Laputans in Retreat
Climate: The Counter Consensus by Robert M. Carter
(Stacey International, 2010)
Bob Carter is a member of a small group of Australian scientists (although he was born in the UK and mostly educated in New Zealand) who, having attained a distinguished position in their disciplines (he is a paleo-climatologist), were willing to put their reputations on the line by speaking out against the most extraordinary fraud in the history of Western science: the fantasy that by controlling anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, mankind can control global temperatures; a miraculous global thermostat.
This fantasy is so bizarre that Jonathan Swift could, using statements from today’s Royal Society without embellishment, write them into his account of the kingdom of Laputa. The citizens of Laputa lived on a cloud and threw rocks at rebellious surface cities beneath them. Using Laputa as a satire on the Royal Society, Swift portrayed the ruin brought about by the attempts by the scientists living in the clouds to impose their will on the helpless people living below them.
Bob Carter’s book is a well written account of the deep corruption of our scientific inheritance which has been central to the spread of this fantasy. It is a fantasy which has spread throughout the intellectual, political and religious elites of the English-speaking world, and which has infected key Australian institutions, notably the CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and virtually all our universities.
The foundation arguments on which this entire nonsense-structure is built are very simple. First, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide control the sun’s energy flow to and from the Earth and thus control global temperatures in particular and global climate generally. Second, anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are driving atmospheric concentrations of this gas inexorably higher and higher, and the consequence will be climate catastrophe.
These two arguments have no evidence to support them. None. And there is a mountain of evidence which negates them. Much of this negation is found in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s first assessment report published in 1990. One of the graphs published in this report was a global temperature graph, originally the work of Hubert Lamb, the founder of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (the centre of the Climategate e-mails). His temperature curve ran from 900 AD to 2000 and showed very clearly the Medieval Warm Period (850 to 1350) and the Little Ice Age (1400 to 1850).
This graph, on its own, was enough to negate the first element of the thermo-maniacs’ foundation, and seriously undermine the second. It was argued in defence of the alleged unique quality of twentieth-century warming that although the Medieval Warm Period was admittedly an era of pre-industrial higher temperatures, the contemporary inputs of anthropogenic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere were unprecedented and a new scientific paradigm was necessary to cover this unprecedented “pollution”.
Despite this attempt to rewrite the laws of physics and chemistry which have served us well for at least two centuries, the Medieval Warm Period remained as a serious barrier to the acceptance of the doctrine of a global temperature controlled by mankind’s emissions. In a famous e-mail Jonathon Overpeck, a member of the Climategate cabal, stressed the need to “do something” about the Medieval Warm Period.
Carter carefully describes the attempts by Michael Mann and his colleagues to wipe out the Medieval Warm Period as an historical event through the invention of the “Hockey Stick”. The consequent unmasking of this fraud is an exciting story, well told here, with careful attention to the details and with references to a wide range of papers. In Australia, members of the Climategate conspiracy, notably David Karoly, kept on supporting the Hockey Stick well beyond 2007, a defence which might be seen as heroic under the circumstances, but which for the conspirators was a necessity, given the crucial role of the Hockey Stick in defence of the IPCC’s arguments about the unprecedented nature of late-twentieth-century global warming.
Following the humiliation of the EU and its supporters (including Australia) at Copenhagen last December, the whole Anthropogenic Global Warming structure is now falling down, as one key structural element collapses after another. Even the Royal Society of London, for years a rock-solid player in this fraud, has announced the establishment of a committee to inquire into the Society’s role and conduct in this debate.
Bob Carter’s book covers all the elements of this structure of fraud and deceit: the bogus computer models (used by the CSIRO as evidence of rising sea levels along the Australian coast, thus justifying the expropriation of people’s property along the coast through the negation of building permits); the temperature record going back decades, centuries, millennia, and half a million years; and the carbon dioxide record covering the same time scales. He covers the ocean acidification scam; the rising-sea-level scam; the Great Barrier Reef scam; but most interesting of all is his discussion of climate in geological time. Since paleoclimatology is his forte it is not surprising that his description of climate events going back hundreds of thousands of years is riveting. At some point in the not too distant future (two to three millennia perhaps) the Earth will undergo, quite rapidly, a shift into ice-age conditions which will make human habitation here extremely difficult. With our present state of knowledge and technology, there would be nothing we could do to prevent it.
As far as we can determine, during the period from 1943 to 1975 the Earth cooled by nearly a degree Celsius (although anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide were rising sharply), and this trend precipitated fear of a new ice age. However, following the switch in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from cool to warm in 1975–76, global temperatures began to rise and the ice age scare quickly gave way to the global warming scare, and within thirty years or so to the situation where we were on the point of wreaking great harm on our nation.
Bob Carter discusses the motivating forces behind the intellectual and moral corruption which has been the central issue in this story, and here we find a scientist who is bewildered by what he has seen. He accepts Aynsley Kellow’s arguments concerning the corruption which follows from adherence to a “noble cause”—in this case “saving the planet”. In my view this is a serious misreading of the situation and it follows from a profound misunderstanding of the nature, doctrine and purposes of the environmentalist movement, which has been driving the Anthropogenic Global Warming fantasy for more than twenty-five years.
The Greens are the political face of the environmentalist movement and they have become extremely influential, not only as separate political parties, but as factions within the major parties throughout the Anglosphere and very clearly within our own Liberal and Labor parties. Because they have been able to play the political game with great skill they have not been subjected to proper scrutiny. John Howard, for example, failed to realise that the environmentalist movement is an existential threat to Western civilisation, indeed to all civilisation.
The core articles of faith of the Greens are the sanctity of “nature”, and the depravity of mankind. Their hatred of mankind is revealed time and time again in their oft-expressed desire to see new plagues wipe out the greater part of the world’s peoples. The creation of more and more “wilderness”, from which humans are barred, is a manifestation of this awful misanthropy, and the ultimate goal of this movement is an Earth which is no longer polluted by any human beings at all. It is an anti-theist movement with a deep hatred of its own kind, which it sees as depraved and incapable of redemption.
There is a growing realisation in the democracies of the Western world that they have been conned by the thermo-maniacs. In Australia the Senate saved us from the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) bill, which had it been passed, would have wreaked irretrievable damage on Australia in its economic, social and political life. Bob Carter was one of those Australian scientists who were not only able to convince many parliamentarians that the science on which the CPRS Bill was based was “absolute crap”, but also, by speaking at hundreds of meetings throughout the land, persuaded thousands of rank-and-file members and supporters of the Coalition parties that Tony Abbott’s famous declaration last September at Beaufort, Victoria, was correct. And it was the rank-and-file’s overwhelming pressure on the Coalition parliamentary parties that led to Malcolm Turnbull’s demise as Opposition Leader and to Tony Abbott’s succession.
What are the political consequences of this great change in the tide of affairs? In former times a king who persisted in ruinous policies was eventually forced to save his throne and the monarchy itself, by abandoning the adviser who was most identified with the policy, conducting a trial, and then executing the former favourite. Under such circumstances Charles I agreed to the execution of the Earl of Strafford, an act of which he repented at his own beheading.
As the federal and state parliaments begin to retreat from the ruinous policies of de-carbonisation to which they are currently still committed, such as renewable energy targets, attempts to turn coal-based power stations into gas-fired power stations, bio-char, and carbon dioxide reduction by command-and-control measures of one kind or another, there will be a need to find a scapegoat upon whom the burden of guilt can be laid. Such a scapegoat is ready at hand: the CSIRO, which has become so deeply corrupted by its thirty-year participation in this scam that its demise will be a welcome reminder that the wages of corruption are institutional disaster and disgrace.
There will be a need for a trial, in this case a Royal Commission with terms of reference which will allow it to bring to light the full story of how this once respected organisation betrayed the principles on which it was founded by Ian Clunies Ross in the 1940s and 1950s. As his book demonstrates, Bob Carter will be an invaluable witness at this Royal Commission.
Ray Evans is Secretary of the Lavoisier Group, which was formed in Australia in 2000 to promote debate on the science of climate change.
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