Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Is climate crisis a religion?

Here is a clip from an article reprinted at Climate Etc. by Garth Partridge, Climate’s Uncertainty Principle. It originally appeared in The Quadrant.

“The significant point in this cost-benefit business is that there is virtually no certainty about any of the numbers that are used to calculate either the likely change of climate or the impact of that change on future populations. In essence it is simply assumed that all climate change is bad—that the current climate is the best of all possible climates. Furthermore, there is little or no recognition in most of the scenarios that mankind is very good at adapting to new circumstances. It is more than likely that, if indeed climate change is noticeably “bad”, the future population will adjust to the changed circumstances. If the change is “good”, the population will again adapt and become richer as a consequence. If the change is a mixture of good and bad, the chances are that the adaptive processes will ensure a net improvement in wealth. This for a population which, if history is any guide, and for reasons entirely independent of climate change, will probably be a lot wealthier than we are.”

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Michael Mann whips that baby out

The hockey stick

The above graph is Michael Mann’s infamous 1998 “Hockey Stick,” long discredited. Nonetheless, I just listened to a Mann presentation from mid-2018, and he once again whipped that baby out, asserted that it is an accurate depiction of reality, and then went into his usual spiel about the need to convert to overpriced, subsidized and inefficient solar and wind energy. More about that later.

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The Church of Climatology*

MannWhat follows is going to be old news for many readers, so bear with me. The issue of climate change is something that takes time to sink in for me, and I am a late arrival, so please, if you are up to speed already, humor me.

I finally took time these past few days to read some of the so-called Climategate emails, wherein over a thousand internal messages from The Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich England were made public. I thought it was going to be a tortuous task for a non-scientist, but it is not. The emails that I read at this site are not loaded with jargon and math. They concern themselves with politics, playing defense against pain-in-the-ass skeptics, and making  sure that the public only sees an alarmist point of view about climate change on news and television. In the emails scientists who are skeptical on this subject are ridiculed, stonewalled and suppressed.

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Judith Curry versus the GTMS

It is interesting how various people are treated in public discourse. Certain propaganda techniques are used to either advance careers or destroy people and minimize their exposure. Since most science is funded by the National Science Foundation, that is where the agenda is set. If a scientist wants to be funded, that scientist had better conform to the current paradigm.

In other words, science in general is corrupt. But readers here already knew this. I have come across two terms that grate like fingernails on a blackboard: “debunk” and “deny.” Both are used as a wave-of-dismissal technique for anyone outside the NSA-funded paradigm, better defined as a “groupthink mindset,” or GTMS (they love their acronyms!). To assert that the current GTMS on climate change is overstated, especially with use of observational evidence, is not science. It is denial! Using the Google to locate anyone skeptical about GTMS usually results a cascade of links on how that person has been debunked.

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Was Ayn Rand a sociopath?

Rand
Yikes!

One of the most read and commented-on pieces  ever published here was called “Was Ayn Rand a Sociopath?” It’s gone now, and I doubt I would have deleted it, but it is possible. I did delete a few hundred posts a couple of years ago, extricating myself from Montana blogs and politics. Maybe that piece was collateral damage.

This came to mind recently as I have been doing a deep dive, trying to understand climate science and the pseudoscience of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I find myself in league with some Randians, and it gives me that not-so-fresh feeling.

To recap on Rand, I suggested that her real-life behaviors showed a callousness that was reflected in her writing and philosophy. She did not believe in romantic love, for example. Those of us of normal makeup know that it is real, and spectacular. She missed out. She was married, but carried on an extramarital affair out in the open, indifferent to any feelings her husband might have had.

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SAT-smart, real life-dumbed down?

Jeopardy champ

I am not a fan of the TV quiz show Jeopardy, though it graces our TV set each evening. I am usually busy playing Canasta or Rummy 500 on the iPad, and these days waiting for the show to end so I an turn on a baseball game. By that time of day, I am usually in  vegetative state.

However, there is a contestant on now who has won sixteen times, and is racking up an incredible pile of winnings. His name is James Holzhauer. He is a professional gambler and holds a degree in mathematics. He is currently well over $1 million in winnings.

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Hand wringers

LGT

I found this very interesting. It is the University of Alabama at Huntsville Satellite Temperature Record. (Website link.) The reason it only goes back to 1979 is that this is the limited time period during which the technology has been available. There’s also an explanation of how the data is collected and calibrated. The site is run by Dr. Roy Spencer and John Christy. As I read it, they currently show warming trends of +0.19 (land) and +0.08 (ocean) centigrade per decade.

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Deception Deluxe

Rancho Deluxe

The above movie poster should be called “A Movie made in a place where I have actually been.” Rancho Deluxe was shot in the early 1970s near Livingston, Montana in a stretch of river bottom (not inappropriately) named Paradise Valley. If you recognize the name, it could be because Peter Fonda owned some land there, and Jane would come visit him. Anytime Jane goes to Smallville, it creates a stir. (Neither Jane nor Peter were in the movie.) Lots of movie stars passed through Paradise Valley, probably still do.

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Black holes of corruption

I am reading an extremely difficult book from 1984, Order out of Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, by the late Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) and Isabelle Stengers (1949-). I was tuned to the book by Eric J. Lerner in his book The Big Bang Never Happened, with a warning that the Prigogine/Stengers work was over the public’s head. I am part of the public, and yes, he is right. It is over my head.

The Lerner book was more accessible to me, a history of science and how it works, really. I see it all around me in my delving into AIDS, the PSA test and climate change. It is laboriously explained in a paragraph from the Order out of Chaos, page 308:

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Unmasking the climate change agenda

My thanks to Patrick Michaels for bringing my attention to the following paragraphs taken from Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address. Like most people, I was aware of his warning about the “military-industrial complex,” long-since realized. But these paragraphs carry a different warning, one also realized:

“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

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