Global warming? More inconvenient baloney – Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun

According to MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, “Journalists who have access to highly placed government and corporate sources have to keep them on their side by not reporting anything adverse about them or their organizations. Unofficial information, or leaks, give the impression of investigative journalism, but are often strategic maneuvers on the part of those with position or power.”

The good professor has listed ten strategies by which the public is manipulated: Number One is “Distraction.” Number Two is “Create problems, then offer solutions.” We needn’t go down the list. Another MIT Professor, Jonathan Gruber, the primary author of Obamacare, has made strategy unnecessary since after all, he says, “Americans are stupid.” Nobody really needs a Chomskian strategy to manipulate stupid people.

We can therefore relax and get a laugh out of the way the Global Warming Investors (GWI) are now ballyhooing hot bad weather while trying to divert attention from Arctic assaults upon the climate of much of the U.S.

In September 2013, after the GWI had predicted that there would be a very active hurricane season in which between 7 and 11 major hurricanes would hit the U.S., Time Magazine noted that as of September 10th, the midpoint of the most dangerous part of the hurricane season, not a single hurricane had been recorded. This sluggish hurricane season paralleled 2012. In fact, not a Category 3 or 4 or 5 hurricane had hit the U.S. since 2005’s Wilma.

This anemic hurricane season left us hanging out to dry after being drenched by An Inconvenient Truth‘s intimation that the East and Gulf coasts were going to be the stuff of horror flicks.

What did we hear from the GWI’s Public Relations’ flack? A focus on Hurricane Sandy (the wide but relatively slow wind Category 2 Hurricane (when it finally hit the Jersey coast) that struck a very expensive area. Within a matter of a few days every GWI group got the same PR release and ran with it:

-Climate Central

How Global Warming Made Hurricane Sandy Worse

-The Scientific American

Did Climate Change Cause Hurricane Sandy?

-NOVA

Climate Change and Sandy

-The New York Times

Did Global Warming Contribute to Hurricane Sandy’s Devastation?

–Climateprogress

Superstorm Sandy’s Link To Climate Change: ‘The Case Has Strengthened’ Says Researcher

– The Week

Energy Department: Global warming made Hurricane Sandy worse

–Bloomberg Business (on Sandy)

It’s Global Warming, Stupid

Google lists pages of links to the articles of various publications that had read the same PR release and got in step to “distract” us from understanding that the storm’s target happened to be dollar-for-dollar the most expensive neighborhood in the U.S. Manhattan Island’s subway system was flooded. Beachfront property in Jersey was demolished. Had Sandy hit elsewhere, it wouldn’t have gotten noticed.

But Uh, oh… When the northern half of the U.S. was inundated with snow and struggled with sub-zero temperatures, and Boston was establishing a new record for snowfall, what did the Global Warming Investors do to protect their jobs, grants, and portfolios? They diverted our attention to the opposite side of the country. Here are a few of dozens of entries as they appeared in Google (from various publications) while 2 meters of snow were still falling and crippling Boston and dozens of other cities. (All of these articles were dated between February 12 and February 16, 2014 at the height of New England’s disastrous snowfall.)

-Climate Central

Climate Change Ups Odds of a Southwest Megadrought

–Los Angeles Times

Chance of ‘megadrought’ in U.S. Southwest now 50%, study concludes

–Livescience

Worst Megadroughts in 1,000 Years Threaten US

–Nature

Mega-drought threat to US Southwest

–National Geographic

Worst Drought in 1,000 Years Predicted for American West

–Modern Farmer

Scientists: The American Southwest Faces a “Megadrought”

–Nation

‘Megadrought’ forecast for Southwest, plains

On and on these takes on the identical PR release continue. Megadrought! Megadrought! Well! We’ve got more important problems to attend to than some lousy snow in Boston! But Wait! When is this Megadrought going to occur?

In the smaller print we read “in the second half of this century.”

So anyone who is alive between 2050 and 2100 should not invest in the Southwest or, as the GWI maps indicate, Mexico and the Great Basin states. Furthermore, as one of the articles reveals at its conclusion, people should not “lease” solar energy devices. No, they should purchase them outright. (This is another way of saying that we have enough Chinese products inside the house… let’s put some on the roof.)

As the snow continued to fall in Boston and Saint Patrick’s Day approached, the Global Warming Investors’ PR diversionary release came out and all the Global Warming media got their headlines in line:

–The Washington Post

Officials blame climate change as Vanuatu picks up the pieces after ‘monster’ storm

–Radiofree.org

Vanuatu Blames Global Warming as Cyclone Causes Nation’s Worst Climate Disaster in Recent Memory

–Stopglobalwarming.org

Did climate change cause Vanuatu damage?

It goes on and on as dozens of Global Warming Investor sycophants rant until… Vanuatu?… Where the hell is Vanuatu? We had to be shown maps. Now, no one wants to downplay the island’s misery, but with so much of the U.S. struggling with the effects of bitter cold, it was startling to see so many publications offer up Vanuatu’s problems obviously to divert our attention from that cold white stuff that was blanketing half the country. Roofs were collapsing in Boston under the weight of unprecedented amounts of snow… and we are given PR releases about Vanuatu?

With all the scientific publications tweaking the same PR release, few unbiased scientists could shake off their dejection over all that unrelenting “sucker born every minute” hype and tell us what we really needed to know about climate change. To the average person, the fact that the earth’s surface is mostly water makes it seem sort of reasonable to assume that an increase in temperature should cause more water to evaporate and form clouds which will release water as rain and snow. What we do not know – and would like to be given some non-compromised information about – is how and where this water would likely fall. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about what the universal average temperature will be. What we all want to know is how will any of this affect our town, our area of the country? Is there no one at MIT who can understand that the collapse of the Larsen B ice sheet is fascinating and, no doubt, very very important, but what is more important to the people who pay the taxes that help fund MIT is the danger of floods and the weight of the snow on the roof under which their children are sleeping. Will somebody please tell us if those devastating polar vortices are related to increases in greenhouse gases?

Megadroughts? So far none of the Global Warmers has accurately predicted what the weather will be next season let alone seventy-five years from now.

Two issues need to be explored. The financial debacle regarding Title XVII – “Incentives for innovative technologies” – the government’s program of lending millions to any company that had a product they claimed would contribute to the solution of the Global Warming “crisis;” and the truth about changes in weather that present conditions can cause. Maybe there could even be a couple of dollars set aside for a chemist and/or engineer who could figure out how efficiently to remove salt from ocean water.

Five years ago we expressed a need for some down-to-earth explanations from the scientific community. (Global Warming, Al Gore, And Sycophant Science : http://www.zatma.org/Dharma/zbohy/Literature/essays/mzs/01102010.html

Nothing much has happened except the rash of bankruptcies of Anti-Global Warming companies. See below)

Perhaps people in the northern latitudes who are suffering under the burden of heating costs should be given a break in their heating bills or in weatherizing their homes – if only to keep them from migrating to the Southwest where they will be baked to death from the Megadroughts. Likewise, people who live in coastal areas might be given a break in order to make their homes better able to withstand hurricanes. (I recall that in Hurricane Andrew huge areas of new homes were wiped away while the few “Habitat for Humanity” houses (that were built precisely to code) rode the storm out. As I recall, they looked a little embarrassed standing there while every building for miles around was so much rubble (and the cause for quick bankruptcies by the builders.) Says the LA Times of September 9, 1992 “Although thousands of homes in South Florida were obliterated or damaged beyond repair by Hurricane Andrew, 27 units built in Dade County by the volunteer group Habitat for Humanity withstood the brunt of the storm.”

Dozens of charitable foundations rake in millions to educate folks about the evils of global warming and the need to purchase the products of companies in which they have personally invested and which obviously haven’t sold too well. The tax free income they generate vanishes into private coffers and into a public relations’ campaign that exaggerates what they perceive as favorable news and diminishes the effects of unfavorable news – illustrating what Professor Chomsky itemized as strategies for such entities: Distract; and Create the problem that you offer to solve.

Here is The Daily Signal’s October 18, 2012 list of energy failures compiled by Schow and Sandoval. (It’s impossible to find a more up to date list.) The amounts are taxpayers’ dollars that went down the drain along with many good ideas.

Evergreen Solar ($25 million)
SpectraWatt ($500,000)
Solyndra ($535 million)
Beacon Power ($43 million)
Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
SunPower ($1.2 billion)
First Solar ($1.46 billion)
Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
Amonix ($5.9 million)
Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
Abound Solar ($400 million)*
A123 Systems ($279 million)*
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
Johnson Controls ($299 million)
Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
ECOtality ($126.2 million)
Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
Olsen’s Crop Serv.and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Co. ($10 million)*
Range Fuels ($80 million)*
Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
GreenVolts ($500,000)
Vestas ($50 million)
LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
Navistar ($39 million)
Satcon ($3 million)*
Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)

*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy as of October, 2012.The 2009 stimulus set aside $80 billion to subsidize politically preferred energy projects. Since that time, 1,900 investigations have been opened to look into stimulus waste, fraud, and abuse (although not all are linked to the green-energy funds), and nearly 600 convictions have been made. Of that $80 billion in clean energy loans, grants, and tax credits, at least 10 percent has gone to companies that have since either gone bankrupt or are circling the drain.The conservative approach would have allowed the common sense of Green Energy to mature in the free market. Yes, there would have been government loans and grants – but in a smaller, slower, more considered process.

An Inconvenient Truth hysteria no longer allowed the free market to proceed naturally with the commerce of products. Every idea was suddenly a finished product. The government was no longer the handmaiden of industry, it was its banker and, as such, became invested in its success, its Public Relations’ agent. A good idea was never allowed to grow naturally with the trial and error of personnel, material, and methods. Instead, millions were diverted to young companies that suddenly were burdened with the weight of inexperienced administrators, bureaucrats, politicians, stockholders, community leaders, and competitors – both foreign and domestic – that often sought to appropriate intellectual property, key employees, and government connections.

Why couldn’t we see the subtle differences between slick operators chanting “Global Warming” and the honest scientists who were trying to develop Green Energy? (and maybe even do that salt-from-sea-water extraction.)

And finally, was it really necessary for Apple’s Tim Cook to show how completely insensitive and arrogant he is when he suggested that people who didn’t accept his views on Global Warming should sell their Apple stock? His words lived on to mock the millions of American fathers who didn’t own stock in Apple and who were biting their knuckles trying to figure out how to pay the heating bills they incurred just to get their families through endless nights of sub-zero temperatures… especially when they couldn’t go to work because so bloody much snow had blocked their front doors and streets.