Morning Briefing | Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Parson Robert Malthus; the sinister ideologue behind the Paris climate change conference
In this autumn of 2015, humanity is being subjected to an unprecedented mass brainwashing campaign in the name of pessimism and the renunciation of a better standard of living for oneself and one's children. This campaign is advancing under the banner of climate change, global warming, overpopulation, industrial pollution, and general historical and cultural pessimism. Unfortunately, Pope Francis and the Vatican bureaucracy are playing a deplorable role by supporting this campaign, which is touted in the current pope's first encyclical entitled "Laudato Sii." The Roman Catholic bishops of much of the world have demanded the phasing out of all fossil fuels, including coal and oil, a reckless, irresponsible, and potentially lethal recommendation for the poor of the planet whom Francis says he is trying to help.
The controlled media of much of the world are laboring hard to create a pessimistic block universe, a new prisonhouse of the human mind. The problem is obviously that only the increased application of science, technology, and modern industry – including production facilities on the moon and other planets and in interplanetary space – can provide significant improvements in the standard of living, longevity, and quality of life of billions of poor people across the globe. But if every proposal for modern production, including modern energy production, is immediately dismissed with the slogans of climate change, then the situation of mankind is a blind alley, and thus truly tragic.
Fortunately for all of us, although there has been some global warming lately, it seems to have stopped about 15 years ago. In addition, whatever warming has occurred is far more likely to be attributable to solar activity than to the carbon emissions of which the climate charlatans prate.
To be a climate scientist is almost automatically to be a charlatan. Climate science is not a real discipline, like history, philosophy, mathematics, geology, astronomy, meteorology, and others. All of these disciplines maintain an open mind as to where scientific inquiry will take them. But climate science is automatically bound hand and foot to a specific conclusion – anthropogenic global warming caused by carbon emissions, which must be fought by wholesale deindustrialization and the introduction of anti-economic and backward technologies like windmills and solar cells.
One does not have to be a climate scientist to have an educated view of the anthropogenic climate change/global warming claim. For a historian like the present writer, it is easy to refute the exaggerated claims of the foundation funded thinkers of our time by going back to about 1000 to 1200 AD, the time which has long been known as the Medieval Warm Period, when, in the absence of widespread use of coal and oil, ocean and air temperatures rose to levels as high as today, and higher. The historian does not have to muck around with ice cores or other inherently problematic forms of evidence; we are lucky enough to have a written document to use as our source. We refer here to the medieval scholar Adam of Bremen, who wrote in northern Germany in the 11th century A.D., telling us of Winland, an island in the North Atlantic, where grapevines spontaneously grow. We would say Vineland.
The earliest record of the name Winland is found in Adam of Bremen's Descriptio insularum Aquilonis ("Description of the Northern Islands", ch. 39) written c. 1075. Adam implies that the name contains Old Norse vín (Latin vinum) "wine" (rendered as Old High German win):Be careful when consulting online reference works on the Medieval Warm Period, since the climate science charlatans long ago identified the Medieval Warm Period as one of the main vulnerabilities in the junk science they were peddling.
"Moreover, he has also reported one island discovered by many in that ocean, which is called Winland, for the reason that grapevines grow there by themselves, producing the best wine." (Praeterea unam adhuc insulam recitavit a multis in eo repertam occeano, quae dicitur Winland, eo quod ibi vites sponte nascantur, vinum optimum ferentes).[6]
Over the years, the more cynical and outspoken of the Malthusian demagogues like Maurice Strong, Alexander King, and Aurelio Peccei have admitted that the principal purpose of campaigns around the limits of growth, overpopulation, or climate change is to prevent the scientific, technological, and industrial development of the Third World (or developing countries, or the postcolonial sector). This is already a very serious matter, since it amounts to saying that anthropogenic climate change/global warming is an ideology of genocide, just as surely as Alfred Rosenberg's ravings were an ideology for genocide in the 1930s and 1940s.
The oligarchy as a whole is compelled to seek an ideology like global warming in order to prevent the development of technology, which constantly erodes the irrational privileges of financiers and similar figures, while providing upward mobility to scientifically trained representatives of the lower classes. The oligarch must assert overpopulation, since this allows him to classify some people as superfluous and inferior, thus helping to cement oligarchical privilege.
Another reason is the one discussed by Sigmund Freud. Oligarchs who fear that their outrageous class privileges might be taken away can easily develop into paranoia. Under these circumstances, the interior of the oligarchical mind feels that all available objects have been deprived of libidinal cathexis. This is experienced by the oligarchical paranoiac as the end of his world. A frequent reaction to this internal impoverishment is to project a zero level of libidinal cathexis onto the outside world, as for example in the claim that the end of the world is approaching. The oligarch is then delighted to find that this warped intuition provides an admirable rhetorical tool for duping and stampeding the weak minded.
The argument here today is that Malthusian thinking, otherwise known as environmentalism, radical ecology, zero growth, or other names represent the inherent mental and emotional attitude of oligarchy (the rule of the few) as it has been expressed over almost 3 millennia, going back to archaic Greece. In a profound sense, today's acrimonious debates are not primarily concerned with scientific hypotheses, evidence, or findings in the theory of anthropogenic climate change/global warming. We are rather dealing with the perennial, compulsive attitude of the oligarchical mind towards human society.
Right now, the oligarchs, charlatans, and demagogues of the world are straining mightily to bind humanity into the straitjacket of their discredited ideology. They want to see anthropogenic climate change/global warming and their view of its consequences enacted into a binding treaty imposed upon all nations of the earth, an agreement which could in theory be enforced by military measures.
The reason they are in such a big hurry is that, according to the evidence, there has been almost no global warming of any kind over the past 17 years. The model the climate scientists have been using is in deep trouble. In an interview two years ago with the German magazine Der Spiegel, meteorologist Hans von Storch pointed out that:
If there is no global warming between now and 2018, the entire global warming paradigm will be in crisis and in grave danger of ignominious collapse.
[Far too many parasites have been earning their living off this absurd and flawed paradigm, so these people do not intend to wait for 2018 when the dinner bell will ring for them for the last time. They wish to ram through a series of irreversible measures to strangle the world economy and make all further discussion of their discredited model superfluous.]
SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temperatures haven't risen in nearly 15 years. What can explain this?
STORCH: So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.
[The IPCC ignored the evidence to keep getting their paychecks.]
SPIEGEL: Do the computer models with which physicists simulate the future climate ever show the sort of long standstill in temperature change that we're observing right now?
STORCH: Yes, but only extremely rarely. At my institute, we analyzed how often such a 15-year stagnation in global warming occurred in the simulations. The answer was: in under 2 percent of all the times we ran the simulation. In other words, over 98 percent of forecasts show CO2 emissions as high as we have had in recent years leading to more of a temperature increase.
SPIEGEL: How long will it still be possible to reconcile such a pause in global warming with established climate forecasts?
STORCH: If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.
At the same time, this means that if the saner part of mankind is able to avoid the worst in the relatively short term, then, in as few as three years, or slightly more, we may have the conditions to bring the entire global warming edifice of kookery and quackery crashing down.
The Paris conference claims to be devoted to preventing the average temperature of the world from rising by 2° Celsius before the end of the current century. We must remember that the pseudo-theory according to which levels of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere are now at ultrahigh levels compared to the past is based on findings drawn from the examination of ice cores which have been drilled deep into the ancient ice of glaciers, almost as a way of going back into time. The problem is that the ice cores are hopelessly inaccurate, in part because of the daily and seasonal cycles of warming and cooling, which lead to the release of much of the old CO2. So the levels were not as high in the past as the yelping ideologues assert. As it happens, the highly competent and precise German and other chemists of the 19th and 20th centuries carried out numerous reliable measurements of the CO2 in the atmosphere. We cannot discuss these findings in full here, but suffice it to say that they do not add up to the much fetishized "hockey stick" pattern based on ice core readings which is touted by the purveyors of anthropogenic climate change. Indeed, the world may have already at times surpassed without any visible damage the CO2 levels which these ideologues regard as catastrophic.
Prometheus: Stole fire from the gods to benefit mankind with technology
Early models of oligarchical-Malthusian thinking go back to the early time of ancient Greek history. In the world of myths, for example, we find the case of the Titan Prometheus, who is said to have fashioned mankind out of clay. Later, Prometheus gave humanity the most precious of all gifts in the form of technology. Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and the other Olympian gods, and provided this indispensable technology to mankind. The Olympian pantheon of Zeus and the other gods represents the oligarchical system of Greek society projected into heaven. Just as oligarchs try to prevent the people from getting modern technology on earth, so too did Zeus attempt to deny fire to mankind. But the courageous and admirable Prometheus dared to defy Zeus, who sent the goddess Pandora to harass him. Prometheus was later chained to a mountain in the Caucasus, where an eagle would come periodically to tear out his liver. Such is the punishment meted out by the Olympian pantheon for improving the lot of mankind.
Today, we can compare the fanatical delegates meeting in Paris with the Olympian gods, but we still need a modern Prometheus to unleash science, technology, and production.
We should also remember that the reason cited by Greek oligarchs somewhat later to explain the 10 year long Trojan War, which caused devastating human losses and partially depopulated the Hellenic world and the coast of the Anatolian peninsula, was the idea found among the fragments of the old poet Hesiod that, by about the 10th century BC, there were too many human beings pressing down on the breast of Mother Earth, so a genocidal war had to be arranged. This was done by having the angry goddess Eris cast a golden apple inscribed "for the fairest" down the aisle at the marriage of Thetis and Pelleus, where Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena were all in attendance. With that, the genocidal Trojan War was on.
A little bit later, the Athenian writer and contemporary of Thucydides who is often called the "Old Oligarch" in modern anthologies complains that science and technology are threatening the class position of oligarchs like himself in two important ways. First of all, he is not happy with the existence of the so-called Long Walls from Athens to Piraeus, since these advanced feats of engineering for that time, make Athens virtually invulnerable to the Army of oligarchical Sparta, meaning that the oligarchical party in Athens is correspondingly weakened. The old oligarch is also not happy about the high-technology Athenian navy, which affords an avenue of upward mobility for educated members of the lower orders, again threatening the class position of the oligarchs.
With these examples we have more or less explored the typical oligarchical mindset: the desire to suppress or destroy technology, the notion that the world is overpopulated, and the fanatical embrace of irrational oligarchical privilege. These are the wares being hawked in the streets of Paris today.
We have already seen that the Medieval Warm Period was as severe or more severe than the current temperature patterns. We will not pause to discuss the question of why warming should be seen as a catastrophe, and not as something beneficial. It will be useful to mention briefly some of the other cases in which oligarchical pseudoscience has made wrong choices and predictions in the service of Malthusian ideology.
The Roman Empire had a steam engine developed by Hero of Alexandria, but the senatorial class did not understand how such a power source could be applied to agriculture and production. Instead, the Roman steam engine was suppressed by the oligarchs and used only for special effects when opening the doors of the pagan temples.
The Roman Emperor Diocletian attempted to freeze all technological development by stating that every son of a member of a guild had to spend his entire working life in that exact same guild. Diocletian also made it a crime to alter or change the property of any guild, meaning in practice that technological improvements could not be carried out. The collapse of the Roman Empire soon followed.
In Italy during the Middle Ages, the pervasive influence of animals in the doctrine of St. Francis of Assisi was, along with other factors, a departure from traditional Christian doctrine and could easily have been grounds for declaring Francis a heretic and preventing his holy orders from being founded. Pope Innocent III, a consummate power politician, decided to draw the line in such a way as to keep the Franciscans and the Dominicans inside the church, while declaring war on the Albigensians in southern France.
The more modern phase of this anti-human ideological tradition begins in the putrefying corpse of the Venetian Republic in the latter part of the 18th century. Here we find the notorious defrocked clergyman Giammaria Ortes, from whom Malthus literally plagiarized all the important points in his system. Ortes viewed the world economy as a zero-sum game, with progress in any part of it leading to decline in some other part. Ortes, and not the Belgian Verhulst in the 1830s, invented the pseudo-concept of "carrying capacity," understood as an insuperable limit for the population of any species in the world. Ortes set his notion of the carrying capacity for human beings on earth at 3 billion. Apart from the conclusion being wrong, the method is especially wrong. Ortes also set the tone for all modern ideologues of this school by rigorously refusing to pay attention to technological change. But, of course, technological change is the most important invariant quality of human existence, without which any society would collapse in the short to medium run, and so any system which refuses to consider this variable is ipso facto bankrupt and incompetent. These sins of the father are still in circulation in Paris today.
Jeremy Bentham also copied various aspects of his felicific calculus, "the greatest good for the greatest number," from Ortes.
Giammaria Ortes of Venice: Originated pseudo-theories of carrying capacity, zero-sum games and calculus of vice and virtue. Malthus copied everything from Ortes
The most avid plagiarizer of Ortes is Parson Robert Malthus of the Church Of England. Malthus posited that there would always be overpopulation, since agricultural production advanced arithmetically, or supposedly more slowly than population growth, which the Parson thought would be geometrical. In reality, there are plenty of times and places where the opposite is true, as for example, during the first impact of the green revolution in the Third World. It has been noted by many that this formulation means that the world is overpopulated as soon as a single human being was on the planet.
The other important side of Malthus is that he was also an economist. He was one of the founders of the flawed theory of a capitalist depression as a crisis of overproduction. Malthus thought that the depression came about because there was not enough effective demand to buy up surplus production, leading to layoffs, factory closings, and the general crisis. Malthus's answer to this was his celebrated formulation that "The Church with a Capacious Maw is best" – meaning that a large group of parasitical state clergy, just like Malthus himself, would always be useful in consuming the capitalist surplus and preventing these phantomatic crises of overproduction. Lord Keynes is a self-declared follower of this side of Malthus.
This is the school of thought, which Dickens ridiculed in his Christmas Carol, when he has uncle Scrooge say of the poor that "if they be like to die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
Ebenezer Scrooge, the villain in Dickens' A Christmas Carol: His anti-human theories dominate the Paris Climate Change conference
Malthusianism became the bedrock ideology of the entire British Empire. Darwinism and especially social Darwinism (a forerunner of fascism) were thoroughly founded in the crackpot schemes of Malthus/Darwin. The British philosophical radicals like Bentham and the two Mills were Malthusians, and it was their doctrines which contributed to vast episodes of genocide in India, administered by the British East India Company.
In 1865, the British academic economist James Jevons announced the absurdity of Peak Coal, saying that he feared the coal mines of England would soon be exhausted. In reality, the British oligarchy felt threatened by large numbers of industrial workers who were going to get the vote as a result of their political mobilization in support of Abraham Lincoln and the Union in the American Civil War. There are still plenty of coal mines in England, but the oligarchs have forced the complete shutdown of all the mines.
In the United States after the Second World War, it was in the 1960s when Malthusian doctrine experienced a large-scale comeback. Quacks like Paul Ehrlich began talking about a "Population Bomb" which never came to pass, although the baleful effects of this cretinous absurdity have certainly done much demographic damage at home and abroad. Once Ehrlich had established his career, a bidding war broke out with pseudo-scientists like David Pimentel, attempting to outdo Ehrlich by citing the number of Americans and other persons whom they considered superfluous.
The Population Bomb: A flawed methodology which failed to predict the crisis of underpopulation impacting the world today
Russia, China, Europe, and Japan are all experiencing demographic crises due to underpopulation – the exact opposite of what the charlatans predicted. The folly of the Chinese government was perhaps greatest of all, since they took the ravings and scribblings of Ehrlich and his co-thinkers so seriously as to impose a one child per family policy. The results of this appalling decision may yet cripple the Chinese economy in decades to come. The Chinese government says it has now abandoned this policy, but the damage is done. Why does Beijing not engage in some good old Maoist self-criticism and explain how they blundered onto this imperialist path? We should also remember that Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, and Schellnhuber, his counterpart in Germany and in the Vatican, come out of this anti-human ideological matrix.
The Club of Rome, founded in the late 1960s, published the Meadows and Forester tome entitled The Limits to Growth, followed by the RIO Report, etc. This methodological monstrosity purported to show that human civilization was doomed because the measurable deposits of critical raw materials were headed for depletion at a rate expressed by the known reserves divided by the yearly consumption. The problem with that analysis is that, almost half a century later, there are more known reserves of most of the main raw materials than there were in 1972. The other obvious point is that if wood runs out, one can turn to coal. Then oil comes along. Nuclear energy can be used to supplement, and eventually replace all of these. Not so far away is thermonuclear fusion technology of the type being tested at the ITER facility in the South of France, and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey.
A subset of the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth is the theory of Peak Oil. There are fast-talking ideologues in London, some of them descended from Darwin himself, who have been milking Peak Oil for all it's worth during the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, and in the current decade. As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. These ideologues are kept in being by hedge fund hyenas and other speculators who always welcome the report that something is scarce, so they can begin to drive up the price before cashing in.
All in all, this is a sorry record for the climate charlatans and their associates, with not one significant forecast coming true. The Tax Wall Street Party invites all persons of good will to become familiar with the sources cited here with a view to fighting back against the monstrous brainwashing offensive of the pseudoscientific and genocidal crackpots. Don't let the people around you succumb to historical pessimism and despair. If the world can hang on for a few more years, climate change/global warming will go the way of Peak Coal 150 years ago.
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