Dr. Tim Ball
Climatologist
Have we reached the height or depth of idiocy with the claim that the cold weather is due to global warming? No, because new insane claims appear every day. This cumulative madness explains but doesn’t make sense of what is happening.
For example, it is hard to understand how the world was not outraged by the exposure of cheating, lying, manipulating, concocting and altering facts, attacking and often destroying people who opposed them, in the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in 2009. Of course, they did this from a moral high ground and an assumed sense of superiority. At least one-person recognized malfeasance and wrong doing and carried out the leak. However, even while doing what a mature, civilized, trusting society requires, the person was afraid and continues in fear to identify themselves. It was a virtuous act that should receive the praise and accolade of everyone. Instead the person lives in fear and silence for telling the truth. Meanwhile, all of those identified in the emails continue without accountability, and several of them are in positions to perpetuate the deception that is anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Official attempts to whitewash their behavior using self-serving committees were quickly recognized as such, but even that changed nothing. The massive lie created by those exposed by the emails continues to thrive. Indeed, those who try to speak out are denounced, threatened, and marginalized in true Salem fashion as deniers. A few years ago, I wrote that the lie that is human-caused global warming was a crime against humanity. Ridiculed at the time, I repeat that charge now in light of the millions of lives lost or livelihoods and potential to prosper destroyed. The threat is reinforced by the recently proposed New Green Deal .
The title of this article refers to a 1963 movie described as an American epic comedy. It was fiction, but now reality is even worse. I started to write this article to pursue the comedic theme of the movie, but the more I thought and wrote the angrier I became. For example, a person claimed to have an ethnic identity and used it to gain entrance to one of the top universities in the world including scholarships. Science proved the ethnicity claim was completely false, yet the person is still planning to run for President of the United States, sits in the major legislative body, and nobody seems to find this totally mad. The fact that the person will not win is irrelevant. The fact that such a person appears in public and is treated as reasonable is frightening. Another person sits on a judiciary committee who claimed military service and action in Vietnam when he was never in that country. Both people are lawyers and supposed upholders of the law. They prove the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. Ideas and understandings once seemingly logical and well-grounded are turned upside down.
Today you can add a thousand more “mads” to the list. One of them would be in capital letters and bold type, to represent the insanity that is AGW. Every day individual “mad” stories appear such as, “Climate change poses greater risk of mental health challenges for children born to depressed mothers.” They based the story on children born in New York City, which is a more likely cause of the mother’s depression.
Understanding the overall level of madness shows how the madness of the AGW story is nothing surprising. Indeed, it is almost mundane. The story of how it was created, promoted, and propagandized is classic.
Events occur in all aspects of life in a constant torrent that leaves you shaking your head. Every day you hear stories and say, it cannot get any crazier, and within hours it gets crazier. This accumulation of individual insanities fits at least two documented trends in society. I wrote about the first in an article titled “IPCC Climate Science is a Gestalt Theory Problem.” Gestalt theory says that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. In this case, the sum of the individual mad stories is greater than the AGW story. A few years ago a list appeared titled A (Not Quite) Complete List Of Things Supposedly Caused By Global Warming. It identifies the individual “mad” stories of events caused by AGW.
The second is what I call gradualism. Instead of compressing parts it compresses time. For example, years ago I met a woman who in conversation over the next half hour told me her adult life history. It was an amazing tale, and at the end the woman looked at me and said, “I know what you are thinking.” Without waiting for a reply, she said, “You are thinking, you silly woman, how did you get yourself in such a mess?” I replied, “Yes, that is what I was thinking.” She then said something that made me rethink history and my understanding of everything. “You have to realize that what I am telling you in 30 minutes took 20 years to occur.” That is gradualism.
We learn about historical events in minutes or at most hours but actually they evolve over months and years, even centuries. For example, English students learn that Henry VIII declared England Protestant, so in their minds, all England became Protestant overnight. The truth is there are still Catholic holdouts, and some are now advocating making the country officially Catholic again.
There is another form I call negative gradualism. For example, an event occurs that one person in a relationship thinks about but decides it is not worth mentioning or confronting. This pattern continues on both sides as similar events occur but are set aside. Later, someone examining the situation from outside is stunned by what has become a ‘normal’ pattern of behavior to the couple.
There is no doubt that thanks to the Internet, information is almost immediately available, extensive, and diverse. In some ways, this is not new. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) published a poem in 1807 titled The World is Too Much With Us. In some ways it anticipates Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village. As one author explains,
McLuhan’s concept was based on the idea that culture would move toward greater personal interaction, after leaving behind early eras of humanity, focused on the spoken and written word.
McLuhan’s belief was that the world was entering a fourth ”age” he called the electronic age, where people everywhere would be able to find and experience the same information through technological tools. His studies on trends in technology, and how human communication was affected, helped him develop his hypotheses about the future, and how innovations such as the coming internet, (he didn’t yet know its name, of course), would impact individuals and culture as a whole.
What McLuhan didn’t allow was that in a village the most destructive person is the gossip. Before the Internet, the mainstream media were the gossips in the global village. Witness William Cowper’s 1782 poem.
How shall I speak of thee or thy power address,
The God of our idolatry, the press?
By thee, religion, liberty and laws
Exert their influence and advance their cause;
By thee worse plagues than Pharaoh’s land befell,
Diffused, make Earth the vestibule of Hell:
Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise;
Thou ever-bubbling spring of endless lies;
Like Eden’s dead probationary tree,
Knowledge of good and evil is from thee!
Confusions are everywhere, including for some basic distinctions, such as privacy and secrecy or human rights and social rights. For example, I opposed prisoners receiving the right to vote, at least while in prison. Voting is a social right, and prison is designed to deprive you of those rights because your social behavior was deemed unacceptable. I tried to explain my position by using a classic form of argument, reduction ad absurdum. I said the next step because of gradualism is that prisoners will want the right to run for office. I tried to lighten the idea by suggesting that one good thing is we would finally have proven criminals in political office. It didn’t work because everything is now beyond absurd.
To illustrate how absurd, normally, as Kerry Jackson noted
Generally speaking, the first person in a debate who compares their opponent to Hitler or the Nazis at that moment loses the argument.
When the Third Reich is invoked, it’s usually clear evidence that that person’s position is so weak that they have had to resort to a gross misrepresentation of the other’s position.
I am not comparing an opponent to Hitler or invoking the Third Reich. I am simply giving you a summary of what Hitler practiced distilled by a Harvard psychologist .
Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.
Now you start to understand how the world is not outraged by the lies and deceptions of the events at the CRU or the originators and promoters of the lie and accumulation of small lies that is AGW. The irony and ultimate madness of all this is that the madness only occurs because economies built on fossil fuels provide the time and support.
Dr. Ball is researcher and/or author of numerous scientific papers on a range of environmental issues. He is also co-author of the book Eighteenth Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay with Dr. Stuart Houston, one of the World’s leading authorities on arctic birds.
Dr. Ball is also published frequently in leading newspapers and magazines across Canada and, increasingly, the U.S. and abroad. For more information about Tim and his work, check out his website at DrTimBall.ca.
