Monday, April 23, 2012

In Australia there has been a poll to assess the public's impression of Climate Alarm which has been written about on this linked blog.

The categories are as follows:
  • Dismissive
  • Alarmed
  • Doubtful
  • Concerned
  • Cautious
  • Disengaged

I started out 10 years ago as being in the "Concerned" category,  which is why I wanted to know more about "global warming" as it was then called. For the first couple of years, the more I asked, the less I was sure.  I was asking anyone and everyone that I could find back then for papers and studies and hard data of what is actually happening, so I could confirm for myself what is happening, against what is projected to happen.  No I did not trust the media, and in 2003 I trusted the media even less when they were complicit in spreading, rather than tackling, the lies which lead to to the supreme war crime of the Iraq Invasion. I discovered for myself that the media have an agenda, just as much as politicians do, so to have any chance whatsoever of ascertaining truth, I had to investigate things for myself, as best I could.  I started as WHOLLY neutral and open minded and with only the strict adherence to "the scientific method" as a reliable guide, I started to investigate global warming, and climate change.



I found myself very quickly finding the sceptical side of the debate more honest, open and scientifically valid,  but I was still open to the data providing evidence which would convince me of the merits of either side of the debate.

I found that I was getting two different sides of a debate which one side denied was even happening.  The more I investigated, the more alarmed I became... Not at the risk of a catastrophic global climatic hazard, which raw data could not confirm beyond reasonable doubt, but at the tactics of the one side which constantly projected its faults and failings upon the other side, and still claimed the other side did not exist, or was irrelevant and tiny, when pushed into admitting that it did exist.

I was assured that the whole world of science supported one side, with all the scientific bodies and institutions and global governments and world industry supporting the global warming claim against a tiny band of irrelevant kooks, nutters and denialists.  Yet they also tried to convince me that this other "non-existent" side, which was tiny and unrepresentative, was also non-the-less the richest and most powerful enemy which was supported by global corporations and governments and the media and the alarmist side was small and a victim of this global conspiracy which meant that the scientific method could be dispensed with to provide evidence which supports "the cause",  of saving the planet, and all counter evidence could be hidden, denied or dismissed as irrelevant or as invalid and cherry picked by denialists.  Climate Science ceased to be science and instead became a cause.

The more I approached the alarmist's side with honest and friendly, yet sceptical, questions, the more I was convinced that I was not dealing with scientists who were engaged in the honest pursuit of truth.

The only side that presented me with honest answers, AND the possible counter evidence to their own arguments was the sceptical side.  They would say something like, [scientist and scientist et al 2006] state that  blah blah blah which is suggestive of the possible effect of.... however, there is dispute because [scientist 2008] discovered something else whilst looking for something else.  Whilst this may mean (A) it could also mean (B), my preference would be (A) because.... 

As more and more data came in, this side was showing all sides of it, sharing it, debating it and treating it the way scientists do and doing so in the face of a very hostile scientific establishment and media. The alarmist side upheld, or dismissed data, or scientists, or any public announcement solely on whether it furthered "the cause" or not.  The validity of the data and method hardly warranted a mention, and was only looked at from the filter of if it supported the cause. Papers which undermined or countered "catastrophic man-made climate change" would not get published at all, unless they contained some sort of disclaimer stating that "this paper does not reject man made climate change" somewhere in the summary to appease reviewers and give them something to counter "denialists with" when the evidence was debated.  Alarmists would write with religious certainty and only provide "accepted" papers even if those papers had been debunked or were blatantly flawed.

We were told that there would be no more snow as the world heated up and the snows of Kilimanjaro would melt completely and sea level rise would accelerate quickly and polar bears were threatened with extinction as the Arctic ice headed for a tipping point which was almost certainly what happened in 2007...

Then Climategate happened.... then 10:10 and exploding children. Then Plane stupid and polar bears falling from the sky. Then global warming was the reason there was so much more snow Then Climategate 2... then Fakegate and  global average temperatures levelled off and so did sea-level rise and the global ice increased again and many more polar bears have been found and the snows on Kilimanjaro were sublimating, not melting and some of the Himalayan glaciers increased and so on and so on...

As all this non-scientific rhetoric and blatant political propaganda was peddled by the alarmists side in lieu of empirical scientifically valid evidence, and as the actual empirical evidence countered all the previous claims of the alarmists, I could not maintain an impartial neutrality anymore.  How come decreasing ice is evidence of their claim, but increasing ice is not classed by them as counter evidence, but bizarrely as yet more evidence of their claim? How come they have created a hypothesis which is not scientifically falsifiable by empirical observational evidence?

As this has increasingly happened over the last three years I have found myself moving through the Dismissive and Doubtful categories and now I am in a category which is not even listed in the above poll.   I now categorise myself as Downright Hostile.

Why? Because I do not like being lied to, manipulated and being charged for it all in the name of a political cause.

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