The state creates vested interests which promote false narratives to profit the elites at the cost of undermining whole societies. Failed ideas, including the idea of the big state, are simply recycled in the search for media profit and political power.
The state creates vested interests which promote false narratives to profit the elites at the cost of undermining whole societies. Failed ideas, including the idea of the big state, are simply recycled in the search for media profit and political power.
Readers of this blog will have seen my nearly dissertation length post on 2nd July ‘Some Perspective on Climate Change’. I explained that anybody who stands back from media-induced panic about climate change will recognise that climate always changes, and that we are far from being in a particularly warm world. Indeed, the only certainty is that in a few millennia, or maybe a lot sooner, another glaciation or ‘ice age’ will have made Britain and many other places too cold for human habitation.
We are at the flagging end of one of the all too brief warmer inter-glacial periods which punctuate the current global ice age period - sandwiched between much longer, around 100,000 year, freezing glaciations. More warmth globally now would be wholly beneficial. A two-degree centigrade increase in global temperatures, which is realistically the most that we might hope for, would merely take us back to the warmth of Minoan or Roman times.
Carbon dioxide is proving to be a star, not a villain. The modest recent increase in CO2 in the atmosphere has greened the planet and increased food production. Meanwhile, the evidence that CO2 has a significant warming effect has turned out to be somewhere between modest and non-existent.
A family friend, Ed Hoskins, has put together his own climate change website, complete with excellent graphs and charts. Many cover the same historical temperature information that I have used. Ed’s site can be accessed via the link below.
The reality of the greenhouse effect is doubtful, and CO2 may well have no effect on global temperatures at all. The scaremongering depends ultimately not on proper science but on GIGO (Garbage-In Garbage-Out) computer projections. The media then cherry pick stories which they think support the alarmist narrative, even if the events described would not in fact be caused by global warming.
In the case of climate models, a bizarre form of evolution means that the models’ forecasts become more alarming as the lack of evidence for man-made warming in the real world becomes more blatant. It can cost a couple of million dollars to build a new climate model. Much easier therefore for an aspiring climate research group to modify one of the more successful existing models. These will be the more extreme models. That is because the direst computer predictions attract the most government research money. More reasonable models generating more muted forecasts will not get funded and will die out.
CLIMATE ALARMISM AND COVID SCAREMONGERING
Anyone with a reasonable regard for the scientific method would understand that climate change alarmism is not a viable hypothesis. As Monty Python would say, climate change is a scientific dead parrot. But government makes the scam too lucrative for anyone to say so.
Decades ago, the alarmists said that, if their theories about the effect of CO2 emissions were correct, the atmosphere would warm rapidly in response to rising atmospheric CO2 levels. This did not happen. They published charts projecting global temperatures rising. But global temperatures have basically flatlined. Global temperatures are far, far lower than they projected. So that means there is something wrong with the theory. It should be back to the drawing board. Instead the Davos Crowd, the EU and the UK Government propose to cripple western societies to cut CO2 emissions. A Biden regime will try to do the same.
China, Russia, India and the rest of the developing world will of course continue to burn hydrocarbons. The West’s attempted energy suicide will just accelerate the shift of wealth from the Atlantic to East Asia. Just as reckless western money printing will finish off London and New York as the primary financial centres.
Climate-change alarmism is promoted by mathematical modellers and media induced hysteria. Money fleeced from productive people by force by the state is liberally distributed to individuals and vested interests which promote public alarm. In the case of climate change, such interests will have netted much more than the $1 trillion reported some years ago as the amount misdirected to unreliable and expensive renewable energy schemes.
The whole thing is very similar to the coronavirus rigmarole. Again, the alarmist ‘scientists’ are mainly not experts in the relevant domain. The better epidemiologists tend to gravitate to the sceptic side. The ‘covid’ alarmism case is instead sustained by a government-funded (naturally) group of behavioural scientists and mathematical modellers who use another set of GIGO computer programs to produce frightening forecasts of deaths without ‘government action’. They have close links to corrupt corporates such as the Big Pharma companies who seek huge contracts for a pointless and probably dangerous vaccination program.
The state and the mainstream media’s willingness to repeatedly foist already discredited computer forecasts on an increasingly sceptical public opinion characterises both the climate change and the coronavirus cons. But with coronavirus everything has happened much faster. The actual ‘risk’ from climate change according to the IPCC is that in a hundred years’ time our descendants may only be three times as well off as us, rather than four times. Seriously? One may be forgiven for not taking to heart such a remote eventuality. That’s why the alarmists have thrown in hysterical assertions that ‘time is running out’ for which there is no case at all. Time may actually be running out for climate change alarmism.
We had to wait decades before the climate alarmist computer projections fell flat on their faces. With coronavirus it took just a few months. In March Ferguson at Imperial College projected 500,000 deaths without a lockdown and 250,000 with one. It was all GIGO. In fact, 40,000 supposedly died ‘with’ coronavirus. The vast majority of these people were already dying from other causes. As numerous studies have shown, lockdown, masks and distancing meddling made no difference to coronavirus death tolls – or made them worse. They do however cause a great deal of suffering and death for people neglected by Covid fixated healthcare bureaucracies. And they are society killers.
Amazingly the government’s apparent desire to be duped again, or to dupe us, means that it is once again bandying about similarly ludicrous forecasts of gloom and doom from the same Gates, and therefore Davos Crowd, funded Imperial College source as in March.
CLIMATE CHANGE, COVID AND SOCIALISM – DO DISCREDITED IDEAS NEVER DIE?
This year has been very disappointing for those of us who hoped that our fellow men and women would show independence of mind and push back against an establishment which is a strange mixture of incompetent and heartless. But the UK government unleashed a particularly vicious propaganda campaign on top of a genuine social media panic. Many people will probably never fully get over the resulting fear, let alone regain any critical faculties.
The populace’s habit of unthinking obedience to the state, instilled in it since childhood by state education and reinforced by state sponsored media, has resulted in a large proportion of the population becoming muzzled zombies.
I can’t help noticing that the more years of ‘education’ a person has, the more likely he or she is to accept bogus science uncritically. It was supposed to be that educated people could understand logical arguments. In particular they could grasp the principles of the key scientific method on which so much depends. They should be well equipped to reject notions such as climate change and Covid-19 alarmism. But they don’t.
The problem is graduates in particular, especially in the humanities. Extra years out of the real world in the hands of mainly Marxist professors do not make them more employable.
The truth is the state employs most such graduates, directly or indirectly. The public sector is full of them. Even in the private sector they often work in professional monopolies where high incomes are underwritten by the state, and often paid by it, such as Law, Medicine or Accountancy. Or they work in the bureaucracies of corrupt corporates (also known as crony capitalists). These are the many big companies whose profits depend on using state power to exploit consumers and suppress competition.
So maybe it makes perfect sense that graduates, especially inexperienced younger graduates, support big state nonsenses like climate change and coronavirus alarmism. They also support the biggest nonsense of all, belief in socialism and the benevolent technocratic state. The projected socialist paradises also repeatedly fell flat on their faces.
A century of uninterrupted socialist failure, mayhem and death in all its myriad Communist, Fascist, Maoist forms, along with the consistent underperformance of social democratic societies compared to freer societies, has not apparently taught these young graduates anything. Possibly because they have not been taught any proper history, or possibly because deep down they fear they are unemployable by anyone but the state. Which is a terrible burden for anyone to bear – and almost certainly quite untrue.
THE CONCLUSION
Well none of this would be happening if there were no state. Few in a free society would spend their own money to develop and broadcast unsound GIGO modelling. There is just no incentive to develop false narratives about the world if you can’t use government power to extort resources in their name.
Climate change alarmism, coronavirus scare-mongering and socialist agitation are all fake narratives pushed by people who expect to use these stories to feather their nests at your expense and at the expense of the diminishing population of genuinely productive people. Now they are coming together in the attempted move towards a totalitarian green Fascism.
Underneath it all is the realisation by western elites that their Democratic Socialist regimes are tottering on the verge of collapse. Either they get a totalitarian hold on the populace now, or it all collapses around their ears – which it eventually will anyway.
Even if belief in the state led only to repeated cycles of mass hysteria and repeated attempts to implement deadly Marxist doctrines, that would be reason enough to reject it utterly.
As it is, there are so many other reasons to abolish the lethal big-state mind-virus…
Comments