research has been linked to their initiatives globally. So when the leaked messages and additional information became public it both stunned and shocked some observers, and very quickly there were attempts to either discredit it or hush it up. However, as Dr. Christopher Booker of The (London) Daily Telegraph (not an extreme right wing newspaper, but highly respected worldwide) detailed, the scandal will not go away, and the serious holes in and doubts about the "climate disaster" narrative loom even larger today.

It is not a question simply of good stewardship of our environment (which I hope we all would have), it is mass perversion of young minds and intellects with such nonsense as "we only have ten years before the earth is uninhabitable," or "we must stop using fossil fuels," etc. etc. ad nauseum.  And at base, as I have said, it is 90 % to serve a political goal, an ideological position which ends in eventual complete governmental control.

"Climate change" is NOT the critical issue of our time: rather imperious globalism and global controls over our lives, mass immigration, terrorism and Islamism, the decay in and decline of historic Christianity, and a needed decentralization of our economies would, in my estimation, rank higher.

Indeed, it is the climate fanatics and not their critics who treat our children like lobotomized zombies, it is they who play on the disabilities of a Greta Thunberg, inoculating her against criticism because of that, and thus hoping to get a “pass” on any substantive criticism. It is they who organized and filled the streets with millions of young, impressionable minds, children they have been indoctrinating and perverting, children straight out of “Village of the Damned.”

Let us have rational and measured conservation and respect for God's creation...but without the hysteria and fanaticism that has turned the question of climate change into a religious dogma for far too many well-meaning people and perverted far too many minds…and turned too many of our children into lobotomized zombies at the service of a Satanic globalism.

********
I am enclosing Dr. Booker's article from The Telegraph.  Following that I also include a recent update, with information from geologist Tony Heller. Then, I list some easily-obtainable references on climate change and “climategate.”  The Heartland Institute, among others, has done some excellent work on this subject, and I urge you to look them up.

The Telegraph

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation


Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the central role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based. This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Dr. Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.


Climate Alarmists Caught Manipulating Temperature Data Yet Again 

Written by James Murphy | Source: TheNewAmerican | June 26, 2019 04:25 PM
A belief in catastrophic man-made global warming should hinge on a couple of key factors. First, it must be shown that in the recent past the Earth was a cooler place. Second, temperatures in the present and in the future must show a dramatic increase in times of increased carbon dioxide.
These facts would supply evidence that scientists could use to show that our planet is getting quickly warmer.
Such a graph would look much like a hockey stick.
But weather hasn’t always cooperated with the climate-alarmist version of events. And when temperatures don’t cooperate with climate hysteria, too often we find climate alarmists manipulating data. History — even recent history — gets changed to reflect what should be happening according to those “in the know.”
Geologist Tony Heller, however, isn’t one to rely on what the mainstream media and climate scientists tell us is happening.
Being a scientist, Heller is keen on reporting facts instead of hysteria. And Heller is telling us that global temperature data is being manipulated before our very eyes.
According to Heller, NASA has manipulated historical temperature data to show a dramatic increase in temperature, especially since the year 2000.
Comparing NASA charts from the years 2000, 2017, and 2019, Heller shows data has been manipulated multiple times since the year 2000.
Heller shows, with NASA’s own data, that the space agency has been adjusting temperatures from the past — temperatures from as long ago as the mid-1800s — downward, while adjusting current-day temperatures upward, and those changes are responsible for most of the claimed global warming during that time. In the year 2000, historical data showed a .5 degree Celsius increase from the mid-1800s to the year 2000. In 2017, the same agency’s historical temperature data showed a 1.5 C increase and just two years later a 2.0 C increase. In each of those time frames, older temperatures are pushed slightly downward.
The 2017 to 2019 rise in temperature is especially confusing when you add the fact that satellite temperature data shows a global decrease in land temperature for the last two years. As well, satellite data adds to the case of fraud in another way: According to satellite data, since the year 2000, land temperatures have increased by .2 degrees Celsius, but NASA's latest chart says that temperatures increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius since 2000. So more than 80 percent of the change in temperature since the year 2000 is the result of temperature data manipulation.
“They’ve quadrupled warming mainly by cooling past temperatures and warming present temperatures,” Heller said in a video released on Monday.
Moreover, the entire Medieval Warm Period has disappeared. The Medieval Warm Period, which has lots of scientific and historical evidence to show it happened — and which was prominent in a 1990 IPCC graph — has been adjusted out of existence. Climate alarmists can’t have a Medieval Warm Period, since it casts so much doubt on the current theory that man is causing a current upward temperature swing. The Medieval Warm Period occurred before man could reasonably blamed for it. That’s why in 1999 when Michael Mann released his infamous “hockey stick graph,” the Medieval Warm Period was suddenly gone. Thus did Mann create a non-existent global-warming “tipping point” based on CO2, starting in the late 19th century.
“If we had high temperatures when CO2 was low, that would indicate that other factors in the climate are much stronger than carbon dioxide,” Heller pointed out.
The CO2 tipping point farce goes beyond Michael Mann’s skullduggery. A 2006 statement by Dr. David Deming revealed that as early as 1995 scientists were facing pressure to “get rid of” the Medieval Warm Period. “I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing e-mail from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,” Deming told the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
(Interesting side note: When you click on the link to Deming's 2002 testimony, the browser says, "Page cannot be found."  Question: Has it been purged, and if so, why?)
“When you’re willing to manipulate data you can show any result you want, and they wanted to show warming,” Heller concluded.
British economist Ronald Coase once quipped, “Torture the data, and it will confess to anything.” While Coase’s quote was about economics, it definitely applies to natural science as well. As Heller’s well-researched charts show, today’s climate-alarmist scientists are more than willing to “torture” the data to achieve their desired results.
There are several examples of doctored historical temperature data.
Besides NASA, we know that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has done it. We know that the HadCRUT 4 data used by the UNIPCC contained at least 70 obvious errors, according to a 2018 audit by climate-data researcher Dr. John Mclean.
And the data tampering isn’t limited to temperature either. Sea-level rise data is tampered with as well.

The willingness of scientists such as Mann and others to completely change historical data to show rapid warming is scientific quackery of the highest order. And that willingness doesn’t just make them bad scientists; it makes them liars.


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES:
DR. ROY SPENCER (meteorologist, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center)
RESEARCH, BOOKS, PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES BY DR. ROY SPENCER:

Articles:

Spencer, Roy W. (June 30, 2006). "Star Search"TCS Daily.
Spencer, Roy W. (January 16, 2005). "World warms to Kyoto, but research will save the day"USA Today.
Spencer, Roy W. (May 1, 2008). "More Carbon Dioxide, Please"National Review.

Books:

Peer-reviewed papers:
Spencer, Roy W.; Christy, John R. (1990). "Precise Monitoring of Global Temperature Trends from Satellites". Science247 (4950): 1558–1562. Bibcode:1990Sci...247.1558S
Spencer, Roy W.; Braswell, William D. (2008). "Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration". Journal of Climate21 (21): 5624–5628. 
Spencer, Roy W.; Braswell, William D. (2011). "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance". Remote Sensing. 3 (8): 1603–1613. 

DR. CHRISTOPHER BOOKER:
BOOKS:
Dr. Christopher Booker. The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, available from Telegraph Books in the UK

jOE BASTARDI (UNIVERSITY OF PA; WeatherBell Analytics LLC as Chief Forecaster in March 2011)
books:

Joe Bastardi. The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won't Hear From Al Gore--And Others (2018)


articles by joe bastardi:


3 comments:

  1. Too bad the author chose to take a gratuitous swipe at "illegal immigration". Sticking to one subject is probably a good idea.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Illegal immigration threatens our civilization

      Delete
  2. Greta would fare poorly in 17th Century Salem, Massachusetts

    ReplyDelete

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