Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

I do not need to instruct most of my readers on the meaning of the Latin phrase used as the title of this piece. For the few uninitiated, post hoc, ergo propter hoc is a phrase used to describe a logical fallacy, one of the most common in use. It translates to “after this, therefore because of this.” Better to illustrate by example rather than ‘splain, John Brown, the man who initiated the beginning of the US Civil War by attacking the weapons storage facility at Harpers Ferry, was supposedly superstitious and guided by stars in the heavens to dictate his moves. If they aligned, he moved. The fallacy here is that stars had anything to do with his movements. That translates to after this, therefore because of this.

I worked on John Brown quite a bit, assisted by Kevin Starr, who added much more. My initial trigger was the fact that the armory at Harper’s Ferry on the night of the attack had but one guard on duty, and was in essence left unguarded. That told me that the event was staged, and that both Northern and Southern elements were in on it. Then we learn that Brown was juiced, part of the British peerage, and that it does not take much sleuthing to realize that his public hanging was staged, and that he walked away. It then logically follows that if the trigger event of the Civil War was staged, that the war itself, while costly in terms of lives and property, was a planned event. Lincoln, who would later fake his death, was in on it as well. The object of the war? Another time, another story. Slavery was part of it, but the driving force was a new kind of union of the states, and a major rewriting of our governing document, the Constitution. Power was transferred from the individual states to a new and powerful federal government.*

I went to college at a small part of the Montana university system, Eastern Montana College in Billings, Montana. It is now called “Montana State University, Billings”. Like most higher education, we get out of it what we put in to it. I emerged uneducated, but in the subsequent years plying my trade as an accountant, got better at it. I think that is true of most professions – it is mostly on-the-job training. I know a man who is engaged in large business undertakings and who does a lot of hiring and some firing. In hiring, he does insist on a college degree, but does not care what it is in. He says that a college degree means that a person can undertake a large project and see it through to the conclusion. That’s all he is looking for. OTJ will supply the rest.

While at EMC I took an elective course, sophomore level, called “Logic”. In it we studied syllogisms ad nauseum, an important reasoning skill, but also logical fallacies. The teacher warned us with the fallacies not to go boldly into the fray thinking we could unravel the world. Most fallacies are buried and are not easy to uncover. There are a few easy ones – the most common in use then and now called ‘ad hominem‘, or  attacking the source of an argument rather than the argument itself. In our modern day it is known as “cancel culture”. It is all around us.

The other most common in use is ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc“. I’ll name an important body where this fallacy is not just used, but drives the engine of all of their work. It is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. It is a non-scientific propaganda body used to advance the myth of [anthropogenic] climate change. It hides behind scientific jargon, and fosters lies and lying liars. It has promulgated a body of climate models developed by countries all over the planet, all of them fatally flawed. There is no effort there to synchronize the predictions of the climate models to reality. Even as the climate is unpredictably changing on a small scale, on a large scale it is stable, sans volcanoes, earthquakes,  comets, and Milankovitch cycles. Climate sensitivity (the effect on our climate when atmospheric CO2 is doubled) is more like 1-1.5°C, most of the models place it at 3°C or more, wildly off the mark. In my own view, CO2 is so small a factor in climate as to be ignored.

Why is that important? Governments around the world base policy on the climate models, and not the actual climate. Why do they do this? We can only infer, but I think it is because they have an unstated agenda, to change the way we live, to diminish our numbers, and make our lives less bearable. In essence, the people who own and run the planet want us off it.

The reality is this: The Earth’s climate, while always changing, is quite stable in the big picture. If we remove the effects of UHI, or the Urban Heat Island effect, we find that outside major cities, there is very little temperature change about us, and that most of it is natural. Hurricanes, said to be increasing in frequency and force, are neither. They do have a large role in moving tropical heat northward, and in the end, the Northern Hemisphere winter drives that heat to the Arctic. Once contained in the Arctic, where there is no winter sunshine, the heat leaves the planet in the form of OLR, or outgoing longwave radiation. That is not just an important factor in our existence, but the actual reason we exist at all. IPCC uses a warming Arctic as evidence of AGW, but that is just bad science, their specialty.

The same force works in the Southern Hemisphere, but not to the degree as in the north.

The Urban Heat Island effect is a crucial part of the measurement of temperatures around the planet, and the temps the IPCC uses are heavily weighted towards urban centers. Predictably, IPCC says that UHI has little effect on global temperatures. Were they to admit the true effect, for them, it would be game over.

The other great lie emanating from IPCC is that the sun is not a factor in our climate. Promulgation of this lie is testimony to the power of the forces behind IPCC, as any damned fool, and I include myself, can see that the sun is the major driving force in our planet’s warming and cooling. Sunspots are a major factor, their prevalence leading to warming, and absence to cooling. Milankovitch cycles are important too, but on a much larger scale.

Every now and then some genius comes along and sets science right again, and Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1958) was one such man. He said that our planet is governed by the Earth’s relationship with the sun, citing eccentricity, or the shape of our orbit; obliquity, or the tilt of the axis with respect to the orbital plane; and precession, or the direction the axis is pointed, sometimes referred to as the wobble.

Eccentricity operates over a cycle of perhaps 100,000 years, and the effect is said to be small. Obliquity operates in a 41,000 cycle and currently explains our delightfully warm period known as the Holocene, drawing to a close. (Winter is coming.) Precession operates over a 26,000 year cycle, and affects the seasons in either hemisphere. In the much larger picture, Milankovitch cycles are behind our flirtation with ice ages, such as the one we are currently in, the Pleistocene, and the ability for the planet to sustain life.

The importance of Milankovitch cycles can be summed up in two words: The Sun.  IPCC denies that the Sun has much effect on our climate. Can they be anymore forthright in their fraud? But they lead with their conclusion, and that conclusion, that CO2 is the driving force behind climate change, is their post hoc, and their ergo propter hoc is anthropogenic climate change, a huge hoax.

By the way, I wanted to pursue more logic classes while at EMC, but the one sophomore course I took was the only one ever offered in my tenure there.

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* Thomas Jefferson said in private correspondence that current generations should not expect to bind future ones to their ways. The constitution was sealed during his time, but he urged that there be regular conventions and that the document be altered to conform to the needs of the present. I agree with this. So the changes made by the 14th Amendment were not necessarily a bad thing, but the manner in which it was done was devious and malicious. The result was two governing documents at odds with one another, and a Congress and Judiciary charged with the impossible task of reconciling the two. To this day, it has not been accomplished. We have simply agreed to ignore the contradictions.