Big Business Manipulates the Climate Change Debate

Big Business Manipulates the Climate Change Debate


by Bill Allin, author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think instead of simply accepting life as it imposes itself on them.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
- Maya Angelou, American educator, autobiographer and poet (b. 1928)

manufactroversy n. (neologism) A contrived or non-existent controversy, manufactured by political ideologues or interest groups who use deception and specious arguments to make their case.

Is the temperature of the planet really warming? No. The dirt and rock are not getting warmer.

Is the average temperature of the atmosphere above our planet warming? That's the core of the debate. Is climate change real and based solely on human activity or simply a cyclical feature of nature? That's the issue.

The arguments for climate change are based on computer models, which are based on sketchy facts from the past and questionable data from the present. Sketchy facts from the past because today's technology was not available more than a few years ago.

Questionable data? A Canadian blogger discovered a simple arithmetic error in the calculations by NASA based on its satellite readings, making the atmosphere seem a fraction of a degree warmer than it actually was. NASA satellite readings form the core of most computer climate model inputs.

Read that story here. But don't expect to find either the correction of NASA's data or conclusions on its web site or an admission that it made the error. You won't.

No one can doubt that the ice cap over the Arctic Ocean is thinning. Travelling by ship through the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, through northern Canada, is possible now. That trip that caused the deaths of so many explorers and their shipmates over past centuries of our history has not been possible for over a thousand years. Yes, the Northwest Passage was open in the distant past.

No one can doubt that some countries that usually experience hot seasons are having it hotter than ever, with a few actually desertifying, especially in the Middle East and the Sahel around the Sahara in Africa.

However, ask the people who live in Edmonton, Canada, how much warmer they feel. One Saturday night in mid December 2009 their overnight low temperature was -46.1 degrees Celsius. (At that temperature Celsius and Fahrenheit have almost similar numbers.) That record cold was 10 degrees lower than the previous record cold night. Not one or two degrees colder, but 10.

Edmonton is the capital city of a Canadian province, not a northern territory. It's not sub-Arctic. It's province, Alberta, hit new power usage records in two successive weeks as Albertans tried to keep from freezing. The whole Canadian west was a deep freeze for the first part of the winter of 2009.

Eastern Canada was different. Maritimers had their summer in 2009, but it only lasted three days. The whole of spring, summer and autumn were cool and very wet. The previous two winters had old timers claiming they had never seen so much snow, so many storms, so much rainfall in a single season.

Cool and wet. Exactly what the climate models should predict when the air warms. Warm air collects more moisture from the oceans, which results in more cloud (less sun to warm the earth) and more rain.

In the 1970s the prediction was that we might have a new Ice Age based on the same data being used today, but different climate models. Canada's weather over the past two years would support that claim, though two years can never constitute a trend.

No one can doubt that those who believe in climate change feel strongly enough about it to fight for grants to study climate models and data more than their opponents. No one should doubt that some people, including a number of well respected scientists, believe that climate shift is natural and cyclical. Their work is available on the internet.

Why is there debate? The simplest conclusion is that there is money to be made. From scientific study of climate, not from climate change itself.

While few among us may know that industries puff out half a million different chemicals into the air, we all seem to know that carbon dioxide is the worst culprit for the greenhouse effect that eventually warms the atmosphere. We all know that breathing too much carbon dioxide is unhealthy, may even kill some of us.

We have not put together what we know, let alone figured out the debate most of us can't understand. While we argue over whether or not global temperatures are rising, whether or not our atmosphere is warming, whether human industries and habits directly affect that change or not, industries and government continue to pour extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide into the air we breathe.

They have no need to spend on changing anything so long as we fight over whether the atmospheric temperature might change by a portion of one degree over a few decades.

We continue to breathe poisonous air. Industries and government owned power plants puff out obscene amounts of poisonous gases into our air. And nothing changes because we are arguing over whether global temperatures are rising or staying steady.

Who wins that scenario?

Those who believe that nothing should change in nature are wrong. History is full of examples. The Mediterranean Sea used to be a plain and the Sahara Desert used to be a giant lake. That's change. Tropical beasts used to roam what is now the north of Canada, Russia and Alaska until the last Ice Age arrived a few thousands years ago. That's change. Changes that happened not so long ago by historical standards.

History should teach us that nature changes by itself. It doesn't need our help. It will change with or without us.

Our own limited knowledge should tell us that we should not be arguing over whether climate is changing while we ignore manufacturing facilities putting millions of tons of poisonous gases into the air we breathe.



No one should doubt that life on earth today is different than it was before the Industrial Revolution. The main difference is not a small change in atmospheric temperature, but a huge increase in diseases that have never before been a problem on earth and the poisonous air we breathe that has caused them since the Industrial Revolution began.

While we debate a small change in atmospheric temperature, we continue to breathe poisonous air. Industries that are fundamentally sociopathic in their quest for profits benefit from our debate because they don't have to change anything.

We continue to get sick. We continue to die. We continue to argue over climate change when the issue is massive poisoning on a global scale.

Who wins? Who benefits while we argue?

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think instead of simply accepting life as it imposes itself on them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

Do We Really Get The Government We Deserve?

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
- George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was a negative person much of the time and his sarcasm shines brightly with this quote.
What he is saying is that if voters are ignorant of the issues, if a majority of them don't vote and if the ones who do vote do so based on advertising parties have paid hugely for an advertising agency to create, then we shouldn't be surprised at the results of the people who get elected.

Who is to blame? Eligible voters who don't find out about the issues? In the highly charged political atmosphere that exists in many countries today, it may be nearly impossible to get a balanced set of information on any given issue from most media.

The ones who don't vote? These people may not be apathetic so much as they don't want to vote for one lackey over another. "They're all the same," many claim. These people don't want to admit that they are totally ignorant about the issues of the election.

People who vote for the most popular candidate? These people are sincere enough to want to do their civic duty. They simply don't have enough information at their disposal on which to make informed choices.

Despite appearances to the contrary, it is likely that most people want to vote, want to make an informed choice and want to know that the candidate of their choice knows about the issues that interest them. The problem is that no official mechanisms are in place to inform citizens in an unbiased manner about legislation that will affect their lives.

The media have staked out their territory, with the heavily biased ones prepared to inundate citizens with the highly editorialized versions of the party policies of their choice, while the others stay away from politics as much as possible.

We need some of the non-committed local newspapers or radio stations to devote some of their space or time to giving people the information they need.

As it is now, most people have access only to heavily biased outlets or others that do not cover political news.

It sounds ironic, but some of the media need to start delivering the facts. We need to ask them to do it.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to throw a rope of hope to desperate voters.
Learn more at http://billallin.com