Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” George Orwell

There it was in reality! The headline I had tongue-in-cheek considered writing for a national newspaper.

Melting in the Arctic reached an all-time high in June: Ice has been disappearing at a rate of 29,000 square miles a day.

This is near the average daily rate of melt in the brief Arctic summer, but few people know this is natural. Approximately 10 million km2 of ice melts every summer in approximately 145 days, which is a melt rate of 68,965 km2 (26,627 square miles) per day. Besides, the variability is wide as a 2011 Journal of Geophysical Research article explains,

“The perennial (September) Arctic sea ice cover exhibits large interannual variability, with changes of over a million square kilometers from one year to the next. Here we explore the role of changes in Arctic cyclone activity, and related factors, in driving these pronounced year-to-year changes in perennial sea ice cover.”

In addition, determination of full ice cover is problematic (Figure 1) so different analysts get different results. It is further complicated by meltwater on the ice surface that the satellite reads as open water (Figure 2). Alarmists claim these are a sign of warming, but they ignore the fact the satellite readings of ice cover are compromised.

Figure 1 What percentage would you assign?

Figure 2 Meltwater on the ice, called freshets on river ice.

It is another example of alarmists and uninformed media reporting a natural situation as unnatural. It is a lie of omission because they only presented facts that suited their story, but lying and deception are now standard and condoned practice for some people. Apparently for them the end justifies the means.

With the introduction of the new paradigm of environmentalism and the subset global warming, natural events were presented as unnatural. The strategy provided a ‘no lose’ situation. People were easily misled because they don’t know what is normal. The few with some knowledge were easily marginalized as skeptics or conspiracy theorists. The sequence is to announce the imaginary problem, produce false science to make it ‘real’, introduce political strategies that do nothing except cost jobs and inconvenience people, and wait. When conditions return to “normal,” you claim victory for your science, policies, and wisdom. It is like the ice hockey defender who was considered good when he was so slow he missed the attacker’s feint and caught him coming back.

Recent political events in Washington, Britain, and Europe remind us of Orwell’s insightful novel Animal Farm. Lying is a constant of politics, but it is now legally endorsed by the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), more appropriately the Department of Injustice. These political traits became standard for environmentalists and global warming advocates with the introduction of claims that humans were the cause of most environmental and climate change.

The characteristics of politics described by Orwell were manifest in the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) beginning in November 2009. On the cover of their 2010 book Climategate, Mosher and Fuller wrote that,

“The Team led by Phil Jones and Michael Mann, in attempts to shape the debate and influence public policy:

· Actively worked to evade McIntyre’s Freedom of Information requests, deleting emails, documents, and even climate data

· 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.”

Those descriptions fit Orwell’s observations. There is no doubt what was done and who did it. The problem was compounded and the practices condoned in the cover-up that followed. The Atlantic editor Clive Crook wrote,

“I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.”

Unfortunately, Crook’s remarks are similar to those made about the testimony given by FBI Director James Comey before the US Congress hearing on July 7, 2016. The Director listed all the lies, deceptions, misdirection’s, abuse of procedures, and attacks on people and groups who questioned or challenged Hillary Clinton. He then concluded there was no criminality nor requirement for accountability or punishment. He condoned the behavior just like the groups set up to investigate Climategate. The behavior condoned by Comey will continue because it is now ‘officially’ justified. We know it will continue because it has in the environmentalist and AGW communities about global warming and ozone.

The CRU debacle was not the first application of “lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia” to advance a false narrative for a political agenda. It began with the “hole-in-the-ozone” issue. It was the first global-scale environmental deception. It was the first deliberately orchestrated misuse of science by a small group of people (cabal) using bureaucracies and the media for a political agenda. The public still doesn’t know there is no scientific basis for what was claimed. AGW proponents can’t let that truth emerge because it would undermine the larger ongoing global warming issue.

The revelation that the so-called “ozone hole” was recovering and almost back to “normal” was predictable. Not surprisingly, the ozone recovery story appeared under the name of Susan Solomon, a principal architect of the original ozone story and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee, described by Wikipedia as follows;

Her work formed the basis of the U.N. Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to protect the ozone layer by regulating damaging chemicals. Solomon served the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She was a contributing author for the Third Assessment Report. She was also Co-Chair of Working Group I for the Fourth Assessment Report.

The ozone story reappears now because the climate change story is losing momentum; Paris COP 21 commitments are failing; polls show little or no public concern; and the public attitude to lying politicians is spreading. The ozone story reinvigorates the climate deception by claiming the originators were correct. We were correct and saved the planet with the Montreal Protocol so you must listen to us on the climate issue.

In December 2015 I explained the purpose of the Ozone scare as a trial run for the CO2 scare and the deception to follow. It had all the components; a false claim of change being due to human activity, it was false because it assumed incorrectly that UV radiation, which creates ozone, was constant; use of the claim for a political agenda; and manufactured scientific evidence to support demands for political action.

The Ozone Issue Template

The Montreal Protocol is a template, but not for pushing the need for a Climate Protocol. It is a template

· For how ozone destruction by human produced Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was a test run for the deception that human CO2 is causing global warming.

· Not because it worked, but because it was completely unnecessary, cost a lot of money and created a multitude of other problems.

· Because humans were blamed for atmospheric ozone destruction without evidence, while natural processes were ignored.

· For using a global environmental issue as justification for establishing a world government.

· For establishing the efficacy of claiming natural events as unnatural.

· For allowing bureaucrats to create and control the entire process outside of normal scientific methods, codes of conduct, and accountability.

· For establishing how bureaucrats could control the political agenda on environmental and climate issues.

The Montreal Protocol appeared to work because there was no problem in the first place. Variations in ozone were perfectly natural. If they don’t know this, they are scientifically incompetent. But that doesn’t matter because they need its false success for political reasons.

Nurtured by environmental hysteria and the determination to show all changes in the natural world are due to human activity, the claim that CFCs were destroying ozone changed from an unproven hypothesis to a scientific fact. All the other ingredients were at hand; the big corporation; the dangerous manufactured product; the luxury of refrigeration improving the quality of life for rich people at the expense of the poor and the environment; and the fear of increased skin cancer, especially among children. The political juggernaut was underway as fearful people demanded political action. As H. L. Mencken said,

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the public alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Most actions did not and could not deal with the problem. One geo-engineering solution proposed to produce ozone at ground level and pump it into the ozone layer. Then someone pointed out that this required more energy than humans produce in total.

There are still no “holes in the ozone”, but the area of thinning over Antarctica continues to vary due to natural conditions. As the climate change deception falters, the counterattack builds. Out of desperation, they fall back on the illusionary “success” of the Montreal Protocol, thus risking the exposure of that charade. Orwell knew the fate of those who expose or even question the charade. He wrote,

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

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