Consensus Bashed in my Head with a Hockey stick.
A good climate skeptic asks the right questions.
The 3 Big Influencer Institutions (Main Stream Media, Governments and the Scientific community) have been bombarding us, the general public, with alarming stories, or what we now call “narratives”, about human-induced global climate change that will inexorably lead to catastrophic consequences for all life on earth.
These stories originate at the time when the Sex Pistols were the logical next step after Pink Floyd.
The climate stories of global disaster have been building up since the 1970’s with the 1972 UN Conference of Human Environment and the first World Climate Conference in 1979 wherein Climate Change was promoted as a global political issue of primary importance.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988, but the climate panic really spread like a wildfire in a dried-out rainforest when Al Gore went on his world-wide climate disaster tour (by plane) promoting the now (in)famous Mann hockey stick graph and followed it up with his movie and book ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006.
Today the hockey stick and man-caused climate change is accepted as common knowledge even referred to in main stream media weather-forecasts. It’s even taught in schools. Consensus on the issue has been reached, so the main influencing institutions tell us.
The problem is that even if it is true that such consensus exist (which I don’t know that it is) that doesn’t mean anything.
Despite the fact that scientists know like no others, that facts are not determined by ‘consensus’, but by factual measurements, the 3 Big Influencers keep telling us that 98.7% of scientists agree that human activity causes climate change. And we, well-thinking skeptics, say: “So what? A large consensus doesn’t make something is true. That is unscientific logic. It is called ‘jumping on the bandwagon’”. Consensus (or a majority) is used as a proxy for truth.
Here’s a perspective of how ‘consensus’ is used to frame it as ‘truth’ in one scenario and as ‘false’ in the other:
Many, mainly left-leaning, scientists are the first to shout that Trump is using unsupported claims when he says that “Everybody knows that Joe Biden is the head of the Biden crime family and the most corrupt politician in US history”. They take issue with “Everybody knows” as a proxy for ‘truth’. On the other hand they have no problem using this very same ‘logic’ to cajole people into accepting the so-called ‘fact’ that humans are responsible for climate change because 98.7% of scientists agree that this is so.
Thus “Everybody knows” is bad, but “98.7% of scientists agree” is ‘truth’. If ‘consensus’ can be used to argue that something is false AND that something is true than consensus is not a valid indicator.
If these people were anywhere near honest, they’d be consistent in dismissing the ‘majority beliefs therefore it’s true’-logic and admit that the consensus-argument is fallacious.
But thinking about this deeper, I have to admit that if we dismiss this ‘majority-argument’, then how do we accept expert-opinions on which experts have reached consensus? We can’t after all, become experts in every field ourselves can we? At least that’s what I thought.
It turns out that we can! A bit of free time and a few searches on the Interweb during the Covid period resulted in most of us becoming experts in virology. Nowadays we don’t need no education. The internet has the answers. Do your own research.
We read something on the internet and as we are all intelligent, unbiased critical thinkers, we have the right background to evaluate the scientific data and arguments posted by scientists and influencers. We can establish who tells the truth for ourselves.
We won’t get fooled again. We even have the advantage of not having been indoctrinated by the leftist propaganda of universities unlike those virologists who have spent years studying viruses, how they get transmitted and how pandemics develop.
Today we are not only experts in virology but also on climate. Just as we now know more about viruses than biologists, medical experts and public safety experts, we also know better about climate than do NASA, the IPCC, weather- and climate- data analysts because we can do our own un-biased, independent research on the internet. We are well positioned to confidently question these scientists and so-called ‘experts’.
To doubt or reject expert opinion is a way to express our intuition which is something that we trust more than the knowledge and experience of established (read: indoctrinated) scientists with their peer-reviewed (read: kabal-reviewed) publications.
As we all know, the mainstream media, governments and the scientific community are in the pockets of the elites.
We also know that the big fossil-fuel companies (also in the pockets of the elites) have produced a number of reports back in the 1960’s that quite clearly indicated that the burning of fossil fuels would lead to worsening climate change with negative effects on the planet and human life.
As reported in Chapter 2 of the U.S. Senate Committe on the Budget fossil fuel report “investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times revelealed that, as early as the 1960’s, oil giants like Exxon knew that burning fossil fuels was a major contributor to climate change.”
A good skeptic has to ask the right questions. I believe that there are some key questions, that we must ask ourselve, as climate skeptics too.
For instance how is it that Big Oil already had reports, made by their own unbiased scientists that showed the threats of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels, and decided to keep these reports secret for decades and then, when global warming became a political issue, started framing the, so-called, independent scientific research (such as research from the IPCC) as “hoaxes”, (see also above named fossil fuel report from the U.S. Senate report April 2024). This is indeed a conundrum that, as a climate-skeptic, puts my head in a spin.
But, the most important question that I have been asking for a long time, and to this day I have no satisfactory answer for, is the following:
How is it possible that whatever group is responsible for this global warming frenzy, is able to combine all governments (except perhaps Russia and North Korea), all Media and 98.7% (if true) of all scientists, to sing from the same human-caused-global-warming-catastrophe song-sheet? This means that Israel, Iran, China, US, Germany, the UK, Saoudi Arabia, Argentina, Mexico, France, Botswana, Switzerland and the Vatican as well as Tibet, Mongolia, Canada, South Africa and Lebanon and hundreds of other governments, and all their media and all their scientists agree to tell the general public the false story of human-made disastrous climate change. These countries can’t agree on a religion or on what side of the road to drive on, but they can all agree to miticulously manipulate their populations with one false narrative about the climate? It would be difficult enough to get a story out in more or less unison, if the story were based on generally accepted scientific standards and if the story were true! Let alone if the story is false and flies in the face of hundreds of years of generally accepted scientific practices and rules!
As skeptics we have to admit that it appears impossible that all these countries all have the same well-aligned objectives and are able to coordinate their message about a false narrative in such unison.
A related question is: to what avail? Why would all these governments, media and scientific communities want to dupe the general public (which includes duping their own families and friends)? How do they keep such a scam secret? Surely there are people who have worked in this scam who can show us the irrefutable evidence of the greatest purported scam ever?
The problem is that, to me, this scenario looks less likely than the scenario where a few washed-up scientists, politicians and media personalities are available to the established elites with enormous financial interests in the fossil fuel industries to do their bidding for the right price and tell stories that cast doubt on a truth that is a threat to theis elite’s financial interests.
This is also the main point of the global-warming-narrative believers, I would think.
How do we climate-skeptics counter the perception that it is highly unlikely that all governments, media and the scientific community are out to dupe the world population and that they are so incredibly effective at this scale? And to what avail? And who is this group of people able to orchestrate this?
I believe that we must provide thorough answers to these questions or it may be us climate-skeptics who have to revise our narative.
