The Boundary Conditions of a Manufactured Debate
Had this comment on the “about” page:
I wandered onto this blog from a twitter link about Antony Watts. Still somewhat befuddled because I was under the impression he hunted down alarmists, not reinforced them. However what really felt like coming home (I’m a Physics grad) was the return to first principles with the laws of thermodynamics in that article – which seem to have been ditched in the climate cacophony. A perfect example of this prostitution of science is this classic from (un)skepticalscience.com:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Second-law-of-thermodynamics-greenhouse-theory.htm
It is stunning that they parallel CO2 with a blanket, when anybody with a basic grasp of physics knows that the effect of a blanket, and indeed an actual greenhouse, is to block CONVECTION, which is a major process of cooling.
I still regularly have to reinforce the point that they are thermodynamic LAWS and anything in climate is a THEORY. Most don’t get it, and the BS touted by the likes of the link above are not going to make it easy to get the point across.
My reply (plus some more elaboration):
Well this may sound ridiculous, but you have to consider the scope of what we’re dealing with here. Read my “Religion of Climate Change” series. And watch Star Wars episodes 1 – 3. Seriously. Crazy, I know.
They’re creating a false reality. Outright alarmism is an obviously false reality, to anyone with the slightest sense of reason. Well, just think of the operation and the forces mustered to establish that false reality, promote it, fake it, have people running websites promoting it, having James Hansen promote it, etc. It’s kind of a big deal.
It all rests on the alarmist version of the greenhouse effect (see here for clarification). There is a real greenhouse effect inside a real greenhouse, and then there is the fake “alarming” greenhouse effect of climate pseudoscience, something pretended to be the same or similar to the real thing, but which it is not, and is not real in its own right either.
It all rests on that. So, you put people in place to look like skeptics, but what they’re actually doing is defending the very basis of the alarming theory, the basis of which is fundamental to every single aspect of the religious, political, and financial platform:
- Religious: belief in a false reality.
- Political: give up rights and freedoms for that false reality.
- Financial: Pay (i.e. be enslaved) for the luxury of believing in, and for having your rights and freedoms taken away for, the false reality.
That’s what people like Anthony Watts, Roy Spencer, Robert G. Brown, Tim Folkerts, Joel Shore, etc etc, are all doing.
To defend the basis of that platform, especially when it is SO EASY(!) to criticize, is ipso-facto to directly defend that platform, no matter what language is being used, no matter what appearances are being made, no matter who you appear to associate yourself with or to be, etc. This is as simple as 1 + 1 = 2.
It is the existence of the debate itself which allows for the intended control. People like Watts are there to ensure that the debate, the battle and chaos, does not end. If it did end, first of all Watts & co. would be out of work. Second of all, more importantly, their “Sith Lord” would lose power. The Sith Lord in the Jedi didn’t want any war to end – it was the existence of the war that gave him his power. Without the war, without the battle, without the debate & chaos, whoever is at the top of it all would lose their power. The Sith Lord played and created both sides of the war because it was that chaos that gave him his power.
So it is here: the longer this debate continues, the more it LEGITIMIZES it in the eyes of the unwary and uneducated public. If the debate itself is legitimized, which is what Anthony Watts & co. are all about with their “the question is not whether or not there is warming, the question is how much warming” statement, then this legitimizes the alarm.
Do people not see how that works? If there was a massively funded group of people who could command large sections of the media, who all created the appearance of a legitimate debate as to whether or not there were unicorns, then this would legitimize the proposition that there are unicorns. A large number of people would see the television telling them that it is a legitimate debate as to whether or not unicorns exist. Given the right emotional language, say, you should feel bad if you don’t believe unicorns exist and you should feel good if you do believe they exist, people will naturally begin to believe in the existence of unicorns, without ever having seen one.
We are dealing with very skillful propaganda with the alarming greenhouse effect meme…masterful propaganda and simulacra and hyperreality, the likes of which only a Sith, an “Archon”, would and could create.
But forget about all of the metaphor, it is all just a matter of practicality: some people want to make (lots and lots of) money off of carbon taxes, and it just so happens to be an extremely useful political tool at the same time. As criticisms naturally arise, new tools are naturally developed to defeat them. Metaphor is fun to think about but it is just practicality: currency, politics, and control.
The last thing that can happen, in fact, the thing which would defeat them, is if the entire thing was exposed as a fraud, or at least as a dumb mistake if the masses can not accept the concept of intentional fraud. This is precisely what would happen if it were exposed that their “alarming greenhouse effect” is pure pseudoscientific BS, and this is precisely why the Sith apprentices defend it.
Do you all know how Anthony Watts signs off on his emails and forum comments when he tells people that he’s trash-moderated their comments or replies so that they can not defend themselves against his and his friend’s bullying and blatantly sophist attacks? This is how he signs them off, after telling people he won’t allow them have a chance to have their say, which note comes after he’s already hooked them into replying or commenting:
“Feel free to be as upset as you wish.”
What kind of a sick f*ck says that? This is what I’ve elsewhere labelled as a “disgusting human being”. That is, someone’s whose existence is viscerally, qualitatively, worth less than what we would normally consider human. 🙂
Climate of Sophistry 
I agree, Joe.
The proof of your argument lies in the reluctance – or downright refusal – these warmist and lukewarmist groups display in addressing the basic physics of the cAGW ‘theory’.
After all, coming up with a thousand reasons why the data doesn’t quite validate/support the ‘theory’ must be more compelling (and probably financially advantageous) than actually revisiting the ‘theory’… right?
The scary thing here is that I actually thought there may be an outside chance that this thing may be beaten, but on this basis you are pretty much fighting the whole human race, which is a bit depressing.
Only a Galilaien feat is capable of overturning such an imbedded paradigm. History tells us that doesn’t happen very often.
Exactly Arfur.
Watts and Willis both from the same mould. They will not even discuss the trenberth AR4 graphic, it is the bible of energy transfers. NO it is crap.
Thanks joe.
So here’s my dilemma. I’ve never seen AGW / climate change / whatever it is this week as a scientific battle but a political one. It’s a series of vested interests that all flows back to power/money, as these things always do. In fighting a political battle truth is probably the last place you want to start from, and therefore my take on the ‘luke warmers’ such as the GWPF (of which I’m a very early member) is that they thought it was much better to take a base tenet of the GH theory as being true (while biting lip) so that they could argue against alarmism without just being dismissed as extremist ‘deniers’.
As it turned out they got branded that way anyway, but at least they have made significant headway against the alarmists by making them become so strident in their Chicken Little outbursts that the general public have smelled a big fat rat and started to turn away from the whole thing.
Leaving Watt’s attitude aside (winning bloggies can do things to a guy obviously), I thought that was where he was coming from. After all his surface stations project called out the worst of bad data collection and the likes of Steve Goddard are tireless in pointing out that every so called ‘worst ever’ weather event has not only happened before, but has probably been worse. Non of this is really science, it’s an art of neutering political spin. Perhaps the last thing he needs is to be targeted as being in league with those that say the entire theory is baseless crap, too many sceptics have already publicly accepted it and it would be a gift to the alarmists.
So while deep down I may feel aggrieved at the way science is being bastardised from first principles, I don’t see that there is a lot of benefit of being a pure shiny beacon of truth in the face of such a tidal wave of bullshit, and therefore would prefer to chip away at the alarmist edifice from the middle ‘lukewarm’ ground. Sometimes you just have to make sacrifices.
The truth will eventually out, and in the meantime some seriously nasty characters will have become very rich, and will escape punishment when it all unravels. This may be sickening and unfair, but then again I’m not combing a rubbish dump on the edge of an African city just to survive – so perhaps I should count my blessings.
John Thorpe
Well I can agree that it is a fine line, John, and that there are such strategies. However, what is wrong with the straight truth?
I’ve stated this point earlier and maybe it wasn’t clear in my recent writing: the goal was to emplace the simulacra version of the greenhouse effect. That was the goal. Alarmism was not the goal. Alarmism was and is so ridiculous that, despite all the energy put behind it, it was bound to fail. It’s like the red flag in front of the bull. Meanwhile the bull is still in the pen and the pen is the simulacra greenhouse effect, which everyone ends up accepting because alarmism was defeated. So sure, what you describe is exactly the point.
The goal wasn’t alarmism, the goal was the hyperreality of the atmospheric greenhouse effect. Now, why? Well, for the reasons I’ve outlined: belief in a false reality. If you know what the true reality is, but you control the false reality, then you control the false consciousness of the masses (think banking here, dumbocracy, a misinterpreted relativity and quantum mechanics, etc, and all the energy put behind enforcing the false reality perception). The thing which the masses accept as true is false, but you control it, hence you have the power. The goal was to establish another layer of false reality in the mass consciousness. As long as there is the fake atmospheric greenhouse effect, and humans can have an iota of effect upon it, then there will always exist an excuse to think about taxing it. Going further, the entire narrative is that the (fake) greenhouse effect we might have an effect upon, and so you should feel guilty for this.
As the Sith (fake skeptical analysts like Watts etc) say: “It is not a question of whether we cause warming, but it is how much.”
So, that is all still totally within the guilt and possibility for taxation paradigm. It all still reduces to what I’ve discussed in the OP article here.
What is wrong with the plain simple truth? Nothing, for me, and for you perhaps. There is something wrong with the plain truth however for those forces who manufacture a false reality for public consumption, and then control that false reality such as to control the masses. That’s what is happening here.
The goal is false reality. To create a hyperreal simulacrum. That was and is the goal. The goal is not science or saving the planet or any of that rhetoric – the goal is to manufacture another layer of false reality for mass consumption. The simulacra version of the greenhouse effect is that false reality; that was the goal. For the direct fact that it is a false reality, a simulacrum.
Point taken, and on reading further into your blog I note the concept of bracketing also…
I’ve always come at this from the physics point of view and been dumbfounded at just how pervasive the explanation of GHE was when I couldn’t, from my own humble abilities, actually calculate how it worked!
Now I know why, it doesn’t! It’s startling that truth can sometimes hide in plain sight, such that nobody is capable of believing it. It is such a classic ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ story only a child could probably unravel it – as long as they weren’t already indoctrinated by our increasingly partisan education system.
In any case the rebel in me doesn’t half like the term Slayer 😉 and being laughed at by the naked Emperor really doesn’t worry me in the slightest.
Hi Joe,
I just finished reading this article with interest not because I believe that there is any point in wasting time battling the “Sith Lord’s” minions whoever they might be, but rather because I would like to know who the “Sith Lord” of this world is at this time in history. Who do you think is running the well organized, well funded, highly motivated, relentless, supra-national, corporate cabal that is behind the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CACC) global deception?
This is what he or they have already achieved:
1) Virtually every university around the world teaches that a human enhanced “greenhouse effect” is causing catastrophic climate change as do most elementary and secondary schools and there are numerous stories of teachers being silenced for fear of loosing their jobs;
2) The meme that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that must be regulated has been given legal status by the US supreme Court in Mass vs. EPA (2007)
3) There are over 1100 local chapters of ICLEI operating in the world and this is their statement on climate change: “we are united in calling for a 30% reduction in ‘greenhouse gases’ by 2020 and an 80% reduction by 2050 “;
4) Virtually every program presented by the corporate media that speaks of “climate change” does so under the meme that it is happening, it is catastrophic and man is causing it. A recent prime example is the documentary “Tipping Points” on the weather channel;
5) Not only are the world’s largest banks partnered with UNEP (parent organization of the IPCC), the World Bank itself recently made the statement, “The science is unequivocal that humans are the cause of global warming, and major changes are already being observed.”;
6) Virtually every ecclesiastical organization views action on “climate change” a moral imperative. For example: “The Catholic Church hierarchy, beginning with the Pope more than two decades ago, has framed climate change as a moral issue involving ‘the future of God’s creation’ and one best viewed through four principles guiding Catholics’ worldview.” Here is a statement from the World Council of Churches, “In the ecumenical understanding, human induced climate change is being precipitated primarily by the high consumption lifestyles of the richer industrialised nations and wealthy elites throughout the world while the consequences will be experienced disproportionately by impoverished nations, low-lying island states, and future generations. Climate change is thus a matter of international justice and inter-generational justice.”
7) There are also numerous private organizations, international think tanks and NGO’s that are all singing the same song.
Here is a statement from the Trilateral Commission: “The informed scientific consensus is that the consequences of global warming are likely to be very damaging if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases continue on there present course and are not reduced.”
Here is a statement from the Club of Rome: “Globally, the escalation of extreme weather continues. Science is clearly linking these events to climate change, with human carbon emissions as the prime cause.”
8) Here is a partial list of national, regional and international science academies that have made formal declarations confirming human induced global warming and urging nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases:
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies
United States National Research Council
Royal Society of New Zealand
The Royal Society of the United
European Academy of Sciences and Arts
European Science Foundation
InterAcademy Council
International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences
American Chemical Society
American Institute of Physics
American Physical Society
Australian Institute of Physics
European Physical Society[53]
American Geophysical Union
American Society of Agronomy
Crop Science Society of America
Soil Science Society of America
European Federation of Geologists
Geological Society of America
Geological Society of London
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
National Association of Geoscience
American Meteorological Society
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Royal Meteorological Society (UK)
World Meteorological Organization
American Quaternary Association
International Union for Quaternary Research
American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Society for Microbiology
Australian Coral Reef Society
Institute of Biology (UK)
Society of American Foresters
The Wildlife Society (international)
etc.
So, again I ask. Who in the world today has sufficient political juice, has enough temporal power to bring all of the above mentioned international and national, governmental and non-governmental organizations under his or their sway?
Carl
Carl,
A great question!
A lighthearted shortlist:
The Templars?
The Rosicrucians?
The Freemasons?
The Jesuits?
(Ok, ok, I am reading ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’…) 🙂
Murdoch?
The G8?
However it is interesting to note that your long list of science academies is almost exclusively Western. The Chinese, Indians (apart from Pachauri) and Russians do not seem to be a part of the ‘scientific consensus’.
Arfur
Watts admits in public he thought it was real in the post below, Joseph.
Go read it on site where he put the big white line in, so people will notice.
This is after I saw him about three weeks ago, say “he has decided the GCMs are junk.”
I’ve got news for his stupid a&&. If the models are junk the theory is junk because the models are built upon the junk by the people who invented the junk that was above being experimentally proven or disproven so it couldn’t be a theory.
We told those
gut eating b****ds
we’d see the day
when they ate crow
to the last bite.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
You’re seeing Anthony Watts do his media coward version of eating it, a bite at a time.
He even put up on the original post, “See my response to PaulH” or whatever.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This is what it looks like when you whip an empire’s ass, boys.
Enjoy the view because you earned it.
He’s just going ahead and implementing the withdrawal after having waited as humanly long
as possible to milk out the political suck monkey and cash flow factors.
He’s a repugnant slug on the face of science and a perfect example of a foul mouthed, sh** talking media idiot
who thinks because he doesn’t curse when he lies and libels and corrupts the reputations,
of an
entire generation
of REAL, scientists,
CORRECT scientists,
he isn’t
a foul mouthed failed parasite
to a class of business
he wasn’t smart enough to get a degree in.
FOR EIGHT YEARS.
Science.
The more rigorous elements of electricity
overwhelmed his simple minded ass. Electricity.
Puppy got all tuckered out. After EIGHT years.
And
went home
“0 for 1”.
He’s an electric car salesman.
An electric car salesman.
Who misled the entire world for like… I dunno, he still is, so..
A failed engineering student.
Who didn’t realize
the over arching law
of the simplest phase of matter
that was named “the over arching law
of the simplest phase of matter”
because it was found to be the
over arching law, of the simplest phase of matter in nature.
The ATMOSPHERE
as well as laboratory/manmade atmospheres.
He didn’t know that applied to the atmosphere.
It took him all this time to figure that out.
PaulH says:
April 13, 2014 at 9:51 am
“As God is my witness, I thought CAGW could fly.”
😉
_____________________
Anthony Watts says:
April 13, 2014 at 9:58 am
Paul H,
+1
————–
Obviously – I wasn’t going to let all that slide after the s*** he did to my friends.
I just appealed to his honest nature.
————–
James Rollins Jr says:
April 13, 2014 at 8:27 pm
LoL.
That’s the funniest thing I have heard or seen since January 1st this year and I’m a news hound.
” Even after they told me and reminded me repeatedly, James Hansen’s green house gas warming models, didn’t have the atmosphere obeying Ideal Gas Law, falsely weighting temperature according to composition of gas mix.
And even after I realized all of Aeronautics, Meteorology, and N.A.S.A. had always, treated the atmosphere as an Ideal Gas mix in every single science predating their modern capability, back to World War II and before,
And even when I saw and heard recordings of James Hansen being predicted to be found a criminal by his fellow employees over this very issue,
And even after I saw them try to float that ridiculously out of balance Kiehl-Trenberth cartoon,
battle flag of the “hotter vs colder” challenged,
And even after I saw Michael Mann close associate of Hansen, caught in computer modeling fake research,
And even after I saw all their names – Hansen, Trenberth, Jones, Mann, – on the now famous “Its a Travesty” Email
where Trenberth exclaimed how amid their combined expertise, “we don’t have the slightest clue what the climatic thermostat is doing,”
I thought it would fly! I thought the basic science, was sound!! I did! I really did!
I thought it was real, science weighting the atmosphere’s temperature according to a minute couple percent of volume, was real gas thermodynamics!
Honest I did!
And all those honest men
who I
defamed,
scourged,
mocked,
lied about,
libeled,
slandered,
and ridiculed,
they can’t hold it against me!
Because I believed!
I thought it would fly!
Like an eagle!”
——-
Yeah: well, the eagle, has landed.
The cowbird of fake science, says thanks for raising it’s young,
into full adulthood.
Couldn’t have done it without their help.
——-
A.B.E.
James Rollins Jr says: April 13, 2014 at 8:27 pm
LoL.
That’s the funniest thing I have heard or seen since January 1st this year and I’m a news hound.
” Even after they told me and reminded me repeatedly, James Hansen’s green house gas warming models, didn’t have the atmosphere obeying Ideal Gas Law, falsely weighting temperature according to composition of gas mix.”
Mr. Rollins,
The whole thing is much worse of understanding than you posit. Eathlings have been peering at and measuring everything for a long while. If they can stop the process and measure, they think they know. On this Earth, all is a process, with some limitation on intrinsic properties. The Earth’s atmosphere will obey no earthling law! With your Ideal Gas Law, PV=NRT please identify any term in that equation in this atmosphere, anywhere, that will remain constant, long enough to measure it? Any average, like that Global average temperature, destroys any knowledge or learning, of what “is”, right here, right now! Time to go into the dirt, with a twig and scratching symbols, so another can understand what you have learned back there, back then.
Statistics, especially statistical mechanics, has done more to hamper learning, than any other concept. Who gives a shit of mean, median, or standard deviation, except bankers, or insurance salesmen? What is right here, right now. (Weather)! Climate is usefull only to realtors, selling a house in a bad location!
How’s this for bullshit statistical analysis designed to back up your own beliefs?
http://www.mcgill.ca/research/channels/news/global-warming-just-giant-natural-fluctuation-235236
Carl Brehmer says: “8) Here is a partial list of national, regional and international science academies that have made formal declarations confirming human induced global warming and urging nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases: …”
====================================
Carl, unless you want to support the myth of scientific consensus on AGW, you should not refer to science academies allegedly confirming AGW. It would be different, of course, if you had evidence that all members of those organizations SIGNED the declarations. I guess you do not have any, do you?
In cases I am familiar with only the council members signed the declarations, which are very few people, maybe 1 to 1,000. I hope you understand that the council members are not elected to represent/fake the scientific opinions of the members. I am not familiar with a single case where the members actually voted on the declarations, and this is understandable, because the scientific opinion like any opinion is individual.
If you look at the Doran&Zimmerman2008 study, you will possibly see that 2/3 scientists polled did not find 2 minutes to fill in the on-line form and confirm AGW, which people honestly believing in AGW would certainly have done. No consensus, Carl.
Now Wacktard Watts is putting up a post saying he wants to start a “skeptics” organization to represent the whole world.
A failed engineering student whose ‘scientific method’ is character assassination, cheered on by a bipolar street entertainer,
have decided they want to represent scientific thought in atmospheric chemistry.
He means “enforce” of course.
“Feel free to be as upset as you wish.”
What kind of a sick f*ck says that? This is what I’ve elsewhere labelled as a “disgusting human being”. That is, someone’s whose existence is viscerally, qualitatively, worth less than what we would normally consider human.
>>>>>>>>
It’s the California mindset. Anthony has a successful blog, so everyone else is just dog poop. As long as he thinks he is something, the more he feels like he can determine “science”. To him the only higher authority is just more “fame and fortune”.
The higher he flies, the harder the ground becomes….
I would like your response to this, Joe: https://skepticalscience.com/postma-disproved-the-greenhouse-effect.htm
I can’t seem to find anything about this on your blog, so would you mind please? He makes some serious allegations about your knowledge!
Thanks!
Oh man that’s just a bunch of stupid bullshit that merely re-states the position again after it was debunked. NOT AN ARGUMENT!
In an argument, when someone refutes the logical and physical foundations of the opponents premise, the opponent doesn’t win by simply re-stating their position. Sick freaks.
Everything I said back then is still correct. It can now basically be watched in my 3 videos here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDK7p7ivYprBgjDNvYwmk5Q
The contributor to the skepticalscience web site dwell within a different universe, which lends credibility to the “multiverse” hypothesis.
On their web site they say that the following are all “myths” about global warming:
1) Climate’s changed before
2) It’s the sun
3) It’s not bad
4) There is no consensus
5) It’s cooling
6) Models are unreliable
7) Temp record is unreliable
8) Animals and plants can adapt
9) It hasn’t warmed since 1998
10) Antarctica is gaining ice
Ergo, by their own admission this is what they “believe”. The climate has never changed before human’s started burning hydrocarbons for energy, the sun does not cause global warming, a warmer planet would not more habitable, everyone agrees with them, we are not entering a global cooling period, climate models are perfectly reliable even though they are almost always wrong, the temperature record is reliable even though its manipulation is well documented, the millions of years of demonstrated genetic ability of plants and animals to adapt to changes in the Earth’s climate has suddenly stopped, 1998 wasn’t warmer than it is now in spite of the temperature record, which they say is reliable, Antarctica is not gaining ice even though it is.
If it can be imagined the mind can believe it. We have to come to grips with the reality that the human beings are not rational beings. Yes, they have the capacity for rational thought, but that is not what is most important to people. People will believe, profess and defend things that are truly bazaar just to win the adoration of what ever group they seek to be embraced by. The believers in “carbon dioxide caused catastrophic climate change” are a global “community” who seek approval from the others who dwell within that community. They have their own dogma that is canonized in reports from the IPCC; they have their own “priesthood” who deliver sermons; they meet at yearly global conventions; they get together, praise and emotionally support one another. And of course, anyone who threatens the integrity of their “community” with scientific data that conflicts with their dogma is deemed an enemy and therefore demonized and ostracized.
That’s just the way it is.
^Brilliant!
And what amazing idiots…