It’s Sunday and this report here at The Local has parallels that I just couldn’t help but notice.
For us skeptics we should never be so naive to think that we are going to convince the world of natural climate change in our lifetime. As history shows us, those who are right often have to wait a very long time before getting the credit or apology they deserve. Hey, it’s the price of far-sightedness.
In climate science we are indeed dealing in large part with religious, fanatic zealots – all drugged up in their CO2 global warming paranoia. Today every weather anomaly even gets blamed on the wicked ways of CO2 emitters, who, we are told, have a pact with the Big Oil devil.
Today, skeptic scientists, bloggers and a few journalists are being singled out and a guilty verdict is being sought for them in the court of public opinion. Some nut-cases are even calling for Nuremberg-type trials.
The Local here writes about skeptics and dissidents (witches!) of the past, how they were blamed for natural catastrophes. Take Katharina Henot –
Germany’s most notorious ‘witch’ – stood accused of having entered into a pact with the devil, conjured up a plague of caterpillars, sown strife and encouraged sexual deviancy. In 1627 she was sentenced to death by torture by the Cologne Court. 385 years later, in a symbolic gesture by the Cologne City Council, Henot and 37 other “witches” executed by local authorities are to be pardoned and rehabilitated, wrote Die Welt newspaper on Saturday.”
So you see, the path back to sanity can indeed be a very long one. Those with the truth at times are put to death as “criminals”.
As the climate catastrophe-obsessed mob decends deeper into madness, us skeptics must always keep in mind that we could very well end up being burned at the stake (of public opinion) and not be rehabilitated until the next phase of the solar millenial cycle when the Earth enters its next cold period – 500 years from now.
Burned at the stake? In these modern times it is more likely that we end up in psychiatric hospitals where we are treated for a new mental disease, called denialism. Already congresses are devoted to this disease and it is seriously discussed in one of our top science journals. If the PR and marketing boys, who want to know why not every advertised product sells, might interview me, I can explain to them why I buy a lot of results from science but not the inconvenient truth as sold us by a hysterical Billy Graham-like charlatan. By the way, even my green friends do not believe in AGW anymore.
Maybe these GHG abatement schemes we now endure will see the onset of the next glacial period commencing in 499 rather than 500 years, or perhaps 999 rather than 1,000 years?
“For us skeptics we should never be so naive to think that we are going to convince the world of natural climate change in our lifetime.”
It may be better than you think Pierre. I was talking a few months ago with one of my near neighbours, a retired painter, as usual about the weather and stuff. At one point, about all the rain we’d been having, he rolled his eyes and said ‘it must be glooobaaal waaarmiiinng’ sarcastically.
Then last week I was at the doctors, and I overheard an old guy in the waiting room talking with the receptionist about how he’d just written to the Prime Minister to complain about the carbon tax and all the green silliness going on here in Australia. He was clearly an ordinary guy in his late 60’s or 70’s who I could see had worked with his hands all his life.
We also have a new Herald/Nielsen poll out saying that the party currently in power, the ALP, who brought the tax in, would be wiped out in a terrible landslide if we’d had an election this week.
So you are probably right that there will be some people like Paul Ehrlich or James Hansen who will hang onto this belief religiously until their dying breath, in the face of reality, but out in the real world many ordinary people seem to have decided it is rubbish.
Refreshing news, Bruce. One month ago one of my green friends told me that she did not believe in AGW anymore whereas she had had sleepless nights about it. I forgot to ask her what caused her conversion. Recently, she told me that she started to visit a Magnetizer. I do not know the English word for this profession, but he causes (as she told me) all kinds of energy flows in your body, and now she is completely relaxed and free from AGW belief.
I have methods of causing energy flow that make people vibrate. Literally. It doesn’t work with magnetism.
Now I need a warmist volunteer.
So good old animal magnetism DOES effect some cures – even if it works only on other delusions. Eat your hat, Benjamin Franklin!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer
An imaginary cure for an imaginary problem. Entirely consistent. Nice idea.
Some(?) people seem incapable of making the leap from “who to believe?” to being able to evaluate facts for themselves and making up their own minds.
They usually don’t like being asked who does their thinking for them. 😉
You’re right. People in the know always underestimate the total helplessness of the ignorant ones. Cem Özdemür for instance: Green politician with an education in child daycare and journalism. He has not the ghost of an idea what a physical unit is; GigaWatt, GigaByte? It’s all gibberish to him. The only thing the poor fellow can do is listen to an advisor, granted to him for free by the PV or wind industry, when an energy question arises.
With this kind of politician, we are well and truly f***ed.
In the long term Bruce I think you are right, but the main difficulty in getting the public at large to realise that the CAGW orthodoxy is nothing more than a baseless scam is that we now have a whole generation of kids who have been brainwashed with the litany of the scam from the time they started kindergarten. None are more guilty of promoting the pseudo-science of the CAGW orthodoxy than the ABC, our national broadcaster, and the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation).
My experience, much like yours it seems, is that people with long life experience “the oldies” are the ones least likely to be conned by the snake oil of politicians and other spruikers of the scam. They’ve seen enough cycles of heat, cold, storm, drought and flood to recognise that what we experience today is nothing that hasn’t happened in the past. But kids don’t have that life experience, they are “starting behind the eight ball” because unless they are of quite independent and inquiring disposition most accept the dogma they have been inculcated with. I’m afraid only time and life experience will see that mist, planted by their group-think teachers dissipate.