Doug Proctor: Essay on West and beyond

Doug has posted an essay[1], book review with wider commentary

I’m reading “American Betrayal”, by Diana West, macmillan (2013).

It is concerned with not the fact of Soviet influence (through placement and support of specific pro-Communist figures in the WWII+) American government, but with the refusal to recognize American political (and military and intelligence) life had been infiltrated by agents working against American (and British) best interests. Her book is a polemic, unfortunately, a rant written in a self-indulgent way that will be easy to dismiss as shrieking from a soapbox in Hyde Park. But her point is extremely well made and very, very pertinent to our on-going fight about CAGW: it is not the facts that are in dispute but the “implication” (her term) of those facts. To accept the implication of Soviet penetration is to accept that our view of the last 70 years is false, that the control and decision-making of our wise fathers was not for our but of Stalinist betterment. This is a paradigm shift that is simply unacceptable so as each unassailable point comes up, something is done to destroy the reputation of the teller, or negate the point as a “detail” within a broader, “normal” background.

Sound familiar?

Now: relate this to the Met Office. Consistently the forecasts fail. I forget who, but within the last couple of years, the reason was claimed by some dame or Dame, that the computers weren’t big enough or fast enough. So they get bigger and faster computers. Still the same. Now the bosses ask for forecasts, but the forecasts are corrupted by the IPCC CAGW narrative, so they can’t give hind-casts let alone forecasts now any better than before. So the technical people say, we put this in and we get that out; the only way to change the result is to change the model. The facts are facts, but the implication is ….

Not acceptable. Cognitive dissonance: your mind tries to hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. You can do it for a while, using the wiggle-space of the conditionals like “might” or “may” or “it is possible”, but after a time the conditionals force themselves into the reverse: “might not”, “may not” “is possible but not probable”. And then you are stuck. The technical people CANNOT put out the desired forecast (well, as long as Britain doesn’t go full-KGB on you). So the upper management simply recycle what was done recently: it worked once, didn’t it, and if it could have been right recently, it could be right again, right?

West describes a war for the intellectual honesty of a civilization vis-a-vis Communism/Russianism (as well as vis-a-vis Islam). But it applies to the Global Warming situation. We do not believe that Al Gore is a liar or that David Suzuki is a megalomaniac actor or Michael Mann knows his results are scientifically weak because to believe any of these is to believe that, as Inhofe said, we are the victims of the greatest scam in history. The Big Lie works because the shift in thinking about so much of what we have come to believe about important aspects of our lives is too shattering.

Now let me dispel a thought that I am speaking about a grand conspiracy here. This is where I think West is off-base. Not that there hasn’t been a conspiracy in that some areas conspired to make a possibility into a probability (“95% certainty”) for their own benefit. Definitely. Tweak a situation for your advantage – a human more than a businessman’s tendency. In fact there are lots of places where self-interest rules. Paul Ehrlich is a good example: make outlandish threats about the future unless we listen to him, but when they don’t come true, say they haven’t come true “yet”. Why? For Ehrlich to admit that he was fundamentally wrong would be for Ehrlich to admit his understanding of his own brilliance, importance and how the universe work is seriously flawed. That cannot happen. Al Gore can move his money out of Green technology without admitting his promotion was wrong, by simply saying the market isn’t right AT THIS TIME; he’ll get back in later. It is in the MSM that the real problem lies, because the MSM only marginally benefits from saying the world is getting warmer. As we saw in the ’70s, the MSM benefited by saying the world was getting COLDER. A crisis is a crisis as far as reporters’ lives are concerned; the truth is background to the headlines. But the MSM has invested hugely into CAGW. To back-off now is to admit that the skeptics and hated Republican-Capitalists were correct, that the liberal view, while morally nice, was and is untruthful. Now that is a paradigm shift of disastrous import.

So the Met Office is in a pickle. Like the IPCC whose mandate it is to discuss the ramifications of human-initiated global climate change, any fixing of the system to make observation match expectation requires changing the unchangeable. So what can you do? You plod forward but add some weasel words. Give a range of outcomes that is meaningless except that you are always right. Stop giving detailed seasonal forecasts – when did the Met Office stop this practice? Roll with what you and others did last year – it works for private industry very well, even as individual companies head for the bankruptcy bin. You can’t be blamed for not being smarter than true rocket scientists in the crowd, after all.

West’s American Betrayal misses the mark not about the Soviet influence on the capitalist system, but that the situation was a unique situation. The existential threat that comes from a paradigm shift involving the beliefs we have of the “goodness” or “rightness” of others or the truth of what we have been told or the appropriateness of our behaviour despite our best intentions – the threat is huge and will be defeated if at all possible. We will go down in defeat before we will admit we have been duped: whether it is a battle that should not have been fought or loading up on junk bonds that we KNEW had no real, only a perceived value, our desire to hold firm to identity important beliefs will carry us over the cliffs. But how unique are we in this trouble? Did the last days of the Roman Empire, just before the Vandals arrived, not have Senators saying “All is well, or will soon be well, for you can trust us to tell you the truth, indeed to KNOW the truth”? What about the last tribes of Easter Island, cutting down the last trees and dooming their people to starvation: what important paradigm could they not challenge, i.e. no trees means no boats, no boats means no fishing, trading or means of escape? Or just that their leaders were capable of leading?

To use West’s position, we of the Western World have been infiltrated by the agents of the eco-green liberal environmental socialist pro-nature anti-human establishment. Each day we pay those stupid subsidies for solar, wind and bio-fuel, we cough up to organized groups that have convinced us that they are working FOR us, that even to question them is to be against all our values of humanity and the love of life. When we listen to the Met Office tell us things that don’t make sense we listen to a voice telling us to look the other way because we sure as hell will be unhappy if we don’t. And we do want to be happy.

1. https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/met-office-2014-global-warming-prediction-of-zero/comment-page-1/#comment-65044