The bubble of climate change group-think burst in a cooling world
John O’Sullivan
Recently, I’ve been reading up on “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” a highly-regarded history of popular folly by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841. His work can teach us a timely lesson in the current global warming controversy.
MacKay warns us of the pitfalls of group think using many notable historical examples when people,
“fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
The wise Scot goes on to cite many notable examples but one case struck me as I remembered it from my school days from the not so merry England of the 18th century. A total of 462 members of the House of Commons and 112 Peers signed up to the South Sea Company that persuaded vast swathes of the general public to also get sucked into one of the greatest financial scandals in history, the “South Sea Bubble“.
Even King George I and two of his mistresses, the Countess of Darlington and the Duchess of Kendal,got taken in and lost a fortune while countless citizens went bankrupt in the ill-founded venture. Thus we see how the “great and the good” can unwittingly lead us all into disaster.
Now welcome to the transmogrified world of our modern “bubble” where the “great and the good” have again apparently been undone by a group-think calamity over climate change in which our perceptions have starkly changed almost overnight. From being fearful of so called man made warming it seems the real danger is from cooling. It turns out that since January 2007, the world has cooled so rapidly that ALL the global warming over the past three decades has disappeared!
The cold facts are confirmed by a plot of actual global average temperatures from the best available source, weather satellite data that shows there has been NO net global warming since the satellites were first launched in 1979. Thus the argument that carbon dioxide emitted by western society that was thought to warm the atmosphere is doing no such thing. See larger image here.
Today’s bubble burst when the Climategate revelations exposed a government-funded clique of scientists as utter polemicists, sophists and necromancers. Leaked emails from this scandal show scientists puzzled by highly-compelling temperature data proving the world is more likely to now be cooling rather than warming contrary to scientific expectations. Rather than make this finding public it was hushed up – until now. We are thus confronted by confusion in a backdrop of the worst economic recession for 60 years and where tax a weary public have grown thoroughly sick of being nagged by nanny governments to cut our carbon footprint.
The facts expose the pointlessness of expending any more hot air over what an increasing number of commentators are calling a non-problem since Britain’s most eminent government climate scientist, Professor Phil Jones admitted the planet has seen no statistically significant warming for over 15 years! Just as in the days of King George I, we see the hubris of “experts” and politicians leaving behind them a profligate money trail exposing their gullibility to the dangers and the myth of consensus- it was all just a climate chimera.
Independent analysis of real world data are now urging us to re-think once more the threat of cooling as we are in the midst of a cooling period to match the one we saw from 1940-75, as reported in Readers’ Digest (March 1977) “What’s Happening To Our Climate?” and when scientists in Newsweek, April 28 1975 (p 64) warned us of “The Cooling World“.
But far more weight should be given to the CIA report that proved government concern over global cooling in the 1970’s and the impact on world politics.
Amongst the host of references is Hubert Lamb – the first Director of CRU- Lamb writes in his many books of the climatic downturns which started sometime around 1960. So this brings us back neatly to the words of Charles Mackay and the example of the “South Sea Bubble” scandal that taught us:
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Let there be no doubt, the next new paradigm may well be that the warming blip from 1975-1995 that global warmists get so hot about may be seen to be an anomaly in the global cooling that can be said to have affected the planet since the Medieval Warm Period ended in the 1300’s.
This is a most credible hypothesis being that we are due to return to an ice age anyway.
But the biggest paradigm shift now taking place is the abandonment of the hypothesis that CO2 was a significant driver of planetary warming. The facts prove that the Earth’s temperature record shows global cooling from ~1940 to ~1979 and this coupled with recent sharp cooling proves that overall, there has been no net warming since ~1940, in spite of an ~800% increase in human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). Thus the correlation between temperature rises and CO2 is bust so that the recent warming trend was probably entirely natural. Therefore, the CO2 bubble has now popped!
John O’Sullivan is a legal advocate and writer who for several years has litigated in government corruption and conspiracy cases in both the US and Britain. Visit his website. He offers his commentary for free and is not funded by any third party. Any opinions he expresses are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the site owner.
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Source: http://algorelied.com/?p=3925
