Global Warming Gurus Beat The Retreat - The Market Oracle

Politics / Environmental Issues Apr 24, 2012 - 10:42 AM

By: Andrew_McKillop

Once upon a time, about 2009, it was practically impossible to say you do not believe in so-called "anthropogenic" global warming, or any kind of global warming - and try getting a job in anything that smacks of carbon finance or renewable energy, let alone the upstream of energy policy.

At the time and due to a small band of supposed guru geniuses given instant access to all government-friendly media, backed by showmen allies like Al Gore, there was Only One Possible Theory. The nearest comparison is Trofim Lysenko's delirious genetic theories which Stalin liked and approved - and used as one more prop in his quest for permanent and total power. From 1964 however, Lysenko was dumped by the new Krushchev power elite, and his ridiculous theory went down the drain. Exactly the same is happening to global warming hysteria, today.

High ranking among the tireless egotripping peddlers of global warming theory, for profit, was the UK's own answer to Lysenko, James 'Gaia' Lovelock . Lovelock churned out a spate of increasingly hysterical pseudo-science books in the 2000-2009 Opportunity Window for selling the theory, getting hefty book sales and conference speaking pay for his New Age-flavored rambling.  Titles included “Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back â€" and How We Can Still Save Humanity,” and “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning - Enjoy It While You Can.”

Lovelock most certainly loved writing these books, or at least the kudos and cash they generated.

Gaia, for anybody with enough spare time to wade through Lovelock's ramblings was a Blue Goddess so all powerful she was unable to stop carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rising from 0.03% to 0.04%, leaving it to Jim Lovelock to tell us we are all doomed - and must build nuclear reactors like never before. At his well-paid conference gigs, Lovelock would occasionally wave a matchbox aloft, telling the agog peepul that a lifetime of using nuclear electricity would only produce that much high level waste. John Rich, director of the nuclear promoting and propaganda organization called the World Nuclear Association would regularly hand out copies of Lovelock's books at his own talks: without nuclear power, global warming catastrophe is certain and sure.  Beware of Doom !

TIMES CHANGE
Lovelock, despite his love for Gaia has to stay with the flow and sniff when the wind changes.  And from late 2009 onward things changed in a big way for peddlers of global warming doom - measured by what Al Gore can get paid for a 45-minute talk today, compared with the high times. Then, before the December 2009 Copenhagen climate "summit" or farce sealed the fate of global warming snakeoil, Al's Gulfstream was flying the planet for him to joyously tell us we are doomed, along with penguins and polar bears, if we dont use less oil or buy into the Climate Conscious hedge funds his friends run.

Today, Lovelock is backing out from his roustabout hysteria theory, mindful of how Gore and other peddlers of global warming such as Tim Flannery (“The Weather Makers”) are facing a massive fall in their earning power, as the public tires of their pat-theory that CO2 is doom. Lovelock, exactly like the UN IPCC group of supposed experts on climate change now says that verily, CO2 levels are still rising, but just as verily we don't get automatic and direct rises in temperature.

In his own words in an MSNBC.com interview of 23 April: 

"The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that  now". “The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books â€" mine included â€" because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,”, he added.

It didn't happen. The tinpot guru Lovelock was wrong.

The very same Lovelock, when riding high in the book sales charts and able to demand fat fees for a string of media interviews was mightily sure of himself. In 2006, in an article for the U.K.’s 'Independent' newspaper, he could spout: “Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

This particular one-liner, incredible as it can seem, was repeatedly used by John Rich of the WNA when touting nuclear power as the silver bullet for global warming - without explaining why a world which just lost "billions of people" would need so many clean, safe and cheap nuclear power plants built in countries soon to be submerged in a permanent tsunami of rising waters. No matter - what's logic got to do with it when big dosh contracts are in sight? Nuclear power has crashed even further in public acceptance and approval than global warming doom, since March 2011.

CLIMATES CHANGE
With no possible doubt the most damaging result of global warming charlatans and hucksters has been to make almost anybody, from politicians like Obama to your neighbor, think they believe that global warming is climate change. Ergo, if global warming is a fake - and it is - climate change doesn't exist.

We can now be almost sure the real danger of real climate change of the anthropogenic sort will be ignored and sidelined like it always has been. The global warming charlatans and their political, corporate and media friends are responsible for that. They are to blame.

This will be a lot more than just a pity. The fantastic media support and political attention that was hijacked and used for personal profit and egotripping by junk science promoters - the Global Warming Circus - will not be available for real climate change. What was just so easy to explain away as due to tailpipe emissions from the family four-wheel-drive, and the signal to speculate on green energy stocks and shares, is not so easy to explain in the real world - and even less easy to mitigate and solve.

The next stage is on us already. The breakdown of climate into random weather events, reversing the old one-liner that "Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get". No longer being able to expect anything predictable from climate only leaves weather to bet on. And we know how that is getting mightily unpredictable, and dangerous on all continents.

Anthropogenic climate change has a track record of at least 5000 years. Even small scale local landscape, soil and agriculture, port construction, deforestation and urban building changes did have climatic impacts, sometimes over surprisingly large areas given the world's minuscule population compared with today. The sideshow of global warming - well explained as a pure physics hoax by Nobel physicist Ivar Giaver (although Giaver made sure he didnt say that outright when he quit the American Physical Society in late 2011) - turns our attention away from real anthropogenic climate change that now extends across the entire planet.

Put another way, we can have a pure and absolute zero change of so-called "average global temperatures", but the world's climate can become totally disturbed, with no easy way to remediate or mitigate the change from predictable, to random. Ever-growing evidence says we are in that random state now: what you thought was your regional climate no longer exists.

One immediate and direct result of this will be crop yields and harvest totals: these cannot be expected to hold firm, as farmers battle to decide when or if to plant and when to harvest, in a vastly more complex set of changing variables - which formerly ran together and were called "climate". Rainfall and cloud cover, already changing but given the pat one-liner "Global warming", will most surely and certainly get ever less predictable, with more negative consequences than the opposite.

GOODBYE TO JUNK SCIENCE
With James Lovelock beating a retreat from the snakeoil theory he made so much kudos and money from, and used to fool so many people for so long, we could or might expect the Charlatan Crowd to show some modesty and contrition, but this is unlikely. It is as unlikely as expecting the world's climates to snap back without harm from the most massive-ever anthropogenic change they have suffered in all time.

Lovelock has moved on and up to geoengineering, in his quest to sell even more books and do more harm to the planet.

His new book is described as "looking at how humanity can regulate the Earth’s natural systems, performing a role similar to the harmonious one played by plants when they absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen". In other words beat the climate back into shape with ideas as primitive as those used by Soviet 'scientists' in the Lysenko era. At the time, cloud seeding with silver iodide was a new trick, spreading poisonous substances over wide areas while almost never 'regulating' the climate as hoped, but geoengineering gimmick notions have mightily advanced since that time.

Lovelock of course admires and defends geoengineering, the notion of total power that it mirrors before the greedy eyes of any immature child - who has already ruined one toy but must repeat. We can be sure Lovelock will produce new gimmick ideas, despite the failure of his global warming gimmick, but the Earth's natural systems do not need "regulating". They urgently and above all need to be understood and allowed to revert to stasis.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

© 2012 Copyright Andrew McKillop - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

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