A Personal Note

 My last active post on this blog was in November 2016. At that point I'd run out of things to say about the perpetuation of the many Ecomyths I had sought to dispel over the previous decade of postings. I was tired and found that I any new posts were repeating arguments I had made many times earlier and that my efforts to refute Ecomyths with empirical data and the evisceration of their underlying ideology was not sufficient to cease their promulgation. 

The issues are largely political in both origin and potential solution. Sadly I lacked the stamina at that point in my career to pivot the focus of the blog and engage fully and effectively in partisan politics that feature little debate and civil discourse.

I did not realize how exhausted I was both emotionally and physically from the academic and institutional marginalization that occurs when the individual takes a stance contrary to the prevailing ideology that has infused and chilled the contemporary academy.  De-platforming and cancel culture takes many guises. To all who are recipients, the result is equally unpleasant.

In April 2019 in the space of one week I gave my final lecture, received news that my father had died and was offered an early retirement buy out from my university position.  I retired formally in June 2019.  I did some initial traveling and was thwarted by the onset of Covid restrictions from undertaking 2 of the more adventurous trips I had planned to mark my retirement.  

This is my first post since I retired and it has taken me nearly 3 years to find my physical and mental health.  I might yet write another book, even one of fiction.

Today's post is to thank all those who read the blog in its heyday as one of the leading blogs in its field and to those who have discovered my posts more recently and to those who continue to read despite my retirement: I felt I owed you the reader a note of explanation for the lack of posting the past 5 years.  

I enjoyed writing the blog. It was fun and it kept me sane in an academic environment that was not conducive to critical thought or independent thinking.  I was born with an intellect that questions. I am inherently resistant to authoritarianism and blind acceptance of authority.  As a teacher I was able to inspire independent thinking and curiosity in thousands who took my courses. I also aggravated and annoyed many who just wished I would just confirm to their stereotype of compliance and passivity. To those who benefited from my courses, I hope the lessons still resonate and inspire you today. 

The ends never justify the means

By definition, a democratic free society cannot be achieved through fiat nor imposition. A democratic, free society must be the result of transparent, open and fair processes. Paramount of these is freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of speech.  The imposition, assertion and promulgation through dogma of predetermined outcomes is totalitarianism defined by the nature of its preferred vision of what society should look like.  Irrespective of which elite or what version of social justice or what religious tenets are used to wrap and disguise it, totalitarianism is easily recognized by its focus on the denial of the processes that define an open society, including: 

• independent judiciary
• an independent media wherein mutiple perspectives prevail
• preservation of free speech
• the promotion of independent thinking
• education free from dogma and censure of divergent views

This sounds like a description of the enlightenment or at least a precis of its key tenets and principles, but it appears necessary as we head into the pending US election at a time when censure,conformity, political corruption and collusion are all manifest and reinforced by a MSM oligarchy, a plethora of SJWs and an apparent diffidence among millennials to reading, divergent thinking and an understanding that the end never justifies the means.

Today is the 5th of November and perhaps now more than ever the concept of blowing up the cesspit of elitist power structures has never had greater resonance. 

I hope Trump wins and I hope he wins in a landslide so that the US can begin to cleanse itself of political corruption, collusion and gross inefficiency.  My hope is that this political transformation is the catalyst to a resurgence in the implementation of the processes of free democracy. AT the same time, this will result in necessary and serious weakening in the "progressive" imposition of censure, conformity and compliance that has masqueraded as the "correct" narrative of political discourse for the last 20 years.

Intellectual Yet Idiot

Elites favor democracy only as long as it suborns their abuse of power. Any deviation they consider invalid or stupid. Brexit + the imminent election of Trump signify an electorate re-asserting control over democracy at the expense of a power elite abusing the power of office for personal advancement + profit. 

Trump never positions himself as a paragon of virtue. His appeal is his express willingness to hold the beltway cabal to account for all the collusion + corruption that the Wikileaks and Clinton scandals are revealing. The Clinton Foundation has clearly only ever been a vehicle for graft. If there is no malfeasance, why the illegal server, the deletion of email records and the clumsy intervention of the Obama + Lynch DOJ to obstruct the FBI investigations? Lastly, if the abuse of power is not indictment enough, people still want to find ways to excuse the cabal rather than amend their view or accept that a cleansing of the system is paramount. 

Not unsurprisingly, I find so many who are virulently anti-Trump are the same people who thought Trudeau as PM was a good idea, Wynne as Premier was necessary and that climate is actually a pressing political issue. IYI.

Resist the Echo Chamber of Confirmation Bias and Presumptive Thought

Nothing like politics to constrain + manifest social media as an echo chamber of presumption + confirmation bias. Such a massive waste of technology. People are seriously afraid to think for themselves, to cast a wide net in what they read, watch + listen to. Change is not our enemy. Throughout history, progress is the manifestation of change + intellectual growth. What is the point of education if all it does is confine + bully people into an acceptance of presumptive narratives and memes? Educational indoctrination breeds convergence and followers, not creative, dynamic learners. The world is not static and the future needs divergent, creative thinkers, not drones who conflate a GPA with actual understanding and comprehension. The echo chamber is the intellectual closed mind. It is a norm that deserves and requires our active resistance.

environmentalism as misanthropic narcissism

In the latest in his series of excellent posts, Ben Pile considers the central conundrum of contemporary environmentalism that as a popular movement it is fundamentally elitist and in opposition to most actions, ideas and beliefs that stem from the principle of individual liberty. Environmentalism as an ideology is profoundly, and irrevocably, a stasist instrument for the enforcement of conformity to elite constructs.

Pile notes that while the ideology of environmentalism is primarily a political construct, it is never presented as such.  Rather,environmentalism is present as a moral imperative and compliance always is couched in terms of deep guilt and emotional rhetoric.

In its substance, environmentalism relies upon presumption, axiomatic constructs and referrals to authority to bolster its assertion of preferred, nay, essential actions to avoid the coming Armageddon.  In reality, the substance is always rather less dystopian and most, if not all, doom scenarios are invalidated and rendered moot by prosperity and continued advancements in technology -- a premise that environmentalism dismisses with derision rather than any valid consideration of the historical precedent of civilization to date.

Pile concludes that environmentalism is merely misanthropic narcissism. It is less real political ideology and more performance art, a contemporary theater of illusion to delude, seduce and ultimately suppress the masses into conformity and compliance with the preferences of an elite who are removed from the restrictions they impose on others. The environment is a prop and its vagaries a mere contrivance to be used as necessary to invoke fear and provide justification for continued control of society.

Environmentalism has assumed the mantle of political ideology as a proxy measure that illustrates the absence of true political debate and analysis. It is the last vestige of stasist control in an era when stasism is an anachronism and the realization of individual freedom has never been greater in history.

Far from being progressive, contemporary environmentalism is a fundamentalist, reactionary imposition of stasism.  And like all forms of fundamentalism, it will be overthrown by the progression of change that is immutable because it is definitive to the human experience: basic to change is the liberation of the individual. 

Sustainability is change. Change is sustainability.  Environmentalism adopted the slogan but has never understood the defining construct of the narrative.

When politics doesn't provide options

Recent elections in Britain caused great dismay and conjecture, causing many observers to condemn the irrationality and sanity of the populace.  This is part of a wider trend observable in all Western democracies of alienation of the ruling elites (a.k.a. the Clerisy) from large parts of a populace disenfranchised by the edicts of an elite whose values they neither share nor embrace.  Popular movements such as the Tea Party in the US are vilified by the intellectual elite and the mainstream media.  Both largely misunderstand both the genesis and motives of such expressions of discontent.  The elite are simply unable to understand why their ideology could be rejected and, thus, they condemn what they can neither condone nor comprehend.  Their ideology is inviolate, so axiomatic that it can only be that the populace must be lacking in morality, social responsibility or intelligence.

In Starship Troopers, Heinlein takes time to discuss the nature of morality and social responsibility.  He writes:

• Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not ...We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind. 
• The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. 
• A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive--and nowhere else!--and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
• We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . 
• The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual.  
• Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination-- devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues -- which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out.

The lesson that Heinlein provides is powerful.  There can be no social responsibility where there is no shared identity nor sense of community.  If an elite ideology of politics, intellectualism and environmentalism is sufficiently removed from the populace to be merely the perspective of the oligarchy which it benefits, then there will be no resonance, no acquired sense of morality, no behavioral change in compliance with that ideology.  There will only ever be resentment, disconnection and political ennui.  Provided the elite do not over-step their intrusion into daily life, they will be tolerated.  The political process offers a small range of alternative elites from which to choose.  But when the intellectual and political elites become too intrusive, too incumbent on daily life and too arrogant to perceive the discontent they are prompting, then a change will occur.

Revolution is a big jump for any democracy.  So instead, discontent first manifests itself in the recognition of populist movements.  Many of these may appear to be simplistic, xenophobic and divisive in their ideology.  No matter.  It is not the substance of the movement that appeals to the disenfranchised: it is the very act of signifying rejection of the status quo, of the dogma, morality, ideology and accompanying polices being imposed by the oligarchy.

For environmentalists especially, this is a hard message to absorb, as it contrasts so markedly with their own image they have of themselves.

IPCC over estimates climate sensitivity

Posted over at WUWT is a link to a significant new report by Lewis and Crick examining climate sensitivity.  

Along with the report, is a foreword by Judith Curry in which she writes:

• The sensitivity of our climate to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide is at the heart of the scientific debate on anthropogenic climate change, and also the public debate on the appropriate policy response to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 
• Climate sensitivity and estimates of its uncertainty are key inputs into the economic models that drive cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon.

• This report by Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok addresses this gap between the IPCC assessments and the primary scientific literature by providing an overview of the different methods for estimating climate sensitivity and a historical perspective on IPCC’s assessments of climate sensitivity. 
•  The report also provides an independent assessment of the different methods for estimating climate sensitivity and a critique of the IPCC AR4 and AR5 assessments of climate sensitivity.

As Lewis notes, the report is significant as it

•  ...shows that – contrary to the impression given by the Summary for Policymakers – the observational, scientific evidence in the main IPCC AR5 report actually supports much lower estimates of how sensitive the climate system is to greenhouse gas levels, both in the long term and over the remainder of this century...

The narrative for CAGW has been loosing impetus for some time. Despite this, the data are still being juiced to imply and promote a crisis not evidenced by empirical observation.  Bottom line:

• The GCMs overestimate future warming by 1.7–2 times relative to an estimate based on the best observational evidence.

CAGW isn't happening.  Won't be happening in the future, probably never was happening.  Climate changes as a dynamic natural system. Always has, always will.  Humans do modify both the weather and the climate, but not near to the degree that has been implied nor implicated in advocacy of the CAGW narrative.  Severe weather has always been a feature of human occupancy of the planet and there is insifficient evidence to support the contention that either the frequency nor intensity of weather events has changed in a manner inconsistent with the historical record.

Climate was and remains a proxy for a supposed scientific imperative for a set of political policies designed to suppress growth, control economic development, centralize governance and curtail globalization.  These policies reflect a particular morality and ideology that is both elitist in design and lacking on poplar support and resonance, hence the attempt to co-opt science as a mechanism to compel compliance by invoking an authority that is difficult to challenge and contradict.

After all this  (the IPCC, the Hockey Stick, the blogs, Climategate and the constant revisionism from global warming to AGW to CAGW) the central issue remains the provision of cheap energy and not climate.

And without the stigma of CAGW, what is the rationale for windmills? For solar panels? For constraint and increasing carbon taxes?  Fracking has removed the peril of an energy crisis for the West.  What is the cheap energy option for Africa?  Why is energy not dropping in price and fueling a new age of innovation and economic prosperity?

And, lastly, absent of any climate crisis, what possible purpose is there to zero-carbon as a goal?

Remove the presumption of CAGW, dismiss the narrative, and the value of pursuing zero-carbon as a goal is similarly removed.

Scary bananas: How environmental exaggeration harms emerging economies: ...

ennui or just resignation?

Read Dale Franks post over at QandO today about how his blogging had lost its passion and become steadily less frequent, less inspired and less purposeful.  I empathized.

Then I read Don Easterbrook's rebuttal to the reaction he'd received to a previous post pointing out the correlation between PDO cycles and temperature cycles and Tim Ball's post on climate as a political dichotomy and not one of science.  And I despaired.  What they write is so transparently obvious to anyone with an open mind on the topic but, apparently, open minds are in short supply despite the age of enlightenment and the extant technology to bring that enlightenment to all.

Between my empathy and my despair, was I enveloped with a profound sense of ennui with the continued intransigence of political authority and the academy to neither see nor accept what people like Easterbrook and Ball so eloquently and clearly expose?  Or was I overcome with a deepening resignation born from personal empathy with their situation?

My own blogging has become sporadic.  I have spent a career trying to change the system from within and it appears that far from taking either Manhattan or Berlin, I have failed to hold even my own home court in the form of my own academic institution.  Ennui or resignation?  Am I simply tired of the stupidity of others? Or am I conceding the field and ceasing to engage in an artificial war of words in which there can be no resolution as the other side simply refuses to accept any evidence as factual that does not accord with their narrative?  When academics blithely and routinely ignore empirical data as irrelevant, the medium has not just become the message, it has become the sole narrative of Big Brother University as funded by Big Brother Government in the cause of Big Brother Media.

Is it ennui or resignation to reject a worldview as promulgated by mass media social theorists?  Moreover, when did social theorist cease being an oxymoron?

In a conscious act of personal salvation and sanity, I have moved my teaching into a large course on tourism and an interactive senior seminar on change.  Professionally, I can survive, still exercise and extend my creative juices in the ongoing delivery and improvement of my pedagogy, and draw considerable satisfaction from the response of those students who value what I offer them: the opportunity to think, reflect and create.

I still believe in the power of education, but I am less confident that there is sufficient interest in using both the extant and future technology to enlighten, to educate and to empower.  Instead, I have a deep sense of ennui with the axiomatic dogma peddled by self-interested stasists and a sense of resignation that the forces of conformity will persist in suppressing ideas in the ongoing oppression of true freedom.

But hope is a funny thing...it persists despite all rationality and tiredness.

The Road to Redemption

I have long contended that the faux concern over AGW had little basis in the science of climate change and large reliance upon the symbolic use of climate as a contrivance for compliance with environmentalist control and censure ideology.  The science was co-opted merely as a tool to embed an axiomatic authority to the alarmist and dystopian assertions activists invoke to compel compliance with their command and control agendas.  Thus, the muted media reaction to the 5th IPCC Assessment is indicative that the conversation on climate is now closed.

In the wake of IPCC5 we have indictments of the IPCC as failed instrument of enforced international consensus, its incoherence and lack of scientific credibility, some insight into the manipulations and deceit utilized to obscure and hide facts within the Summary most media use for their summaries and some excellent summations of the present state of affairs.

I was recently faced by two different requests at my own institution. One was for a repeat of a debate on climate change I had participated in a decade ago.  The second was to promote a student event on the 'growing climate conversation". 

I decided to decline the first: nothing good can come of disabusing people of their faith and that's all a belief in AGW is today, all it ever has been.  Any pretense of scientific imperative, of pending crisis and human induced catastrophe has ceased to exist with the release of the very data contained within the full version of IPCC5.  Climate sensitivity is now estimated at its highest to be below the lowest of the lowest possible scenarios contemplated within previous IPCC supported AGW hysteria.  Moreover, climate change at 0.8 degrees Celsius per 100 yrs. can't be spun as alarming to anyone let alone a developed, technocratic and fast changing world.

And yet, the student run environmental association on campus is still in thrall with the anti-hydro carbon, zero-carbon, environmental Armageddon caused by humans message that both initiated and fueled the AGW myth.  Ignorance is pervasive, especially within the academy that has feasted at the AGW trough for the past two decades, that thrives on the clarion call for intellectually derived command and control compliance with expertise and authority acting in consensus and uses intimidation politics to marginalize its critics.

I decided to use the second request as a teaching example of the pervasiveness of environmentalism as a religion and as a placebo for real caring, real action and real implementation of change.

Its been a long 20 years of futility, chasing a false God and a mythical Holy Grail.  The AGW myth has been a blight on intellectualism, academic integrity, environmental thought and effective policy making.  The only question facing its proponents, adherents and inductees is how quickly they will recant and at what cost to their own personal integrity, careers and credibility.

The road to Damascus will indeed be crowded.