Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

These opening comments will trigger knee-jerk responses from proponents of the human-caused global warming deception. Just saying President Trump is sufficient to trigger them. However, when I add that he handled the Lesley Stahl CBS interview well, the comments will appear without them reading any further. Poke them, and they blindly respond triggered by the tunnel-vision of political ideology and the source of their funding.

This article is a response to an interesting experience involving an article I wrote for WUWT. As most readers know, I rarely reply to comments and almost never go back to read my earlier articles. While preparing to produce another article I needed to confirm something from one of these articles. I was astonished to read that in response to a complaint from two researchers Anthony added a foreword to the article.

It is Anthony’s website, and he is entitled to control it however he chooses. Over the years there were several cases when he questioned, challenged, ask for a revision, or simply would not publish a comment. However, we always worked these out to our mutual satisfaction. One of the things I did to offset many of Anthony’s concerns was to place the qualifier “Guest Opinion” after each headline. Again, I am not challenging Anthony’s right to add the qualifier to the article in question. My concern is what triggered his action. I immediately recognized the technique used by the perpetrators and believe that everyone should understand what was done. Problems are only problems if you are unaware of them. That is also true about biases.

I am more than qualified to speak about this topic after 40 years of dealing with all types of media and people on all sides of an issue in a variety of formats from all over the world. Besides this university of the real world, I took courses in communication and media as part of officer training in the military and continued as a student and practitioner ever since. Clear patterns emerge, a few of which I discuss here, however, the overall pattern is that the mainstream media was unchanged for at least 236 years. It was and remains a vehicle for the power elite, as William Cowper’s 1782 poem The Progress of Error reveals.

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!

What changed was the advent of the Internet that bypassed the mainstream media and gave ordinary citizens access to more information than many governments had in the past. It meant that people using the Internet developed the methods and tricks of the mainstream media. Change the word “press” in Cowper’s poem to the Internet, and you see what I mean.

I was part of a group gathered in Washington in November 2015 to talk about policy for climate and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during a Trump Presidency. The consensus was that he should avoid making decisions based on bad science. It is bad science, but at least 80% of the public don’t understand any science; therefore, they cannot identify bad science. In addition, no matter how much you prepare, somebody will ask a question you can’t answer, and it only needs one. Instead, he should exit the Paris Climate Agreement because it is a bad deal and fits his main theme of improving or expunging them.

As the media loses its power and control over the information the people access most, they chose to become aggressive, uncivil, devious, and biased. I experienced it as they changed. It is telling that the FOX news slogan is “Fair and Balanced.” They did it because the competition was no longer fair and balanced. Of course, FOX only pays lip service to the idea by having a few token liberals in what are, from my observations, contrived and stupid.

The technique of mainstream media interviews was on full display in the Stahl interview. The interviewer begins by establishing a false premise, with a false fact, or a quote from a person who doesn’t know the subject. Stahl did it with the information about Greenland ice chunks breaking off and raising sea level. It is a technique used throughout the environmental and the human-caused global warming hysteria.

For example, Paul Ehrlich already established the false premise of overpopulation in his 1968 book The Population Bomb. In 1977, he followed it up in a book, “Ecoscience,” co-authored with John Holdren, Obama’s Science Advisor with proposals for mitigating the false problem. One proposal said,

Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

That sounds reasonable on the face of it. However, you understand the deception when you ask questions that expose the technique.

Who concluded that such laws were sustainable?

Who decides there is a population crisis?

Who decides when it endangers society.

In each case, the answer is, they do.

Maurice Strong and the creators of Agenda 21 introduced a similar technique when listing the Principles for that global policy document. It incorporated the most popular justification for action by environmentalists, namely the precautionary principle. If the facts are not available, then argue that we should act ‘just in case.’ Here it is as Principle 15.

In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

Again, it sounds reasonable, especially tot eh casual reader. The questions are

Who decides the environment needs ‘ protecting? ’

’ Who decides how to protect the environment?

Who decides which States are capable?

Who decides the level of capability?

Who decides what are “ serious threats”?

Who decides when the damage is approaching an ability to reverse it?

Who decides what is an appropriate level of “ scientific certainty”?

Who decides what “cost-effective” measures are?

Again, the answer is they do.

I quickly learned that the first thing you must do is question the false premise. This brings me to the issue that triggered this article. I went back to an article on the need to address the motive behind the AGW deception. I argued that once you get the public accepting that the idea that science was corrupted to produce a predetermined outcome. This involved narrowing the science through definitions and limitations of variables to a focus on CO2. After they accept these ideas, the next logical question is to ask about the motive? I pointed out in the article that in many recent media interviews this was one of the first questions.

Anybody who reads the comments about articles on WUWT knows the pattern of responses and the core of people and their positions. I know the comments that topics will elicit. The most predictable responses are whenever the question of motive is raised. The perpetrators and ongoing supporters of the AGW deception used it to push a socialist agenda.

The complaint from the two people appeared as an article titled “A big goose-step backward” and was referenced by Anthony at the beginning of my original article. I will not repeat their names, suffice to comment on the obvious bias because of their positions and funding, identified by several people in their comments. As Upton Sinclair said,

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (I know it is sexist as stated but still applicable to all with salaries).

Their complaint was about the use of the word denier to describe those who questioned the IPCC science. It was in the context of the change from global warming skeptics to climate change deniers. I added, the phrase, with all the holocaust connotations of the word, hence the reference to goose-stepping. They began their complaint with establishing a false and emotional premise designed to marginalize any who might question their charge. They introduced the word “Nazi” followed by the claim I was debasing the entire debate. I never used the word “Nazi.” I referred to the use of the term because I lived through the evolution of the word denier in the climate debate. The term was deliberately and carefully chosen for precisely the connotation I gave it.

To understand the tenor and tone of what went on, consider Michael Mann’s comment in a 2004 email about the RealClimate website,

“…the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing (sic) the PR battle. That’s what the site is about.”

On that website, a 16 December 2004 entry asks,

“Is there really “consensus” in the scientific community on the reality of anthropogenic climate change?”

They provided their answer on 22 December 2004.

We’ve used the term “consensus” here a bit recently without ever really defining what we mean by it. In normal practice, there is no great need to define it – no science depends on it. But it’s useful to record the core that most scientists agree on, for public presentation. The consensus that exists is that of the IPCC reports, in particular the working group I report (there are three WG’s. By “IPCC”, people tend to mean WG I).

The second sentence is the key to their deceptive practices. They acknowledge that consensus does not apply to science, but then use it because it will deceive the public. And what is the consensus, on which they agree? The scientists at the IPCC agree, therefore there is a consensus.

In the same year, 2004, emails between “Nick” at the Minns/Tyndall Centre, the group involved in handling PR for the people at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), identified their dilemma. He wrote,

“In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media.”

Swedish alarmist and climate expert on the IPCC, Bo Kjellen replied,

“I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming.”

In that year, across the media, the term global warming was replaced by the term climate change, when talking about the work of the IPCC and the threat to the world. However, they didn’t leave it there. Global Warming Skeptics became Climate Change Deniers. Why make that change? The switch from Global Warming was necessary to hide the fact that their theory no longer matched the evidence. It would have been reasonable to simply call those who continued to question the science, Climate Change Skeptics, but they decided not to do that.

The answer to that question involves the nature of another debate on the front page at the time, namely the battles with David Irving, renowned Holocaust denier. He went to trial in 2001 and was sentenced and jailed in 2006. If you are interested, the recreation of the events and entire trial were portrayed in a movie called “Denial.”

The motive behind the entire misuse of climate for a political agenda was to create a world government. Maurice Strong made that clear to Elaine Dewar who concluded after five days with him at the UN and hearing him explain his goals that,

“Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.”

If you are not convinced that the people at the CRU would connive and manipulate both the science and the people, go and read the leaked emails. On the back of their book, Crutapes” Mosher and Fuller summarized them for you,

Actively worked to evade (Steve) Mcintyre’s Freedom of Information requests, deleting emails, documents, and even climate data

(Steve) Tried to corrupt the peer-review principles that are the mainstay of modern science, reviewing each other’s’ work, sabotaging efforts of opponents trying to publish their own work, and threatening editors of journals who didn’t bow to their demands

Changed the shape of their own data in materials shown to politicians charged with changing the shape of our world, ‘hiding the decline’ that showed their data could not be trusted.

If you don’t think the fight is political with all the accompanying nastiness, lies, and deceits, then ask yourself why, if you accept the theory of AGW you are liberal and informed. However, if you question at all, you are conservative and uninformed, regardless of your actual political views. It is the nature of the left to attack the individual in the vilest ways possible and without any evidence. It is their nature to isolate those who dare to question their orthodoxy.

No, I will not be bullied by those with a political agenda and vested interests. I stand by my comment about the connotations of the use of the phrase holocaust deniers. Besides, I lived through the war in England and know what the Germans did.

Share this: Print

Email

Twitter

Facebook

Pinterest

LinkedIn

Reddit



Like this: Like Loading...