Articles Tagged "Daren Jonescu"

The following news headline appeared on the internet last week: "Scientists warn global warming will fuel spread of ticks that carry Lyme disease."

The corresponding article begins this way:

Another effect of climate change may be crawling up your leg this summer as you frolic in the woods.

Scientists say our warming world is speeding the spread of ticks that carry potentially debilitating Lyme disease.

Okay, given that many in the climate change fraternity -- including, famously, Phil Jones of East Anglia University -- have been forced to concede that global warming has been on "pause" since 1995, how exactly is it "speeding the spread" of disease-carrying ticks?

Don't read this news article for an answer. In fact, from the third paragraph on, the article is a straightforward discussion of the slow spread of the tick population into various southern regions of Canada, and the new risk of Lyme disease that this brings. There is no further mention of global warming, and no attempt is made to establish a significant relationship -- or even a coincidental one -- between the movements of the ticks and changes in mean annual temperatures in the relevant regions.

Aspiring apparatchiks of the coming world dictatorship, tiring of the hopeless race against facts in their anti-industrial carbon dioxide hoax, have finally given up the pretense of science in favor of pure, old-fashioned doomsday preaching. Having been outlasted by reality in the pseudo-science of "global cooling," undone once again in the pseudo-science of "global warming," and ultimately laughed off the stage in the unfalsifiable quackery of "global climate change," it is apparently time at last for the advocates of tyranny in the name of Gaia to play their last card: global mass hysteria.

Consider a recent New York Times editorial by James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and adjunct professor at -- where else? -- Columbia University, the headquarters of the U.S. East-Coast wing of the global socialist movement. The article is an assault on the Canadian oil sands project, and a plea to the Obama administration to do something to stop the Canadian government from allowing wealth and jobs to be created.

Hansen's diatribe -- I choose that word merely as a literal description of the article, which bears no resemblance to an argument -- is noteworthy on three fronts: (1) its tone of angry defiance, suggestive of a man whose instinct, in the face of rational defeat, is to say, "Damn all of you!"; (2) Hansen's attempt to use the Times' friendly confines to double down on the projections of his discredited climate models, without compunction at having no remaining grounds for his claims; and (3) the straightforwardness with which his proposed course of action on this issue proclaims the real, but hitherto half-concealed, purpose of the global climate fraud -- namely, a government takeover of the world economy by means of a proletarian uprising against the "capitalists."

If I believed the Earth was slowly turning into cheddar cheese, I could invoke this theory to explain a lot of things. Why is the rat population in our major cities growing so quickly? Earth cheesification is providing more rat food. Why have there been so many earthquakes lately? The cheesification of the tectonic plates has made them less resistant to sudden shifts. Why are glaciers melting? The freezing point of cheddar cheese is lower than that of water; as the Earth at the poles undergoes cheesification, the unfrozen cheese is causing a slight warming of the ice sheets from below, resulting in unusual levels of melting.

I could go on like this for a long time, I suppose. At some point, however, you would confront me with some natural fact that I could not logically account for by means of my cheese theory. In other words, even the greatest faith in this underlying assumption could never withstand all possible evidence.

If, however, we could devise a theory that might literally be able to repel absolutely any possible counterevidence, then we would have accomplished something truly diabolical: an unfalsifiable theory. If we could indeed devise such a theory, then we could run wild explaining anything and everything, and absorb absolutely any eventuality, without ever needing to question our faith in the underlying hypothesis.

Then we would be at liberty to publish headlines such as this: “Research suggests warmer summers could be causing colder winters.” This conjecture, brought to you via the magical theory of global climate change, is reported as though it is the most plausible explanation of the peculiar fact that Canadian winters do not appear to be getting any warmer.