LewRockwell.com ANTI-STATE•ANTI-WAR•PRO-MARKET
By Dr.
Tim Ball
September 26, 2014
Free speech is essential to freedom,
but with it comes a level of personal responsibility. Supposedly, Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes recognized this in his observations about shouting “fire”
in a crowded theatre. People assume this meant you can’t do it, but his
original comment included the critical word, “falsely”. In the US, your right
to shout fire is part of free speech, but Holmes argued that you couldn’t shout
fire, if it is false. The trouble is, who decides it is false and once it is said,
the damage is done. The question then becomes accountability. Both the need for
personal responsibility in confirming there is a fire, and being held
accountable, when it is determined there was no fire, and you did not check
with a modicum of due diligence. What if you shout fire in a supposedly crowded
world?
Who holds the person accountable and
how is it done? Lack of accountability is of great public concern. It was an
issue raised by engineer Pierre Latour at the recent Heartland Climate
Conference. It involved a debate over the difference of opinion between
engineers and theoretical physicists using physics in the science of CO2. He
said engineers have to belong to a professional organization in order to
practice and are legally and professionally liable for their work, unlike many
others using physics, including climate scientists.
Only the US makes free speech number
one in their Constitution. Some deride the fact that the Founding Fathers made
the right to bear arms the second guarantee, to defend the first guarantee.
However, it recognized the reality that the greatest threat to the people was
their own government. This threat also applies to those who seek total
government control through any form of totalitarianism. H L Mencken said
decades ago,
“The urge to save humanity is almost
always a false front for the urge to rule.”
Change the word “humanity” to “planet” and it is equally true
today about exploitation of environmentalism for a political agenda.Vaclav
Klaus, in his prescient book Blue
Planet in Green Shackles wrote,
“Environmentalism is a political
movement that originally began with the intent to protect the environment – a
humble and perhaps even legitimate goal – but which has gradually transformed
itself into an ideology that has almost nothing to do with nature.This
ideological stream has recently become a dominant alternative to those
ideologies that are consistently and primarily oriented towards freedom.
Environmentalism is a movement that intends to change the world radically regardless
of the consequences (at the cost of human lives and severe restrictions on
individual freedom). It intends to change humankind, human behavior, the
structure of society, the system of values – simply everything.”
These are the same criticism Patrick Moore,
co-founder of Greenpeace, made when he left that organization.
Some refer to people who use
environmentalism as a cloak for political activities as watermelons. James
Delingpole explains the situation in detail in his book Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True
Colors. The damage done by their false claims are virtually
incalculable. Paul Driessen was
among the first to identify the damage in his Eco-Imperialism. Beyond that, there is the frustration that nobody
is ever held accountable.
In advance of the September Climate
Conference in New York, the UN, through the World Meteorological Organization
(WMO), is distributing world wide a series of short videos that are tantamount
to shouting “fire”, in what
they say is a crowded theater. The first
one is a forecast for 2050, full of extreme events including floods,
droughts, heat waves and even an indirect threat, by cynically claiming one
benefit to the warming, will be easy transit through Arctic waters. They base
their position and claims on the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). It is not just that many scientists disagree, but all
IPCC predictions (projections) are wrong to date and the IPCC was created by
the WMO. In addition, they use UN money, mostly contributed by developed
nations, in their effort to make them pay for causing the problem. But who
decided they caused the problem? They did, using scientific methods that are
clearly wrong because the predictions are wrong. It is a classic circular
argument.
There are leading environmentalists in
every country who practice political abuse of environmentalism, as Klaus
defined it. These individuals and their organizations have done great social
and economic damage with environmental misinformation and false claims, for a
political agenda of total government control under the guise of saving the
planet. They are effectively a green fifth-column,
the enemy within. Sadly, their exploitation and misuse of environmentalism is
putting the entire paradigm in jeopardy, as people stop believing anything
they’re told. Something about crying wolf.
Most of the organizations, despite a
tax exemption that requires them to be apolitical, are used for political
objectives. Trying to determine who and what is political is virtually
impossible and fully open to abuse by the user and the government making the
determination, as the recent IRS scandals in the US have demonstrated. What
happens is, taxpayers end up funding organizations with which they completely
disagree and those organizations use the money to attack and even eliminate
them. The illogic of forcing a taxpayer to pay for a gun that another person
uses to shoot them, is obvious.
Salmon fishing on North America’s
northwest coast has long been a target for environmentalists. They attacked all
forms, including fish farming. In Canada, there was no organization more
vociferous than the David Suzuki Foundation. There was no justification for any
of the changes. Salmon runs were not depleted by over fishing or declining
habitat, as they claimed, but natural fluctuations of numbers due to changing
ocean currents and water temperatures. It is a cycle registered in the oral
tradition of the west coast aboriginals. When the salmon run fails they
experience a period identified as the time of “full stomach”. This refers to
the distended stomach of starvation, not too much food. The oral tradition also
includes description of changing conditions that preceded the return of the
salmon.
In the 1990s salmon numbers started to
decline as weather patterns, including temperature, precipitation, and winds,
caused changing ocean currents. Conditions, along the coast and in rivers,
became unfavorable for returning salmon because of natural changes. The myth is
that salmon always return to the river in which they were spawned. It is only
true if conditions are favorable. While numbers declined in southern latitudes,
they increased significantly in northern latitudes, from northern British
Columbia, the Alaska panhandle and Alaska.
Salmon numbers fluctuate like all fish
populations, as a brilliant work by L.B.Klyashtorin
and A.A. Lyubushin. (Figure 1) show. Nobody has promoted this work and
spoken out about the misinterpretation surrounding global warming more
than Gary Sharp.
Figure 1
The Canadian problem was made worse by
media pressure, but enhanced by the government Department of Fisheries. Every
year they produced estimates of potential runs that almost consistently were
much lower than the actual runs. It didn’t matter that they often
underestimated by 50 percent. The numbers they produced were used to set the
fishing quotas for the season and put many fishermen out of business, causing
severe hardship for thousands of people. As Margaret
Wente wrote,
In B.C., there’s something almost
sacred about salmon. So when the salmon runs started to dwindle, the blame game
began in earnest.
The Canadian Department of Fisheries
used similar declining cod population numbers on the East Coast to stop the cod
fishery completely. This devastated the Province of Newfoundland, because it
was akin to going to Kansas and saying you can’t grow wheat anymore. It also
led to closing
many “outport” communities and moving the people to bigger centers,
disrupting centuries old cultures and traditions. The frustration for
Oceanographer, Roger Pocklington and I, was, we were monitoring ocean water
temperatures and their causes and warning Ottawa that cod numbers were going to
decline because of changing conditions. Nobody listened! A complete way
of life was destroyedunnecessarily, because the cod moved to inshore waters
and out into warming Gulf Stream waters where Europeans continued to catch
them. Canadian fishermen were banned from fishing in these areas. Proof that
claims of overfishing was the problem, is that the numbers haven’t recovered,
even though there has been no fishing since 1993. The sad irony is the
government and its bad decisions, that would have devastated the economy, were
offset by increased revenue from the Hibernia oil discovery – saved by the
fossil fuel devil.
The story is different on the northwest
coast because now the salmon are returning, just as they have in the past.
Record runs are being recorded all along the coasts of Washington, Oregon and
British Columbia. It is not making headlines in the mainstream media. The
Suzuki Foundation and other environmental groups, who blamed human activities,
are silent. There are no apologies for being wrong, and certainly no attempt to
hold them accountable.
In addition to getting the free salmon
issue wrong, the Suzuki Foundation was involved in corruption of data about
farmed salmon. Again Wente commented,
But the biggest villain is fish farms.
Many people believe the fish farms are responsible for spreading deadly sea
lice and disease to wild fish.
Thanks to Greenpeace, the David Suzuki
Foundation and other activists, fish farms are among the most loathed
operations in British Columbia.
Here is what Vivian
Krause wrote,
For more than a decade, the David
Suzuki Foundation has run an aggressive campaign against farmed salmon. “It’s
poison!” David Suzuki told a conference in Toronto. “Phone your local hospitals
and find out if farmed salmon is served to patients,” said a brochure from his
foundation.
The central issue they claimed, was the
damage done by “farm origin” sea lice. Krause concludes,
Sea lice are found on many species of wild fish, including herring. A method
to trace the origin of sea lice is under development but currently does not
exist, so it is methodologically impossible to distinguish between sea lice
that originate from a fish farm and those that come from other wild fish. It
follows that claims about “farm origin” sea lice are flagrantly unsubstantiatable.
Damage to reputation, financial loss,
emotional stress, all those things a court considers damage due to wrongful
actions, were suffered by people in various situations. What is even more
galling is that their taxes, either directly or through increased taxation to
offset these tax-exempt organizations not paying, are used.
The Suzuki Foundation is entitled to
its view, and the freedom to express it, but there is a social responsibility
that they appear to abrogate. Celebrities and mainstream media, duped by the
PR, or a willingness to ignore facts and evidence, support him in this
abrogation. Witness the use of Leonardo DiCaprio by the UN
Secretary General to promote the New York Climate Conference. The
cynicism of the appointment is underscored by his title of Messenger of Peace.
Global warming has nothing to do with peace, but they couldn’t connect him with
science. No more than the Nobel Committee could connect the IPCC and Al Gore
with science, so they got Peace Prize. If the UN climate conference requires a
Peace Ambassador and the Nobel Peace Prize is about climate science, it means
they have declared war on global warming. This makes the observation of Greek
philosopher, Aeschylus, “In war
truth is the first casualty.”
It is one matter to get the science
wrong, for which there is a scientific culpability. However, when you use bad
or deliberately false science to direct public policy, there is a social
responsibility for which there should be total accountability. A simple
definition of science is the ability to predict. The UN meeting is based on the
predictions of the IPCC that were so wrong from the start that they started
calling them projections, but even those were wrong. It doesn’t require an
understanding of science to know that their predictions (projections) failed,
which raises the question, how much “due diligence” did DiCaprio apply in his
desire to bring peace? He has the freedom to speak, but as Oliver Wendell
Holmes said it must not be a falsity, otherwise there is liability.
Reprinted
with the permission from Dr. Tim Ball.
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