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Saturday, November 2, 2013

Anthony Watts pushes more crazy paranoid conspiracy theories at WUWT

Sou | 10:18 PM Go to the first of 7 comments. Add a comment

Updated - see below for new comment and NASA video on depletion of groundwater.



Anthony Watts hates it that his blog WUWT has a reputation for zany conspiracy theories but doesn't do anything to dispel the notion.

On the contrary.  And today seems the day for more crazy conspiracy theories.

Anthony himself indulges in conspiracy ideation as you'll have read in my last blog article.  Now he's got "sky dragon slayer"** Tim Ball indulging likewise.  In an article today (archived here and updated here), Tim writes:
UNEP, the agency that brought you Agenda 21 and the IPCC established...
What he's saying is that Agenda 21 and the IPCC are conspiracies of the wicked UN.  Implied in those few words are all the weird and wonderful theories that the cranks and crazies can come up with, like all the various conspiracy theories based on the "new world order" theme.

Tim Ball is trying to suggest there is something malevolent in these quotes from the UN Secretary General.
“Water holds the key to sustainable development,” “We must work together to protect and carefully manage this fragile finite resource.” 

And what about this - Tim reckons the IPCC is in on the plot writing:
Environment Canada (EC) produced the map information, but their credibility is close to zero because of involvement in the IPCC from the start. 

If you think I'm reading too much into what Tim wrote, think again.  Here is a direct quote from today's WUWT article:
Environmentalism was a necessary new paradigm hijacked by a few for a political agenda. The goal was political control with subjugation of individuals and their rights to a world government through the UN. Elaine Dewar, author of The Cloak of Green explained,

And there's more:
Strong appeared to achieve his goal with CO2 through the UN, particularly the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that gave the IPCC effective control of national weather agencies and therefore national policy. Global warming seemed like an easy control agenda until nature took over. Instead of acknowledging their science was wrong the UNEP, IPCC and national environment agencies simply moved the goalposts to climate change and more recently to climate crisis. Now that is failing a move to a new goalpost, water, is underway to pursue the real objective – total control. As always it is cloaked in righteousness (green). Who could oppose a desire for clean air or water?

Notice all the references to the UN, Maurice Strong, the IPCC, Agenda 21.  They are dog whistles to the paranoid conspiracy mob of the "new world order" kind.

Anthony Watts complains about research that shows conspiracy ideation is a predictor of climate science denial, albeit a weak predictor.  But all the while he happily pushes and promotes such paranoid conspiracy theories by cranks like Tim Ball and Christopher Monckton on his very own blog!

PS Remember this water article Anthony put up not that long ago?



**Tim Ball is a co-author of the book: Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory which tries and fails to prove all atmospheric physics is wrong!  They "don't believe" in the greenhouse effect.


From the WUWT comments

Here is a sample of the comments to Anthony Watts' latest conspiracy article by Tim Ball (archived here - updated here).


Txomin says green policies kill lots of people:
November 1, 2013 at 2:43 pm
Experience says that this “green” nonsense will slow down (but not stop) progress. To be sure, many will die because of “green” policies, policies that will enrich a new breed of charlatans. However, humanity will work around them all and will be better off tomorrow than it is today.

Robin says it's a Marxist plot (excerpt):
November 1, 2013 at 3:01 pm
We need to remember that the West, especially the US, is where the Marxian criteria of reaching a stage of technological development that would supposedly allow redistribution was met. Rather than admit the Governed/Governors/Redistribution to Latin America and Africa gambit, the bureaucrats just keep coming up with excuses of why administration via the OECD and the UN is necessary. And the rationales need to extend beyond nation-stat borders and thus require international administration by bureaucrats who can tout their links to local (ICLEI), state (eco devt schemes with China usually), and national.

nigelf says "it's all a scam":
November 1, 2013 at 3:03 pm
Countries far and wide need to start electing Libertarian types as their leaders who won’t be afraid to pull the plug completely on these ongoing scams. They also won’t be afraid to turf the UN and order them all out of their countries so that real prosperity can take place and freedoms restored.
The Republicans have to move considerably to the right or the TEA Party message is really going to start to resonate among regular people in the coming years.

Brian H is under the illusion that Tim Ball has any climate science credentials (Tim Ball used to teach geography many years ago. His publication record is very sparse.):
November 1, 2013 at 3:07 pm
For those inclined to demand credentials, it should be noted that Dr. Ball’s in this subject, as with Climate Science in general, clearly exceed and trump those of the UN sock puppets.

sanaerchi says it's not just water that the one world government wants to control:
November 1, 2013 at 3:34 pm
You could also include food as an item of control because there is a global attempt to improve people’s behavior towards food waste

Bryan Johnson is something of an extremist and says:
November 1, 2013 at 3:49 pm
“Demodernising” is exactly the goal. Not to sound too much of a conspiracy-minded observer (although I’m often enough accused of that), but aren’t the people who want *any* human influence on the earth to be banned — reversed — following a goal of the return of humans to a paleolithic level of hunter-gatherer civilization? It seems so, to me.

A.D. Everard agrees the UN is one giant evil conspiracy says:
November 1, 2013 at 3:53 pm
It is vital, then, for all countries to disconnect from the UN, ignore its directives, cut off its funding and let it die a death. It is the UN and its agencies which are the true enemy of mankind and civilization.

Rhys Jaggar says just wait for the big one:
November 1, 2013 at 4:03 pm
The problem with all these crying wolf scare stories is that, one day, there actually will be an existential threat to mankind and the chances are that no-one will believe the messenger.

Bill Illis seems to think that water was only once created and remains unchanged, ignoring such inconvenient things as metabolic pathways (and not distinguishing potable water from the rest) saying:
November 1, 2013 at 5:42 pm
All the water that was here 4.4 billion years ago, is still here.
Hydrogen loves its oxygen.

Jer0me says, wrongly and irrelevantly:
November 1, 2013 at 6:40 pm
I really wish people would stop stating that tempos have stopped rising for ’15 years’. This makes it look as if it is starting from a cherry-picked 1998. This is easy for warmists to refute.
As I understand it, it has been 17 years, and is not from 1998.

humanati tosses everything into his conspiracy theorising and says (my bold italics):
November 1, 2013 at 10:40 pm
Good to see so many people joining the dots. MMGW wasn’t a mistake or an isolated example of the UN’s war on humanity. It is part of an organised, sustained, orchestrated campaign to extend it’s control & simultaneously destroy truth, science & reason. It’s going on in many, many other areas of science. Fluoride, vaccines, GMO’s, cancer causes & treatments… Someone has declared a war on our minds & bodies. The MMGW myth is just one aspect of this obscenity. I urge others to seek the truth & go wherever it takes you, regardless of how uncomfortable that is…Our lives & our liberty depends on it.
I've got to update the archived article to let you read this comment by Dodgy Geezer who says (excerpts - my bold italics and links):
November 2, 2013 at 4:10 am
I repeat again: There can NEVER be a shortage of water
There are many places in the world where you cannot get fresh, clean water when you want it. But this is NOT because WATER is short. It is because the Infrastructure is short. That means it is NOT a natural resources problem. It is an economic one.
The green trick is to point out places where people are short of water, and then treat this as a resource problem. It is not. If we wanted to, we could run a string of fresh-water swimming pools across the Sahara in case another ‘Phoenix’ crashed, and we wouldn’t waste any water at all. We would have wasted a large amount of money. Unless, of course, this created a new tourist attraction… :)
... What this means is that the appropriate response when told that you are ‘short of water’ is to consider how to address the problem, and the two available ways will always be:
1 – limiting local population
2 – providing more water
In practice, for a typical town, item 2) above will be the answer, and the discussion will centre on how best to pay for that. The one thing that is NOT an answer is to get everyone to cut back on consumption so as to service more people with the same infrastructure. All that does is lower people’s standard of living and ensure that when the problem arises again it will be more dangerous, because everyone will be living that much closer to the critical point where they cannot survive…

Dodgy Geezer might have never heard of this thing called "evaporation".  He (dodgy geezers are always a "he" aren't they?) might learn something about the futility of putting swimming pools across the Sahara if he read about Lake Eyre.

And he might recognise the water resource problem if he knew a bit more about water and its sources, such as:


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7 comments:

  1. I read that last night and hoped you would highlight it! So thank you. But I think this quote from the article is really the crux of Tim's belief system:

    "Exploitation of fear about environmental problems kept shifting from ozone depletion, acid rain, desertification, rainforest destruction, global warming, sea level rise, climate change, and climate crisis, among others. In Farad Manjoo’s post-fact society, water, like all previous environmental issues is used to push an ideology or political agenda with experts providing the ‘facts’."

    So concerns over serious environmental issues are simply manufactured for the purposes of controlling society? Riiiiiight... I wonder if he had his tin foil hat on while he wrote that :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Who says the Illuminati are not illuminating? There's so much to learn!

    Sou captured a particularly voluble person sailing under the handle "Humanati":

    Good to see so many people joining the dots. MMGW wasn’t a mistake or an isolated example of the UN’s war on humanity. It is part of an organised, sustained, orchestrated campaign to extend it’s control & simultaneously destroy truth, science & reason. It’s going on in many, many other areas of science. Fluoride, vaccines, GMO’s, cancer causes & treatments… Someone has declared a war on our minds & bodies. The MMGW myth is just one aspect of this obscenity.

    Turns out there's a name for that kind of conspiracy sponge, coined by historian David Fisher and called the "furtive fallacy:"

    The furtive fallacy is an informal fallacy of emphasis in which outcomes are asserted to have been caused by the malfeasance of decision makers. Historian David Hackett Fischer identified it as the belief that significant facts of history are necessarily sinister, and that "history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious." It is more than a conspiracy theory in that it does not merely consider the possibility of hidden motives and deeds, but insists on them. In its extreme form, the fallacy represents general paranoia.

    The thing that doesn't bode well for Watts and his friends is his refusal or inability to recognize how ridiculous are ravings such as Humaniti's and by extension how ridiculous he himself becomes for providing a conduit and megaphone for crazy talk. The comments on Watts' blog and indeed some of his preferred authors point to marginalization.

    A cold winter may find the furniture being broken up and burned to stay warm. Desperate times demand desperate measures, and for Watts and Crew the times are truly desperate. Having nothing substantial in hand, magic is all that's left for. Conspiracies and crank theories are the latter day equivalent of dark magic, explanations transcending any requirement to stick with facts. The trouble is, most people don't believe in this kind of magic, don't take it seriously, and if they bother to acknowledge it all do so by noting how sadly amusing it is. Once burnt, furniture is gone for good and so it is with credibility. There's no way back for Watts so this is only going to become uglier.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know someone who works for the UN and when they explained their job description to me I confess that I thought it was actually a bit of a waste of money. They also don't pay any tax! And the UN pays a substantial part of the cost for their children to attend University anywhere in the world. I think it was 75% of the total tuition fee. So I have come to the conclusion that the UN is a largely inefficient organisation that is incapable of launching a crusade to take over the world.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Actually Rachel, they probably do pay an internal tax, but not national income tax. That would be seen as being overly advantageous to the country in which they are working.

    N.B. Some countries tax their citizens on their world wide earnings, so the above is not applicable to all cases.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Teh Stupid is strong in this quote..." Global warming seemed like an easy control agenda until nature took over. Instead of acknowledging their science was wrong the UNEP, IPCC and national environment agencies simply moved the goalposts to climate change and more recently to climate crisis.."
    It refers to the rebranding of "global warming" to "climate change" by amongst others the IPCC. Er, the IPCC was set up in 1988: anyone like to hazard a guess as to what the CC stands for?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. cc meant cubic centimetres when I were a lad. Now it means climate change. Now you try telling the kids today that there's no conspiracy and they won't believe you. (Apologies to Brooke-Taylor, Cleese, Chapman and Feldman)

      Delete

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