Climate of Fear (pt 1.)

The science has spoken At the moment this text is being written, the Paris Conference on Climate Change  – better known by it’s acronym COP21 (Conference of the Parties) – reached its end. The outcomes are, of course, deemed “not satisfactory” by those who profess that the planet is on the verge of catastrophic, anthropogenic climate change – a term subtly shifting the focus from the already shaky notion of “catastrophic global warming” towards the ambiguity necessary to keep the political-cum-religious-cum-epistemological paradigm of an endangered world-system running in the future. Approaches to the dilemma as to whether  Climate Change is really an impending catastrophic event, always just around the corner “if we don’t act now”, or if it is merely a sham perpetrated by misuse of science for political ends are, roughly, twofold: either you accept the supposed “97% scientific consensus” – and the 100% media and political consensus – or you decide to take a closer look. It’s a chocie then whether you’ll take the path that starts with  inspecting just how this 97% consensus came to pass, which will inevitably lead you down the rabbit hole of statistics abuse and networked interests – a networked delusions, one might say – in politics, academia and media, or whether you’ll try to educate yourself on the  material the “climate scientists” are using to prove the principle and raison d etre of their science, which is becoming more and more eligible to take its place in history right next to physiognomic and eugenics. Either way, you’ll be faced with mountains of publicly accessible data and educated opinions, demolishing the conclusions of designated the UN body for induction of paranoia – the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) – and will need to rely on your knowledge of statistics and natural sciences to approach the being we call “climate”. If you go down this path, two things will happen. First, you’ll be expected to question every single scientific inference compiled by the IPCC as relevant and affirm or refute it, and then quantify your findings in order to calculate just what amount of truth is there in its latest (fifth) report named Climate Change 2014. Synthesis Report (further:SYR5). After you have spent a tremendous amount of time on this, very probably losing any job you currently hold, because you’ll have to skip it for a higher purpose, you will become eligible to call out the “climate scientists”. Then the second thing will happen.

They’ll tell you to piss off.

So we’ll take a different path. The thesis of this analysis is that the Climate Change is nothing but the value base of the model of the Global System, truly existing only in minds of its authors. This value base is the universal integrating factor that makes this unified, imaginary, dynamic model possible and has the form of a common enemy against  which  humanity can unite. We’ll demonstrate how this principle evolved from the earliest propositions made by the Club of Rome in its 1970. founding document Predicament of Mankind into what is now called sustainable development, a demonstrably totalitarian social and economic principle which is entirely deductive, reliant on a priori value judgments and by its very nature divorced from reality as such. Furthermore, we’ll indicate the possibility that hype over COP21 and the overwhelming adherence of the “scientific community” to its purpose is a sign that we are bearing witness to the beginning of the death throes of modern science. The inaccessibility of “climate science” to anyone uninitiated – and this means physicists, geologists, chemist and even climate scientists who reject it’s foundational principle that climate is in fact our enemy – is an unmistakable sign of the inexistence of a unified principle of experience upon which scientists can communicate, save for the imagined one, as well as a compulsive need to establish it. In the future this will finally demonstrate that “stubborn facts”, for the sake of which humanity endured the murder of metaphysics, theology, aesthetics, ethics and all other traditional modes by which human spirit acquires the truth, were nothing but a mirage or, more bluntly, an image conceived for the purpose of epistemological masturbation.

“The science has spoken”, say virtually all outlets of media, from academia to Hollywood.

And, as is perfectly fitting, it told a lie.

But, before we take to our analysis, it is pertinent  to outline the nature of the institution COP21 relies upon to give it’s legislation real yummy “scientific” flavor

“Settled science” and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change The IPCC is a political organization tasked with  evaluating and compiling the findings of climate scientists around the world, in support of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was founded in 1988. by two UN organizations: the World Meteorological Association and the UN Environment Programme. If the scrupulous reader consults the second most reliable source on Climate Change, i.e. Wikipedia, he will notice that there’s a slight deviation from  our definition. Namely, there we read that the IPCC is a scientific organization. However, this is not true. Intergovernmental in the title of this august assembly indicates the  origin and main purpose of IPCC, that is: it is set up by a UN assembly of government representatives to provide “policy guidelines” for the UN and it’s member states decision making bodies. These guidelines are, on the one hand, supported by a quantified body of scientific findings acquired from top-notch-undeniably-fuckin’-awsome-peer-reviewed material taken from the world’s coolest scientific publications and, on the other hand, by the most thorough-state-of-the-art climate models conceived to project the climate trends in the future, as well as their impact on social and economic systems. The science of the IPCC is finally subsumed under the name Synthesis Report, which is a “comprehensive up-to-date compilation of assessments dealing with climate change, based on the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic literature in the field.” (SYR5, v). It is notable, however, that the smaller, ‘policy guidelines’ portion of the SYR is presented first. It is not surprising in itself, bearing in mind that it is written for the uninitiated, but, as we shall see later, its stubborn and consistent adherence to principles laid out long before “climate change” was recognized as the feindbild of humanity, raises more than one red flag. For instance, it is suspiciously convenient that before enduring peer-reviewed showers of statistics and graphs, we are treated with this:

“By embedding climate change risk and issues of adaptation and mitigation within the framework of sustainable development, the SYR also highlights the fact that nearly all systems on this planet would be affected by the impacts of a changing climate, and that it is not possible to draw boundaries around climate change, its associated risks and impacts on the one hand and on the other, development which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (SYR5, vii)

src:publicintelligence.net

Reader is advised to remember this passage, not only because it indicates to a pre-existing framework into which the scientific report has been squeezed, but also because it perfectly mirrors the essentially identical framework of World System conceived 45 years ago by Club of

Rome, and which yielded essentially identical policy propositions. However, that is not the only problem with IPCC reports. As this body is not a research institute, but rather a policy think tank compiling the works of others, it’s findings are not real scientific discoveries but synthesis of best scientific literature on the subject which is distilled into recommendation of certain global policy. Hence, aside from statistics, IPCC fundamentally relies on the pre-existing process of peer-review. The authors who write the actual report are nominated by their respective governments, yet, as former IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri noted, the selection of nominees for actual work on SYR is apparently rigorous:

“These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record, on their record of publications, on the research that they have done…They are people who are at the top of their profession…“ (source)

However, as Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise discovered, the public, scientific or otherwise, has no other way to verify this but to take his word for it:

“Authors are chosen via a secretive process. First, the IPCC receives nominations from governments – but it declines to make public the names of these nominees. Second, the IPCC fails to explain what selection criteria it uses. Third, when it announces who has been chosen, the only piece of information it feels obliged to provide is the name of the country the author represents.” (Laframboise, D. The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the Worlds Top Climate Expert, Toronto: Ivy Avenue Press, 2011.)

In the course of her research Laframboise decided to conduct the public audit of references to scientific literature in 2007. SYR4. Total of 40 volunteers from 12 countries proceeded in following manner:

„I devised a methodology – a set of guidelines – by which to conduct a wider investigation. The references at the end of each chapter were examined by three citizen auditors working independently of each other. Only after the final results were released did they learn who else had audited that chapter. These volunteers sorted references into two categories – scholarly journal articles and everything else – and then reported the totals. When their findings differed slightly, we used the number most favorable to the IPCC.“ (ibid.)

The guideline for evaluation was Pachauri’s often repeated statement that: “IPCC studies only peer-review science. Let someone publish the data in a decent credible publication. I am sure IPCC would then accept it, otherwise we can just throw it into the dustbin.“ (source) This high standard, according to Laframboise’s group, proved to be a fraud. The result of audit was that out of 18531 references in SYR4, 5587 were not peer reviewed. Out of 44 chapters of the document 22 were supported by 59% or fewer peer reviewed sources. To add insult to injury, those were not only newspapers articles, but activist publications from such organizations as World Wild Life Fund, whose activists figure prominently among IPCC luminaries.

As damning as it is for “Climate Bible”, as SYR is being commonly dubbed in media, we won’t dwell deeply in this problematic, because, for the undersigned, the very notion of peer-review as a standard for truth is in itself unacceptable. Interested reader can consult the work of Laframboise herself, as well as some other reliable – i.e. not yet proven to be lying as former SYR chairman – sources (source, source, source). For the purpose of this analysis, however, the very fact of relying on empirical findings, which peer-review should supposedly mirror, in order to support the preconceived value-based model not only in theoretical, but also ethical, political and, above all, theological sense is the sign that Climate Change scare is nothing but an updated case of application of system dynamics doctrine which was for the first time applied on such grand scale under the auspices of the Club of Rome in early nineteen seventies. It was accepted by UN and, from Club of Rome concept ecological balance, morphed into doctrine of sustainable growth at the UN Conference on Human Environment in Stockholm, 1972., only to be again reformed into further politicized guise of sustainable development in the Bruntland Commission’s report Our Common Future in 1987. And all those tree huggers bending their knees before climate patriarchs and their climate Bible for years now do not, of course, realize that it is in fact, more than anything else, a military notion.

Morbid images Nowadays, it is hard to consider Club of Rome as influential organization. One only has to appraise the posture of it’s leading author Dennis Meadows, the co-author of nineteen seventies international best seller Limits to Growth, in his contemporary public appearances, to conclude that he is a defeated man. No wonder, because he played all his cards on proving that, “if we don’t act now!” the planet and humanity will be destroyed beyond repair. None of these predictions came true, despite adjustments of models and interpretations convincing the public that this was not what they really meant. However, the idea he apparently dedicated his life to, i.e. notion that planet Earth is a dynamic system which can be mentally modeled and then controlled by projecting the trends of dynamic interactions of it’s sub-systems and contingent environment is alive and well, holding sway not only over UN, but more-or less all elites of Euro-Atlantic bloc – above all it’s military centre of gravity, NATO. Moreover, it morphed into an ersatz religion for the masses of liberal-left bent, now fully supported by Vatican itself, of which we already proposed some insights in the analysis of Papal Encyclical Laudato Si. Now we’ll dissect this paradigm using the foundational document of Club of Rome project, named Predicament of Mankind (further: PM).

The PM opens with statement that in 1970. the world is in quite novel historical moment. While hitherto problems were observed as isolated events, to which special problem-solving techniques were applied, the high time of postmodernity demands something else: a recognition of interconnectedness of all major problems in the world and corresponding unified approach to solving them. These problems are named Continuous Critical Problems and they can be summed up under the blanket term misbalance. The authors recognize that human “technological” capital, “failed to satisfy those other requirements that would have permitted us to evolve in ways that, for want of a better word, we shall henceforth call ‘balanced.’“ (PM, 5). So the assumption is that matrix of global problems exists, it’s somehow connected to human activity and that it would have been solved if man could create – mind you, not restore – balance in the world. For some reason, this line of thought – coming from the think tank convened and led by leading Italian industrialist – strangely, seems to touch some deep recess of postmodern man’s soul. Strangely, we say, because it is completely, utterly and demonstrably false. Namely, the PM document is in essence a “how-to” handbook of making up imaginary problems and pushing reality to conform both to them and to proposed “solutions”. The “world problem” or problematique, as authors called it, is not something existing in itself, but something members of Club of Rome intend to conceive as existing. In their own words:

„(…) our notions of solution are equally insufficient to enable us to define those outcomes that could or might result in novel ways of coping with our predicament namely, of organizing our vision at a higher level where new approaches and attitudes might begin to acquire a degree of immediate relevance. It is the aim of this particular project of the Club of Rome to turn the above assumption into a positive statement, by trying to cognize and investigate the all-pervasive problematique which is built into our situation, through some new leap of inventiveness.“ (PM, 7)

So, it is not about empirics but about a sort of transcendental intuition which will help somebody to invent, not only means of solution, but the problem itself. While analyzing documents such as this we must bear in mind that words most often mean primarily what they say. So when authors write about “inventiveness” they very well mean it – it’s not meant in the sense of nowadays overhyped “creativity” in problem solving – but literary in the sense of inventing both problem and it’s resolution, as they called it then: resolutique. What they don’t say is that such approach requires some kind of metaphysics, i.e. the a priori understanding of the world and man’s place in the midst of it. By it’s very nature, metaphysics transcends, but at same time encompasses, principles of all other sciences, providing it’s adherent with an ability to see the one in many; the one subject in all subjects of all sciences; the one problem in all problems of the world. The metaphysics of choice for neo-Malthusians of Club of Rome was systems dynamics. It is an attempt to provide humans with an ability of unifying science, founded on assumption that primary act of cognition is modeling:

“The primary aim of modeling is to give the subject a shape, a structure, a configuration that is determined by an objective which, itself, is external to the subject. Hence the clarifications or insights that might be obtained from a successful modeling effort are never reached in terms of the subject (i.e., a problem or a situation) but in terms of the external objective to satisfy which the modeling was undertaken in the first place. Such an objective always entails a value, and the setting of it must therefore create the particular value-base that gives meaning and direction to the whole endeavor.” (PM, 21)

 This passage is a blatant statement that ultimate “science” is in fact an act of imagination. Model is not a concept – the later being an unity of essential attributes that define some being – but image founded on the structure which is in turn shaped by it’s desired future state. This futurity stems from the fact that model is “determined by an objective (…) external to the subject” and this objective is a “value base”, therefore supposedly scientific system of value judgments telling us how the things should behave and what follows if they misbehave. Sounds familiar, already? We want balance, so we must eradicate misbalance … we need to level obligations of states to curb CO2 emissions … we must redistribute wealth … we must push for gender equality to combat climate change. Yours truly thinks that it is, but let’s not be jumping to conclusions, because the identity of approach is not probable but demonstrable. Namely, above passage tells us that the authors of PM are looking for value basis to be simultaneously scientifically demonstrated and at the same time invented, because it is painfully obvious that they are not telling us what it is. They just vaguely state that it has something to do with balance. So every empirical find will be modeled in accordance with the unchangeable image of balance. This flies in the face of prerequisite of modern science, i.e. that there is no necessary connection between empirical and value judgments. On the contrary, the world model sought after here must give order, structure and, finally, value to any and all empirical findings. If the facts prove to the contrary, well, then:  bad luck for facts, because “the governing statement concerning the project as a whole is that its aim is not research in the traditional sense but ‘invention.’” (PM, 26) So there is a need for “a hypothetical-deductive system that provides us with the tool concepts necessary to penetrate and manipulate the facts that make up the situation surrounding us.” (PM, 34)

To “penetrate and manipulate” the empirical facts … no wonder our contemporary pop-scientists like to call science “sexy”. Yet if we know how it all ended up with the first world model of Club of Rome, devised by Jay Forrester and published as a book World Dynamics, and, a bit later, with more exoteric, and hence popular, Limits to Growth it was more like a rape of facts, an act of epistemological doom’n’gloom pornography which, strangely enough, gained an eager, world-wide audience, as well as the ear of politicians.

The system dynamics approach has an underlying purpose and that purpose is an ability of system to be controlled. It is inherent in the very notion of system as a structure built around purpose. While traditional metaphysics – meaning both Platonic, Aristotelian and Christian –presupposed the existence of purpose both in nature and the human being, the new, we can safely say: pseudo-, metaphysics presupposes meaning as a fundament of every structure. And this meaning is supplied from the outside, as an objective of the system given to it by conscious agent. The facts in themselves are meaningless until they are modeled by human or, still better, pseudo-human, i.e. computer, agency. And this procedure is essential not only for systems approach but to all natural sciences, because the underlying assumption of truth is that it is a unity underlying the facts. While in metaphysics proper this unity – the One – is an assumption, in modern scientism it is a creation. The predicament of branching sciences being unable to communicate amongst themselves comes from the fact that there’s no necessary connection between their subjects. So, in order to bridge the ever widening abyss between them, the connection has to be created artificially. What is strange about it is, first, that it’s completely – and consciously so – imaginary and, second, that it’s completely – and consciously so – political. The control as an essence of the system is in it’s ultimate, world-encompassing, hypostasis a political, world-encompassing, control. After all “we must on the one hand build an axiomatic, and on the other hand a plan.” (PM, 34)

Global Revolution Well, if you want to ‘global governance’, you got to have a plan for the future, because that’s what it essentially means. How convenient then that world-modeling approach is completely future-oriented. The only thing missing, let us maliciously assume, would be to find just the right scientific guise – or just the right science – to give it logical coherence and publicly appealing shape. Well, long before existence of IPCC and climate scare the luminaries of Club of Rome invented it:

“In the project being considered we have started from the assumption that the problematique is both world-wide and new in its configuration; therefore it would be impossible to evaluate its differentiating aspects with reference to a past situation. Hence it was decided to establish differentials with reference to some future state of the world-system of which the defining value-base would be ‘ecological balance’.”(PM, 23)

So it’s ecology, stupid! The nascent ‘science’ of behavior and interactions of ‘populations’ of life-systems fitted the bill perfectly. But note the reason why it was picked up. The model demands that the “continuous critical problem” of misbalance be completely novel, so it cannot have “reference to a past situation”. After all, wouldn’t it be such an inconvenient truth that past can’t be re-imagined into anything else then what it was? Only future, an infinite range of “possible” futures with no ground in anything but “penetrated and manipulated” facts, can make a convincing world-system and means of steering it in balance. But there’s one more thing, one hidden necessity, in the heart of this approach. The unquestionable, outside objective of the system must be based on fear. This eventuality stems from the fact that system is essentially reactive and only secondarily pro-active structure. In order to exist as definable, closed entity it has to be in a constant state of feedback based interactions with contingent environment. The consolidation of system is therefore not it’s opening, but it’s closing to the world. What then if we consider the world itself a system? Why, that’s obvious. We must find the common bogeyman to integrate its interconnectedness. Not to let our imagination run amok, let us quote from another Club of Rome publication The First Global Revolution, (further, FGR) from 1991.:

“In searching for common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, (…) namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human (emphasis in the original, KT) intervention in natural process, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is the humanity itself.” (FGR, 75)

We implore reader once more to take words for what they are. If the documents of neo-Malthusian lunatics, the undersigned had to read in the course of his work, could be measured on the crazy-scale from 1 to 10, The First Global Revolution would be somewhere on the lower end, like 5 or, at worse, 6. It is relatively mild book, whose authors, one of them (Alexander King) the founding member of Club of Rome, try to cash in on “global change” in the aftermath of Cold War, but the song remains the same. The common enemy is man, and that means you and me, dear reader. So the World System, an artificial model to be projected in order to understand and control the globe – to hatch a global society – is both anthropocentric, in the sense that it is constructed solely by human imagination reflecting chosen empirical data, and misanthropic, in the sense that it considers human race an enemy to the value basis of the system. Hence the greatest, now somewhat downplayed but still very present, problem of World System is human propensity to procreate. In the early days of ecological balance, sustainable growth and sustainable development, birth control was alpha and omega of resolving the problem of misbalance:

“There is (…) an urgent need for these (developing) countries to adopt (…) policies of population regulation, and to encourage family planning measures which would complement the death control achievements ushered in by improved medicine and better hygiene.” (FGR, 105)

Here we see a trademark of system thinking – an inability to think outside the self-imposed model: the medicine must be ‘death control’ because it is complementary with ‘birth control’. Both system-activities are here to bring the balance into system dynamics, so there’s no essential difference between physician delivering the baby and abortionist murdering it; there’s no difference between Bill Gates the corporate shark and Bill Gates the philanthropist, teaching “developing world” merits of birth control. There’s no difference between global modeling and global governance. After all:

“We use the term ‘governance’ to denote the command mechanism of a social system (and it’s action), that endeavors to provide security, prosperity, coherence, order and continuity to the system. (…)” (FGR, 114)

So the system-model can be anthropomorphic but it is not human. It is made in human image, but is hell bent on destroying the enemy, i.e., as shown above, it’s original – the man as such.

So how the climate change plays into all this? As we have seen from these older installments of world system models, the main problem for the system engineers was the nature of time. The past could not be put into equation because the hidden assumption of all world models is that they are depicting a revolutionary situation. This means that they must provide completely novel situation steered by radical challenge – a catastrophic event – set in the near future. Such situation, by it’s very nature, must be, simply put, made up or imagined. Hence, the past becomes an inconvenient truth, something that cannot be remodeled and, if given a closer look, can demolish the idea that world model is displaying something both novel and accurate. It is no accident that both Club of Rome and UN luminaries, as well as environmentalist dupes, repeat the sentence “We must act now!” for more than forty years now, despite the fact that it is obviously not true, because older models, as, for instance, foundational paradigm of Limits to Growth had already been proven wrong, and will always be proven wrong. The jargon of emergency, familiar to everybody who worked in NGO sector, is intrinsic to system modeled on clear but never present danger, which gives it purpose, integrity and cohesion. As UN, thanks to, above all, late Maurice Strong, readily embraced ecological balance paradigm, which evolved into sustainable development, nowadays a ruling political paradigm from the UN downwards, this state of emergency was gradually imposed throughout the world. In the media sphere swaying the consciousness of the Western world, soft power institutions like UN and myriad of NGOs played the key, and often underestimated role, in duping the public into believing that Earth is overpopulated, terminally polluted and that humanity is to blame for this. The main problem, as it seems, was inability to put the global change – and this ever present term is in fact global revolution – into proper temporal unity of past, present and future.

Well, enter global warming!

(part 2)

Branko Malić