The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Thursday, December 29, 2022

The Kerry Kampaign

We come to the end of yet another year of media driven climate change hysteria. It's worth noting Chilton Williamson, Jr.'s entertaining, albeit snarky, ode to the predicted climate change apocalypse—a long-running mass hysteria event that set the stage for the even more extreme hysteria associated with the Covid pandemic:

Historically, plagues, earthquakes, meteors, eclipses and the warnings of religious prophets have been among the principal causes of mass irrational fright. Today, observations and measurements by scientists and the theories [and computer models] they construct from them, together with the prophesying of a Swedish teenager with the gaze of a prime candidate for the exorcist, are chiefly responsible for the panicked, directionless charge ...

Liberals [Progressives] have acquired in subsequent decades what amounts to an inchoate fear of nature and natural forces. Their phobia is one result of their reevaluation of technological progress and their lessened confidence in the ability of applied Western science to solve wide-ranging problems of a practical sort. Historically, liberalism and scientific thought have been inseparable allies in the effort to understand the laws of nature for the purpose of controlling, dominating, subduing and exploiting it for the material benefit of an ever wealthier and progressively freer human world.

Today, this loss of confidence in the scientific-political project of the past six centuries has combined with the neopaganism which personifies the earth as “Gaia,” a living, breathing, semi-sentient being that deserves a degree of human respect that begins to approach conceding a claim to “rights.”

... So it is that, at a moment in history when the human race should be preparing its defenses against the future [natural] warming of the planet — an empirically observable fact, whatever the cause — by building, for instance, dykes as the Dutch did in the three centuries between 1200 and 1500, we are planning instead to mobilize societies under authoritarian, and doubtless in the end dictatorial, regimes to prevent the unpreventable. Meanwhile, we are launching flights of bogus “experts” and bureaucrats on hundreds of pollutive private jets to gather at luxurious private resorts around the world for impotent and futile [John] Kerry Konferences. 

During Covid, we saw the tendency of progressive leaders "to mobilize societies under authoritarian" policies and mandates, going so far as to criminalize behaviors that these leaders deemed (without scientific basis, compelling evidence, or common sense) to be "harmful." Opposition to these petty dictators was censored and demonized. And worse, their policies and mandates did almost nothing to address the problem in real terms. The catastrophic damage to lives and livelihoods that resulted was at first ignored and then minimized by their propaganda media.

As time passes, it's likely that the same leaders or their ideologically similar descendants, will enact analogous authoritarian policies and mandates that deal with climate change. The policies and mandates they enact will do little if anything to address the problem but will do serious and possibly catastrophic damage to lives and livelihoods around the world.

Williamson addresses the most disheartening aspect of this when he writes:

Thankfully, an international effort to coordinate, direct and regulate the political, economic and social systems of the world’s 195 countries is precisely the sort of project to which fallen humanity is spectacularly unsuited, given its irredeemably rivalrous, competitive, devious, selfish and stubborn nature. It has been, as it remains, liberals’ conviction that a liberal education can remove these morally unpleasant but practically useful human qualities and replace them with the liberal idea of sweetness and light, an ambition that has only grown stronger the further it retreats ahead of them.

In fact, the present Kerry Kampaign to lessen and even to halt the progress of a warming atmosphere is doomed to fail, as the vast majority of the world well understands.

Deep down, anyone who can think critically understands this, and that includes at least some of the political leaders who are its strongest proponents. But there's enormous power in laws that control large populations and large sums of money, and climate change gives these leaders that power. What better excuse than one that "saves the planet."

UPDATE-1:

Because climate change is one of the most pervasive narratives pushed hard by the Left, their trained hamsters in the propaganda media (a.k.a. mainstream media) work every day to suppress opposing expert views. Chris Morrison comments:

The political fiction that humans cause most or all climate change and the claim that the science behind this notion is ‘settled’, has been dealt a savage blow by the publication of a ‘World Climate Declaration (WCD)’ signed by over 1,100 scientists and professionals. There is no climate emergency, say the authors, who are drawn from across the world and led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever. Climate science is said to have degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science.

The scale of the opposition to modern day ‘settled’ climate science is remarkable, given how difficult it is in academia to raise grants for any climate research that departs from the political orthodoxy. (A full list of the signatories is available here.) Another lead author of the declaration, Professor Richard Lindzen, has called the current climate narrative “absurd”, but acknowledged that trillions of dollars and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists currently says it is not absurd.

Particular ire in the WCD is reserved for climate models. To believe in the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. Climate models are now central to today’s climate discussion and the scientists see this as a problem. “We should free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models,” says the WCD. “In future, climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science.”

There is an eerie similarity between the propaganda media's treatment of the WCD and their treatment of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD)—a document written by public health experts who (in 2020) opposed government policies associated with the Covid pandemic. Both got little if any coverage when they were released and no critical analysis or investigation after the fact.

The GBD has now been proven to be correct in its criticism and its alternative policy approach. It's highly likely that the WCD will be proven correct as well. And that's what frightens the leftist journalists and climate alarmists. When Greta Thurberg—a humorless teenager with no scientific background—is your spokesperson, why even consider the opinion of 1,100 scientists and professionals. After all, according to Greta (and that eminent scientist, Al Gore), "the science is settled." That statement shows a profound ignorance of scientific investigation, but for the Left, ignorance is indeed bliss.

UPDATE-2 (12-30-2022):

This summary statement comes from an article that addresses the faux urgency the swirls around the "climate change crisis" provides a perfect conclusion to a year of climate hysteria:

There is growing realization that these emissions and temperature targets [set by the UN and other climate alarmists] have become detached from the issues of human well-being and development.  Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century. However once we relax the faux urgency for eliminating CO2 emissions and the stringent time tables, we have time and space to envision new energy systems that can meet the diverse, growing needs of the 21st century.  This includes sufficient energy to help reduce our vulnerability to surprises from extreme weather and climate events.

As I mentioned in the body of this post, climate policies and Covid policies circa 2020 - 2022 have a lot in common. Both are authoritarian, both are NOT based on reliable or even generally repeatable science, both play on fear, both exhibit a hypocrisy that is breathtaking (i.e., the elites who suggest them do NOT abide by them), and both do NOT consider the collateral damage they have done and are doing to the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.