Global Warming Skepticism: the final Phase of the American Revolution
Recently I spoke at the Freedom Force Conference in Phoenix on Climate Change. The person who made the connection between climate and freedom clearly and concisely was former Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus.
He was the keynote speaker at the first Heartland Climate Conference in New York. His opening comment “We have just gone through 70 years of communism, why the hell would you want to go back to that?” brought a standing ovation. He summarized his views in a brief book with the pointed title “Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom.”
Forget about politics for a moment and consider that the recent US election was the final phase of the American Revolution. Web sites, like WUWT, were a major part of this event as I will explain.
The deliberately created illusion was that “American exceptionalism” meant Americans thought they were superior to everyone. I hear it all the time in Canada, from family and friends in the UK, and during my recent trip to Australia. The term applies properly and only to the unique political system created by the US Founding Fathers.
In very simple terms, the first two legs were free speech and private ownership of land. They do not exist in any other country and are under attack in the US because they are essential to freedom, free will, and an environment for every individual to maximize their potential. This was my philosophy in the classroom: provide an environment in which every student could achieve their potential. Of course, like life, many would not avail themselves of the opportunity, but at least they had the chance.
People claim the Magna Carta was about private ownership of land. That is nonsense. It was known at the time as the “Articles of the Barons” because it represented the anger of the great aristocratic feudal landowners against the monarch. It was akin to the modern aristocratic landowners as members of the House of Lords telling the Queen that they want better treatment. It did absolutely nothing for the serfs, tenanted slaves, back on their estate, and it wasn’t to do anything until the American Revolution. Even then it didn’t do anything in Britain.
My brother went to agricultural college and specialized in sheep husbandry. He became the chief shepherd on an estate in which a Lord owned five farms and the local village. As recently as the 1960s when the Rolls Royce went through the village the older women curtseyed, and the men doffed their hats. Unable to carry out a popular revolution in Britain, the people led by the Founding Fathers seized the opportunity in America and for the first time secured free speech and ownership of land for the individual. However, that left one important leg of the triumvirate of true freedom outside the control of the individual.
Up until recently, whenever a revolution occurred the first imperative was to seize the radio and TV stations. To maintain a dictatorship, it is essential to control the mainstream media is critical. This implies that the mainstream media is a free agency that challenges and holds the people in power to account. This is another illusion. The mainstream media have always been the voice of the power elite. Consider William Cowper’s 1782 poem “Progress of Error” that I published earlier.
How shall I speak of thee or thy power address,
Thou God of our idolatry, the Press?
By thee, religion, liberty and laws
Exert their influence and advance their cause;
By thee worse plagues than Pharaoh’s land befell,
Diffused, make earth the vestibule of Hell;
Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise;
Thou ever-bubbling spring of endless lies;
Like Eden’s dead probationary tree,
Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.
All this changed with Brexit and the American election. For the first time in history, most of the people had access and input to a vast pool of information. The power elite lost control of information that allowed them to manipulate the system and the people. This occurred despite the bias and efforts of the mainstream media to direct and control the outcome of the Brexit and US election votes for the political power elites. It was the final stage of the Revolution. The people bypassed the mainstream media and accessed information from the Internet via blog sites and social media. We must block any attempt to limit and control the Internet, the voice of the people.
The battle over dissemination and access to climate information was central to defeating the control established by Maurice Strong through the United Nations Environment Program (Figure 1).
Figure 1
Limited Access and Input Before the Internet.
The leaked emails are a litany of attempts to control the message. The only access the public or climate skeptics had to the media was through letters to the editor and in most cases, they were controlled to present only the ‘official’ science. I learned early being as skeptical of the consensus about global cooling continuing in the 1970s as I was of the warming continuing in the 1980s. Very few climate journals existed, and neither Nature nor Science published much on weather or climate at the time. After that had changed in the late 1980s and the political misuse of global warming began, they were coopted into the global warming deception and only published supportive material. One journal that broke the trend was Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) and as I wrote in an earlier WUWT comment,
I remember when Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) first started publishing papers related to climate. It was the among the first to address the cross-disciplinary nature of climatology, which previously was restricted to just a few climate and meteorological journals.
This is likely part of the reason why the CRU gang later worked to get the GRL editor James Saiers fired.
I also wrote;
The behaviour of journals and especially their editors has been a disgraceful episode in their lack of objectivity essential to good science. There are a variety of causes not least the taking over of journals by publishers. Profit became the driving force and sensational papers producing the prevailing political wisdom the hallmark for high sales. Of course, there was also the realization that control of editors was essential if you wanted to control the scientific method – something the CRU people did with frightening efficiency and effect. They also realized that even being editors themselves gave inordinate control. They could hide behind the secrecy of not disclosing reviewers to peer-review each other’s work. Donna Laframboise, author of two books on the corruption of the IPCC apparently identified this problem for the Journal of Climate.
All that changed with the advent of the Internet. Although it took a semblance of the current form in the 1980s, the Internet became global in the 1990s as it shifted from a government and academically controlled system to a global commercial operation. A major key to the success was that
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name system (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.
I realize this is a Wikipedia quote, but it is a reasonable summary that conveys the point that the Internet was operating outside of government. Marshall McLuhan’s global villagewas realized through the electronic village of the Internet. The power of the Internet and thereby its threat to the power elite who want total government control.
The mainstream media and their political masters were end run by the people ignoring them and seeking facts evidence and information from fellow citizens. Internet success and power were confirmed when the power elite and media tried to participate by creating websites. A classic example of the power of climate blog sites like WUWT on the deception propagated by the people at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU was creation of RealClimate. Here is a portion of a quote from what went on as reported by Bishop Hill.
Many thanks for your very helpful comments. Essentially I agree on all counts, and indeed the “sceptics ask, scientists answer” web-page that you have set up is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind as a possible minimal response that we (Tyndall et al, and even maybe the Royal Society if it wants to get involved) might undrertake (sic). Wherever possible this could/should refer to other reputable sites (incl IPCC, Hadley Centre, the ones you mention, etc etc) rather than duplicating the material. I would envisage that such a site could be maintained by a consortium of the willing, in this case involving (say) Tyndall, Hadley & PIK. We could then asked the RS (et al) to mention it and link to it on some sort of “sound science” page on their own web-site(s) (Rachel, do you think that this might fly ?).
Notice the use of traditional centers of the power elite namely the Royal Society who in turn orchestrated similar propaganda through science societies in other nations. Realclimate and others tried but failed to stop the explosion of information accessible to people. A citizen’s army of people grasped the opportunities for input and power. The battle was enjoined by passage of Freedom of Information legislation that triggered various blocking attempts. Most notorious of these were cataloged in a notorious email.
At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:
Mike, I presume congratulations are in order – so congrats etc !
Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it!
Exposure of the global warming deception was one manifestation of the final phase of the American Revolution. For the first time in history, the people had access to and control of information. The battle to control information, as with all gains of the Revolution, will continue. However, as John Adams warned,
“I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.”
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