Seer of the Year

Say what you will about Lord Christopher Monckton, one thing is absolutely certain: contrary to the forecasts made by scores and scores of CAGW alarmists over the past 35 years, his predictions are actually coming true. In fact, when we first watched the short video that can be seen further below, it struck us as downright eerie. Considering the implications, the fact that his prediction turned out to be 100% on the mark is actually quite depressing.

Seer of the year: Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Photo via theaustralian.com

CAGW, in case you’re wondering, stands for “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming”. We refuse to employ the euphemistic weasel term “climate change”, which has likely been adopted for the express purpose not to have to explain all the time why there has been zero warming for nearly 20 of the 35 years in which we have been regaled with increasingly hysterical warmist tales of imminent doom.

Incidentally, there has finally been word from a mainstream source that Antarctica’s ice sheet is actually growing – something that has been known for what feels like an eternity to us. Now and then a countervailing fact is grudgingly admitted to by the alarmists, usually when it simply becomes too obviously ridiculous to keep insisting that black is white (as in this case, when the growing ice sheet forces long established research stations to relocate). As a result, the entire “we’re going to drown!” narrative, a totally bizarre comic book version of which has inter alia been promoted by California’s governor Moonbeam, is blown flat out of the water, so to speak.

However, as the author of that grudging admission assures us, “Climate-change deniers should not take comfort in this, and they should not use this as proof that their denials are correct.” (Maybe the fact that there has been no warming whatsoever for nearly 20 years will do then? Just asking). Just think about this sentence for a moment.

First of all, there is no-one who actually denies that the climate is changing – the climate has been changing incessantly for more than four billion years after all. What is disputed is only this: whether so-called global warming represents a serious threat, and to what extent human activity can be held responsible for the exceedingly tiny amount of warming since the end of the last mini ice age, as opposed to natural climate variability.

Directly connected with this is the question of what actually causes the climate to regularly fluctuate (incidentally, catastrophic ice ages are a far greater threat from a historical perspective than warming could possibly be). This question remains wide open. The “it’s all due to the CO2 greenhouse effect” story propagated by the alarmists looks actually quite flimsy upon closer inspection.

Get out your microscope to spot the “catastrophic human-caused warming trend”,

Data: R.B. Alley, The Younger Dryas Cold Interval as viewed from central Greenland. Journal of Quarternary Science Reviews, 19: 213-226.

Secondly, the term “denier” to describe those who are skeptical of the prevailing CAGW narrative has of course been chosen very carefully, and this fact alone should register as a “10” on a 10-scale BS meter. It serves a clearly discernible propaganda purpose: it sounds as if said skeptics were somehow comparable to holocaust deniers. Using such smears has historically been the standard repertoire of the worst tyrannical regimes and their supporters.

Indeed, the latent authoritarian streak of the alarmist faction surfaces on a regular basis. We last reported on the alarmists’ Stalinist inclinations when they ran into an unexpected little PR snag (not to worry though, the mainstream media essentially ignored the incident). As we have pointed out on a number of occasions, the demands of the most fanatic alarmists range from jailing, to forcibly re-educating, to outright killing so-called “deniers”. That would no doubt “settle” the scientific debate once and for all.

Just to give you a small taste of the utter absurdities that continue to see the light of the day, Bloomberg recently reported that “Climate Change Kills the Mood: Economists Warn of Less Sex on a Warmer Planet”. Since there has been zero warming for nearly two decades, this wouldn’t matter one whit even if it were true. However, we should perhaps point out to these genius economists cum sex experts that they somehow seem to have failed to inform the people of sub-Saharan Africa of their epiphany. In spite of the great heat prevailing in the latter’s neck of the steppe, they are proliferating like a fluffle of rabbits. Let’s just say that there seems absolutely nothing wrong with their “mood”.

A small protest meeting in Yaba, Nigeria, over rising fuel prices. The willingness and ability to multiply in the hot climate is the least problem these people have at the moment.

Photo via radiobiafra.co

An Eerie Prediction and Well-Founded Concerns

Let us get back to the Lord Monckton though. In spite of his slightly funny appearance, he is an extremely eloquent, well-informed and rhetorically gifted supporter of the cause of the skeptics. In some respects, the video below made him sound like a looney tunes conspiracy theorist at the time, but his concerns were obviously extremely well founded.

About a year ago, Monckton told an audience in Australia that he suspected that the only two governments that were still regarded as “hold-outs” that would refuse to sign away their national sovereignty at the Paris climate summit in December this year would be removed by hook or by crook prior to the summit. One of them (the government of Steve Harper in Canada) was considered to pose no problem, as it was facing an election ahead of the summit and would be removed by that route. Australia’s Tony Abbott posed a bigger problem, but he could surely be removed by non-democratic means (i.e., without being voted out of office in an election). Chillingly, this is exactly what happened:

Monckton’s eerie prediction

As every climate scientist will probably privately admit, there is no branch of the natural sciences that is more politicized than climate science. This should be no surprise: what was once a tiny also-ran branch of science has become the greatest gravy train in the history of doom-saying cults.

It is of truly breath-taking proportions, generating 10s of billions in government spending globally every year. Behind it trails a whole megillah of rackets and corruption, as it has opened the door wide for the most shameless and wasteful cronyism (including the entire tax-payer subsidized “green energy” scam in its various shapes and forms). Only the war racket still dwarfs it.

And although the previously neglected climate scientists are among those who are greatly profiting from this state of affairs, they aren’t even the main drivers of this trend. After all, most scientists are as a rule more interested in science than in riches (although they do of course want to get their grants). It is for instance well known that politicians and bureaucrats are the ones who insist that the UN’s IPCC reports admit only the most alarmist language and predictions.

Every mitigating remark that deviates from maximum alarmism in these reports must be fought for tooth and nail. Why do most scientists meekly go along? They aren’t going to bite the hand that feeds them, it’s that simple. Expressing skepticism or a contrary opinion is simply a mortal threat to one’s career at the current juncture. This leads to almost comical contortions at times, such as the ever growing list of excuses, resp. “explanations”, for the lengthy and inconvenient warming pause – the most up-to-date count shows that 66 different ones exist by now (quite astonishing for a “settled science”).

The most amusing one so far is definitely “global warming causes no global warming”, closely followed by “if our models could travel back in time, we could have predicted the pause, if we had the tools of the future back then” (the time-travel, or “back to the future” excuse for short).

In light of this, Monckton’s other concerns seem well-founded as well. When he says “they want a wall-to-wall Marxist agreement”, he is probably right. Just look at the prototype of governance preferred by the modern-day ruling elite, which is embodied in the EU. They want a centralized state-capitalistic system ruled by socialist technocrats, in which democracy and individual liberty are relegated to unimportant side-shows at best (while being constantly invoked as “sacred”).

Conclusion

If Lord Monckton’s prediction had only come true in the case of the Harper government, one could well have argued that this was just a coincidence – after all, there were numerous reasons for which Harper may have lost the election (although the decisiveness of his loss was a surprise). However, Tony Abbott’s unceremonious dumping by his own party (led by warmist believer Turnbull) does make it rather unsettling.

A class of technocrats has emerged that is striving to impose a governance model on the world that although it is certain to lower economic output and living standards and will severely undermine individual liberty, could muddle on for a depressingly long time. The “climate change” promotion appears to be one of the tools used to further this agenda. This can be discerned from the fact that the effort continues at full hysterical blast, in spite of the fact that not a single alarmist prediction has come true in 35 years and that there is no longer any warming detectable (ex post falsifi…, err, adjustments, of surface temperature readings by NOAA notwithstanding).

Normally one would expect such evidence to at least be seen as giving grounds for vigorous debate before extremely costly steps such as those proposed in the new treaty are taken. Instead debate continues to be suppressed by every conceivable means. Evidently, ulterior motives are at work.

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