The left in general has only a nodding acquaintance with that thing we call "honesty." There are people across the spectrum, mind you, who make you want to count your fingers after shaking their hand, but the left seems to fall too often into the trap of "George Washington couldn't tell a lie, Richard Nixon couldn't tell the truth, and (insert name of leftist croaker) couldn't tell the difference."
They can tell the difference. It just doesn't matter. The ends justify the means.
Now, when it comes to the climate scolds, the editorial board at Issues & Insights has presented one of the best compilations of dissembling from climate scolds that I've seen in a while.
The “experts” who have told us that man-made climate change is a grave threat must have stumbled across the Winston Churchill comment about duplicity, because they know the truth has a hard time catching up to lies. They’ve also relied on lying by omission, an offense that can’t be blamed on innocent oversight.
One of Churchill’s greatest quips warns us that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Propagandists know this is true.
Fabulists also lie by leaving out important facts. Such as burying the medieval warm period. Former University of Alabama assistant geological sciences professor Matthew Wielicki explained in a Substack post the day before Earth Day how “the deliberate erasure of past climatic states” is used “to support alarmist conclusions.”
There are, of course, a lot more warm periods to hide than the medieval warm period, although their ignoring of that is telling. The medieval warm period is relevant because, well, people were around, and none of them were using gas stoves or driving SUVs. But the earth has a long, long history that goes back a long time before climate scolds were around to bemoan the planet's not maintaining the correct temperature.
The contravening evidence missing from the alarmists’ account is the Medieval warm period, “a globally recognized warm epoch from roughly 950 to 1250 AD,” says Wielicki. It “poses an existential threat to the IPCC-endorsed narrative that modern warming is unprecedented. Initially documented extensively, the MWP was systematically erased from mainstream climate records following the infamous hockey stick graph popularized by Michael Mann in 1999.”
That's because it doesn't support the agenda.
Here are a few other items the scolds aren't interested in discussing:
The Oligocene - 34 to 23 million years ago. This time was sandwiched in between the tropical Eocene and the milder Miocene; there were several glaciation events but most of the epoch was warm and dry.
The Miocene, 23 to 5 million years ago. The Miocene Climatic Optimum was warm as well, about 3 to 4 degrees C warmer than today. Still no SUVs.
The Triassic, 250 to 200 million years ago. The climate over most of Earth's one continent was hot and dry. Most of the landscape was one big, hot, sterile desert.
There's a lot more - around 4.5 billion years of it. The point is, through most of this time, the planet was warmer than it is now. Sometimes, during glaciations for example, it was cooler. And through the vast, vast majority of that time, there were no humans. Just the Earth and its unbelievably complex and chaotic climate systems.
See Also: Stupidity on a Global Scale: UK's Government Plans to Blot Out the Sun
It's Earth Day. Forget the Climate Scolds. Forget the Enviro-Kooks. Go Outside.
These are the systems that the climate scolds claim to understand.
The global warming clique has a history of distributing misinformation and disinformation. It uses flawed computer models to back its claims, exaggerates, embellishes and manipulates data to further its anti-human, anti-capitalism agenda.
Ay, that's the rub.
See, this is why these people are so often referred to with the appellation "watermelon." They're green on the outside and red on the inside. It is as Issues & Insights concludes:
Maybe after nearly four decades of what is clearly nonsense, climate alarmism is losing momentum. But this doesn’t mean the warming zealots will become productive citizens. They’ll find another matter to screech and rage about, because with radicals, the issue is never the issue, the issue is the revolution. That means that free enterprise, capitalism and free men are always the targets.
I've been saying, and writing, exactly this, and for quite a few years. The climate panic-mongers don't make sense to most of us, especially if you have some idea of Earth's geologic history. It doesn't make sense if you don't think the Earth has a "correct" temperature, or a thermostat we can set to ensure we stay there. It doesn't make sense if you know that the planet's climate is incredibly vast, complex, and chaotic, and our understanding of the climate on the global scale is roughly at the level of when we thought the moon was a light shining through a hole in the roof.
It's about control. It's not about the environment; these people don't live out in the environment. It's not about the climate; these people are not telling the truth about the climate. It's about control. It's always about control. Once you grasp that, then it makes sense.
