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......

if BERLIN WALL still existed, would DENIER INDUSTRY exist ?

climate denial is a SCAM by unscrupulous think tank BUREAUCRATS to con money from naive Corporate executives

When first the Berlin Wall and then the Kremlin went tumbling down, the communist bureaucrats inside were not half as terrified as were their exact bureaucratic counterparts in the free world's thousands of COLD WAR think tanks.

FACT : 97% (note the neat symmetry with you know what) of the world's strident advocacy libertarian think tanks were created between 1945 and 1992 , IE during the Cold War.

They got their money from gullible government politicians, paranoid billionaires and big corporations executives by always seeing ever new reds under ever new beds.

Students of lobbying might recognize this as a variant on the classic Jack Abramoff  move of deliberately ratcheting up your own client's fears, to scam more out of them.

When unexpectedly (well stoking anti-communism had seem a secure job-for-life) the red terror self-imploded, these well-paid bureaucrats had to cast about for a new scam.

It is not a coincidence that the very same year that the Berlin Wall fell, that a new terror threat arose to afflict those who are conveniently both easily scared and very wealthy : The Green Terror and Climate Change.

Even if global climate change goes away as a profit centre for evil tankers inside the Beltway, because voters of all parties say it is real , ever new terrors will be dreamed up to scare the rich and gullible.

Perhaps strong medical evidence that fat, salt and sugar now kill far more than bacteria and viruses do today in the rich countries will become something new to deny : like the 1950s "commie fluoride in our water" panic.

Rest assured that wherever thousands of fat lazy bureaucrats gather in an attempt to avoid a real job, think tanks and scams of denial will flourish....

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....

Why the fighters of Climate Denial are sometimes their own worst enemy

No politician sets themself up as Goliath and their opponent as David, but scientists *ALWAYS* do

If we are ever to defeat the evil forces of Climate Denial, we need to take a page out of their book and keep our Boffins "on tap, not on top".

Nice guys, but no political smarts.

I cringe every time I see another denier fighter start off with the claim that 97% of our smartest, best educated , best paid, best pensioned scientists at all the big universities back East know a lot more about climate change than some unknown with a BA from Hamburger U, operating out of Dubuque, in little old tennis shoes and a blog.

Oh yes, and doesn't he believe in Creationism and a Flat Earth as well ?

(All this is what football fans call The New Yorker Magazine Defense ---- a play that they say very rarely works.)

True it might knock 'em dead in the Faculty Lounge, but outside - in the real world - it is just setting yourself up for a political fall.

 There are always a lot more populist-minded plebs from the hinterlands than there are elitists from the Big Cities in the East.

I have friends and acquaintances who are mildly denier-istic and they always enjoy reading about an unknown blogger taking on those smart asses at the big universities.

True, none of these friends have graduate school level degrees, but then that is true of 97% of the world.

Solo denier bloggers..... with big corporate funding

I try and point out this "lone blogger" actually gets a lot of funding from big bad fossil fuel corporations but it cuts no ice.

The optics just aren't right in their mind's eye.

But when I say all this controversy is caused by the big lobbyists and big think tanks inside Washington's Beltway, they listen up.

Most people wouldn't vote for Christ Himself, if He came back to Earth and got an apartment "Inside the Beltway" .

So here's the deal : I set myself up as the nobody from nowhere blogging on the reality of climate change from my bedroom, while all my opponents are the big city Think Tanks, just stuffed with snotty guys and gals with snotty accents from Yale and Oxford.

So Jane,  please get it right : me david - you Goliath ....

Comments, denier-fighters ?

PhDs who can, teach ; PhDs who can't, 'TANK' in Washington, the original 'tank town'

There is new hope for all those kids who got a pass-level PhD but can't find work at a real university: they can find work at the ever growing number of 'tanks' that fill the Washington Beltway and cluster around every national political capital world wide.

(Before 1941, many reporters from bigger cities used to regard Washington DC as a 'tank town' : in many ways, it still is.)

If Libertarian Governments continue to cut science research and universities grow ever smaller as a result , soon there will be more people with PhDs working in the think tanks than at universities.

Those PhDs capable of teaching and doing research will be in the universities while those PhDs only capable of offering opinions will 'tank' out of  academia and into the warm financial embrace of those libertarian stalking horses, the partisan think tanks.

Better to teach at Hamburger U than tank in  'tank town'

At least at Hamburger University, the teachers engage in real world activities : flipping burgers.

The partisan think tanks merely engage in magical thinking and conspiracy theories : they are the Roswell Area 51s for guys in suspenders and bow ties whose daddies went to Yale : academia for mouth-breathers.....

Forget the 1% versus the 99% : try the .2ppm versus the rest of us !

   Interstate 495 (I 495) is much better known as "THE BELTWAY", as in 'opinion inside the Beltway'. That is because I495's 64 miles of asphalt is solely devoted to encircling Washington DC and its inner suburbs.
  What goes on inside that tiny 'bubble of hot air' has a far greater effect on the cultural - and thus political/social/economical and biological - life of the globe than all the rest of the world combined.
  Opinion makers (opinion-takers?) from all around our planet take their cues from what is said or not said/ done or not done inside that tiny blessed circle.

   Or is that Washington DC's "Blesse' Circle" ?
    3300 squares miles of self importance : versus 200,000,000 square miles left for the rest of us.
   So ".2 parts per million" rules the rest of the mix.
   You may have heard of the "RESISTING THE GREEN DRAGON", an evangelical front organization actually partially
funded by Big Oil and orchestrated by those " Beelzebubs of the Beltway" --- the lobbyists.
   It is yet another example of the astroturfing efforts of the Reality-Deniers.
   Some people say that cars goes around and around that Beltway.
   Untrue: what actually goes around and around is the money-changers of the 21st century.
   The Beltway is really a 'money loop' turning semi-clean money into very dirty money.
  In the case of the Reality-Deniers, that money is running through cutouts and front men to secret numbered bank accounts in offshore havens, with impressive-sounding organizations existing physically only as separate box office numbers, together with agents and their handlers and fellow travellers riding along side.
  On and on and on ---- including all the rest of the Cold War spy world --- as revealed in endless government commission reports and lurid 'fictional' novels.
   Michael Crichton had his own lurid novel about a shadowy spy world of green environmentalists ---- isn't past due time, that others rip this astroturfing story from the headlines and do up some novels of these Reality-Deniers and their Liars-For-Hire...

the kindergarten arithmetic of asteroid IRON mining ...

Michael Marshall

Its not the higher mathematics so many of our scientists have trouble with - its primary school arithmetic.

For decades many scientists have been seriously talking, out in the POPULAR SCIENCE world, about mining asteroids for IRON , and all the other scientists have let them get away with it.

Oh, they would be severely shellacked for saying the same thing inside an article they wanted a peer-reviewed journal to publish.

But as long as you just say it to 6 billion civilians , instead of to 6000 fellow scientists, well that is alright then.

"Mustn't slight a fellow colleague, no matter how asinine, in public - lowers the tone, lowers our pay packet."

Well it isn't alright.

As the NRA is wont to say, "Public Science (science inside the hothouse of the peer-reviewed Beltway) doesn't kill people, Popular Science (day-to-day science) kills people".

Our world has real problems - but mining distant asteroids for iron isn't the solution - it is a senseless,hare-brained, diversion.

Iron is so abundant on the Earth's surface - still, after 10,000 years of use - that it remains cheap. Even now, our sloppy recycling efforts does a pretty good job about recycling most big bits of iron.

God would have to wing asteroid iron on the backs of celestial angels to beat the current - and future - price of iron on Earth.

Put a penny on this side of the classroom and pour a million pennies on that side of the classroom (representing the delivered cost of a gram of iron, from future earth sources versus future asteroid iron) and ask a four year old which pile is bigger.

Then ask the PhDs of the limit-denying asteroid mining lobby the same question and watch them waffle....

My job isn't "inside the BELTWAY" ...

Michael Marshall

My job, as I see it , isn't "inside the BELTWAY" of peer-reviewed science.

Whenever I do peer inside that Beltway (ie when reading the articles in our leading science journals) I see little to complain about.

And I am a great one for complaining.

Instead I see provisional results, I see uncertainty, doubts, probabilities, possibilities, unknowns.

I see, in other words, scientists admitting that there are limits and restraints on what we can know and what we can do vis a vis the physical world.

(I am not naive and I know that these admissions are themselves frequently only provisional, necessitated by the need to be accepted into peer-reviewed journals.)

No, my concern is the science of our day-to-day world (POPULAR rather than PUBLIC science in my definition of those terms) and here I see big, literally "Life-Threatening", problems.

Most of us pick up what little notions of science's potential and methods we retain, from textbook teaching in high school or from a few undergraduate intro courses.

We supplement this with the occasional news item  and magazine article, perhaps even with that best-seller book from that famous scientist we've seen on the telly.

Out here in the real world, the science we get is still mostly Whiggish Science, Newtonian Science , a science that sunnily dismisses any possibility of limits to Man's knowledge of reality (given enough time and money thrown at the scientists' labs).

(Let me give you a mild example, from an article I recently read with admiration, until this short passage jarred me into alarm ; it's
from STEVEN WEINBERG, Nobel prize winner and a key architect of The Standard Model of physics:

"...I think that we'll get to the point where there are no puzzles of this sort. And that will be quite a remarkable turning point in the intellectual history of the human race."

To his credit, Dr Weinberg didn't quite say the physicists' equivalent of the medical doctors' "we can close the book on infectious disease", but in his quiet, cautious way, he came damn close.)

Most other examples are far more blatant.

And I see all this hot air hubris as what is driving our world to meet its Climate-Changed-Doom.

Not so oddly enough (given my previously stated lack of naivety) most of this Blue Sky Science wind is generated by the same chappies as what wrote those carefully constipated peer-reviewed articles: Drs Hyde & Jeckel, PhD,FRS .

My job then is to expose split-personality scientists and ask the real one to stand up: either stand up and admit they really see no limits to what Man can do or stand up and reaffirm that Reality will always be a bit of a mirage forever slightly beyond our grasp.

That is, I only want our scientists to be consistent: to say outside the Beltway of peer-reviewed journals what they say inside it.

Is that too much to ask ?

And once our Stevensonian pair have made their admissions , we will then be better forearmed as how to trust their handling of the Climate Change brief....