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More on the left’s language game — 22 Comments

1. The manipulation of the citizenry through linguistic sleight-of-hand and outright fabrication is an old leftist tactic. Recently, having seen the aspiring “Czarina of Disinformation” fail in her attempt to gain nearly totalitarian control over freedom of expression, the illegitimate Biden administration appointed Camille Stewart Gloster as “Deputy National Cyber Director” in order that she may continue her previous work of censorship from her time at Goolag. Off-topic (but somewhat related), U Penn’s spineless law school is determined to bring down the brilliant Amy Wax despite her having tenure and despite her being, in all likelihood, the single brightest member of the faculty (see the recent interview posted at the blog TheHebrewConservative).

2. ferguson of imperial college and murray of u washington, generated these models that justified the lockdown, something like 100 million dead, (don’t quote me) of course they did little to slow the spread, but maybe that wasn’t the objective, likewise with the climate change mitigation, actually does nothing for the climate, in part because it ignores china and indias huge carbon footprint, but that isnt really the goal, in both cases, a panopticon that jeremy bentham would be proud of is demanded,

3. this may have been the beta version

   https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/bombshell-template-to-export-lockdowns

   the green new deal, said that restriction on travel and other aspects of quality of life would be required, we didn’t ask for any of this, and yet they are pushing it through regulation,

4. It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that the Left gets away with it because they dominate big media and big education, among other communication sources. But, those two are the major players.

   As noted, their hyperbole breaks down when people can observe phenomena directly. But, there are too many critical issues that defy direct observation. The communication stranglehold needs to be broken; and that will be very difficult at this point.

   I suppose that one thing we can all do is address the issues with our personal contacts in hopes of starting ripples across the waters of deceit. This can be hard, because it runs the risk of alienating family and friends. In our house we shy away from it. Some family members call this prudence; I tend to think of it as cowardice.

   I know that I state the obvious, but I wanted to say it just the same.

5. “What’s more, I don’t see how climate change theories can ever be proven or disproven,…”

   I suspect you may be using “theories” in the generic sense, rather than the scientific sense. First of all, to be pedantic, theories are large scale explanations, models are small scale ideas with predictions. The AGW community has been pushing their climate models for 3 decades now with actual quantitative predictions. And the temperatures have not conformed to the predictions. Their models have been disproven. Of course, they continue to push their “scary” models.

   However, and this goes to your analysis of perception by the common folks, if you look at the actual temperatures they are talking about, it’s on the order of tenths of degrees!!. They are not talking about absolute earth temperature, but temperature anomaly; that is, a deviation of earth temperature from some established baseline of temperature over a time period. Look at those scary graphs with large temp increases, then look at the y axis; tenths of a a degree up to max of 1 degree. They then claim a 1 degree change in average earth temp will be disastrous. But of course they ignore the historical data where earth’s temperature was much warmer than now and life thrived. Such a remarkable set of science BS and even 30 years later it still is going.

6. physicsguy:

   Yes, I’m using “theory” in the generic, vernacular sense.

7. The federal facility I work in is back to mandatory masks. Contractors who are not vaccinated have to have a test ($140 a pop on their own dime) every three days to continue to work.

   Even though the president caught it after being vaxxed and double boosted.

   The policies don’t have to make sense, as long as they are rigidly enforced.

8. “The economy is something that affects people very personally and very obviously” neo

   All of the democrat’s policies cannot but increasingly affect people very personally and very obviously. And the more deeply and obviously their policies affect people negatively, the less effective will be their word play.

9. If this keeps up, and it will, “Biden” will have to declare a “Climate Emergency”(TM) pretty soon…as November gets closer and closer…:
   “Biden Hits an Astonishing New Low With Hispanic Voters”—
   https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/07/27/biden-hits-an-astonishing-new-low-with-hispanic-voters-n2610895

10. As far as bamboozlement goes…
    Once you realize that…
    “Biden” and his pals lie about everything;
    that “his” policy is one of destruction/transformation;
    and that the ONLY thing that matters is optics, which must be doctored to fit the Narrative…it makes the entire charade a whole lot easier to understand: obey, or else.

    Covid-induced lockdowns were based on lies and myths purported to be “science”. And if the lies and myths changed over time it was—simply—because the “science” “changed” over time.

    The Climate “Emergency” will be based on the same “follow-the science” trick (i.e., “methodology”)—as noted above, there is a connection—only on steroids.

    Yep, lockdowns and limitations—threats, intimidation and punishment—on steroids.

    It has already been noted by not a few that Covid19 was a dry run for what’s coming down the pike. And “thanks” to Justin Trudeau, we have learned how government “persuasion” will be implemented, i.e., enforced and coerced.

    (Things will be “easier”, to be sure, once the armed forces are gutted, law enforcement is essentially neutered, and a lack of the availibility of ammunition renders guns useless.)

    Remember: Lies, Destruction, Optics.

11. Great post, great inspiration by “Bauxite,” great comments. I would add only the obvious: this crap happens because it is lucrative. It will not stop until it gets too expensive. But –to take “climate change”— they have been getting it obviously wrong for decades and has any of them been fired? Lost grant money? Been forced to retract their garbage papers?

    If that’s happened, please let me know.

    The sad and scary bit is, once this habit of emotional “thinking” sets in, it is infectious. If you swallow their garbage on climate change, you’ll more easily accept the same mode of argument on other topics like gender identity and race theory, and Covid-19. Your critical skills grow dull, you weary of demolishing their sloppy “reasoning” and pseudo-factual claims, you see other and better critics being picked off, bullied, sidelined.

    It will be on the personal scale, over tangible economic realities, that these tyrannical BS artists will fail; must fail. Although even there we see the WH scrambling to redefine “recession” and gaslighting us about the real meaning and extent of “inflation.”

12. I regularly appear before the Omaha Public Power District. OPPD is a tiny utility with $1b in revenue and it serves about 1m people in Eastern NE.

    The elected Board are all Greens. OPPD has adopted a net carbon zero policy. It will cost $28b and double or triple rates.

    The Board and the usual lunatics who appear before the Board are all insane. They really and truly think it is essential for future life on Planet Earth for tiny OPPD to close its coal-fired power plants and buildout all sorts of new wind and solar.

    It is the craziest thing I have ever seen. And these people are supposed to be both intelligent and educated. I give them the facts and they blow me off.

    The latest is they are proposing to do business with the criminal Nextera Company and OPPD refuses to exclude companies that benefit from slave labor.

    If my buddy gets elected, I’ve got new laws in mind for OPPD.

13. no marlin perkins in from the great beyond,

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwvPbqmQh_o

14. Great commentary by Neo. I’ve probably said it before, but I actually thought that the switch from AGW to Climate Change was a laugh line when I first heard it. In the last 4 billion years, when hasn’t the climate changed? Or in the last 0.5 billion years?
    ______

    My follow-on thesis here now is how they’ve gone beyond simple language manipulations. Sticking with climate change:

    Back in the late 20th century, the IPCC, models and predictions were calculating some dire numbers. They were already talking about “the settled science” but the predicted warming numbers were in the range of 6 to 8 degrees C which would be very scary. Then around 5 or 10 years ago, a new report was actually a little apologetic and quoted a new warming prediction of about 3 degrees C. The settled science had changed, by more than a little. How many media outlets trumpeted that?

    Did you hear about the very recent revision? I hadn’t. Maybe because there wasn’t any coverage at all? (Not sure.)

    Here is the IPCC chart I posted before:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#/media/File:Physical_Drivers_of_climate_change.svg

    I was looking at the relative sizes previously, but this has absolute numbers attached. I added up the two biggies, CO2 and methane, and got 1.4 C of warming. Gee, that seems very small. But wait … that negative sulfur dioxide cooling number is rather large. Add them all up and you obtain: +1.04 deg. C. Seriously!?

    That nitrous oxide from farms that Trudeau is so worried about is about +0.09 deg. C globally. Canada’s contribution is probably something like +0.01 deg. or less.

    This is very eye opening stuff, to me anyway. But what is the IPCC’s language?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#/

    At current greenhouse gas emission rates, temperatures could increase by 2 °C (3.6 °F), which the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is the upper limit to avoid “dangerous” levels, by 2050.[10]

    [10]
    https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-when-might-the-world-exceed-1-5c-and-2c-of-global-warming/

    So instead of predicting future temperatures with the current atmosphere, they are predicting future atmospheres and then conjecturing the temperature effects of that. That is, forget about global temperature models, look at how bad the emissions are! Misdirection. Look at how badly we are missing the Paris accords. Trust us; the future is dire if we don’t take all these drastic actions.
    _____

    Two other quick points. The terrestrial temperature record is real isn’t it? Uhm, not exactly. The old recording stations have heat island and other effects that they correct with some arcane math. Last I heard ten years ago or so, they had “corrected” the record from 1970 on five different occasions. Each new correction lowered the 1970 temperature so that the recent temperatures would look warmer relatively speaking. This is not a language manipulation, but science and data fraud.

    NOAA also measures near surface seawater temperature. They have an old system that uses their boats and has significant systematic errors associated with engine heat that is dumped into the seawater. They also have a new system of temperature measurement buoys that have effectively no systematic error.

    In the last two years of the Obama admin., NOAA released a report about the dire increase in seawater temperatures. Unfortunately, their chief scientist responsible for data integrity had retired the year before and he blew the whistle on that report. Turns out, they had interpreted the low quality uncorrected boat data as the high quality data, and then took the high quality buoy data and fudged it to match up with the boat data. More data fraud.

    All of this ties in with Bauxite’s notion of “policy debates occur[ing] in the realm of abstract theory.”

15. There has been no long-term trend in climate, heat waves, storm severity, etc. etc. etc. You can convince yourself (assuming you are influenced by data) by going to Tony Heller’s You-Tube channel and watching his videos – most around 5 minutes.
    He presents the data and shows how the government has been “cheating” by changing their records, carefully choosing starting points to eliminate older data that undermines their narrative, and many other techniques.

16. Thanks “TommyJay” for pointing out the cooking of historical data by the climatistas: systematic, deceptively explained, curiously asymmetrical “corrections/adjustments.” The earlier numbers got cooler (the 1930s set heat records which have…gone away) and the later ones got warmer, but only every single time. Anthony Watts has *plenty* of empirical evidence on that scandal, plus urban heat islands, plus the shabby/compromised quality of many official data-collection sites (so they ran hot), plus ARGO buoy shenanigans. Between a fair sampling of Watts’ site and a reading of Shellenberger and Koonin and Judith Curry, it is impossible to ignore the corruption of the science. Biggest scam in history.

17. Scammers gotta scam.
    (They just can’t see to help themselves…)
    And when the stakes are “saving humanity” (meh) or—far more fetching—“saving the planet”, the mega-grift is just too, too hard to pass up…especially when the whole point is to consolidate power…(along with the “thrill of the chase”, i.e., grift…)

18. The temperature record is adjusted every quarter. The adjustments always cool the past to help the narrative. But people don’t realize that the current temps are “adjusted” by algorithms before they are recorded.

    90% of US temp monitoring stations flunk basic scientific siting requirements (rest of the world is worse). The current temps are adjusted based on temps in other areas. It’s a real Rumpelstiltskin algorithm process where they try to take crap numbers and massage them with other crap numbers to produce something they try to pass off as scientific gold.

    I’m serious. They know that 90% of their data is wrong. They don’t know which data is wrong or by how much. But they claim that their magic super duper pooper scooper algorithm scientifically turns all the crap into science.

    How do we know that climate science is garbage? Because the theory relies on crap data, crap models and studies which are so mindbogglingly stupid, incompetent and corrupt that they should be an embarrassment to junior high science students. And because modern science is thoroughly broken. No one ever checks anyone else’s work. Without any quality control process, no one should trust a word of it. Especially when the main proponents have been caught lying and subverting science repeatedly.

19. Neo, as physicsguy notes, the town cryers of disaster have all been proven wrong many times. They actually have made tangible predictions within measurable timelines, and not just on their esoteric models, and been proven wrong on each one. No, Manhattan is not under 12 feet of water, Algore. No hurricanes and tornadoes have not increased. The 2 Pauls (Ehrlich and Krugman) have been proven wrong, absolutely, totally wrong, so many times it’s ridiculous.

    The problem is Hood’s Law, “People’s perception of someone’s guilt or innocence is almost always proportional to their view of the heinousness of the crime, not the likelihood of actual guilt.” That’s why the courts are so meticulous in explaining to juries that they are there to discern the facts, not to judge the defendant. Likewise, people perceive risk on the magnitude of potential harm, rather than on its likelihood. That’s rule #3 of how to be a psychic.

20. }}} On climate change, every person alive today will be dead before climate change theories are proven or disproven.

    Not at all. They have literally already been mostly disproven — in the 1990s, they were saying things would already be direly obvious BY NOW. Yet they continually have to revise (often with serious mods to prior claims to reduce metrics yet despite this, claim the exact same dire consequences despite the reduced metrics).

    “The validity of a science lies in its ability to predict.”

    On these grounds, alone, AGW fails. They had to change the ephing NAME from the at least vaguely descriptive “AGW” to “Climate Change” — an utterly ambiguous and catch-all term which can be used for virtually any weather phenomenon — Blizzards? Climate Change! Heat Waves? Climate Change! Severe Cold? Climate Change! Drought? Climate Change! Floods? Climate Change!!

    Here’s a REAL prediction —
    2006: “We have to get use to this [four severe hurricanes in one year]”.
    Reality:
    Literally THE LONGEST term of no class-three or greater hurricanes striking the eastern seaboard, from Texas to Maine, in recorded history, since about 1820, when the population along the coast was sufficient to record and note a class-three or greater hurricane making landfall. This record had been in place since the civil war era, from about 1860-1869 (IIRC). We managed to go 11 years (IIRC) this time.

    This is nontrivial, because hurricanes are a direct byproduct of ocean warming, and before the earth can “warm”, the oceans — a truly enormous heat sink — MUST warm up to supply the cyclones with the energy needed.

    And yet this has not happened at all — there has been no significant uptick in the severity of either tornadoes or hurricanes for decades.

    Here’s another one for you, which I’ve seen virtually nowhere.

    There is a concept called “The Citrus Line”.

    The orange tree has a lifespan of about 20y. So, when you plant one, you want to get the full 20y out of it, or you’re losing money. Now, hard freezes kill orange trees. So you want to plant them in zones where there are few, if any, hard freezes in any given 20y period. This is what defines the “Citrus Line”, north of which you don’t tend to find orange groves.

    It’s not easy to find, but go looking for a map of the historical locations of the Citrus Line.

    Hint: In 1880 it was up in Georgia. I is currently down at or below Orlando, FL.

    And yes, this is even observable. I recall, back in the 1970s and 80s, a region along Florida’s Turnpike just north of Orlando, a region of rolling hills called “Howey-in-the-Hills”, that used to be covered with orange groves. I mean, it was horizon to horizon orange groves.

    Not any more. I don’t believe there is a single orange grove there any more.

    :-/

    Prediction. It’s the end-result of the scientific method. You make predictions, and they come true. Over and over and over. And you know you are on the “right” track.

21. neo – I completely agree that under the current political dynamic, catastrophic climate change cannot be disproven, at least in a political sense. I was assuming that at some point in the next century or so things will change such catastrophic climate change isn’t as politically important, maybe when future anthropologists are trying to figure out why we destroyed our civilization. (Hopefully not.)

    It’s also conceivable that at some point in the coming decades, heavy handed climate change regulations will become inconvenient to the left. Then, we will have always been at war with Eastasia.

22. In re Climate Change – a reprise of a recent link from physicsguy.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/27/connecticut-steps-up-to-save-the-planet/

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