Scottish Sceptic

Just watched the headlines on BBC news at ten after pope’s encyclical. Not mentioned at all in headlines.
What’s happened to the BBC?

I’m seeing a lot of headlines which are going to be causing really sleepless nights for those who understand government security and intelligence services. It’s ones like this:

• Pope urges revolution to save Earth, fix ‘perverse’ economy
• Pope Francis Calls For ‘Revolution’ To Save Earth From Climate Change
• Pope’s bombshell climate change views could be a ‘game-changer’

And it is not just the rhetoric. In the encyclical are calls for a revolution in world governments – indeed to bring in a new world government.
I can see why it is being phrased that way. But if I were sitting in government reading about a “revolution” and a new type of government, I have to read this as replacing the present form of government by a new government in a revolution – revolution – as in chopping people’s heads off! Are you starting to see the point!
This is technically an incitement to overthrown government – coming not from some almost unknown idiotic environmentalist, but from another (idiotic) government leader.
And what is more, this is not a message directed at governments. Instead it is directed to the people within countries. In many countries the pope, if they were someone in that country, would be technically breaking the law and no doubt getting a quick knock at the door and a few very difficult questions.
And OK, the Pope is hardly going to pick up a bomb and walk into the government offices and blow himself up – but there are many idiots who will! And the intelligence services never get praised for what they don’t let happen – but they get shit loads of criticism if some idiotic fanatic does take the pope to heart and try to start “the revolution”.

There are going to be a lot of really annoyed people after today!!

And a lot of people in the intelligence services are going to have to focus far more carefully on the activities of extremist environmentalists than ever before.

They are not going to like it!

Looking at the news coverage, a very profound realisation has occurred and it is this: most governments will be horrified by at least some aspect of this encyclical.
Basically it is nuts. And to be frank it seems many governments have gone along with these nutty ideas because they couldn’t see the harm in pandering to a few environmentalists as it kept a sizeable – but deluded number of their electorate content.
In other words, governments have tolerated this rising eco-fascism that has created a whole industry of green blobbiests who more and more try to dictate everything we do.
So, far from unite the world into action to “end fossil fuels”, a far more likely outcome appears to me that governments will end their toleration of the eco-fascist elements that have allowed these nutty ideas to flourish and seem to be advising the pope.
We’ve already seen countries like India moving against “Greenspin”. The UK government is ending onshore wind subsidies. Germany is increasing coal use. That is the real world. What the pope represents is a fictional idea of the world where energy is produced by magic where changing to bio-fuels does not lead to mass starvation of the poor.
The pope’s “vision” represents the worst possible scenario for the world: a utopian anti-science vision that not only fails to reduce CO2 but because of the stupid ideas it contains, will likely leads to mass starvation and then wars. In short, it is like Stalin’s five year plans – a great idea for the intellectuals to discuss at dinner – but appalling for those that suffer its implementation.
So, basically, I think this encyclical will be a wake-up call. The silent sensible majority will view it with horror and resolve to severely reduce the power and influence of the “grand-plan” eco-fascists whose ideas the pope now so enthusiastically proclaims.

There is a fundamental rule of politics that you try to unite people.
But reading the Reuter’s article released a few minutes ago, I see so many red flags to so many bulls that many who never paid any interest in climate are bound to feel they have to unite against this pope.
Also, what a bizarre set of objectives: “Pope calls for ‘action now’ to save planet, stem warming, help poor”

• Save planet: The planet is greening because of rising CO2 (CO2 is a plant food)
• Stem warming: satellites tell us there’s been no warming for 18 years – DONE!
• Help poor: rising CO2 is leading to record harvests. And with 1million extra deaths in winter particularly amongst the elderly poor in the UK since this scam started even if temperatures rise – rising temperature help the poor.

However what is really going to annoy world governments and turn them against this pope is the ideas of reducing the power of governments by putting them under a single (very socialist) world government.
He’s also very much said that (except for the pope) every other world leader has to do what their academics (pretending to be scientists) tell them.
So, again, this is not going to be a very palatable message.
As for the poor. Here I start seeing red! Reducing CO2 will cause starvation in the long term because it will hit crop yield boosted by higher CO2, but much worse is encouraging “bio-fuels” which will quickly kill millions and land producing food gets turned over to producing fuels. And  increasing fuel costs will kill the poor and elderly in places like Scotland with rising fuel poverty.
So, basically when none of the predicted trends in severe weather have come true, the (heavily adjusted) temperature data has not warmed at even the lowest predicted level of the IPCC in 2001 – so the science tells us the academic forecasts are wrong. This encyclical is anti-science anti-the-poor and elderly, anti-reason. In short it the victory of the carbon (credit) profiteers and as such in my view it is a totally scandalous and immoral betrayal of the people the world PARTICULARLY the poor and vulnerable.

There’s been a whole raft of articles on the web preceding the pope’s proclamation. Unfortunately, a small but obvious minority have resorted to the same childish name calling of “denier”. However, as I tried to comment on these articles and explain how childish it was, I began to notice a distinct pattern: most didn’t have reader comments. And it seems a far higher percentage than other sites.
There are two possible conclusions:

1. They don’t have comments because they are rather nasty extreme alarmists.
2. They are rather nasty extreme alarmists because they don’t have comments

And of the two, because many journalists have substantially changed their tune and those “denier” sites are really just the stragglers, I’m beginning to see that reader comments are having a very positive effect on many journalists causing them to tone down the extremist rhetoric they get in their green-spin press releases. But that effect seems to be absent from those which don’t have comments.
Which basically means that a paper which allows comments is far more in tune with its readership and so far more likely to have higher sales and therefore bigger advertising revenue.

A while back I published a consensus document called “the sceptic view“. With so many new journalists now coming to the issue of climate as a result of the encyclical, I started thinking: “what would I want them to know about our views”.
So I started thinking how I might explain the real nature of the climate “debate” and this is what I produced:
Experience versus Theory/Naivety
Sceptics are mostly real word scientists. Our survey shows most sceptics are equal in qualification to our academic opponents, but in contrast, we are engineers and scientists with experience of applying theory in real world situations. And we are sceptical of theory not because of any political views, but because in the real world with all its real complexity, simple theories often fail to work as expected. Experience makes us sceptical because our experience has taught us that you can’t just naively take theory and apply it to the real world.
In contrast “alarmists” (those who are alarmed or fake alarm due to a minute change in temperature) tend to fall into two camps. In one camp are public-sector academics who know a lot about their particular field, but who have very little real world experience or wider knowledge of climate (certainly not the broad knowledge of many sceptics) AND they have no experience of the importance of the private sector and so very little understanding of the damage their ideas could do. In the other camp are “greens” … who are mostly clueless about the science … hate industry … but are very good at raising money and copy and pasting “research”. Many are not really green at all but “anarchists” or “anti-capitalists” who are “green” only in the sense of naive.
Treading on the academic’s toes
One thing that cannot be denied, is that academics are not happy with us sceptics.  We have seen some really vitriolic comments about us sceptics. Originally I naively thought this was because they didn’t understand our views. But then I found they knew very well that we were just as capable on the science as they (even if sceptics tend to look at the science overall whereas academics tend to focus). Continue reading →

There’s a general rule that anyone with any sense doesn’t make predictions based of very short runs of data. So it would be crazy for me to start getting excited on what is after all just the first day of the pre-release of the encyclical.
However, things just have not gone that smoothly for what was supposed to be a major event stemming the tide of scepticism. Because after the initial flurry of the expected environmentalists “pope excommunicates climate denier” type news stories, the alarmist stories have pretty much crumbled. So much so that even by the end of day one I reckon that sceptic articles were dominating.
That’s appalling! It’s their story! They should be running with it, not us. They should have had days of news stories, so such an early turn around is a disaster for the alarmists. Yes, it’s still early and things might change.
There’s a scene in Lord of the Rings where the auks are attacking Helm’s Deep and one of them says something like “is that all they’ve got”. Obviously it’s a really bad quote because the auks then blow up the defensive wall and nearly overrun the place. But looking at the climate articles I have been left very much thinking: “is that all they’ve got”?
Because at present, I’m left wondering what on earth the pope was thinking when he got involved with this encyclical.

Pope-gate** has started to get the feel of the Eurovision song contest. We’ve already had a series of monotonous contributions and now there’s some dreadful singer dressed in an appalling costume singing a song that no doubt was humorous in their own country but the humour has been lost in translation. And this is still the very start!!
In a similar vein, the latest re-incarnation of the “Pope-gate” story is a series of press releases asserting that sceptics are attacking the pope – and we are still days away from the official release!
That a rush of stories appears with similar wording isn’t news – because no doubt some green blobbiest has sent out a press release (but it could be a sceptic?)
But what is more interesting is what I found in one of these articles in the Telegraph Pope attacked by climate change sceptics because not only does it quote Lord Monckton:

“My message to the Pope would be, don’t take sides on the science. Don’t make the same mistake as seven out of 10 judges in the trial of Galileo, when they invited him to retract his views (that the Earth orbits around the Sun rather than the other way around).

“The Vatican used to be prepared to hear both sides of the debate but now they don’t want to listen to the sceptics,” said Lord Monckton, who was UKIP’s leader in Scotland before being sacked by Nigel Farage in 2013.

“Benedict XVI took a very cautious line but Pope Francis is not willing to say, ‘don’t bully the sceptics’.”

He accused the UN of “falsifying” data on climate change and insisted that levels of global warming were “insignificant”.

But it also quotes DeSmug Blog (an alarmist blog that banned me from commenting). More importantly, these new correspondents seem to be  … treating both sceptic and alarmists as equal! Wow! That’s very unusual in this subject.
Almost invariably journalists take sides and those like the BBC are so biased that if ever they include any comment from sceptics it is always preceded by the obligatory “warning” phrases intending to signal to the listener that our views are not credible.
But now the Pope seems to have brought out is a rash of articles where journalists (who do not appear to be natural sceptics) are treating our views with respect. What a change! Better still, because it is the pope, these stories are reaching a whole new audience (those interested in religion) who will be reading what we say free from the usual snide comments for the very first time.

So, thank you Pope!

Far from undermining us,  by entering the debate and involving a whole new group of journalists who don’t have the preconceived hatred of sceptics, you have quite unintendedly given Sceptic views credibility.
The big question now is this – will the initial interest being shown in Sceptic views lead to wider discussion, increased public interest in the sceptic view and potentially a wholesale shift in public opinion? Only time will tell, but suddenly I am beginning to think we sceptics may see progress – and not in the direction the Pope intended!

 
**Pope-gate – is just a humorous name – originally intended as a parody on the way everything these days seems to get called “-gate”.

Pope-gate** the “heinous act” of leaking a daft sorry draft copy of the Pope’s proclamation may have been an insider job according to “Newser“.

“[it] may have been designed to steal some thunder from Thursday’s official launch, Vatican observers say—and some think it may have been masterminded by Vatican insiders, the Associated Press reports”

Looking at Associated Press they continue:

On Tuesday, the Vatican indefinitely suspended the press credentials of L’Espresso’s veteran Vatican correspondent, Sandro Magister, saying the publication had been “incorrect.”

Magister told The Associated Press that his editor, not he, obtained the document and decided to publish it.

“I just wrote the introduction,” Magister said in a text message, adding that he had promised the Vatican to keep quiet about the scoop.

Several Vatican commentators hypothesized that the leak was aimed at taking the punch out of Thursday’s official launch of the encyclical, in which the Vatican has lined up a Catholic cardinal, an Orthodox theologian, an atheist scientist and an economist to discuss the contents.

They noted that conservatives — particularly in the U.S. — attacked the encyclical even before it was released, chiding the pope for talking science in a church document and insisting that global warming isn’t a scientific reality. It would be in their interest, the argument goes, to fudge the pope’s message.

Italian daily La Stampa suggested that the leak might have come from “conservatives” inside Vatican, noting that Francis’ reform plans for the Vatican bureaucracy have been resisted by the more conservative old guard who would have an interest in sabotaging Francis’ labor of love.

**In case it is not entirely obvious, “Pope-gate” is a jibe at the way every scandal gets a “-gate” suffix.