EUREFERENDUM Blog 5.2.09
In need of pity
It was in late January that Booker picked up on the ongoing saga of
the "incredible warming Antarctic", the warmists' answer to the
previous obstinacy of that region to conform with the creed that
requires that we should all fry unless we reduce our carbon emissions.
Notwithstanding that the original figures were, shall we say, the
mother of all inventions, extrapolating limited data from a few
ground stations to provide "data infill" of the areas not covered, it
now appears that even those data were flawed.
Courtesy of Watts up with that and diverse posts on Steve McIntyre's
Cimate Audit, there unravels a tale so convoluted as to defy easy
description. But it all points to the single observation - that the
temperature data on which the original warmist claims were based rely
on unreliable sensors. They are not worth the snow they were buried in.
The broader point, however, is that while the findings from the Watts/
McIntyre duo - with their expert readers - are hugely entertaining
and provide yet more evidence that the warmists are a bunch of
charlatans, they will make no difference at all to the warmist creed
and will have no affect whatsoever on the body politic.
The problem is that while the warmists jibber about the science being
"settled", this is not about science. We are talking here about the
scare dynamic, a social phenomenon which obeys its own rules, where
science takes the back seat. It provides merely a patina of
authenticity to confirm that which the warmists hold, with or without
the science.
Such is the nature of the dynamic that the belief comes first and the
"science" is then cherry-picked (and distorted) to provide the
evidence to support the belief. And, in the nature of things, any
"inconvenient truths" are automatically discarded. Watts and McIntyre
fall into that category.
Thus, we get one of the High Priests of the belief system UN Sec Gen
Ban Ki-moon, preening himself in New Delhi today at the start of a
three-day conference on - you guessed it - "sustainable development".
Oblivious to the shaky foundation on which his belief system is based
- and entirely uncaring - he trots out the same old mantras, telling
us that that "failure to tackle climate change will lead to major
economic upheaval".
"Deserts are spreading. Water scarcity is increasing. Tropical
forests are shrinking. Our once prolific fisheries are in danger of
collapse," he intones. "Failure to combat climate change will
increase poverty and hardship. It will destabilise economies, breed
insecurity in many countries and undermine our goals for sustainable
development."
All this, of course, is bullshit. Credo in unum deum, Patrem
omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae ..., he might just as well
have chanted, only his "god" is global warming, the god above all
gods to which the whole of mankind must be subservient.
The problem is, of course, that you cannot deal with other peoples'
belief systems by rational argument - or by other means. The Romans
tried those, as did many after them, and look where that got them.
Oddly enough, the death of religion is not persecution - faith is
strongest where there are attempts to suppress it - but indifference.
and scorn. Few faiths survive both, and the latter is perhaps in this
case more powerful. We should not resent the warmists, or fight them
[We'll bankrupt ourselves and freeze to death if we don't! -cs] . We
should pity them, in the same way one would the village idiot, for
the delusions in which they are trapped, hoping that one day they are
cured of their afflictions.
The nightmare is, of course, the damage these people are doing while
in the grip of their delusions, which they inflict on all of us. But
the derision of the crowd will eventually get through. These people
need our pity. We should not stint in giving it to them.
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Posted by Richard North
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