18A045 Hot or Cold? by Jim Davies, 11/6/2018    

That's the question, but the answer from archists is always the same: more government control, and fast; otherwise humanity is doomed.

They swamp us with the Global Warming myth these days, Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) being their primary rock of faith: it's getting hotter, and mankind did it. The irresponsible burning of fossil fuels has pumped so much CO₂ into the air that heat cannot get out fast enough to stay cool.

The priests in this cult still move around in their fossil-fueled limos, and while they preach EVs (electric vehicles) they've had to force their development with money stolen from taxpayers and have not explained well how the electric power, used to top up the batteries, is to be generated. In fact, the public has been so unresponsive to the AGW myth that several years ago they changed its name to "Climate Change" - far harder to deny. Of course the climate will change; it's been changing for about four and a half billion years. Which way it will change in the short term, however, is harder to tell.

All this is rather familiar: what may be less so is that under half a century ago, the fore-runners of the AGW cultists were screeching that the Planet was on its way to a new ice age. Right; orthodoxy in 1970 required the faithful to believe in AGC; Anthropogenic Global Cooling.

For example the Sumter, SC Daily Item reported in 1970 that dust and smoke particulates from the Industrial Revolution have stayed in the upper atmosphere and caused more of the incoming solar radiation to reflect back into space, so causing a drop in terrestrial temperature. It then quotes Dr Arnold Reitze of Case Western, an expert in environmental law, as proposing that this problem be countered thus:-

* Outlaw internal combustion engines for vehicles
* Control all new products to minimize pollution
* Halt all R&D at the least sign of additional pollution, and
* Possibly, control populations by punishing families with more children than the law will allow

Subsequently Dr Reitze was promoted Professor of Environmental Law at GWU, from which position he has now retired. Evidently it doesn't matter that his understanding of global temperature changes directly opposed the currently accepted wisdom; his fanatical prescriptions are seen as an excellent fit for either direction. Control matters. Science doesn't.

Steven Goddard's Real Science has a spectacular collection of articles and clips from the 1970s that form a powerful mirror-image of today's nonsense. Here's one I took at random. The same scary stuff, designed to create fear of the future (and so increase public dependency on a wise and powerful government to protect it) but on the basis that soon we'll be shivering, not sweating.

Twenty years later, it was at East Anglia that the "Climategate" scandal broke, when a hacking of emails revealed that data supporting the GW myth (never mind AGW!) had been manufactured or seriously twisted. Evidently, EAU is one of the world's primary disinformation centers. And golly gosh, we thought science has to do with observation, theorizing, testing and more observation, so as to refine an impartial understanding of the way things are.

It is. But EAU's "scientists", along with a formidable array of others, aren't real scientists at all. They are paid agents of the Goebbels Institute of State Propaganda.

The Earth's climate will change for sure, eventually. Warmer, colder, whatever; and since weather can be forecast reasonably accurately only a few days ahead, nobody knows or can know which of those it is, or whether for a while it will stay about where it is now. There's about a 33% probability for each.

One thing is for sure, however: whatever happens, the best way humans can prepare to survive and prosper in those changes is not by centralized government planning and directives (which never saw success anywhere, despite exhaustive testing) but by hundreds of millions of individual decisions, made on the basis of the best information visible and with the motive of self-interest dominant. In other words, by the simple operation of a free-market, zero government society.

For example, if presently productive farm land becomes too dry and hot while more Northerly tracts yield more, guess what: farmers will get the signal and move North. If homes near the sea shore get flooded more due to rising ocean levels, insurance will become too expensive and owners will move to higher ground. Such changes will happen naturally and gradually and without any authoritarian directives.

Wouldn't it be fun if some elements of both these bodies of fiction were actually true and self-canceling - that is, one theory (that industrial particulates cut down incoming solar radiation) nicely balancing out the other (that excess CO₂ reduces outgoing thermal radiation.) Enviro-fascists would have nothing at all about which to bleat. It wouldn't stop them bleating, but it would make them even more visibly ridiculous.