Beltway higher food price DENIERS face angry housewives : Tumbrils to follow

Can you see global warming and global climate change with your own naked eyeballs ?

Most of us can't.

 Oh yes, we can sometimes see with our own eyes some short term extreme weather events in our own local community.

The databases don't lie : its global warming

But ultimately we rely upon the public databases of thousands of observers all over the world and going back 50 years or longer which clearly show the overall global trend, as the reason we believe in global warming.

However when the global impact of extreme weather events all over the world (droughts AND floods) affect the food prices at our local supermarket, we can definitely see and experience global warming as manifest in rising food prices.

My advice to the libertarian think tank bureaucrats - every last one a man ( its the law) :

 Continue to deny climate change at your peril to your necks.

(Cue: roll 'em tumbrils !)

Ignoring rising food prices kills more males than drinking or driving : angry housewife alert !

I was door-to-door campaigning in the UK (Wandsworth) in the early Spring of 1970.

I heard lots and lots and lots of housewives, all strong Labor supporters, moaning about rising food prices.

 But I totally failed to read the signals correctly.

I was a male - and I wasn't alone in my failure.

A few months later, in June , those same Labor housewives rebelled - failed to vote or voted Tory.

 Wilson's 100% certain re-election prospects were instantly deader than dead.

If only he had listened to his wife, instead of  the think tankers of his day......

new HORROR : Rip Van Winkle awakes and PASSES 2012 high school science exam with flying colours

Rip Van Winkle awakes from long sleep and wins big science scholarship to famous university

There is absolutely nothing in most 21st century high school physical science courses that the average smart lad or gal from the Victorian Era couldn't pass with flying colours.

And that curriculum is killing our planet.

One hundred and twenty five years of science - all the new science discoveries since the 1890s - the science we need to save this planet - has been deliberately ignored in the world of popular education.

 And need I add that most of the science done in the millions of years of human existence has been done very very recently, ie in those last 125 years ?

Unbelievably but true that most of humanity's body of science is not taught - by deliberate design - to most high school and even most university students.

Instead they learn the science of George Babbitt and the science known by the man who knew Coolidge, the science of mid-west Lions and Rotary Clubs, the science of small town boosters in loud checkered suits : the science of the Holy Anglo Saxon Trinity of Newton , Dalton and Darwin.

It is the self confident, arrogant,  science of Babbittry and it is killing this planet ; the science that fuels the certitudes and hubris of the climate deniers and of the vast majority of ordinary people wavering in the middle of that debate.

I - jokingly - argue sometimes we need to do an Admiral Byng every now and then : pick one or two high school science teachers, high school principals and school board curriculum directors at random and put them before a firing squad " pour encourager les autres".

It basically boils down to this ; how do you set and mark an exam question on determining the position and speed of a quantum particle ?

Public - compulsory - Education was birthed in the high Victorian Era and was deliberately designed to convince the doubting working class that Reality was an easily controlled and manipulative object for the greater profit of Man.

Education deliberately designed ideologically, from the ground up, to teach certitudes, not "Indeterminacy".

But un-certitude-ism is the real grain of reality - never more so than in the area of weather and climate.

The best that our best scientists can currently say is that  Airliner Earth has a 60% chance of crashing and burning fatally , if we don't quickly reduce the carbon pollution we pour into the skies.

That is not 19th century science's 100% certainty certitudes of the  libertarian bureaucrat think tank deniers - but it is real science, the science of today.

More to the point, would you not avoid flying a airline company that said its planes crash and burn 60% of the time, every time they take off?

Indeterminacy as the fundamental core of reality needs to be taught not just to bright-eyed 15 year olds : we senior citizens need to learn it too and apply it to our lives.

If only for the sake of the future lives of those bright-eyed 15 year olds.....

grampa's SUNNY science vs today's GRIM realities

Grampa's science is still judged only one safe enough for kids

If you want to build the world's longest, straightest, airport runway all you need to succeed , on time and under budget, is still just GRAMPA's SCIENCE.

The science from back before the 1890s , the kind of science 21st century high school administrators still think is the only one safe enough to teach children.

Good old, solid, commonsensical, white protestant ANGLO SAXON science : the Holy Trinity of Newton, Dalton and Darwin.

Science when Science, by God ! , was like a religion, a faith.

A positive, outwardly-looking, optimist, can-do, religious fervour, type of science.

Science so intuitive and commonsensical you almost didn't need some fancy-assed professor to teach it , merely have a fellow from your own church, with a BSc and a great game of golf .

Someone who could confirm your childhood scientific insights for you.

None of that dour, new-fangled, complicated, so called "jew boy" science.

The science so tough that high school principals think it should only be used by adults : science rated PG-18.

That counter-intutitive science of relativity cum quantum physics, green chemistry and horizontal gene transfer oriented biology.

Yep, science like grampa's can still build great runways.

But - if you let it build your GPS for you --- by using good old newton's laws --- your airplane would crash and burn about 15 yards beyond the runway.

New science does many things much more accurately than the old science of 150 or more years back.

That is only natural : we don't much use horse and buggies to get people to emergency departments anymore : we use helicopters.

Today we face new - unparalleled - problems, a whole new reality and we must use the newest and the best science to help prevent the airliner Earth from crashing and burning 15 yards beyond the runway.

Grampa's science is simple enough for kids - yes , it truly is simple.

Libertarian bureaucrats in advocacy think tanks, the ones that are "skeptic"   big deniers of climate change, are along with high school principals, among the world's most strident believers in the comfortable old simple science from back before the 1890s and the "Great Schism in Science".

Bu, unfortunately, our problems today are complicated and like it or not, we need complicated science to help solve them.

Child-like problems (designing yet another routine runway) only require the sweet, gentle medicine intended for children.

But grown-up sized problems requires grown-up science, bitter-tasting as that might be .....

Erroneous common sense vs nonsensical Reality : Sciences, solid vs quantum

quantum-modernity

Modernists such as think tank climate deniers pride themselves on their side's "solid science" , their "common sense" science developed from that reliably Anglo Saxon trio of Newton, Dalton & Darwin .

They dismiss the other side's (quantum-based) science as "nonsensical".

On both counts they are correct but unfortunately, also in error.

(Rather like a quantum particle which can be shown by experiment to be in two places at once and also both a particle and a wave.)

Nineteen Century science - the only sort of science that 21st century university undergraduates and high school seniors are ever taught, is indeed solid and commonsensical.

Unfortunately, starting in the 1890s it was also shown to be fundamentally wrong (more accurately : wrong at fundamental scales) and only apparently semi-accurate over a limited (but very common) scale of activities.

Up until about 1947, nothing we had ever built in the Age of Modernity (except perhaps natural penicillin antibiotics) reflected the new quantum sciences of physics,chemistry and biology.

Not even the A-Bomb.

But starting with transistors and other semi conductors, almost everything truly major invented since then has been only possible by understanding and accepting quantum science's take on reality.

We can still safely build huge bridges and dams using only old Newton's rules, but I won't want to land a plane using a GPS system built by Newtonian Science : crash ,boom, dead !

What we take to be solid actually isn't fundamentally solid - not from those little hard elastic balls we thought were atoms, right down to the smallest possible sub atomic building block, sorry random vacuum energy flux.

And a great deal of quantum science is indeed non-intutitive and nonsensical but the measurements do not lie ; to parts per million they are real, they are reality.

Our sense impressions are at fault : not Reality.

By contrast much of Newton's & Maxwell's most fundamental laws fail embarrassingly at crucial points.

Nineteenth century science convinced engineers, at least, that feathers fell as fast as lead ball (in a vacuum) and that the sun's gravity "force" affected the earth via "spooky action at a distance" : neither ideas seem on the surface to be commonsensical.

But they were (and are) wildly popular notions among modernists and deniers despite all that.

Why ?

I would argue this is because Nineteenth Century Science promised us that while our macro (Man-sized) world of volcano and weather sized objects and events seemed complex, dynamic and uncertain, it reassured us that underneath - at the most fundamental level - Reality was actually solid, simple, certain, regular.

 Fundamentally Reality was knowable, controllable and manipulatable by Man.

A libertarian capitalist or socialist's dream : in Isaiah Berlin's formulation : Liberty for Man and Slavery for Atoms.

What quantum science revealed was exactly the reverse: a man sized rock was solid - particularly if your car hit it - but neither its fundamental atoms or their tinier components were solid - really just flickering bits of energy : altogether the wrong sort of eternally shifting sand to set the foundations of an ideology of certitudes upon.

Quantum science and Solid science of modernity / libertarianism / climate denial are fundamentally opposed - only one can be true.

No science experiment - even at the high school level - shows that solid science beats quantum science ; always solid science is a subset of quantum science, a useful subset that sometimes works - and then embarrassingly - sometimes does not.

But quantum science's revealing of the reality at its most fundamental has split over into post-modernity ; in fact helped create it and sustain it.

Post-modernity is quantum-modernity ......

Russian oil barons: Commie Red on the outside, Republican Red on the inside

The Red-Red Terror

Russian oil barons, secretly denying climate change because it threatens their profits are only Commie Red on the outside --- inside they are as Republican Red as any mid-western state GOP lifer.

Ironic isn't it that those former supposed enemies-to-the-death, the American libertarian think tank bureaucrats and the Communist oil barons of Russia, are actually more united than anyone else in world in denying the reality of climate change ?

"Reds always stick together", my mom said whenever she sorted clothes for the wash - how right you are Mom !

As a teenager in the late 1940s, Mom had had friends among America's super rich auto barons in Detroit's suburbs AND spent a terrible six months in Budapest at the height of that country's Stalinist state of terror : so she knew red staters of both varieties.

She never liked either of them and always lived by the principle that 'there are no pockets on a shroud' .....

denier think tank BUREAUCRATS & billionaires: who is the con artist and who 'the mark' ?

billionaires bribing think tank bureaucrats or tanker bureaucrats scamming billionaires ?

Most denier fighters hint (libel alert) that it is billionaires that have led the battle over climate denial .

Via their family foundations or the big corporations they control, these rich guys have supposedly discreetly 'bribed' libertarian advocacy think tank bureaucrats to work up credible denial efforts.

All to combat current attacks by government and environmentalists on the products that have made these billionaires wealthy.

Denier-fighters hint at this process by (A) noting that this think tank did a one time major denial effort on tobacco in 2003. And (B) one or two paragraphs later, when they drily note the only year this think tank got money from Big Tobacco was...... 2003.

You are led to - sorry left to - draw the conclusion that Big Tobacco was the instigator in this process .

And that supposedly the process works in the exact same way, in the current case of climate denial and the hydrocarbon producing or using industries.

But how true is this narrative ?

Students of how lobbyists work or how election fund-raising works are not so naive.

When the senior majority or minority member on an American House committee faces a fierce, expensive, primary or re-election fight, they often do "The Abramoff Manoeuvre" .

The politician suddenly lets (or encourage others to let) dozens of intrusive new regulations become attached to a bill affecting, let's say the potato farmers in Idaho.

Working closely - and profitably - with a lobbyist for the potato farmers of that state, he and the lobbyist convince enough gullible farmers that these regulatory threats are real, real enough to spend some very heavy money to squash them before they get to the formal vote.

The lobbyists tells the farmers , 2000 long kms away from the Beltway, that "old Joe is right dead set on seeing these regulations pass - but you may have heard he is in a bad battle to win his primary, back in New Jersey."

" I just bet X dollars for his campaign might move him our way - and he is the lead minority congressman on this issue you know..."

Old Joe gets his money, the regulations disappear and the potato lobbyist gets his percent of the money flowing from Idaho to New Jersey.

Its a win:win scam !!

Think tank bureaucrats of the cold war advocacy variety are pros at this sort of game: ever seeing new reds under new beds to scare gullible paranoid billionaires ---- or today, ever seeing new greens under new protest banners.

Let me hint , just as the other denier fighters have.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall slash Commie scam was over - so over.

Now most cold war advocacy think tank bureaucrats had to unexpectedly find new money cows to feed their salaries, expense accounts (don't get me started !) and fat pensions.

Suddenly climate change, a science news story about thirty years old by that point, became an overnight global threat to every free market company .. that had lots of money.

Ending the cold war was supposed to provide a peace bonus to many different people ---- firms might take the money that they had wasted for 40 years donating to cold war think tank bureaucrats and put it into something truly useful for them and society ------ like R & D.

But no --- a new, worser , terror lay on the horizon : the Green Terror.

"I'm a telling ya : way worse than the Red Terror : cause at least the commies also had their smoke polluting power plants, just like us free marketeers, but these greenies are truly scary - they got horns !"

"Thanky  , thanky  ,thanky  : you just keep 'em silver dollars coming in, and God Bless your continuing Prayers for our Holy Crusade."

Fundamentalist tele-evangelicals, politicians seeking re-election, think tank bureaucrats or 'discreet' lobbyists : they all have the same quasi-religious spiel .

That's why I say we are looking at gullible billionaires and cynical think tank bureaucrats milking them for all they are worth --- NOT the other way around.....

denier THINK TANKS face specter of "The Dirty Teens" & the neo Dust Bowl

Deniers face a drought of new lies to combat the dry truth

Libertarian think tanks have cancelled all leave and put all hands on deck to fight off the worse specter the DENIER INDUSTRY  ("Doubt is Good - good for our paycheques anyway") has yet had to face.

The Denier heartland, now as it was from September 1939 to December 1941, is the American Mid-West.

And the Mid-West is on fire, facing the biggest, deepest drought since "The Dirty Thirties" and the Dust Bowl.

Denier supporters are starting to wonder, sotto voce, whether there really is something to this Global Warming that all their secular church fathers warned them against.

Inside the Beltway, inside Whitehall, inside the Triangle, even way up on the Hill, the tankers are trying to spin doctor their oleaginous way out of this climatic bind.

I can imagine that Bell's long distance revenue plunge will reverse itself this quarter as Canberra, Washington, London and Ottawa denier spinners try to come up with common alibis when the voters come around.

Big Oil's profits soar with the temperature, because AC use way up in sweltering drought - let them fund the new denier lies

 Big Oil is making bigger than expected profits as more petro  is used to create the Air Conditioning cool (and more CO2) to beat this "not-global-warming"-warming -trend.

 Maybe they can cough up a few readies to combat this summer of
of 2012 threat to the Denier "endless summer sinecure" for so many second rate scientists, academics and journalist hacks....

dear think tanks : I will DENY Higgs Particle for cash - no marked bills please ....

Political science BAs are like old school nuclear physicists , we think we can talk about everything like an expert

Why not ?

If Marc Morano is qualified to be an expert on climate change, than so am I on the Higgs particle.

Like Marc, I have a BA in political science, hold strong opinions and am at times very partisan.

On the other side, it too is a similar story : teams made up of thousands of scientists at universities and institutions all over the world have laboured for decades before coming up with a a cautious scientific consensus.

(A) Humans are causing the atmosphere to heat up  (B) we have located evidence that the predicted Higgs particle exists, to Sigma 5 level of probability.

So on one side, high level tenure & repeated high level peer-review has qualified about one earthling in a million to truly be regarded as experts on a technical scientific matter.

These 7,000 experts have divided themselves into two big world-wide groups to look for the Higgs by two totally different methods and each big group has now separately decided, by general consensus, that the Higgs does exist.

One the other side, amateurs in the academic world's second oldest profession : not pros but game - on the game in fact.

Now all we need is a pimp and a john.

Strident advocacy think tanks die without constant infusions of hot cash --- they'll know who has some readies available.

Maybe Big Asbestos - they under the gun lately - seems at least 100,000 people die annually thanks to this killer mineral.

But how would proof of the existence of the Higgs particle damage the libertarian-capitalist world view enough to waste money refuting it ?

SOLID science is threatened, like never before, by Higgs

Well, I guess I would begin - strictly as a Devil's Advocate - to argue that what all of the various denier efforts have really been fighting is the notion that erroneous common sense (solid) science has been losing a century long battle with nonsensical but accurate quantum science.

The Higgs particle is the missing keystone to the Standard Model of how ultimate fundamental reality actually works.

How it works is in a manner totally in conflict with the 19th century commonsense positivist science that all deniers and corporate CEOs expouse.

Basically what we take to be a solid reality, based on a solid science, turns out to be neither.

Solidity is a vivid illusion - but illusion nevertheless.

But who can blame the deniers & CEOs - it is what they were taught and what 21st high school teachers still teach kids, (in part, because it is easy to teach and easy to write exams for) .

Solid - Newtonian - science is a BLACK BOX - it gets more less accurate results at a certain limited but common scale of events, but it is not a true explanation of the world.

But it is this old fashioned newtonian and daltonian and darwinian science that we spoon-fed high school and yes university kids with.

Rather than teach their trusting charges science that is difficult and unsettling but also happens to be true : quantum physics, quantum chemistry and yes, quantum biology.

By no coincidence, High School teachers teach this crap because because politicians in school boards and departments of education force them to.

Politicians and their corporate handlers sense that if quantum science was taught to all of the population, in a lay manner, it would unsettle the current human belief that we are the only smart and rational beings in a stupid but stable and simple world.

This belief is what lies behind libertarian skygod-ism and the denial of human climate pollution.

Attack Higgs, you attack the quantum theory and thus you attack the quantum (earthling) way of looking at the world.

So gentlemen, when do I get my money ......

Area 51 Alert : 97% of ice MELTING ; 97% of scientists VOTE agreement

the 97 % solution ....

It was like something out of Roswell New Mexico's Area 51.

 Or  A. "nasty" Abbott's worst nightmare.

An unlikely but true coincidence ----- or is it, boys and girls ?

Space photos showing 97 % of Greenland's ice cap melting at the same time that 97 % of the world's climate scientists have voted that the whole Earth is getting hot.

97 Percent - wow !

Like that is three times the vote that Stephen Harper got when he was elected absolute - majority government - dictator of Canada for 5 years to life, with time off to Canadians for good behavior.

But is just 97% of the votes of the climate scientist electorate enough to push ahead on bold new changes on how we run our national governments ?

The 37% solution

No, of course not, for that you need a, er, much lower vote - like 37%.

Like the sort of vote that Nasty Abbott or Harper or Cameron get when they are given majority government to make bold new decisions.

97% is much too , er, high  for politicians.

But for scientists ? Politicians - the lying, denying politicians anyway - say that   97 %  is way, way too low.

Politicians simply point out that on this, as in so many things, citizens must simply learn to suck it up ; it is "do as I say --- never, do as I do" .

the 100.00000000% solution of the think tankers

Libertarian denier think tankers have made this point very clear - and as long as Tobacco or Oil or Asbestos keeps feeding them money, they're the experts.

They say we shouldn't act on the gravest crisis facing us since Adam ate the apple until every last one of us, that is all 6.7 billion of us , becomes part of the consensus: 100.00000000% agreement, or nothing.

'Cause I mean, after all, saving our great grandchildrens' lives isn't anything like voting is it ?

For something like saving our own kiddies, it is a case of every last one of us on Earth must be on board or none of us is.......

KUSI-TV to S FRED SINGER : do you think the climate changes, when moving from Earth to HELL ?

This is a question that KUSI-TV will probably never have the guts to ask.


Which is a real pity.

Because that is about the only climate change question that quasi independent/ think tanker /senior citizen S Fred Singer will ever be fully qualified to answer......

(And don't forget to cast your guess on the S Fred Singer deathwatch, below)

Beltway, Whitehall, the Hill, the Triangle : home of the DENIER think tanks

Their air-brushed world of magical thinking

Every national capitol soon develops a widely use nickname for its tight little world of national politicians with their staffers and bureaucrats,  married up to lobbyists and think tankers and topped off by the capitol's political journalist elite.

In Washington they call it working "within" The Beltway, in London it is known as being "within" in the corridors of  Whitehall.

Lesser known, Ottawa has its political elite centred "on" The Hill and in Canberra the elite is found "within" The Triangle.

Now I realize that claiming that Nature is changing under humanity's influence is probably a moot point inside the Beltway,Whitehall,the Hill or The Triangle.

For in each of them , it might be more accurately said that Nature is long dead and replaced by a concrete jungle.

True these four relatively small areas are among the prettiest green areas in the entire world - a virtually artificial simulacra of Nature - the finest fake that lots of taxpayers' money can buy.

But here, the real human activity all takes place inside concrete and glass towers and inside that glassed-in world, few signs of a changing-for-the-worse Nature are visible.

Here is the true home of the world's biggest and most influential think tanks, the brains and the money behind global climate change DENIAL efforts.

By contrast, most believers in climate change are like me - and maybe you - living in smaller communities much closer to Nature and hence much more sensitive to its new reality.

My garden of joy is in a nearby rural seaside village, a place where I like to say I grew up in, though as always it is a bit more complicated than that.

In the 57 years that I have "lived" there, (well all right, off and on, annually) its summer weather in particular has permanently changed from reliably cold and foggy to very hot and very muggy.

I find it too hard to lift a shovel from June to September these days - its just too damned humid.

And I resent being told by some snotty-voiced ideologue in a Yale tie sitting in an air-conditioned inside The Beltway (or inside The Triangle) that my climate hasn't changed - it has, you bastard, it has.

So if you too are a nobody blogger from nowhere who sees the signs of climate change occurring right before your eyes - don't just despair about it - blog about it.

Let those guys in those big city glass and concrete towers that there is a real world out there in trouble - a real world outside The Beltway....

dear DONNA LAFRAMBOISE , if you are going to play 'little david' at least do it right

Dear Donna :

I feel that since you and I are in the same 'game' and because I am so much older than you, perhaps I might be permitted to offer you some fatherly advice.

If you are going to play at being little david to the great big bad Goliath (in this case, of the IPCC) at least try to do it right.

I too claim to be a solo blogger, albeit on the other side of the climate change debate.

But I have a real job, totally unconnected to my passion about climate change, that supports me and my passion modestly (my annual income is about $8,000) .

I do not accept any financial support, I do not copyright my climate change writings and I wouldn't cross promote my other money making ventures on my climate blog, even if I had any commercial ventures to promote.

My passion is entirely my own, not paid by others and not a loss leader cum CV/RESUME to promote my other money-making ventures.

I am a genuinely low income blogger from a genuine backwater , Nova Scotia, thousands of kilometres from the well-funded Libertarian-denier think tanks of Washington or London --- and so when I rail against them, I do so credibly.

But you, Donna : you are just astro-turf .......