Climate Orthodoxy

Temperatures on track for 5-degree rise
by 2100 after another hot year

Thus screamed the heading to an newspaper article that continued:

This year is on course to be the fourth hottest year on record, trailing only the three previous years, as rising levels of greenhouse gases warm the planet, the World Meteorological Organisation said. 

Up to October 31, mean temperatures in 2018 were an estimated 0.98 warmer than the average for 1850-1900, according the UN agency's provisional State of the Global Climate report. 

“We are not on track to meet climate change targets and rein in temperature increases,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO Secretary-General. “Greenhouse gas concentrations are once again at record levels and if the current trend continues we may see temperature increases 3 to 5 degrees by the end of the century." 

The WMO report comes days ahead of a global climate summit in Katowice, Poland, where nations will discuss progress on implementing the goals of the Paris climate accord signed three years ago keep temperatures to 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Australia's delegation will be led by Environment Minister Melissa Price.

Figure 1

https://public.wmo.int/en

So the WMO Secretary-General says "we may see temperature increases 3 to 5 degrees by the end of the century", plucking the figures seemingly out of thin air. The heading of the Brisbane Times article thus includes the upper limit of his prediction with the intended result that anybody perusing the newspaper can hardly fail to miss this unsettling prediction.

For anyone who bothers to read the article, there is the inevitable graph included in a screenshot of a tweet from a so-called "climate scientist" Gavin Schmidt, described (source) as a "climatologist, climate modeller and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the award-winning climate science blog RealClimate".

Figure 2

The graph is below a photo of firefighters battling a blaze in England with the caption: Firefighters work on a wildfire on Winter Hill near Bolton, England. Extreme temperatures, particularly warm ones, have again been prominent in 2018, on course to be one of the hottest years in history.

Let's break the news article down into its components:

• overly sensational heading
• dire pronouncement from a prestigious international organisation (here the WMO)
• dramatic photograph of firefighters battling a conflagration
• suitably supporting graph from a climate scientist

I'm not attempting here to confront any details in the WMO report but just to focus on the highly biased manner in which climate news is presented by the mass media. Despite evidence to the contrary, the message being conveyed is clear: the world is getting warmer. You must believe this or else you are a climate denier who has chosen to ignore the irrefutable climate science and the climate facts as presented by the world's leading climate scientists. You must be a climate skeptic and a deluded fool.

Figure 3

As with vaccinations, there is no middle ground when it comes to man-made global warming. It's all or nothing. It is the prevailing orthodoxy to which you must adhere.

Clearly there is an agenda

A Lot of Hot Air

UK weather: Blistering heatwaves and tropical storms to last four years with 'abnormally hot' air until 2022

So touted the Mirror headline of an article from the 15th August 2018 edition. The news article was based on new research by a team led by Dr Florian Sevellec, of the University of Southampton. Brazenly she said: “Warming caused by greenhouse gas is not linear. It appears to have lapsed in the early 21st century". So wait a minute, she concedes that global warming has "lapsed" since the new century began eighteen years ago.

One might hope that this would have prompted the good doctor to review her assumption that the world is in fact warming. No way! She confidently asserts:

"A new method for predicting mean temperatures, however, suggests the next few years will be hotter than expected.” The system, developed with French and Dutch researchers, uses a statistical method to search 20th and 21st century climate simulations, find similarities to current conditions and then make forecasts.

Apparently, the "lapse" is now over and this new statistical technique ensures that from now on the world will be warming again. At least until 2022! No doubt her research was well funded by the usual interested parties and her academic career will benefit because the results obtained using this new technique support the current climate orthodoxy of relentless global warming.

This is "climate science" in the early 21st century and Dr Florian Sevellec would be regarded as an expert climate scientist. Where is the science in all of this? She admits that the globe has not warmed during the opening years of the new century and then she uses a new and clearly as yet unproven statistical technique to predict what will happen over the coming few years, based on "climate simulations"!

All that most readers will remember is that the next four years are going to be "abnormally hot". Even if they're not, I'm sure climate experts like Dr Sevellec won't be phased. They'll explain it away as a "protracted and atypical lapse" before the warming begins in earnest. They'll go off and tweak their statistical tools to take account of unforeseen variables and then reassure us that the next eight years are going to feel like a "furnace".

It's sad to see presumably intelligent scientists like Dr Sevellec abandoning the scientific method and making unfounded claims about the coming "blistering heat waves and tropical storms". It seems that all climate scientists must worship at the anthropogenic global warming branch of the Church of Climatology.

Flat Earth

A May 22nd 2018 post by Harry T Dyer, a lecturer in Education at the University of East Anglia, on the website The Conversation was titled I watched an entire Flat Earth Convention for my research – here’s what I learnt. It was a refreshingly thoughtful article as evinced by this declaration early on in the post:

Let me begin by stating quickly that I’m not really interested in discussing if the earth if flat or not (for the record, I’m happily a “globe earther”) – and I’m not seeking to mock or denigrate this community. What’s important here is not necessarily whether they believe the earth is flat or not, but instead what their resurgence and public conventions tell us about science and knowledge in the 21st century.

Importantly, he makes the critical observation that:

While flat earthers seem to trust and support scientific methods, what they don’t trust is scientists, and the established relationships between “power” and “knowledge”. This relationship between power and knowledge has long been theorised by sociologists. By exploring this relationship, we can begin to understand why there is a swelling resurgence of flat earthers. 

He concludes by saying:

In many ways, a public meeting of flat earthers is a product and sign of our time; a reflection of our increasing distrust in scientific institutions, and the moves by power-holding institutions towards populism and emotions. In much the same way that Foucault reflected on what social outcasts could reveal about our social systems, there is a lot flat earthers can reveal to us about the current changing relationship between power and knowledge. And judging by the success of this UK event – and the large conventions planned in Canada and America this year – it seems the flat earth is going to be around for a while yet. 

The post is well worth a full read. The author notes that, while the Internet has led to an unprecedented sharing of ideas and information, it is by no means conducive to consensus. On the contrary, it is promoting polarisation as various, competing interest groups strive to make themselves heard and garner support for their causes. What I'd like to add in this post is that such interest groups are highly susceptible to infiltration and manipulation by parties that are not "true believers" and have their own agenda.

The flat earthers are perfect in a way because they outrage of the scientific community and amuse most of the rest of us who choose to believe that the Earth is a globe. By first aligning with the flat earth community and then broadening their scope to include other issues such as questioning manmade global warming, certain parties can "contaminate" these other issues. It can then be said that those who question the reality of manmade global warming also believe in a flat Earth. Many would assume that, since the latter is absurd in their opinion, so too is the former. It's just one of the ways in which the power elite can undermine and derail legitimate concerns about all sort of issues including climate change, fluoridation, vaccination, banking and significant historical events.

I'm certainly sympathetic to the flat earthers and agree with their deep suspicions about the scientific establishment. If NASA says the Earth is a globe, why should this organisation be believed? This is the organisation that claims to have landed men on the Moon almost fifty years ago! Scientists in general have been forced to compromise their commitment to the scientific method in order to get ahead in their chosen fields. They have to adhere to the prevailing orthodoxy or risk professional stagnation, ostracism and even expulsion. Climatologists who don't support "the truth" of anthropogenic global warming will soon find themselves "out in the cold" if I can be allowed a pun. There is no funding for studies that challenge this orthodoxy.

The flatearthers are going back to the basics and questioning everything they have ever been told. This of course is always a good idea. They choose not to accept that the earth is a globe simply because NASA and other scientific institutions say that it is. Photographs and videos showing the curvature of the Earth can be easily faked in the same way that the Moon landings were. However, the polarisation around the question of whether the Earth is flat is essentially a distraction, diverting attention away from the key issue of how power is shaping knowledge. The ruling elite choose to remain largely in the background but its members control global finance and wield enormous power through the banking system, mainstream media, political structures, multinational organisations and scientific institutions. This tiny percentage of the world's population, controlling most of the world's wealth, is cleverly shaping what it thinks we should know.

The elite has an agenda that it intends to implement and we, by taking sides over this or that issue (flat Earth, vaccinations, global warming or whatever), are unwittingly abetting it by diverting our energy and attention from THE BIG ISSUE. This issue is the need to become aware of how our knowledge of the world is being shaped by powerful people who don't have our best interests at heart. These people could have promoted peace over war, economic equality over disparity, health over an illness industry but they chose not to do so. It is important to focus on who "they" are, discovering what agenda they are pursuing and what agencies they are using to implement it.

As I said earlier, the flatearthers are going right back to basics and questioning the nature of the very ground on which they are standing. They believe they are standing on a flat Earth. They may be right. Right or not however, they are reclaiming power for themselves and reevaluating what they've been told is true. They are redefining their knowledge using this new power. For too long, humans have willingly relinquished their power to others: religious leaders, politicians, demagogues, false prophets, scientists, charlatans, doctors or whoever. There are a very few who manage to reclaim all their power, attaining when they do access to infinite power and infinite knowledge while experiencing infinite bliss. The knowledge attained is true gnosis and not knowledge of the phenomenal world. For the rest of us, we must try to reclaim what power we can and thus add to our store of what we know to be true: our gnosis or knowledge of spiritual mysteries.

Humanity is increasing its knowledge of the Earth and its place in the universe but this does not come for the most part with any commensurate understanding. To say the stars and planets are shards of a shattered unity that eludes our understanding sounds nonsensical to most scientists and yet it is closer to the truth than our current cosmological conceptions. With increasing personal power comes increasing gnosis, knowledge of what is and what we know to be true. It is not knowledge that has been given to us or that we have acquired from someone or somewhere. It is endogenous. Our intellect cannot help us to attain it and is in fact the biggest impediment to gnosis. For flatearthers, belief in a flat earth may be a rite of passage, replacing a sense of disempowerment with one of empowerment. It may be a first step in disengaging from a reliance on outside parties to define what is to be believed.

I choose to believe in an Earth that is a sphere, albeit not a perfect one. My long time practice of Astrology, a subject virulently attacked by scientists who often have no idea what they're even attacking, inclines me to accept that we are indeed on a large ball spinning on its axis as it revolves around a much larger, luminous ball called the Sun. It's not that I'm right and the flatearthers are wrong. Ultimately, all such knowledge about the workings of the Universe is illusory and has nothing to do with gnosis. We all need to reclaim our personal power in our own way. The Flat Earth is a way for some but not for others.

The Grand Solar Minimum

According to USA Today, "Earth just had its 400th straight warmer-than-average month thanks to global warming". The May 17, 2018 article goes on to state that:

It was December 1984, and President Reagan had just been elected to his second term, Dynasty was the top show on TV and Madonna's Like a Virgin topped the musical charts. It was also the last time the Earth had a cooler-than-average month. Last month marked the planet's 400th consecutive month with above-average temperatures, federal scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday. The cause for the streak? Unquestionably, it’s climate change, caused by humanity's burning of fossil fuels. "We live in and share a world that is unequivocally, appreciably and consequentially warmer than just a few decades ago, and our world continues to warm," said NOAA climate scientist Deke Arndt.

Despite a constant stream of such articles in the MSM, there are those to beg to differ with the prediction that our world will continue to warm. Some say that the Earth is entering a cooling phase and their claims are based on the behaviour of the Sun. They say that the Sun in entering what is termed a Grand Solar Minimum and that this will have a profound and chilling effect on global temperatures.

Who will be proved right? This 16 July 2015 article on Skeptical Science maintains that "no, the sun isn't going to save us from global warming" and goes on to say that:

Recently there’s been a flood of media stories claiming that the sun may be headed towards a quiet phase (a possibility), which could send the Earth into a “deep freeze” (a virtual impossibility). These stories appear to have originated in the biased conservative media (like the Daily Mail and Telegraph) and seeped into other media outlets (like CNN). Some media outlets, like the Washington Post, did a good job researching the story and discovering its flaws before publishing. 

The stories stemmed from a presentation at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Wales by mathematician Valentina Zharkova. Her research (not yet published) suggests the sun could be headed for a quiet phase like the one that coincided with a period known as the “Little Ice Age,” but doesn’t say anything about how this solar minimum would impact the Earth’s climate 

Some of the fault for raising this zombie myth from the dead lies with the Royal Astronomical Society’s press release, which mentioned the previous mini ice age without making it clear that it was solar activity but not the Earth’s climate that was the subject of the study. Some of the fault lies with Zharkova, who made comments ‘skeptical’ of human-caused global warming that were not supported by her research. 

And much of the fault lies with media outlets like the Daily Mail and Telegraph, which ran rather sensationalist stories about an impending mini ice age apparently without consulting a single climate scientist. It’s not a coincidence that the media outlets that didn’t contact climate scientists spread this myth, while the media outlets that did contact climate scientists debunked it.

Clearly, the MSM has not presented a united front in blocking the dissemination of these alternative views and the guilty parties are identified. The notion that the Sun could affect global temperatures is dismissed as a "zombie myth" and instead the claim in made that "research has clearly shown, it’s carbon dioxide that’s the temperature’s main control knob". This is an article of faith amongst "climate scientists" and is not open to rational debate.

I've just downloaded a book by John L. Casey called "Dark Winter" described as follows:

Climate change has been a perplexing problem for years. In Dark Winter, author John L. Casey, a former White House national space policy advisor, NASA headquarters consultant, and space shuttle engineer tells the truth about ominous changes taking place in the climate and the Sun. Casey's research into the Sun's activity, which began almost a decade ago, resulted in the discovery of a solar cycle that is now reversing from its global warming phase to that of dangerous global cooling for the next thirty years or more. This new cold climate will dramatically impact the world's citizens.

I'll try to ignore his White House and NASA connections and set about reading the book. I've watched an interview he gave on YouTube about his views and he was certainly presented a good argument in support of his claims. The video appears on The Grand Solar Minimum Channel, uploaded 1 Jan 2018:

Valentina Zharkova is mentioned in this interview. According to Casey, we are now entering this cooling period but he doesn't believe we are entering a mini-ice-age of the sort that is associated with the so-called Maunder Minimum of the 17th century. Rather, he is of the opinion that we are entering a so-called Dalton Minimum of the sort that is associated with the late 18th and early 19th century cooling phase. He has published a more recent book called Upheaval in which he focuses on the increased volcanic activity associated with these cooling phases.

In the following 15 Jan 2018 interview with Zharkova on The Grand Solar Minimum Channel, she states the cold period should only last 30 years and will not be as severe or as long as the Maunder Minimum (that lasted for about 60 years):

She is confident in her predications about the coming cold snap and urges governments to prepare for what is about to happen, rather than clinging to the myth that man-made CO2 emissions will continue to warm the planet.