The great climate change conspiracy revealed
George Monbiot, climate change activist and author of the best selling book, Heat, has revealed an alarming and damning email which lays bare the great conspiracy behind the global warming scam:
From: ernst.kattweizel@redcar.ac.uk
Sent: 29th October 2009
To: The Knights Carbonic
Gentlemen, the culmination of our great plan approaches fast. What the Master called “the ordering of men’s affairs by a transcendent world state, ordained by God and answerable to no man”, which we now know as Communist World Government, advances towards its climax at Copenhagen. For 185 years since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working towards this moment.
The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master’s initial thesis – that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the atmosphere – had to be accepted by the scientific establishment. I will not bother you with details of the gold paid, the threats made and the blood spilt to achieve this end. But the result was the elimination of the naysayers and the disgrace or incarceration of the Master’s rivals. Within 35 years the 3rd Warden of the Grand Temple of the Knights Carbonic (our revered prophet John Tyndall) was able to “demonstrate” the Master’s thesis. Our control of physical science was by then so tight that no major objections were sustained.
More resistence was encountered (and swiftly despatched) when we sought to install the 6th Warden (Svante Arrhenius) first as professor of physics at Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to project the Master’s second grand law – that the infrared radiation trapped in a planet’s atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and chemical science to sustain the second law.
Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the instrumental record. Securing the consent of the scientific establishment was a simple matter. But thermometers had by then become widely available, and amateur meteorologists were making their own readings. We needed to show a steady rise as industrialisation proceeded, but some of these unfortunates had other ideas. The global co-option of police and coroners required unprecedented resources, but so far we have been able to cover our tracks.
The over-enthusiasm of certain of the Knights Carbonic in 1998 was most regrettable. The high reading in that year has proved impossibly costly to sustain. Those of our enemies who have yet to be silenced maintain that the lower temperatures after that date provide evidence of global cooling, even though we have ensured that eight of the ten warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001(10). From now on we will engineer a smoother progression.
Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret nuclear power stations around the Arctic Circle, attached to giant immersion heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the world’s glaciers.
Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world’s wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world’s biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations of farmers, gardeners, bird-watchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.
The co-operation of these governments requires unflagging effort. The capture of George W. Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly-capitalist governments remain apprised of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of compliant states, the Master’s third grand law has been accepted: world government will be established under the guise of controlling manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.
Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse’s head turned up in James Hansen’s bed, appear to have staved off the immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus?
Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and terrify.
Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the Temple of the Knights Carbonic.
He-he.
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Einstein: religion is “childish superstition”
Few other historic figures have had their religious beliefs as thoroughly questioned as that of Albert Einstein. I suppose the problem is that he often used the word “God” in his conversations and writings. Of course, atheists would like to claim him as one but he consistently rebuffed this claim since he considered himself an agnostic. He did though reject the notion of a personal, interventionist god. So at most he was a deist agnostic. But even then, he emphatically pronounced that the god he talked of was “Spinoza’s God“, which broadly translates to god = nature.
The religious claims on Einstein is however a curious phenomenon. Why is it that the religious always seems to want the authority of scientists to effectively disprove science? People who believe in an entirely invisible realm without one iota of evidence ever have being produced – a concept in complete antipathy to science – somehow need a scientist to validate their fantasies. And the more famous the scientist, the better. Hence the continuous claims on Einstein as a believer in “god”.
A year before his death in 1955, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to philosopher Erik Gutkind after reading his book, ‘Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt’. If anyone is still undecided whether Einstein believed in a god, I would suggest this passage from the letter will clear up the matter:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong … have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.
Until his dying day, Einstein was in awe of nature, the universe. And like all people who know so much about it, he understood how little we know. This was his mystery, his “god”. As Walter Isaacson says in his book Einstein: His Life and Universe,
For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world was comprehensible, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe.
How to get to heaven
Getting to heaven seems to the preoccupation of a big slice of the world’s population. I’m not aware if the concept of heaven exists outside the Christian and Muslim faiths, but by all accounts it seems to be fairly popular.
So how do you get there? The traditional way seems to involve a great deal of piety, worshipping, good works, abstinence, praying, praising, sexual repression, obedience, submission, no crime (except for murdering abortionists) and absolute faith in a deity. Unfortunately for those of us who don’t want to go through these rigours and rather choose to live an enjoyable life, the alternative is to roast in the fires of hell for the rest of eternity. Which doesn’t sound nice.
But not any more. In the nick of time a new service, Reserve a Spot in Heaven makes it much easier. For a modest sum you are guaranteed a spot in heaven (money back if you don’t make it), and are given all the required travel and other documentation. Max your order and you get a VIP access pass to exclusive, elite areas of heaven. Seems like a bargain.
But of course heaven might not be your thing. Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) for example, thinks that heaven would be more like a celestial North Korea, without the option of dying. Which also doesn’t sound very nice. So what to do?
Well you can also Reserve a Spot in Hell. Now wouldn’t that make the perfect gift?
The crowd in your head
The Wisdom of Crowds, a somewhat ground-breaking book written by James Surowieki, was published in 2004. Since then the phrase, “wisdom of crowds” has entered the popular lexicon.
Surowieki argued that data aggregated from a group is often better than could be made by any single member of that group – including an expert in the field. This differs from crowd psychology, or herd mentality as it pertains to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals.
Now in a new study, Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig have shown that the power of averaging could be applied to individuals making two estimates which when averaged are shown to be more accurate than either of them.
But it’s not as simple as making two wild guesses and then averaging them out. Surowieki had shown that in order for a crowd to produce a successful estimate, it (the crowd) needs to be wise. A wise crowd has the following four attributes:
- Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts
- Independence: People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them
- Decentralization: People are able to specialise and draw on local knowledge
- Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision
When it comes down to a single individual, the first assumption must be that the person has knowledge relevant to the topic. The diversity implied in the attributes of a wise crowd is more difficult to achieve. We know from the “wisdom of crowds” that greater diversity improves decision making. So how is diversity achieved by a single person?
Herzog and Hertwig got participants to make their first guesses – at the dates of historical events. When the participants were made to simply give a second estimate, there was little increase in either either knowledge or diversity.
A second condition was designed to increase diversity. Participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?… Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.”
Using this second method to estimate the second value, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate – about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person.
Herzog and Hertwig called their more involved process “dialectical
bootstrapping.” You can pull yourself up by your own proverbial
bootstraps by assuming that you are wrong, providing a second estimate
based on a search for new evidence, and then averaging the two
estimates. (Interestingly, in Herzog and Hertwig’s studies,
bootstrapping did not lead to second estimates that were more accurate
than the first. The benefit of dialectical bootstrapping was only
realized when the first and second estimates were averaged together.
Compared to simply providing a second judgment, dialectical
bootstrapping creates diversity —it leads to estimates that are more
likely to have offsetting errors.)
We’ve heard terms like “thinking outside the box” which I take to be an attempt to increase diversity. The question is how does this increase the quality of decision making? Without the insights into “wisdom of crowds” any new estimate is simply a data point that has as much chance as any other as tending to be “correct”.
The more structured and methodical approach of dialectical bootstrapping is potentially a powerful technique for decision making – without the need for advisers. You could be carrying your own board-of-adviser crowd around in your head.
You are what you cook
Physically, humans are an anomaly in the Great Ape family. Yes, there’s the walking upright and large brain stuff, but what about the things that the other Apes rely on for their survival? Such as hairy skin to keep them warm. Or powerful jaws to crush and chew plants and flesh.
About a decade ago Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham and others developed an hypothesis about the role of fire, and particularly of the cooking of food, in human evolution. It is an intriguing idea which helps to explain these apparent anomalies – and much more.
Wranham has now published a book: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. It’s a fascinating read and is thoroughly convincing. When I heard some commentator call it a “new theory of human evolution” my sceptical hackles rose, but Wranham claims, probably quite accurately, “What is extraordinary about this simple claim is that it is new”.
In essence, our path from ape to modern human ago began about two million years ago when our ancestor Homo Erectus emerged knowing how to control fire and heat food. Eating cooked food – at first tubers and other plants and later meat – made digestion easier, leading to selection for smaller guts. Cooked food takes less energy to digest and provides more energy for the amount consumed. This extra energy could then have been used to power larger, energy sucking brains.
The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by
natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.
Of course fire would explain our relatively hairless skins which gave us the advantage of greater temperature control allowing us to endure long periods of physical exertion – such as hunting – without overheating. There is also the argument that fire allowed us to evolve into more social, calmer beings.
Humans in all cultures and all locations cook their food. Wranham cites studies that show that we cannot survive on uncooked food, and by extension, neither could our ancestors. As an example, one study shows that 50 percent of women on an all-raw food diet stop menstruating. Among the list of ills that befall those on raw diets are back and hip problem, and frequent urination.
But their is a darker side effect too: male authority over women. Marriage, or as Wranham calls it, “a primitive protection racket”, is really a means to protect lone (female) cooks from hungry (male) thieves.
Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited. Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food.
A male-dominated culture with women trapped in a subservient role – from cooking? I am always a bit leery of evolution “just-so” stories, but Wranham presents his postulations in a nuanced and convincingly rational way. As Edward O. Wilson said, “In this thoroughly researched and marvelously well written book,
Richard Wrangham has convincingly supplied a missing piece in the
evolutionary origin of humanity.” I can’t argue with that.
It seems that the anomaly is that we have small mouths. Yes, us load, big-mouthed creatures. Says Wrangham: “They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape.”
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