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Dick Smythe is … predictable.

For many years Dick Smythe worked in the Toronto area in news and commentary. His voice was distinctive, a great radio voice, and his politics were always to the left. Now he lives up north and submits commentary clips to the premiere talk station out of Toronto.

He is mostly predictable, although once in awhile he will surprise the listener. Today he weighed in on global warming and made some glaring assumptions. In his remarks he took shots at me as a member of the growing group that regards the man-made global warming alarmism a monstrous hoax. Let’s call those who follow the party line on this the “Warmist Alarmists”. Here’s his commentary;

Climate Change Exists Posted 3/16/2010 7:18:00 AM

Climate change has its pleasant aspects…

We spent a delightful couple of days at Mount Tremblant…ate on the patio…walked around without jackets. The snow in Muskoka is vanishing quickly. Toronto has had one of its balmiest winters ever. This winter winding down was the mildest in 63 years!

Yet people who should know better — including the dear leader — scoff at global warming.

It’s so simple. If you pump mega tons of crap into the air, you affect the climate. It can cool things as well as warm them. Look at Europe. Florida.

But it messes with them!

Unfortunately, climate change has been tagged with pointless political labels…left wing and right wing…which have nothing to do with it and get in the way of tackling the problem.

Climate change skeptics are the intellectual heirs of those who once thought the oceans had a limitless capacity to absorb our waste.

There’s lots we don’t understand. But when it gets warmer every year, when there are anomalies like cold in Cuba and drought in Australia, only greedy, short sighted idiots — the suits who own the smokestacks — would dismiss the problem as some loonie leftie conspiracy.

Let’s see. Where do we start?

“If you pump mega tons of crap into the air it effects climate.” What is he talking about? Pollution? Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the whole global warming theory, now “climate change” theory, about CO2 and its effects? That’s very specific crap. Actually, it is the stuff that plants breathe so it’s not really crap now, is it?

He expands. “It can cool things as well as warm them.” Now this is a break through. Think about it. All we need to do is differentiate which “crap” is which, and we can raise or lower the global temperature at will by varying which “crap” we toss into the air. Brilliant. Our problems are over. Call the IPCC, there’s no more need for extortion schemes.

This recent “climate change” slogan has been advanced to cover the backsides of people who realize that their alarmist theories about “global warming” are being mocked by the actual facts, like satellite temperature readings over time. They have had to admit that the actual warming trend of the late twentieth century is now a cooling trend for over ten years. Voila! Call it climate change. How do they get otherwise intelligent people like Dick Smythe to buy in? The pre-existing hysteria created by the now discredited “global warming” alarmism. The people that slip into the “climate change” hysteria have already bought the previous hysteria.

But think about that for a moment. There is also another underlying motivator. How do we know? It’s simple really.

If we look at science and the history of the world as we have learned it, we recognize right away that there has been climate change for all of recorded history and far beyond that for millions of years. In fact, that is the reason given in many instances for the changes in the populations of various plants and animal life as well as the extinction of some of those populations including the dinosaurs, the evidence of which we have in the fossil record. So, if we state the plain fact that there is and has been climate change, anyone who approaches the issue with an open and rational mind will follow on with the question, so what?

What is so different now? Enter the man-made global warming theory and its centerpiece, the now infamous hockey stick graph. The only way that climate change could be the least bit interesting to anyone but the climatologists themselves and perhaps the farmers of the world, is if it could be demonstrated first that we have a particular strong trend in one direction; and second that it is unusual and beyond the normal fluctuations recorded in history. That is the beginnings of the “global warming” theory.

But remember, if we can show that a particular trend is either not happening, or has changed direction, or is well within the normal range of fluctuations in climate, we don’t have a case to begin with. Beyond that, it is necessary to show that there is a correlation between man’s activity and that strong trend, and finally, in the course of the investigation we must try to determine what the climate “driver” is among the various activities that man gets up to.

Let’s go one by one. The strong trend was warming, hence the global “warming” theory. But now, we have seen that the strong trend is indeed turning the other direction. The theory should be abandoned on that basis alone.

But, also, now that the hockey stick graph has been shown to be a complete fraud and yes, indeed there was a medieval warm period warmer than now, with a little ice age in between, we find another good reason to toss the whole “global warming” theory because it falls within the most recent climate fluctuations that we know about.

And then, to cap it off, the medieval warm period occurred in a time before the current industrial revolution, which leads us to that final straw, the climate “driver” CO2. The record shows us a correlation between the rise of CO2 and global temperature, but even Al Gore’s famous presentation “An Inconvenient Truth” shows us that CO2 follows temperature, so that the cause and effect relationship is reversed, meaning that CO2 cannot be the “driver” of global warming.

Can we now throw the whole thing out as quackery? Of course not. We now call it “climate change” and ride the wave of hysteria that we have created. How is that possible? Quite simply it is based on the predisposition that many people have against free markets, industrialization generally and the quite legitimate abhorrence people have been trained to feel against reckless use of resources and indiscriminate pollution that characterized the early and mid parts of the twentieth century.

Combine that with a socialist hatred of free market success, and you can call it “global warming” or “climate change” or anything you want, so long as the culprit, the bad guys are who Dick Smythe here calls “greedy, short sighted idiots — the suits who own the smokestacks” and you will have a dedicated hard-core following and a peripheral group of fellow travelers like the bitter minded Smythe.

Beyond that you have a further cadre of the enlightened leftists of government who love bureaucratic control and a large group of the guilty rich in the general populace; whose wealth has not been created by producing real goods but merely by handling other people’s wealth; who feel they must atone for the fact that they have a half a million dollar home, three cars, a boat and a cottage, and are quite willing, because they have already “got theirs”, to trash the economy for this ideology and make life well nigh impossible for the rest of us, the working poor, who just want to be left alone so we can feed our families.

It is never the ideologues that suffer the consequences of their own theories. It is always the poor man that carries the weight of it. That is the rule, and has been for time immemorial.

So Dick Smythe, the political labels are not pointless. They are absolutely right on the mark. What did we see in Copenhagen? Any objective observer, from another planet let’s say, would rationally think that a get together about climate change would be focussed on technology and methods to reduce it. But what was Copenhagen all about? Paying guilt money to undeveloped and underdeveloped nations. Carry on as you were fellows, just pay up.

As I’ve said before, it was and is an extortion scam on a scale that no doubt causes the Mafia to stand back in awe and admiration. It is generous to call it redistribution of wealth. That would give it even a smattering of legitimacy. But it certainly is a “leftist” tactic. Create a crisis and hysteria and then extort money to assuage the guilt of the rich and successful. And only a leftist could look at it and pretend it is not political.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010, by admin and is filed under "Commentary, Global Climate Change, Hmmm, Science ". You can leave a response here, or send a Trackback from your own site.