What's his Agenda? Anthony Watts lets Tim Ball run riot with his crackpot conspiracy theories at WUWT

Anthony Watts is a bit of a nutter and he's posted some crackpot conspiracy theories in the past.  He's even added some of his own, musing he's about to be incarcerated in a psychiatric facility.  But today he goes for the conventional crackpot conspiracy theory. (Archived here, latest update here.)

Agenda 21, the master plan for the 21st Century

Tim Ball we know holds completely nutty conspiracy theories. He didn't make them up himself, you'll read them on any run-of-the-mill wacky conspiracy website.  You know - new world order; Maurice Strong is going to take over the world (at whatever age he must be now); Agenda 21; HAARP mind control (Anthony draws the line there - I wonder if he edited it out of Tim's article?)  Even Charles Darwin is part of Tim Ball's conspiracy theory.

Tim Ball's given an acronym to the Club of Rome - TCOR.  They are the brains behind this dastardly plot which involves Al Gore, James Hansen, Charles Darwin, Thomas Robert Malthus, Paul Erlich - it looks as if it could include not just anyone who has warned the world of the problems it faces, but also people who have been involved in addressing these problems.  Even people who died well before the Club of Rome was born!  Tim Ball doesn't credit anyone with finding solutions to the problems documented by the Club of Rome and Paul Erlich and others, like the Green Revolution or family planning or education.  Not at all.

Tim starts off with a misquote - conspiracy nutters and disinformers rely on misquotes and cherry picks because otherwise other conspiracy nutters might have their dim brain alerted to the fact that they something was askew.  Then again, dumb conspiracy nutters don't really care about details and rely on disinformation and misrepresentation (as well as confirmation bias and ideology among their readers).

Mistaking symptoms for causes

Here's Tim's misquote with his lead in, followed by the actual quote:

Global Warming was just one issue The Club of Rome (TCOR) targeted in its campaign to reduce world population. In 1993 the Club’s co-founder, Alexander King with Bertrand Schneider wrote The First Global Revolution stating,

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

Here is the actual quote, from the book, The First Global Revolution ( H/t ClimateandStuff).  I've highlighted the differences.

The ploy of inventing a scapegoat

There are some earlier passages in the same chapter that are relevant to the sort of conspiracy theorising by science deniers that's often seen at WUWT.  For example:

So are conspiracy theorists merely filling a void?  Are they so in need of finding an enemy that they'll make them up out of thin air?  Here is the rest of the passage:

No. It's because science deniers cannot accept that there are real problems that we must address. Tim Ball, for example, is arguing that there are no problems brought about by the population explosion. He is painting as the "common enemy" the UN, the IPCC, Al Gore, James Hansen etc.  In fact Tim's enemies include anyone who is working to help humanity find solutions to common problems. 

Deniers have warped imagination

It's not that deniers have no imagination.  They have it in spades.  But their imagination is warped.  Tim Ball, for example, cannot imagine that an exponential rapid growth in population could cause any difficulties for humankind.  But he can imagine that James Hansen is the devil incarnate and Agenda 21 is "the master plan for the 21st Century".

Tim Ball cannot imagine that global warming is a "common threat which must be confronted by everyone together".  In his imagination, it "was structured to predetermine scientific proof that human CO2 was one contribution of the “common enemy”."  To do so, Tim Ball had to misquote the Club of Rome, which pointed out that to cast things like global warming as "the common enemy" is to mistake the symptoms for the cause.  He also has to reject physics and the science of the greenhouse effect.  Not bad for someone who claims to be a "climate scientist".

In my mother's lifetime (and she's still alive) the world has grown from less than two billion people to more than seven billion people.  When I was born there were only about 2.5 billion people in the world.  Since that time the world has managed to feed a lot of people, but a lot have died from starvation and fouled water and associated disease. 

Since the beginning of the Club of Rome, and in part because of the Club of Rome and others who spoke out, agricultural scientists have found ways to lift the productivity of food crops (eg the green revolution). There have been massive family planning programs and education programs and health programs such as immunisation.  Recycling programs are still pretty pathetic and waste production has yet to be brought under control - largely because all that's been addressed has been the waste disposal end.  The waste production end has barely been tackled (except for making some packaging biodegradable.)

If it had been left to conspiracy theorists like the Tim Ball's and Anthony Watts of the world, we would all be in a fine pickle - those of us who'd survived.

But what gets me is the 'monsterising' of people who are doing good in the world.  What good have conspiracy theorists ever done?  What good are the mad ravings of Anthony Watts and Tim Ball and the potty peer Christopher Monckton and other nutters?  What good has Judith Curry ever done by her demonising of science and putting nutters on a pedestal.

HotWhopper exists to demolish disinformation.  Denier weirdness is an understatement. It's nuts that some of the disinformation it comes across is as primitive as you find at WUWT.

Addendum

Prompted by the comments, I looked to see where else the Club of Rome book passage is misquoted.  I searched for "In searching for a new enemy to unite us" in place of the actual text "In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite" and checked it had the comma added by the conspiracy nuts in the last line of the quote.  I came across books that included the mangled quotation, which had titles like:

• The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power
• Prince of Darkness: Antichrist and the New World Order
• RISE OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER: The Culling of Man

That last book has the following blurb on Amazon (my para breaks and bold italics):

The same occult group of people who have been ruling over humanity for thousands of years continue to do so to this day. The one world government prophesized in the Bible is unfolding behind the scenes right under your nose as you read this, and was given the catchy name of the 'New World Order'.

Currently, the technology exists to fulfill all aspects of the Biblical prophecies regarding the End Times, including the resurrection of the Antichrist, who came up with the idea for the New World Order roughly 4,200 years ago. He will be brought back to life using modern DNA technology, fulfilling the prophecy of Revelation 17:8" " The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, now is not, and yet will come."

I discuss all of this in my book, including who exactly the Antichrist is, how the New World Order started, who ran it through history, who runs it today, and what is to happen in the near future. I also go over how and why the Federal Reserve is a privately-owned, for-profit corporation. The same people who founded and own the Federal Reserve are the same people who founded the United Nations, the first incarnation of the Luciferian one world government. These same people were also responsible for starting the Civil War, World Wars I and II including the rise of Hitler, the Vietnam War, and on and on and on.

I am trying to wake up everybody I can with my book. It is not so much a reference book as it is an outline with commentary on what I personally believe is going on in the world. Judging from the emails I've received and the book reviews I've garnered here, I pretty much put the gist of the New World Order conspiracy into a 445 page book that you can read in a couple of days and be brought up to speed quickly.

They say we are known by the company we keep.  Anthony Watts and his followers bed down with the lunatic fringe. Anthony doesn't just keep company with them, he actively promotes their paranoid conspiracy theories.

Sou 5:30 pm Monday 6 January 2014 AEDST 

From the WUWT utter nuttery

There aren't a huge number of comments - maybe Tim Ball's extreme crackpottery is giving some of the usual suspects pause. (Archived here, latest update here with quite a few more comments from the nutty fringe at WUWT.)

MarkW says:

January 5, 2014 at 3:27 pm
GregS, I have never met anyone who promotes population growth for growth’s sake, so stop with the silly strawmen.

The only conceivable reason for stopping population growth would be if you could demonstrate that it is a problem. To date, no one has been able to do that, indeed, the opposite is probably true. As Julian Simon stated, more people means more minds working on the world’s problems.

TobiasN says (excerpt):

January 5, 2014 at 3:37 pm
CO2 is irrelevant. CAGW is the warmists way of praying. They simply do not know how to actually achieve what they really want.

Lil Fella from OZ says:

January 5, 2014 at 3:53 pm
I hope more people read this article than this blog. It demonstrates the wider battle the average person is up against, against the Left (I am Left because I can use your money to destroy your way of life!).

Leon Brozyna says:

January 5, 2014 at 4:12 pm
Taking their elitist thinking to its logical conclusion, they would view genocide as a viable option to reining in the growth of human population.

dbstealey says (excerpt):

January 5, 2014 at 4:21 pm
Cheyne Gordon says: “Family planning remains the most cost-effective technology we have for reducing poverty.”

Well, that is a completely wrong statement. Captialism is the most cost-effective effective technology we have for reducing poverty, bar none.

jim karlock says:

January 5, 2014 at 4:23 pm
I argue that resources also increase exponentially:
1-we explore more of the earth’s surface
2- We explore deeper in the earth
3 – we can recover less concentrated materials
4- we material more efficiently
Example: oil – deeper wells; fracking
thanks
jk

Faustino aka Genghis Cunn says:

January 5, 2014 at 6:07 pm
Dr Ball, the most worrying thing is that what you say has been demonstrated time after time, yet few are aware of it. They are therefore prone to accept the recurrent scare stories such as the population bomb and CAGW. How to counter this? One tactic I use is to get frequent letters on related topics published in Australia’s national newspaper, The Australian, whose readership is more likely to be interested in such issues than the population at large. I have one or two letters in most weeks, so have developed some credibility with the readers. Michael Cunningham.