The origins and development of eek!-o-freakery (Part 3)

AL GORE'S MEIN KAMPF

In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, Gore displayed the world view identified sixty years ago by Eric Hoffer as the signature of The True Believer:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. 

Gore believes in America’s “natural” world leadership and in his own uniquely personal relationship with God, and his holy cause is environmentalism, all bound together by an apocalyptic vision of a looming showdown between good and evil to make a very nasty package indeed.

His Jimmy Carterite vision of America’s international role is tediously familiar. OK, Gore wrote the book to boost his chances in the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries, but still:

From the beginning, our leadership of the world community has been based on much more than military and economic strength. The American drive to correct injustice – from the abolition of slavery to the granting of women's suffrage – has constantly renewed our moral authority to lead. 

Only Brazil lagged behind America in abolishing slavery, only South Africa took longer to abolish apartheid, and New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Finland - and the Soviet Union - had all enfranchised women before the USA got around to it in 1920.

For the rest, all the shyster tricks are there: argument by indirection, weasel words, false repentance and outright fabrications presented as facts. When dealing with someone who relentlessly employs all the logical fallacies with the air of one entitled to impart eternal verities, Aristotle himself would have recognised the need to get ad hominem. So, let's look at the man. The book, he says, came about because he had:

. . . for several years now been engaged in an intensive search for truths about myself and my life; many other people I know are doing the same. More people than ever before are asking: Who are we? What is our purpose?”

This is the inchoate angst of the adolescent proclaimed by a grown man as a guiding principle. But even that is to be preferred to his equation of society with a dysfunctional family, repeated so often that you have to wonder what went on in the Gore mansion when he was growing up.

Fueled by the fruits of the sun and the soil, water and air, we are constantly growing and creating, destroying and dying, nurturing and organizing. And as we change, the world changes with us.

As we grow older we perceive the world differently, but only a narcissist could believe that a change in his perspective is actually a change in reality. Hoffer again:

The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources – out of his rejected self – but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength. 

Thus Gore’s mid-life crisis, after being beaten like a cheap rug in the 1988 primaries:

. . . caused me to be increasingly impatient with the status quo, with conventional wisdom, with the lazy assumption that we can always muddle through. Such complacency has allowed many kinds of difficult problems to breed and grow, but now, facing a rapidly deteriorating global environment, it threatens absolute disaster. Now no one can afford to assume that the world will somehow solve its problems. We must all become partners in a bold effort to change the very foundation of our civilization.

The books revealed someone so confident that he embodied all that is decent and even holy in man that, if given the chance, he would ruthlessly undermine individual liberties in pursuit of his view of the common good. Conservative theologians and clergy, he says:

. . . are deeply suspicious of any effort to focus their moral authority on a crisis in the material world that might require as part of its remedy a new exercise of something resembling moral authority by the state. 

Surely it is not only conservative clergy who have reservations about this? I believe there is something in the US Constitution about the separation of Church and State. A bagatelle to Gore, who advocates:

Adopting a central guiding principle – one agreed to voluntarily – [which] means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action – to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system.

Make the last phrase read, “to destroy capitalism and ensure the triumph of socialism” and this could be the text of a speech by Lenin.

There are no ends in politics, only means, because the means ineluctably become ends in themselves. Gore wants to persuade Americans to give up the unalienable rights enshrined in their Constitution to Big Brother. But “unalienable” means that you cannot have it taken from you or give it up – you are stuck with it.

Something that most Europeans would fail to evaluate correctly is Gore's adoption of the rhetoric of a born-again Christian. They should not. He has:

. . . a deeply personal interpretation of and relationship with Christ, and an awareness of a constant and holy spiritual presence in all people, all life, and all things. 

Gore was a theology student, so when he invested “things” with a “constant and holy spiritual presence” we must wonder if the church-going folk in Tennessee were aware that their favourite son was a pantheist.

But it is Gore's concluding words that really let his cat out of the bag:

Unless we grow in these understandings, we will lose our ability to redeem the promise of freedom. 

So, we must grow not in mere understanding, but in these understandings. He knows what you should think, so grow in his understanding – or else.

Climate Research Unit "exoneration"

An inquiry led by Muir Russell, a senior ex-Mandarin, into the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has produced yet another in a long series of reports affirming that British institutions are run by honest, diligent and upstanding persons. How could it be otherwise? A priori, there cannot be anything fundamentally wrong with a system that produces wonders of creation like Muir Russell.  

So, the sociology of British establishment mutual masturbation being an established scientific fact, commanding a consensus of anyone with any knowledge of its workings, what else did the eminent and utterly wonderful Russell conclude about the leaked emails? Oh, a certain lack of openness (Mandarin for cover-up), but apart from that "their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt".

One wonders why, therefore, the Director of the CRU, Phil Jones, confessed to thinking of suicide when the emails were leaked. 

But the most important thing, the finding Russell was charged with - er - finding, was that there was nothing in the e-mails to undermine Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Thus the following contribution by the CRU to the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report is just fine, according to the peerless Russell, even though the CRU emails clearly identified it as a presentational "trick" to "hide the decline".

Why are tree rings so important? Because they are the device used by Michael Mann, the CRU's most important American co-conspirator collaborator, to abolish the Medieval Warm Period, thus creating the ludicrous "Hockey Stick" hyped by Al Gore.

Mann's importance to the CRU web can be seen from the flow-chart of the leaked emails.

Not coincidentally, a separate inquiry at Pennsylvania State University, where Mann has created a significant profit centre, has recently found him to be a scientist of impeccable integrity.

Did anyone really expect a life-long establishment lackey like Russell to upset the multi-billion pound apple-cart of climate catastrophism? There are too many in it, too many policy decisions that would have to be reversed, but above all too many "right thinking" people would have been revealed to be at best dupes, but more likely cynical opportunists riding the climate catastrophist wave in pursuit of power and profit.

'Scientific consensus'

Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric science at the Masachussetts Institute of Technology. That's professor of atmospheric science at MIT, the world's leading centre for science and technology.

If 24-carat credentials counted for anything, therefore, any pronouncement he might make on the subject of man-made global warming should be given the respect it deserves by all the media that pretend to care about the subject.

Instead, his annihilating short article 'Earth in never in equilibrium' found a publisher in The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and has attracted attention only from the blogosphere (hat-tip to Watts Up With That). His concluding paragraphs are superb (my italics):

One may ask why there has been the astounding upsurge in alarmism in the past four years. When an issue like global warming is around for more than 20 years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence and donations are reasonably clear. So, too, are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of carbon dioxide is a dream come true. After all, carbon dioxide is a product of breathing itself.

Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted to save Earth. Nations see how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. So do private firms. The case of Enron (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, Enron was one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon-emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to trillions of dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions.

It is probably no accident that Al Gore himself is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense.

Finally, there are the well-meaning individuals who believe that in accepting the alarmist view of climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, psychic welfare is at stake.

Clearly, the possibility that warming may have ceased could provoke a sense of urgency. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, the need to courageously resist hysteria is equally clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever-present climate change is no substitute for prudence.

Another prop of the global warming scam falls away

Remember this fake picture of forlorn polar bears on a vanishing iceberg? Well, with the news that the Arctic ice pack is back to where it was before the panic-mongers were assuring us that it would all disappear before 2013, the only thing that's melting is the global warming scam's last vestige of credibility.

Here is a partial list of the braying assertions that have been shown to be unsubtantiated allegations when not also outright fabrications:

• the abolition of the medieval warm period in Gore's hockey stick and other pseudo-historic projections
• ice core samples 'showing' that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide causes temperature increase: it's the other way around
• Mann's tree ring and lake deposit 'evidence'
• scientific 'consensus' shown to be a based on intimidation and suppression of contrary evidence
• Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035
• Amazon forest vanishing because of drought

So, what we are left with as the coldest winter for nearly 50 years draws to a close is what nobody with any knowledge of the subject denies: world climate has been rising since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century, as have sea levels. It is not within our puny power to affect global climate one way or another.

What we are also left with is that the big lie, repeated often and loudly enough, will unfailingly attract a host of cynical opportunists seeking to profit from it, and collective hysteria will ensue.

And that there are a LOT more horses' arses than there are horses.

Love the bears!