Allan Schnaiberg's 1980 nightmare : pollution-producing SkyGods vs impacted-upon earthlings

SkyGod Machine in earthling Garden

In the1970s, the Canadian-born sociologist of environmentalism, Allan Schnaiberg , was the first to detect the emerging split in popular Science that this blog (also Canadian-born) is devoted to exploring ; so a man well worth honouring.


But as I have written in an earlier post in SVE, I didn't stumble upon Schnaiberg's seminal concept until I chanced upon the work of Myanna Lahsen --- thanks to the wonders of Google search.

She casually mentioned the concept of earlier-dominant production science versus the contested rise of today's impact science, as if all her readers would know what it meant.

But I didn't --- or rather I did.

It sounds an awful lot like my concept of earlier (pre-war) SkyGod scientists versus later (post-war) earthling scientists.

I eventually traced the meme back to Schnaiberg and a time period almost 40 years ago.

Long past overdue, then,  for the concept to be a commonplace and a cliche in the vocabulary of every warmist earthling environmentalist green.

Basically it can be seen as a variant of my beloved contrast between the fundamental second law of thermodynamics (matter and energy gets less and less useful to humanity (aka more and more of it becomes useless  particulate pollution and heat pollution) and the derivative first law of thermodynamics.

The sciences of half-truthfulness...

The first law says (as a half truth) that matter and energy can't ever be destroyed but only changed into alternative forms.

A half truth because converting the concentrated energy in the gasoline that powers your Piper Cub into ever so slightly heating the entire Universe does not destroy that energy --- but it certainly ruins for all time its further usefulness for humanity.

 In fact, if that waste heat in the air helps heat up the entire atmosphere --- en route to the frozen reaches of the universe --- it is likely to ruin all of humanity as well.

Similarly, impact science is fundamental science while production science is but a half truth science derived from it.

Production science produces a machine which makes lots of widgets, very cheaply and profitably - apparently the end of story.

Impact science visits that once-successful widget machine cum factory in the town of Anywhereville Quebec and discovers that the factory is throwing off deadly pollution that is ever so slowly poisoning the employees at the widget factory. As a result, they are producing less widgets per hour.

It is this, not unfair competition from the Japanese, that is the real cause of the factory owner's declining profits.

Production science is about The Machine, Impact Science is about The Machine in the Garden, with both garden and machine complexly interacting with each other in unpredictable ways.

(Hat tip to Leo Marx for re-applying his famous meme!)

Deniers cum skeptics who deny change in geology, biology, climate and physics  still only see science in the simplistic terms and certitudes of production science.

Warmists accept that changes happens and happens unpredictably and are much less sanguine about our ability to correct our own mistakes in time to prevent real harm.

Climate deniers - I steadfastly affirm in the face of zillions of scientist-bloogers who argue to the contrary - do believe in Science.

But it is the older, out-dated, hubristic SkyGod science - not current earthling science .....

Paulie-Ayn Rand : after Nov 6 , libertarian one heartbeat away from nuking the tired , poor, huddled , masses

Paulie loves poor me, he loves me not 

So one night two Micks, a Mormon And a Moslem walk into a TV studio and the Presidential Debates moderator says  " What the FRACK ever happened to an All-Protestant America !!!???"

Okay, okay,so maybe the President really was born in America and so maybe he is a church-attending member of the Trinity United Church of Christ denomination, but don't think that tongues aren't wagging in the back rooms of the Irreligious Right.

Their Chosen Party, the GOP (God's Only Party), has a Mormon and a Catholic as its ticket --- definitely a first.

But far more important is that the GOP Mick - Paulie-Ayn Rand - claims his number one influence isn't Christ but pro-atheist, pro-abortion, pro-greed, pro-selfishness AYN RAND.

Rand was about as "SkyGoddish" as one one could get.

Libertarians honor their own Trinity, just like Obama : but their Trinity consists of three American women.

Paul Ryan worships atheist pro-abortion home-wrecker Ayn Rand ,not Jesus, but GOP evangelicals don't care Diddley about Jesus : it is all about getting juicy tax breaks...

(Albeit two were foreign born - one in Russia (Ayn) and one in Canada (Isobel Patterson). The third woman, Rose Ingalls Wilder, ironically  got rich and selfish co-writing her mother's sentimental "Little House on the Prairie."

Mr Ryan, with his selfish Ayn-inspired philosophy, could be the closest a hard-core libertarian has ever got to world power.

Ryan is only a heartbeat away from the Red Button, only a heartbeat away from nuking America's tired, poor, huddled masses of wretched refuse with his harsh, selfish policies.

Like Mrs Thatcher , Ryan is death on the poor and a denier to the manor born on climate change : a wet is a warmist and a warmist is a wet , is his motto.

Earthlings are dirt, worms - not his fellow beings.

Past time then, to bring back 1964's  little Daisy Girl ad from out of the DDB vaults ....*

"Ten, nine, eight, seven......."

The real Daisy Girl was two year old Monique M Corzilius ---- and she was a redhead ---- only the effects of the very bright sunshine on the day of shooting and black and white film made her seem the iconic blond-headed kid !

Popular science is the 99.99% of us who DON'T read the journal NATURE

unread by 99.99% !

The world's most important science journal is read by.... almost nobody.

 The British weekly publication NATURE , the most influential science journal by far in the world, sells only about 50,000 copies but its publisher says around 400,000 read it one way or another. So by its own count, less than .01% of the world reads it.

But NATURE is considered required weekly browsing for all professional scientists, in part to to maintain a credible claim that they are professional scientists.

So indirectly, via NATURE's readership, we have some gauge of just how few professional scientists there are in the world.

About the widest possible definition of a scientist says they regularly do scientific research that gets published in credible peer-reviewed journals in their field of endeavour.

It doesn't say they must be paid for doing so, and it does allow for those who could successfully publish their research, if military or commercial powers didn't prevent it, if only temporarily.

It admits that those who write about, administer or teach science may have once been active research scientists and could be so again, so that while not currently professional research scientists, they are at least highly credible critics of published research.

They must number in the range of millions.

Next are those science-trained professionals who only do "hands on" production science or impact science in government or industry but who can read and evaluate articles in their own area of expertise : again they must number in the range of millions, even tens of millions.

Then there are the students in university level science courses   who are able to usefully assess a published journal article in their own field of interest : they number in the tens of millions.

All together, perhaps 70 million out of a total world population of 7 billion can make some sense of some of the back page articles in the journal NATURE : the scientific "1% " .

But for the rest of us, the 99 % of us , we need the raw data of those dense and turgid articles filtered and translated by science populariziers.

The editors of NATURE, in the front pages of the journal, do a pretty good job of rendering their back page articles into lay language and assessing why these highly specialized reports of research in obscure areas of science nevertheless matter for the 7 billion "rest of us".

Other science journalists and science book writers also try to render - second hand - what NATURE's articles really mean for the non-professional 99% of humanity.

Among the "us" in the 99% or the 99.99% are the most powerful people in the world : presidents of countries or of corporations, generals, publishers of newspapers , activist movie and rock stars .

We , by our power, our money or (for most of us) by our votes and buying dollars will decide most of the big science issues : not NATURE.

This is hard - in fact impossible - for most lifers in professional science to believe.

"Let us bring forth the real-world facts, as predicted by a successful lab-theory, and what more needs be done ?" they cry.

Maybe, once. Maybe once, most of the science-besotted middle and upper classes in the world would have automatically accepted anything NATURE reported at face value (the religious and the peasantry might have scoffed, but who cares about their opinions ?)

But that was before 1945, and 1965, and 1995 . The popular image of Science has undergone two - opposing - and profound changes.

For about one half of the world, the old, pre-1945 image of the scientist remains the same - only today's real-life scientists don't live up to that image.

For the other one half of the world, the old style scientist has been rejected completely and they rather like the new post-war style of scientist.

All this matters, because both sides do not accept or reject new scientific articles based on their own internal scientific evidence, but rather more based on how they feel about the sort of person who delivers them.

In other words, "if they don't like the messenger, they shoot down the message".

The three filters of Science

This blog is concerned about how science evidence is thrice-filtered, rather like Gaul or Saint Peter's Rooster.

First by the multi-person filter of the scientist, his or her employer-superiors and the journal editor cum referees.

Successfully passing through this filter, private science is now public ( published) science.

Next up on the filter machine are the popular Science gatekeepers : the editors and journalists who decide whether this new research gets splashed, downplayed or even ignored in popular science periodicals and in newspapers and on TV.

Finally past this second filter, how do we, the remaining 98% of humanity, assess it ?

If it is first only widely reported in the UK Guardian newspaper that Tasmania is now seeing tropical fish thanks to human climate change, and then this news item is re-published in a hacked up and mocking manner by the Wall Street Journal , the readers of that latter newspaper are likely to deny its truthfulness as mere "warmist claptrap science".

We are the third and final filter ---the biggest one of them all.

How, and why, do we assess this particular - specialized - bit of new scientific research the way we do ?

We don't - we have a few vivid, semi-permanent, images of "Science" in each of our heads and we simply run every new bit of data against those few rigid memes : and then we award a simple pass or fail.

Fundamentally, whether we prefer our scientists to be pre-war SkyGods or post-war earthlings is the only filter we have to assess all the immense amount of science-related news items that hits us weekly.

This is why, in science as in economics , this blog is focussed on the 99%  , not the 1% .....

On Sunday ,climate skeptics worship Sir Charles Lyell : the "Deity of Denial"

DEITY of the DENIERS

Dr Pangloss is really more your average climate denying punter's cuppa, but he is a fictional character. Not that the denier cum skeptic doesn't love a lot of fiction, mind : he just calls it "science".

 No, better that the skeptics worship a real person like SIR Charles Lyell, almost a lord - sorta like Viscount Batty -  but only more dead.

Most older geologists now firmly deny that they ever believed in the Arbeit macht frei  of Lyell's  Uniformitarianism , they were all just "following orders" .

Victorian era is over for physics but not economics

However, news of their "warmist" apostasy hasn't yet reached the softer sciences, so Uniformitarianism is still the wind beneath the wings of orthodox economists and political scientists.

And denier skeptics are always much more motivated by economics and politics than by basic physical science issues.

That is because Uniformitarianism teaches that Man and Mind is all and Nature and the Physical is nothing : a mere passive, eternally-unchanging, back cloth.

The climate hasn't fundamentally changed, because it can't change, only oscillate within narrow, safe, bounds.

But whenever two or more people gather, they are planning a conspiracy and that IS a catastrophe.

Physical science can never truly animate a person who firmly believes that a major invasion by the Chinese is truly a catastrophe but a major Chinese earthquake can never be.

For your true climate deniers , the phrase "natural catastrophe" is always spelt : H u m a n  C o n s p i r a c y .

 It is always something done by humans to other humans ; never something done by Nature to humans......

Climate skeptics unmoved by apostasy of Muller and Koch : its all a JEWISH bankster conspiracy

Fate of DENIER apostates

With apologies to First Corinthians 13:4 , 21st century climate denial's optimism is "never battered and never bruised" : a fresh application of "conspiracy" antiseptic neatly covers every gapping would.


Stalwart climate skeptic,Richard Muller, massively funded by  "The Deities of Denial" (the Koch Bros),  now says climate change is real ?

Warmist apostates ?

No prob, man !

Galileo Movement head mouthpiece , former mining exec Malcolm Roberts, has it all neatly spun away, like the PR flack he is : it was all a trick , all done by Jewish mirrors.

Banking families, a tightly knit cabal of them control the climate change scam for fun and profit.

The same old whine , in new bottles....

Muller and Koch got turned, like spies did all the time, back in the good old days of Reds under every bed.

Reds are still here -still inside the radio, still behind  the plots of vaccination and fluoride in the water : but now they're also inside the watermelons at the bottom of the garden.

 Run, run for your lives : They're here ! They're here !

The Panglossian NAIVETY of the climate denier cum skeptic

NAIVE denier cum skeptics

The Early-Victorian era may have ended over 150 years ago, but living fossils of its optimism, exuberance and naivety still beat on, inside the hearts of today's climate denier cum "skeptic" .Think of  today's deniers as  perfect clones of Voltaire's Doctor Pangloss (albeit as updated by Sir Charles Lyell).


In the 1830s, Lyell chose to modify Pangloss's famously naive philosophy.

It now read - in the light of Lyell's own even more optimistic theory of Uniformitarianism : "We live in the most average, the most normal, the most typical and representative of ages : our charmingly tasteful present is a roadmap back into the mists of the past and forward into those sunlit uplands of our future."

In the Lyellian cum deniers' minds , Man is endlessly progressing : ever upward, ever forward.

But the Universe ? The Universe, by way of total contrast, with all its inanimate but varying objects and all its animate, varying, beings, is in their minds but a passive backdrop.

 A crudely painted canvas drop , with only one actor allowed on stage : Man.

Reality, to a denier, is literally, "all about me". Selfish self-centeredness deified into a scientific philosophy and political ideology.

Libertarianism is the political wing of Uniformitarianism 

Libertarianism is Uniformitarianism is Libertarianism : a perfect circle, round and around a static, mildly oscillating , Universe.

Oh yes, the Universe, and our Earth : to the Lyellian denier, they do not progress  forward and upwards or backwards and downwards - in fact, do not radically move any which way.

Instead they merely oscillate, over a very narrow range, back on forth over a normal, typical, average, representative, mean : the mean of  present day values.

Local, temporary volcano up, local, temporary earthquake down neatly balancing each other : the perfect proof of the First law of Thermodynamics.

That Law, crudely and incorrectly stated, holds that Matter and Energy can not be created or destroyed but merely (and usefully for Man) changed into different forms of themselves, back and forth ; forever and ever Amen.

The early Victorian optimists and their 21st century kinfolk  viewed this law - erroneously - as the fundamental law of the universe.

But don't blame them too much ; instead blame our High School science teachers from the 19th , 20th and 21st century  for teaching that to them.

The true fundamental law of the universe, the one from which the First law of Thermodynamics is derived , is the Second law of Thermodynamics.

(First and Second refers to the time of their formulations : the First was formulated and popularized before the Second was realized to be the truly important one.)

The Second (in simple english) states that , statistically, all energy and matter becomes less and less useful to humanity with each use and eventually all energy and matter and life will be frozen dead at a temperature very near Absolute Zero.

So, in fact, the Universe and Life does have a direction and is constantly changing and that direction is more or less steadily downhill, albeit very slowly.

So, some of the heat from every time we burn even a small lump of coal eventually escapes the world's atmosphere and winds up heating, ever so ineffectually, some distant corner of the frozen Universe.

Probe a climate change denier skeptic or climate change believer warmist and you will find the concept of a steadily changing universe is their dividing line : both are people of either the First or the Second law.....

The only DEAD newspaper is a FEXLESS newspaper : the Halifax Metro ignores Merkel's Halifax visit !

LAMEST daily ever ?

How lame must a daily newspaper be to ignore a well-publicized  major news story in its own backyard ? After all aren't the news-o-saurs always reminding us bloggers that we only comment on the hard news that their fearless reporters dig up ?

But there it was , for all the world to see , the Halifax METRO exposing its inner failings as shamelessly as any ex-porn star seeking air time for their bio-pic.

Chancellor Merkel - de facto leader of the Euro currency group currently undergoing a meltdown of global depression proportions : by any definition, her every doings are eminently a top news subject.

Making probably her only ever visit to your medium sized backwater city.

So, on your front page the next day, a big splash story on Merkel and a nice photograph.

Great !  Well done !

Except : both were pulled off the wire from the Canadian Press agency, ie filed by somebody else.

In your own home town --- your rare chance within the world-wide METRO news organization to see a Halifax story go worldwide - handed over to strangers, on a platter.

Shameful ! Disgusting ! Lazy ! Slack-assed !

I have said it before : 97% of "news" originates when someone wants reportage on an event, for their own purposes, and details the story to all the press.

The only "digging up" usually done consists in finding one or two unique tidbits, to make your story stand out from the rest of your competitors.

Like the Halifax METRO staffers, I too live in Halifax.

I offer up my "blogged" articles about Merkel's education versus Harper's education here, here, here and here.

They, I think, help explain these fellow conservatives wildly varying stances on on climate change :  top warmist vs arch denier.

I think they provided a lot more "hard news" on Merkel's  freelance visit to a climate change project in Halifax, than whatever this sad-assed sorry excuse of a daily newspaper did.

Here's a  real hard news fact : the local alternative newspaper THE COAST generates more words of local reporting in a once a week publication than the Halifax METRO does in a week of daily reporting. How lame is that ?

"The only GOOD newspaper, is a DEAD newspaper...." 

Well ,that is not my saying or my belief - but at times like this, I am sorely tempted to subscribe to it .....

Big Oil Astroturfer Eric Loughead says people who deny climate change are "stupid"

TarSand or BullShit ?

Extremely well known astroturfer Eric Loughead , co-founder of Calgary's "Friends of Big Oil Science", startled the Canadian Press agency's Jennifer Graham by calling people who DENY climate change "stupid" .

Loughead was responding to an online polling survey of 1550 Canadians that found that only 2% of those who responded denied that climate change is happening.

Eric Loughead a "warmist" ; say it ain't so !

Is denier - cum - skeptic Loughead actually going all "warmist" on us, like Angela Merkel ?

Well, not exactly : but do read it all and see if you detect a slight shifting in position among the "deny,deny,delay,delay" crowd.....

In Andrea Saul's pliant hands , Romney denies climate like, er, an EXXON flack

DENIER-IN-CHIEF

Perhaps as a condition for seeing bribe-sized donations go to his fellow-travelling Super PACS, Willard-the-Wimp has had to accept Andrea Saul , former EXXON flack-in-charge-of-denial ,  as his new press-liaison-thingy.

And so Willard has changed his tune yet again on denying the need for any serious action on human-caused runaway global warming.

Perhaps his day's position on climate denial is pinned by Ms Saul* to the Wimp's underwear, because like his underwear, it does seem to be changed daily.

Better idea, Andrea, is to attach it to one of them there new-fangled wind powered windmills, and then let it change with the wind. if we have alternative energy, why not alternative policy positions too ?

EXXON meets in convention in Tampa at end of August to pick the new President

Ooops ! No more windmill, bosses' orders : Willard has been told, firmly, (as firmly as jello can be told anything) to tell everybody that under his government, wind subsidies are out and subsidies to Exxon, er, Oil are in.

After November, America will be headed by a two person government : Romney will be Denier-in-chief and Andrea will be the de-facto Commander-in-Chief.....

* And a big tip of the hat to DeSmogBlog for spreading the word on Damascus-bound Ms Saul.

QUEER-BASHING and CLIMATE DENIAL : related ?

Gay-friendly Tassie !

Australian politics perhaps shows best how closely related are the strident opposition to both Gay marriage and the reality of Global warming .


In that Antipodes nation, the right wing of the socialist party joins with the capitalist parties in opposing both : and that adds up to about 70% of the voters on Election Day, though polling on these issues alone shows a much more even split among the  population.

Electoral systems that favour the two biggest parties give the "paranoid" voter the final say on every thing.

Clearly the parties are well behind current public opinion. This is because both main parties need to get as many of the "paranoid" voters as possible, to form government in a distorted electoral system that wildly favours the two biggest parties - by design.

(The left wing of the socialists joins with the Greens in favouring gay marriage and the reality of climate change.)

At the federal level, the governing Labor (socialist) party is trying to straddle the fence, knowing it appeals to both queer-bashing Labor activists and gay-supporting Labor activists..

But in Tasmania, the governing Labor party will use a small loophole in the Australian constitution to allow gay marriage in the tiny island state - heartedly supported by most Greens but opposed by some Labor activists.

(By contrast, the Libertarian party and its rural and far right fellow travellers are undivided in roundly opposing gay marriage.)

Much the same for global warming ; the right denies it 100%, the Greens support it 100% and the centre-right socialists tries to have it both ways.

Switching to America , a life-long active Republican worker and professional denier for Big Tobacco and a host of other big rich unpopular industries, Frank Schubert , is leading the richly financed anti-gay marriage movement in the United States , further cementing the arguments that all denier movements are intimately connected......

"Member" of HOUSE OF LORDS ensnared in claim that global warming is a JEWISH conspiracy

Viscount Monckton, fond of announcing that he is a member of the House of Lords and winner of the Nobel Prize, now finds himself embroiled in a growing scandal surrounding The Galileo Movement , the well known climate changer denier group that says global warming is a JEWISH conspiracy.

Malcolm Roberts, the managing director of the group recently told Ben Cubby of Australia's biggest daily, the Sydney Morning Herald, that climate change science has been "captured" by some of the world's major "banking families" who form a "tightly-knit cabal".

These "dog whistle" phrases are well known for being coded references to the old faked book, The Protocols of the Elders of  Zion, a text that claims Jewish bankers are conspiring to take over the world and much used by Hitler to justify the Holocaust.


The morality of the  Cliveden Set re-visited : silently assent - or not - to rising tide of anti-semitism in the world of deniers


The Viscount Monckton, a member of the Galileo Movement's board of scientific advisors , now faces a moral dilemma : face a bruising public clash with his fellow deniers over this racial slur ---- or silently assent to it, to keep the deeply fractured denier movement united a short time longer .......

new HORROR : Rip Van Winkle awakes and PASSES 2012 high school science exam with flying colours

Rip Van Winkle awakes from long sleep and wins big science scholarship to famous university

There is absolutely nothing in most 21st century high school physical science courses that the average smart lad or gal from the Victorian Era couldn't pass with flying colours.

And that curriculum is killing our planet.

One hundred and twenty five years of science - all the new science discoveries since the 1890s - the science we need to save this planet - has been deliberately ignored in the world of popular education.

 And need I add that most of the science done in the millions of years of human existence has been done very very recently, ie in those last 125 years ?

Unbelievably but true that most of humanity's body of science is not taught - by deliberate design - to most high school and even most university students.

Instead they learn the science of George Babbitt and the science known by the man who knew Coolidge, the science of mid-west Lions and Rotary Clubs, the science of small town boosters in loud checkered suits : the science of the Holy Anglo Saxon Trinity of Newton , Dalton and Darwin.

It is the self confident, arrogant,  science of Babbittry and it is killing this planet ; the science that fuels the certitudes and hubris of the climate deniers and of the vast majority of ordinary people wavering in the middle of that debate.

I - jokingly - argue sometimes we need to do an Admiral Byng every now and then : pick one or two high school science teachers, high school principals and school board curriculum directors at random and put them before a firing squad " pour encourager les autres".

It basically boils down to this ; how do you set and mark an exam question on determining the position and speed of a quantum particle ?

Public - compulsory - Education was birthed in the high Victorian Era and was deliberately designed to convince the doubting working class that Reality was an easily controlled and manipulative object for the greater profit of Man.

Education deliberately designed ideologically, from the ground up, to teach certitudes, not "Indeterminacy".

But un-certitude-ism is the real grain of reality - never more so than in the area of weather and climate.

The best that our best scientists can currently say is that  Airliner Earth has a 60% chance of crashing and burning fatally , if we don't quickly reduce the carbon pollution we pour into the skies.

That is not 19th century science's 100% certainty certitudes of the  libertarian bureaucrat think tank deniers - but it is real science, the science of today.

More to the point, would you not avoid flying a airline company that said its planes crash and burn 60% of the time, every time they take off?

Indeterminacy as the fundamental core of reality needs to be taught not just to bright-eyed 15 year olds : we senior citizens need to learn it too and apply it to our lives.

If only for the sake of the future lives of those bright-eyed 15 year olds.....

denier think tank BUREAUCRATS & billionaires: who is the con artist and who 'the mark' ?

billionaires bribing think tank bureaucrats or tanker bureaucrats scamming billionaires ?

Most denier fighters hint (libel alert) that it is billionaires that have led the battle over climate denial .

Via their family foundations or the big corporations they control, these rich guys have supposedly discreetly 'bribed' libertarian advocacy think tank bureaucrats to work up credible denial efforts.

All to combat current attacks by government and environmentalists on the products that have made these billionaires wealthy.

Denier-fighters hint at this process by (A) noting that this think tank did a one time major denial effort on tobacco in 2003. And (B) one or two paragraphs later, when they drily note the only year this think tank got money from Big Tobacco was...... 2003.

You are led to - sorry left to - draw the conclusion that Big Tobacco was the instigator in this process .

And that supposedly the process works in the exact same way, in the current case of climate denial and the hydrocarbon producing or using industries.

But how true is this narrative ?

Students of how lobbyists work or how election fund-raising works are not so naive.

When the senior majority or minority member on an American House committee faces a fierce, expensive, primary or re-election fight, they often do "The Abramoff Manoeuvre" .

The politician suddenly lets (or encourage others to let) dozens of intrusive new regulations become attached to a bill affecting, let's say the potato farmers in Idaho.

Working closely - and profitably - with a lobbyist for the potato farmers of that state, he and the lobbyist convince enough gullible farmers that these regulatory threats are real, real enough to spend some very heavy money to squash them before they get to the formal vote.

The lobbyists tells the farmers , 2000 long kms away from the Beltway, that "old Joe is right dead set on seeing these regulations pass - but you may have heard he is in a bad battle to win his primary, back in New Jersey."

" I just bet X dollars for his campaign might move him our way - and he is the lead minority congressman on this issue you know..."

Old Joe gets his money, the regulations disappear and the potato lobbyist gets his percent of the money flowing from Idaho to New Jersey.

Its a win:win scam !!

Think tank bureaucrats of the cold war advocacy variety are pros at this sort of game: ever seeing new reds under new beds to scare gullible paranoid billionaires ---- or today, ever seeing new greens under new protest banners.

Let me hint , just as the other denier fighters have.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall slash Commie scam was over - so over.

Now most cold war advocacy think tank bureaucrats had to unexpectedly find new money cows to feed their salaries, expense accounts (don't get me started !) and fat pensions.

Suddenly climate change, a science news story about thirty years old by that point, became an overnight global threat to every free market company .. that had lots of money.

Ending the cold war was supposed to provide a peace bonus to many different people ---- firms might take the money that they had wasted for 40 years donating to cold war think tank bureaucrats and put it into something truly useful for them and society ------ like R & D.

But no --- a new, worser , terror lay on the horizon : the Green Terror.

"I'm a telling ya : way worse than the Red Terror : cause at least the commies also had their smoke polluting power plants, just like us free marketeers, but these greenies are truly scary - they got horns !"

"Thanky  , thanky  ,thanky  : you just keep 'em silver dollars coming in, and God Bless your continuing Prayers for our Holy Crusade."

Fundamentalist tele-evangelicals, politicians seeking re-election, think tank bureaucrats or 'discreet' lobbyists : they all have the same quasi-religious spiel .

That's why I say we are looking at gullible billionaires and cynical think tank bureaucrats milking them for all they are worth --- NOT the other way around.....

denier THINK TANKS face specter of "The Dirty Teens" & the neo Dust Bowl

Deniers face a drought of new lies to combat the dry truth

Libertarian think tanks have cancelled all leave and put all hands on deck to fight off the worse specter the DENIER INDUSTRY  ("Doubt is Good - good for our paycheques anyway") has yet had to face.

The Denier heartland, now as it was from September 1939 to December 1941, is the American Mid-West.

And the Mid-West is on fire, facing the biggest, deepest drought since "The Dirty Thirties" and the Dust Bowl.

Denier supporters are starting to wonder, sotto voce, whether there really is something to this Global Warming that all their secular church fathers warned them against.

Inside the Beltway, inside Whitehall, inside the Triangle, even way up on the Hill, the tankers are trying to spin doctor their oleaginous way out of this climatic bind.

I can imagine that Bell's long distance revenue plunge will reverse itself this quarter as Canberra, Washington, London and Ottawa denier spinners try to come up with common alibis when the voters come around.

Big Oil's profits soar with the temperature, because AC use way up in sweltering drought - let them fund the new denier lies

 Big Oil is making bigger than expected profits as more petro  is used to create the Air Conditioning cool (and more CO2) to beat this "not-global-warming"-warming -trend.

 Maybe they can cough up a few readies to combat this summer of
of 2012 threat to the Denier "endless summer sinecure" for so many second rate scientists, academics and journalist hacks....

Area 51 Alert : 97% of ice MELTING ; 97% of scientists VOTE agreement

the 97 % solution ....

It was like something out of Roswell New Mexico's Area 51.

 Or  A. "nasty" Abbott's worst nightmare.

An unlikely but true coincidence ----- or is it, boys and girls ?

Space photos showing 97 % of Greenland's ice cap melting at the same time that 97 % of the world's climate scientists have voted that the whole Earth is getting hot.

97 Percent - wow !

Like that is three times the vote that Stephen Harper got when he was elected absolute - majority government - dictator of Canada for 5 years to life, with time off to Canadians for good behavior.

But is just 97% of the votes of the climate scientist electorate enough to push ahead on bold new changes on how we run our national governments ?

The 37% solution

No, of course not, for that you need a, er, much lower vote - like 37%.

Like the sort of vote that Nasty Abbott or Harper or Cameron get when they are given majority government to make bold new decisions.

97% is much too , er, high  for politicians.

But for scientists ? Politicians - the lying, denying politicians anyway - say that   97 %  is way, way too low.

Politicians simply point out that on this, as in so many things, citizens must simply learn to suck it up ; it is "do as I say --- never, do as I do" .

the 100.00000000% solution of the think tankers

Libertarian denier think tankers have made this point very clear - and as long as Tobacco or Oil or Asbestos keeps feeding them money, they're the experts.

They say we shouldn't act on the gravest crisis facing us since Adam ate the apple until every last one of us, that is all 6.7 billion of us , becomes part of the consensus: 100.00000000% agreement, or nothing.

'Cause I mean, after all, saving our great grandchildrens' lives isn't anything like voting is it ?

For something like saving our own kiddies, it is a case of every last one of us on Earth must be on board or none of us is.......

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....

dear DONNA LAFRAMBOISE , if you are going to play 'little david' at least do it right

Dear Donna :

I feel that since you and I are in the same 'game' and because I am so much older than you, perhaps I might be permitted to offer you some fatherly advice.

If you are going to play at being little david to the great big bad Goliath (in this case, of the IPCC) at least try to do it right.

I too claim to be a solo blogger, albeit on the other side of the climate change debate.

But I have a real job, totally unconnected to my passion about climate change, that supports me and my passion modestly (my annual income is about $8,000) .

I do not accept any financial support, I do not copyright my climate change writings and I wouldn't cross promote my other money making ventures on my climate blog, even if I had any commercial ventures to promote.

My passion is entirely my own, not paid by others and not a loss leader cum CV/RESUME to promote my other money-making ventures.

I am a genuinely low income blogger from a genuine backwater , Nova Scotia, thousands of kilometres from the well-funded Libertarian-denier think tanks of Washington or London --- and so when I rail against them, I do so credibly.

But you, Donna : you are just astro-turf .......

CATO vs CASSE : skygod vs earthling , battling thinktanks

Duelling think tanks, on a flatlining planet....

The CATO Institute, spawner of the denier movement and of all mean things Koch-able, is a powerhouse in the think tank business worldwide.

(And man oh man is it ever a business.

 In most think tanks it provides steady, pensionable, profitable employment for wannabe academics who can't get tenure or peer-reviewed publication. A first rate sort of home for the second rate sort of thinker....)

And I can't think of an organization more worthy of being called the skygod of all skygods - the denier of deniers on all the biological and material limits that humanity must face up to and deal with.

By contrast,Brian Czech's  CASSE ,  the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy ,is virtually unknown outside a relatively small circle of friends and supporters ( albeit friends like David Suzuki and Herman Daly !)

I couldn't even seem to find it on Wikipedia, normally a fount of information on all things obscure.

(I might try seeing it I can edit a token bit about CASSE for Wikipedia and rely on the good will and bad bile of regular wikipedia editors to do it up right.)

But CASSE would seem the natural choice for becoming the planet's leading green think tank.

This is because the advocating a steady state economy is the ONLY thing that truly divides real Green parties from the pro-environment 'greenish' wings of the other parties who remain stubbornly and foolheartedly pro-bloat.

Any party or individual that advocates perpetual growth is really preparing mentally to abandon the Earth, once it is raped to resource-exhaustion, for other worlds.

But CASSE really seems to deserve the title of Earthling of the Earthlings.

Please support it - sign its petition and live and think and talk up a steady state economy.

Be 100% green - not 1% green.

Because 1% of anything might make you rich, but it won't make you happy....

Deniers can turn - on a dime - the case of SOLON LOW

Mormons vs Jews

Solon Low was the long time leader of Canada's Social Credit Party --- by far the most successful branch of that party in the world.

He and the bulk of the party came from Alberta - whose dominant leaven of immigrants (in the Hartzian sense of the word) were American libertarians and Mormons.

So Alberta was born redneck and if anything, has mellowed in recent years.

Low and his party were successful by appealing to the deniers of their day ; those who denied that Jews were widely discriminated against.

They denied that fact totally and indeed claimed it was Protestants who were discriminated against by a worldwide secret conspiracy of Jewish global bankers and  Jewish global communists.

Volte-face 

But deniers can change - few as abruptly as Solon Low though.

Suddenly , in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, he stopped all his violent anti-Jewish rhetoric and began equally violently accusing the Canadian mainstream parties of being anti-Isreal !

Low was but one of millions of right wingers who did a volte-face in their lifetime on the subject of Jews -- though few as dramatically as him......

DENIERS conquer Brazil - and it is only going to get worse - much worse

So - in just one year - and after just one half hour airing on a popular comedy show - Brazil has gone from being the nation least likely to have its mainstream media deny climate change to one of the bad guys.

Perhaps the best known denier-tracking journalist , Chris Mooney, credits - or blames - popular TV comic Jo Soares and his invitation to denier & geography prof RA Felicio to babble on for half an hour, for turning Brazil into a place hospitable to the denier classes.

I am not surprised - I have said all along the deniers are not a mere fringe of nutters but about 60% of us - the majority of us.

Oh sure most of us don't deny human-caused climate change ---- we simply deny its a problem.

"Surely people of good will and top engineering skills can come together and terraform the problem away - under some tropical carpet perhaps ?"

Its the gospel according to REX (Rex Tillerson, new CEO of Exxon-Mobil) : don't worry, be happy and we'll soon have this ship off the iceberg : engineers-are-on-their-way.

(But if you are a Canadian of a certain age you might recognize this as the so called "NFB gambit", "we have problems, yes, but we acknowledge them and are currently working on solving them.")

We live in post-hegemonic times : no one worldview rules the world .

Both green visions and good old fashioned concrete and steel visions will have to duke it out.

Skygods vs Earthlings : not yet with guns, just words so far.

But a civil war within an entire global species makes it a world war ,as well as a civil war, doesn't it ......