The Climate Change Mania

It never looks like hysteria when you are in the middle of it. It never feels like a mania when you are being consumed by righteous zealotry. It never looks or  feels like a cult when you believe it to the depths of your soul.

True believers are never swayed by the evidence. They believe the absence of empirical data is a test of their faith. They might skew the data in order to lure in those who still hold to an outmoded view of empirical science, but they themselves have given their lives to the narrative, not to the facts.

If you can still be a true believer when the facts tell another story, your status within the cult will be enhanced. If you really want to take it a step further into delirium, you should propose punishing and persecuting those who do not believe.

Up with climate change! Down with the marketplace of ideas!

Those who worship at the altar of the goddess of nature will severely punish anyone who denies their beliefs.

Eminent scientists like Richard Lindzen of MIT and Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever have stated forcefully that the climate change hysteria is based on bad science-- if it is based on science at all.

Now a group of French mathematicians has weighed in on the side of those who, while accepting that the climate does change, find no real evidence to suggest that human activity is causing the change. They suspect a more nefarious purpose: climate change fanatics want to shut down Western economies. That would get us back to the state of nature, n’est-ce pas?

The CNS news service reports the story (via Maggie's Farm):

As the United Nations gears up for its next international conference on climate change in Paris next month (COP 21), a scathing white paper released by a society of French mathematicians calls its fight against global warming “absurd” and “a costly and pointless crusade”.

“You would probably have to go quite a long way back in human…history to find [such a] mad obsession,” according to a translated summary of the document released in September by the Paris-based Société de Calcul Mathématique SA.

The mathematicians harshly criticized a “crusade [that] has invaded every area of activity and everyone’s thinking," noting that "the battle [against] CO2 has become a national priority.

"How have we reached this point in a country that claims to be rational?” they ask, adding that mathematicians “do not believe in crusades. They look at facts, figures, comments and arguments.”

“There is not a single fact, figure…[or] observation that leads us to conclude the world’s climate is in any way ‘disturbed,” the paper states. “It is variable, as it has always been. … Modern methods are far from being able to accurately measure the planet’s overall temperature even today, so measurements made 50 or 100 years ago are even less reliable.”

Noting that concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have “always” varied, the French mathematicians also said that after processing the raw data on hurricanes themselves, they verified that “they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past.”

“We are being told that a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees C[elsius] by comparison with the beginning of the industrial age would have dramatic consequences and absolutely has to be prevented.

"When they hear this, people worry. Has there not already been an increase of 1.9 degrees C?

“Actually, no. The figures for the period 1995-2015 show an upward trend of about 1 degree C every hundred years! Of course, these figures, [which] contradict public policies, are never brought to public attention,” the white paper stated.

Obviously, many things can cause climate change. Human activity and cow farts are not at the top of the list… if they even make the list:

The French mathematicians also said that the UN’s climate models have failed to take into account natural phenomena that affects climate far more than human activity.

Human impact on the climate is “tiny, quite negligible in comparison with natural causes,” they point out. “Human beings can do nothing about solar activity, the state of the oceans, the temperature of the Earth’s magna, or the composition of the atmosphere.”

Furthermore, the work done by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not meet the basic standards set by reputable scientific journals because its “conclusions go [contrary] to observed facts; the figures used are deliberately chosen to support its conclusions (with no regard for the most basic scientific honesty); and the variability of natural phenomena is passed over without comment.”

As we know, true believers neglect to measure what happens to real human beings when the climate change mania is allowed to define government policy. The French mathematicians are especially concerned with the effect on France:

“French policy [on] CO2 is particularly stupid, since we are one of the countries with the cleanest industrial sector,” the white paper pointed out, slamming “virtuous” policies that have resulted in a significant loss of industrial activity and the resultant loss of jobs that has left three million French unemployed even as global CO2 emissions continue to rise.

“If we were in France to stop all industrial activity (let’s not talk about our intellectual activity, [which] ceased long ago), if we were to eradicate all traces of animal life, the composition of the atmosphere would not alter in any measurable, noticeable way,” they said.

These policies should never be judged by the outcomes they produce. They succeed when they allow their adherents to feel virtuous.

One empathizes with those who are in the throes of an apocalyptic visions, those who are standing on the street corner with signs reading “The End Is Near.” One also understands that when you base policy on apocalyptic visions you will never allow the data to shake your conviction.

True believers believe that the threat is so grave and that they are so right about it that no dissent should be allowed. Remember when leftist politicians and intellectuals said that dissent was the highest form of patriotism? No longer.

CNS News continues to quote the French mathematicians:

“People who do not believe in global warming have been told to shut up. No public debate, no contradictory discourse. No articles in scientific journals. They simply have been told that the case is proven and it is time to take action… We are simply required to keep quiet and do what we are told. No second opinion is permitted.”

At considerable risk to life and limb I would suggest that you might for a mere moment look at the way climate change is being used politically. Consider the possibility that it is being presented as an irrefutable fact, used to persuade people to vote one way or the other.

And you might also consider the fact that the world’s greatest polluters, China and India will never sign on to a treaty limiting their ability to feed their people. Keep in mind, nations and cultures are engaged economic, social, political and even military competition. When China and India are building power plants as fast as they can, America is shutting its own down.

You might say that we are occupying the moral high ground and that our people will breathe cleaner air a few centuries from now. But you might also say that our civilization is committing cultural suicide.

When it comes to how their policies might harm human beings, the climate change zealots don't really care. They believe that human beings are at fault and deserve to be punished. The natural world is being destroyed by their sinful consumerist ways, their love of nourishment and luxury. They deserve to be punished, to be reduced to subsistence living. If a few or a few million of them starve to death it’s that much less carbon dioxide emissions.

Didn’t Max Weber famously argue that capitalism arose when Protestant Europeans decided that subsistence was not enough?

In truth, following a dictum of Ludwig Wittgenstein there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow. There are hypotheses and prophecies, but there are no facts about what is going to happen tomorrow or next year or a century from now.

In a strange way the climate change hysteria is like what others have called the madness of crowds. It is like selling your house and your business in order to buy a tulip bulb. How did that one work out?

[Addendum: From the comments, David Foster provides us with this link to the remarks of physicist Freeman Dyson on this topic. Link here.]