* I have slightly stretched the meaning of catatonic [ Catatonia is a state of apparent unresponsiveness to external stimuli in a person who is apparently awake. ], in this case, to include what might be better called ‘cognitive dissonance’, anyway, it’s all about acquiring knowledge and the degree of its validity.
Specifically, the difference between truth and propaganda.
What follows is a blatant copy of an article published by ‘The Federalist‘, By Robert Tracinski :
James Cameron’s Climate Change Lies At The DNC
The DNC featured a video from James Cameron touting the devastation already happening because of ‘climate change.’ It’s propaganda through and through. {My emphasis}.
Among the various previews of the Democratic agenda at their convention this week was a video by James Cameron touting the horrific devastation already happening because of global warming.
It was heralded by a snippy little introduction from its narrator, Sigourney Weaver, who came across as so sanctimonious that she made me long for the laid-back open-mindedness of Pat Buchanan. That’s just a warm-up for the video itself.
It’s a perfect combination: all of the sappy, over-the-top melodrama you would expect from the director of “Titanic,” and all the pompous self-importance you would expect from the guy who gave the Oscar acceptance speech for “Titanic.” Plus all of the realism you would expect from a guy who launched his career with wildly inventive stories about fictional catastrophes.
The key opening line of the video is: “We all know it’s happening. It’s real, it’s happening now.” What is it that we’re supposed to “all know”? A bunch of stuff that isn’t real and isn’t happening. Global warming is supposed to be causing droughts, floods, forest fires, hurricanes, rising sea levels, and crop failure. Here’s a little fact check on those claims.
The clip focuses briefly on droughts in Texas and Kansas, because those are nice, heartland states, and because apparently farmers have never suffered through drought before. But it really focuses on claims that global warming is causing a big drought in California.
The problem is that drought is normal in California. It’s normal on a year-to-year basis: Most years are dry, and the state has always relied on the occasional wet year to refill its reservoirs. It’s even more normal on a historical time scale. Estimates of rainfall going back thousands of years show recurring multi-century megadroughts. It’s the relatively wet twentieth century that is abnormal.
It’s telling that environmentalists describe themselves as being in fear of “climate change,” because they are actually believers in climate stasis: the conviction that all aspects of the natural world ought to remain exactly as they were in 1970, forever. But the climate has always been changing, and viewing drought in California as abnormal or unnatural is itself an example of “climate change denial.”
What about outside of California? Certainly, all of those ranchers and farmers in Texas and Kansas are doomed, right? Actually, there is no global trend toward increasing drought.
Source: Nature
To say “Hey, there was a drought last year in Kansas” is not scientific. Measuring drought trends around the globe over a period of years is science, and it doesn’t support Cameron’s claims. But if there aren’t droughts, surely there are lots more floods, right? Nope.
What about forest fires? The video touts an unspecified year (I presume it is last year) as having record-setting forest fires. But we just established that one year doesn’t make a trend, because other years might be different. In fact, if you go to the year before last, it was one of the quietest years for forest fires, and there is no clear trend.
Source: National Interagency Fire Center
Global warming alarmists are always telling us weather is not the same thing as climate — that weather varies, but climate is the larger, long-term trend. They tell us this every time there’s a nasty cold snap in January, and we start cracking jokes about global warming. But when the current weather of the moment fits their theory, suddenly weather is totally the same thing as climate.
We also see this when it comes to hurricanes. Why does this video make such a big deal out of hurricanes? Because Al Gore flogged hurricanes as proof of global warming after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He even put a hurricane on the posters for his movie. Then hurricane activity in the Atlantic promptly dropped off, and the United States had a nine-year hurricane drought.
Ah, but what about Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which features prominently and tragically in the James Cameron video? The problem for the warmist narrative is that Sandy was not a hurricane at landfall. It had already weakened before it reached the coast and fell below official hurricane strength. That’s little consolation to those who lost their property or loved ones in the storm, but it’s relevant here because the claim in this video is that global warming is leading to more intense storms. Yet the damage from Sandy was not due to its intensity but to its breadth and the heavily populated area where it hit.
How about those rising sea levels? The video touts a rise in sea levels of one foot over the last century. But that’s controversial. At least one distinguished scientist argues that the sea level hasn’t risen in 50 years. Certainly, if a one-foot rise in sea levels — which is about all that is predicted for the next century — is so devastating, we haven’t seen any evidence. And even if the one-foot rise in sea levels of the past century is true, it happened pretty steadily over that time period. Yet man-made global warming could only have caused it during the past 30 years or so. That’s the only period in which significantly increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has coincided with rising global temperatures — roughly since the mid-1970s and mostly in the 1990s. So a gradual rise in sea level over the entire century is independent of and irrelevant to any man-made global warming.
As for the crops failing — well, I think we would have heard about that if it were actually happening. There have been some very recent declines or plateaus in agricultural production, but within the context of large increases throughout the alleged period of warming.
There is certainly no evidence for the kind of warming-induced agricultural apocalypse this video implies. Of course, against all of these scientific facts, Cameron offers us the assurances of such scientific luminaries as Jack Black, George H.W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Andrew Cuomo, and the pope.
That, plus the assurances of Hillary Clinton herself, whose voice we hear at the end of the video making vague and extravagant claims about how we won’t have to give up any prosperity because we can supply all our power needs from wind turbines and solar panels — a scientific fantasy I have debunked elsewhere.
I certainly hope it is no surprise to you that a video produced by a Hollywood director and broadcast at a political convention is propaganda through and through. The problem is that it is largely exempt from any skepticism by all of the so-called watchdogs and fact-checkers who have been corrupted by their own commitment to the same political cause.
While searching for stories about Hurricane Sandy, for example, I came across a column from Cecil Adams of “The Straight Dope,” who made a name for himself a number of years ago as a kind of debunker of urban legends. He takes on the claims about Hurricane Sandy and global warming and concedes that the connection is bogus. But then notice the U-turn he makes at the end.
Hurricane Sandy, by scaring the daylights out of the New York media people who set the national agenda, has at last gotten the climate change conversation off the dime. Can we legitimately blame that disaster on global warming? No, but I’m not going to object if a lot of people do.
So it’s okay to mislead everyone, as long as it’s for a good cause. That’s the mentality behind James Cameron and the Democrats’ climate crusade. And you wonder why we treat environmentalist claims with such skepticism.
As for “So it’s okay to mislead everyone, as long as it’s for a good cause.“, I suggest that this is extremely debatable, as the cause for all this propaganda-based alarmism is anything but “good”. That is another story.
BTW, it’s significant that Donald Trump, whatever his shortcomings may be, actually is unique among politicians in his awareness of the ‘global warming’ scam.
My apologies for the probable copyright infringements, full acknowledgments and respective links are included. The effectiveness of revealing important truths is enhanced by copying it all and is hopefully justified by the extra exposure offered by this post.
The GOLDEN RULE 
We all know? If that was the case? People would stop eating cows. Then the Amazon rainforest would not be under such threat. If that were the case? It would be a crime to cut down large tracts of trees, anywhere. The Christian, believes climate change is real? Okay but does he just believe without checking facts? Just like his religious beliefs?
Then we have the claim of “I am not a believer in climate change” ….. Huh? Duh! Climate is always changing. It’s the normal state of our universe. It’s the assumption that climate change is avoidable that appears to be the lie. Cheers Jamie.
Thanks Jamie.
Terminology is a major problem and its misuse by the alarmists aids them in easily pulling wool over the public eyes.
Even the term ‘global warming’, discarded when the warming was no longer significant because it failed to follow the CO2 increases, was still meaningless unless they add ‘catastrophic’ and ‘man-made’.
There are hardly any truths in the published arguments by the alarmist scientists and even less in what appears in the mass media. So what hope have the public got in understanding truth.
Add a corrupt education system brainwashing the children and the picture is revealed.
Analyze the behaviour of all involved, government, associated authorities and rich individuals and companies and the picture is really focussed.
Corruption at the highest levels and the public lap it up!
True enough. Yet I consider myself as a part of the public. What is it I get and most others do not? Thanks to you Ken, some years ago you helped change my perceptions. Hopefully that’s all it would take, is some truth from those in charge? I’m not holding my breath …. Cheers Jamie.
Thanks Jamie. Agree that holding one’s breath waiting for truth from the ungodly leaders would be unwise. 🙂
Hehehe …!
“Selfishness, self-centeredness“ in both leaders and in opponents of worldwide social movements is the root of cause of human suffering.
Today, I am pleased to report that unselfish cooperation among a few vocal opponents of the AGW fable promise a reconnection of society to reality at the London Conference on Climate Change on 8-9 Sept 2016, “A NEW DAWNING OF PEACE & TRUTH ON EARTH!
Click to access london-conference-volume.pdf
Also please see “The Clexit Campaign” and a
Statement by Viv Forbes, Founding Secretary of “Clexit.” http://clexit.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/clexit.jpg
Oliver, Link only presents a graphic, no information.
Fingers crossed!!
I have only had a quick look at the start of the paper and will read it all with great interest and hope.
However, even as a strong believer in the alarmism being a gigantic scam, I remain critical of all the scientific arguments and data.
Leading to a comment on Monckton’s “speedo” contribution – “Conclusion
Fifteen years is long enough to verify the predictions from IPCC’s first three Assessment Reports
against real-world temperature change measured by the most sophisticated method available –
satellites. ”
I suggest that it is not reasonable to select a 15 year period and call it representative of 5 or 6 decades. I suggest that the alarmists will rubbish this and add fuel to their fire of propaganda.
Certainly the IPCC predictions are a nonsense and can be shown up as such, without resorting to questionable techniques.
We all now live in an insane world, totally out of contact with reality, constructed by the DNC.
This one-page summary of a paper to be presented at 11:30 am, 8 Sept 2016 at the London GeoEthics Conference on Climate Change may end seventy years (1946-2016) of deceit about the Higher Power:
Click to access HigherPower.pdf
Questions, criticisms and/or comments are encouraged and will be answered promptly.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
1-573-647-1377
omatumr@yahoo.com
olivermanuel36@icloud.com
Congratulations Oliver, on your participation in this exciting and encouraging Conference.
Good luck with your presentation.
The high level academic company you keep will better understand the technicalities than I. As a Tech School Diploma graduate I need a few more ‘connecting dots’ to get a real grasp on these theories.
Not so much the theories themselves, but how they actually influence the ungodly to become inhumane, psychopathic leaders hell-bent on world domination.
Best Regards, Ken
Thanks, Ken, I was as blindly arrogant as any of them. I now recognize and accept scientific evidence recorded in precise atomic rest mass measurements at Brookhaven National Lab of a benevolent Higher Power sustains life.