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Fear the Weather
The ongoing alarmist campaign warning about the terrible dangers of man-caused climate change, trumpeted by most major media outlets, is rather irritating. Nearly every major weather event, in whatever season, that results in major disruptions in daily life is declared 'unprecedented' and the original 'normal' weather pattern is declared to have been affected by climate change. Anyone skeptical about these fanatical claims is often harassed with the epithet 'climate denier' - as if anyone can honestly deny there is a climate!
I live in Wisconsin which is subject to periodic relative extremes in weather, from heat waves in the summer to blizzards in the winter. The Weather Channel began to name large winter storms in 2012. This storm naming was of course similar to the international practice of naming severe hurricanes (in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans) but this practice of names for severe winter storms was really for publicity reasons, for people to get the name for the next storm from the Weather Channel. This practice implied to the populace that these winter storms were to be feared just like those tropical storms that can destroy everything in their path due to their extreme winds. That extent of devastation does not happen with winter storms, though there still can be misery, death, and some damage from blizzards.
With every new extreme weather event, there is always someone somewhere who will make the claim this latest event was made worse due to the effects of climate change. Sometimes these claims are by nobody respected but sometimes they are claimed by climate scientists acting as political activists, so the claims are meant to make people fear these extreme weather events, so they might accept government policy actions driven toward carbon dioxide reductions.
As many people have recognized the cycles of normal weather and so many weather events are just like those that happened in the past, the priority for accepting action against carbon dioxide continues to decrease among many countries around the world as there are more important priorities for improving their daily lives. To counteract that falling perception of this danger, there is a continuing stream of news stories and academic papers claiming just about everything caused by global warming.
There also claims, heard nearly every year over the past decade, of the last year was the 'hottest year ever' even though other climate scientists and statisticians can easily discount those claims. These hysterical claims about global warming are Ludicrous, Idiotic, Asisine, Ridiculous, and Stupid, especially when the satellite monitoring of temperatures reveals more than the last half of that record (dating back to about 1979) shows no trend (the infamous hiatus in warming).
Tony Heller recently uncovered another news story about unwarranted alarmism about weather.
Three consecutive years of drought, while they have stimulated the inventive resources of practical agriculturists, have had the natural effect of calling forth a plentiful crop of speculation of weather prophets, and projectors, and half-instructed meteorologists, and all the philosophic tribe of Laputa in general, to whom the periodic press now affords such fatal facilities. We have often noticed that in the tabular statements of these compilers of weather records who write to the Times, useful and welcome as their communications are, every season is sure to be "extraordinary," almost every month one of the driest or wettest, or windiest, coldest or hottest, ever known. Much observation, which ought to correct a tendency to exaggerate, seems in some minds to have rather a tendency to increase it. And many seem now to regard three dry hot years in succession as betokening some general change in climate, as it was not perfectly certain, in the wide range of the table of what we call chances, that with our existing conditions of climate such a combination must every now and then recur.
I find amazing these comments were published so long ago (in the Brisbane Courier, in Australia) back on January 10, 1871, and yet they apply to today as well. Apparently the use of weather alarmism has been a political tool for much of human history.
Fear mongering is a political tool. When people are made afraid of external forces, they are more susceptible to changes by their politicians in government policy to their disadvantage. There is the famous quote of Rahm Emanuel: 'You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.'
America's global war on terror was initiated after the catastrophe on 9/11/2001, which was a 'Pearl Harbor' type of event that could be used to back the initiative for military dominance on a global scale. America has even created and backed forces of these 'militant Islam' groups so there is always this opposing force to fear in international affairs, even using them as an instrument for regime change in countries not behaving according to American wishes.
Similarly, the UN IPCC was formed to tackle man-caused climate change; it was not tasked to take on natural causes of climate change. Just as terrorism is seen as a global threat so a global military empire is required to oppose it, carbon dioxide is portrayed as a global threat to humanity and to the earth and so an international organization like the UN is required to take action against it.
Even as the claimed dangers of global warming are scientifically denounced, fanatics still stress the dangers of climate change, where everything changes due to global warming. For many, this is a case of 'noble cause corruption' as they feel their actions are to save the world, which they consider a noble cause.
Eventually one can only hope the population of the world will recognize these alarmist claims about fearing the weather should be ignored. This necessary lack of engaging these fanatics can be difficult in the short term as the fanatics are becoming more militant, even seeking abuse of anyone being skeptical of those claims.
So many of these fanatics are so wrapped up in their noble cause (like a religion) they are unable to reconsider their position in a rational manner. This fear mongering about cycles in weather is difficult to debate by the nonbelievers. Many should be aware of the natural cycles, with warm periods alternating with cool periods, even dating back to the 'Garden of Eden' time of human history, since the current interglacial warm period began roughly 10000 years ago. The 'medieval warm period' changed to the 'little ice age' and more recently the Earth has been naturally warming the last 200 years since that time of relative cold (over the past millennium). The El Nino / La Nina cycles of the Pacific substantially drive the world's temperature trends. The believers in anthropogenic global warming (or 'climate change') are trapped in avoiding a rational defense of their religion, unable to consider the evolving science behind weather. Even as more claims of the danger of carbon dioxide are published, other scientists continue to investigate the intricacies of weather (which has been characterized as a coupled nonlinear chaotic system); these scientists follow the scientific method rather than those who are just activists while employed as a scientist.
As Mark Twain famously said: 'It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.'
The corruption of contemporary climate science for political purposes will be seen, looking back from the future, as a very dark time for human science.
created - January 2016
last change - 01/31/2016
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