It’s all over but the paying

 

 

Vincent J. Curtis


1 May 2013

 

Canada isn’t committed to buying the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter, Canada is condemned to buying it.

 

Condemned by a combination of factors.  The first is a complete lack of rigor in the analysis of strategic needs:  What threats will North American air space face between now and 2030, and between now and 2040, that will necessitate stealth technology?

 

What are the likely kinds of overseas deployments that will the RCAF have to undertake between now and 2040, given that any such deployment will be voluntary on Canada’s part?  Can tactics substitute for stealth?

 

Is the investment in stealth technology going to hold good for forty years, given the rapid advances in electronic technology?  (Stealth is derived from the shape of the aircraft and the materials of construction, and together these prevent the reflection of radar and other signals back to the enemy’s detectors.)

 

Will UAV technology overtake the requirement for manned aircraft?

 

What about investments in other CF capabilities, such as fighting ships?

 

In other words, is $85 million US times 65 copies a worthwhile investment of defense dollars?

 

The recent webcast conference sponsored by Lockheed-Martin, the manufacturer of the F-35, made it clear that Canada’s fighter pilots are convinced that the stealth fighter is the way to go.  The way to go in the same way that, if you like driving fast cars, an Italian sports car is the way to go over a Ford Mustang - when you don’t have to pay for either one.

 

Having the F-35 to fly will enable our fighter jocks to to sit across the Mess table from their peers from other countries and be able to thump their chests and say, “We’ve got the stealth fighter, too!”

 

Canadian fighter jocks won’t be “penalized” as they were in Kosovo because their jets had non-standard refueling nozzles.  Canadian fighter jocks won’t be left out of the fight because their jets will have all the same data sharing electronics and spare parts as those of our NATO allies.  The embarrassments of the Libya campaign won’t happen again.

 

There is no doubt the F-35 is a capable flying machine, and 80 of the estimated 3100 production aircraft have already been delivered.  However, not one of these aircraft is presently able to fight because the weapons systems for them are still being tested.  As racehorses go, these fighter aircraft are geldings.  They are a terrific flying platform with nothing on them except makeweights.  The electronics in them will be great, also.

 

Canada will be taking delivery of its first F-35 in 2017.  By then, one hopes, that Canadian aircraft will be a little more manly.

 

During the webcast, a remarkable claim was made that the cost of a Gen-4 fighter like the F-16 E will be the same as the Gen-5 F-35 in 2017.  Implication: there is no point in looking to scrimp on stealth because the costs will be the same.  The new, advanced electronics make the Gen-5 fighter far more capable in every respect to a Gen-4 fighter and so why not buy better for the same cost?  If you believe the premise.

 

The US Navy and the Australian government are not placing their faith in stealth technology, which is unalterable.  Instead, they are investing in tactics and in electronics.

 

The US Navy commissioned and has in service the EA-18G Growler aircraft, which is based on the “Super Hornet” airframe.  This aircraft has one purpose: to be the platform for all the superior electronics a fighter squadron needs.  It is capable of jamming radars, employing radars, and doing the data sharing among the individual jets of a fighter squadron.  The fighter squadron does not rely on stealth technology to remain undetected, but on blinding the enemy’s electronic detectors with the gear carried by the Growler.  The flyaway cost of one of these is $68.2 million, less than the F-35; and it can be employed with Canada’s current fleet of CF-18s immediately.

 

The F/A 18 Super Hornet is a new aircraft that presently is in service, (Flyaway cost: $67 million) and is considered to be a Gen-4.5 aircraft because it is not completely stealthy.  However, as a fighter/bomber it is as capable as the F-35.  The last time I checked, the Mark I human eyeball is capable of detecting a stealth fighter.

 

Canada’s fighter-jock mentality is of individual aircraft doing individual missions, just like World War I.  Consequently, no one is shaping the thinking of fighter tactics such that other than stealth technology is admissible to the discussion.

-          XXX –

 

The Self-Mutilation of Angelina Jolie

In the news recently has been an example of moral exhibitionism by Angelina Jolie.  This famous movie actress announced to the world that she has had her breasts removed as a preventative against cancer.  It has now been revealed that she will also have her ovaries removed.

The announcement of her prophylactic double mastectomy was greeted as a brave example to follow for other women who might also be threatened by breast cancer.  One fellow has had his testes removed because he carried the same gene that Jolie carries.

It seems to have occurred to no one that these may be only the latest examples of self-mutilation that Angelina Jolie has put herself through in the last fifteen years.  She may not be so much brave, as having a few screws loose.

Comparing pictures of her when she was a teenage model with those of her in her twenties make it obvious that she has had facial reconstruction, or plastic, surgery in her early twenties.  That freakishly sharp jawline and her famous puffy lips were not so straight or so puffy in her teenage years.

She became notorious in her twenties for her numerous tattoos and body piercings, as well as a bizarre marriage to Billy Bob Thornton.  She later became a lesbian.

Her marriage to Brad Pitt may have put her more self-destructive tendencies into abeyance for a while, but they seem to have broken out anew.

With the removal of her perfectly healthy breasts and ovaries, the substance of her womanhood - what made her famous on the screen - has been destroyed.

The doctor who recommended she mutilate herself in that manner must have something of the sadist in him.

Rather than marveling at the courage of Angelina Jolie, we ought to be wondering at the bizarre psychological needs she carries that has led her over the last fifteen years to a series of self-mutilations.

Facts, faith, and religion: a Response to T. David Marshall

RE:  Fact: Faith is not reasonable by T. David Marshall, The Spectator May 8^th, 2013

 

This is in response to an Op-Ed article published in the Hamilton Spectator on 8 May 2013.

 

 

While I generally agree with the conclusions of Mr. Marshall, the process by which he reaches those conclusions is full of error.

 

Mr. Marshall does not know what science is.  He does not understand the difference between rational science and empirical science.  He does not understand what reason is.  He does not understand the difference between faith and reason, or between faith and knowledge.  His definition of religious observance betrays a sense of contempt.  Yet he reaches the correct conclusion that a religion ought to be held accountable for what it professes.

 

Science is not, as Marshall says, a “mode of thinking and method of inquiry.”  Scientific method is a method of inquiry.  Science is an organized body of knowledge.

 

Prior to Sir Isaac Newton, all sciences were rational sciences - branches of philosophy like philosophical theology; or, like geometry, branches of mathematics.  Only since the 17^th century has empirical science, the kind of science Mr. Marshall actually means, been in existence.

 

Mr. Marshall, as a former lecturer in ethics, might be horrified to learn that ethics is a rational science, one founded upon a self-evident truth and which, like religion, offers propositions that are prescriptively true.  In contradistinction, chemistry is a both a rational and an empirical science that offers propositions that are descriptively true.

 

The difference between ethics and religion is that the prescriptively true propositions of ethics are those founded upon a self-evident truth, while those of religion are founded upon propositions dogmatically asserted to be true.  The difference between ethics and religion on one hand, and chemistry and physics on the other, is the difference between prescriptive and descriptive.

 

Reasoning is the process by which both ethics and religion create their bodies of doctrine, though they begin from differing basis sets of starting propositions.  Reasoning is also employed in the empirical sciences, and the conclusions of the reasoning process in empirical science can be confirmed by scientific experiment.

 

Religion is not unreasonable.  The Christian faith came to be what it is today because it passed through the filter of Greek philosophy during the early years of its existence, as the best minds of their time grappled with the meaning of Christ and God.

 

It is not unreasonable to assert the existence of God.  Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, first proposed the existence of a Prime Mover, an Uncaused Cause.  Today, the God of philosophical enquiry is understood to be the creator ex nihilo of the universe and the efficient cause of its continued existence.  One can understand this notwithstanding belief in any particular religion, or in no religion.  Religion adds understanding of God to the bare-bones understanding of the God philosophical enquiry.  This is where faith comes into play in religion – you either believe in the dogmatically asserted propositions of the faith or you do not.

 

Physics cannot touch this understanding of God, Stephen Hawking notwithstanding.  The laws of physics came into existence after the universe was born, and physics has no explanation for the continued existence of the universe.  The particular beliefs of this religion or that cannot impugn the existence of the God of philosophical inquiry.

 

Consequently, one can reach the conclusion Mr. Marshall reached - that a religion is accountable for what it professes to be true - without making all the errors Mr. Marshall made.  That some people shrink from the full conclusions of their professed religion is a statement about the condition of man not unknown to any religion.  It is as much a lack of rigor in reasoning – a failure to act on a philosophical imperative by the individual – that leads people to act in a manner inconsistent with religious beliefs.  It is not an act of reason, as Mr. Marshall asserts, to refrain from acting on religious beliefs, but a failure of reason.

 

Faith and reason are not at odds with each other; reason is a means by which the consequences of faith become known.  And if those consequences are discovered, empirically, to be in error, then fault lies in the propositions of the faith.

-30-

 

Why Can’t Our Malians Fight Like Their Malians?

 

 

Vincent J. Curtis


18 March 2013

  

Publisher Scott Taylor has been sounding the tocsin over Canada’s deployment of a C-17 Globemaster aircraft to Mali in aid of the French effort there.

 

As a result of the collapse of the Gadhafi in Libya, for part of which Canada bears responsibility, militarily proficient Tuareg tribesmen returned to their native Mali and nearly destroyed the country.  Troops from mainland France deployed to Mali and restored the situation, and for the sustainment of these forces France asked Canada for the assistance of one of her strategic lift aircraft.  Canada’s commitment has lasted longer than the government projected, and our commitment will likely persist for as long as French combat troops are in theatre.

 

That Mali collapsed ought to give pause to westerners.  Mali was created out of French West Africa in 1960.  It was seen as a stable country in the Treaty of Westphalia sense.  It had borders, a government, and a sense of nationality - leavened and weakened by powerful cross-currents of tribalism and race.  The relationship of tribe, religion, race and nation were supposed to have been settled, and all that remained was for Mali to develop economically and to expand and raise the level of education for it to ripen into a liberal democracy with African roots.

 

The overthrow of the Gadhafi regime disrupted Malian equilibrium with unsettling ease.  Freebooting Tuareg tribesmen, thrown out of work in Libya through the fall of Gadhafi, joined with elements of al-Qaeda, and tried to found a separate country upon the desert wastelands of Northern Mali.  What is worrisome to westerners is the ease with which an African country organized on western lines collapsed in the face of weak tribal forces motivated by grievance and fired by religious zeal.  Malian military forces, trained by western countries, ought to have given a good account of themselves.  In the event, large numbers of these military forces changed sides.

 

The French military theoretician Colonel Ardant Du Picq would account for the collapse of Malian forces before the Tuaregs to differences in morale.  The tribesmen had a cause, while the trained military force did not.  They did not even have professional pride, apparently, despite western training.

 

After an independent Azawad was declared, France deployed its military.  The French military provided the air power and the corseting on the ground that enabled fresh Malian forces to drive out the al Qaeda forces who had hijacked the rebellion.  The appearance of western civilization was thus restored, but France has more mopping up to do.

 

After sixty-five years of French governance followed by another sixty as an independent country, showing all the signs that a civilized political culture had taken root, Mali in this crisis reverted to the kind of Africa that the Saracens overran in the seventh century.  The larger question that Mali raises is when NATO partners should serve as fire brigades for liberal democracy.

 

After Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and now Mali, western countries ought to become alive to the differences between western civilization and other civilizations in the rest of the world.  It may rankle some to hear it said, but the wondrous beliefs of liberty, equality, justice for all before the law, and respect for human rights which were born of the Western experience, are not the cultural inheritance of large portions of the world.  Even the experience of these values for a long time seems to make no lasting impression in the Middle East and in large parts of Africa.

 

Those of the third world who speak in terms of western values talk in a learned language.  The collapse of Mali shows that there is little cultural basis for them.  Western values are forms to be observed until something thrusting comes along, such as a return to tribalism.

 

The French are admirable for the way in which they tend to the countries born of their empire.  The front line of western civilization runs through Mali, and because of decisive French action al-Qaeda presently has no Treaty of Westphalia to hide behind like they had in Afghanistan.

 

But is rescuing Africa the best medium term strategy against Islamic extremism?  Should the west be on the offensive everywhere?  Would it not be better to wait and allow extremist anti-western forces to gain a foothold somewhere, the better for them to concentrate?  Islamic extremism is no more the cultural inheritance of sub-Sahara Africa than liberal democracy is.

-30-

 

Bearding the Boss

 

 

Vincent J. Curtis


11 Mar 13

 

 

Jim Lacey is not afraid to pull the beards of his bosses.

 

Jim Lacey is a professor of Strategic Studies at the United States Marine Corps War College.  In a recently published article he demolishes point by point the campaign of the Navy and Air Force chiefs of staff to grab a greater share of the defense budget.  Though he and I see eye to eye on this issue, we reach diametrically opposite conclusions regarding Canada.

 

Interservice rivalry in the United States is more obvious and bloody than here in nice, civilized Canada.  Entire political campaigns are launched from the Pentagon to gain the favor of important Senators and congressmen for one service project or another.  Together, the pentagon and congressional committees conspire against the unsuspecting taxpayer to put spending programs into particular congressional districts that favor the re-election of the congressman or Senator on the congressional committees.  The pentagon, in turn, gets a bigger empire.

 

It’s called “bringing home the bacon.”

 

Nothing like this happens in Canada because, for one thing, there is no bacon.

 

Jim Lacey is unconcerned with bringing home congressional bacon.  What he is concerned with an adjective often associated with victory, namely “decisive.”

 

Decisiveness is our mutual point of departure.

 

The US Navy and Air Force have put together a military doctrine which they call the Air-Sea Battle, appropriated from the now thirty year old Air-Land Battle concept.  The Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003 were applications of the Air-Land Battle concept.  The US Navy and Air Force believe the growing military threat from China requires the development of an air-sea battle concept for the United States to keep sea lanes open in the western Pacific and Indian oceans.  Of course, this requires money.

 

The US defense budget absorbed a self-imposed whack of a 10 % reduction in expenditures over the next ten years.  On top of this comes another 10 % reduction through a budget constraint known as “the sequester.”  While the US defense budget may see some funds restored, the long term prospect is for lower spending levels, smaller forces, less equipment, and lower readiness.

 

Some would say this is a good thing.  Unless you rely upon US military force for one’s protection.

 

Lacey attacks the new balance in lower spending among the services being proposed by the Navy and Air Force.  He argues forcefully that the true arm of decision are land forces, and therefore land forces are deserving of having its funding given preference over that of the other services.

 

He attacks the work of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, saying that Mahan argued only half the story.  Reading Mahan, Lacey says, one would never get the idea that armies had anything to do with the wars Mahan wrote about.  On account of British sea power, one would never get the impression from reading Mahan’s work that the Brits lost the American Revolutionary war, and that Napoleon hung around for another ten years after his fleet was destroyed by Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805.  The surface fleets of both Britain and Germany were reduced to near worthlessness in World War I, and neither were decisive in the outcome of the war.  The battle of Midway, Lacey concedes, turned the tide of the war in the Pacific, but three years of land battles lay ahead to destroy Japanese power.

 

In the air, despite years of bombing round the clock, German manufacturing escalated every year until reaching its peak in September, 1944, when loss of terrain caused a loss of essential supplies such as petrol.  The only truly decisive blow struck by air power alone was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August, 1945.

 

Air power and naval power are great ancillaries to land power, Lacey says.  To what purpose, then, is enabling the opening of an air and sea corridor?  To enable the employment of land forces – whose power of rendering decision was deprived by diverting spending to air and sea power!

 

Canada is in a different strategic situation, and Canadian generals should take no comfort from Lacey’s case.  The US Army is capable of being an arm of decision; Canada’s army is not.  A Canadian expeditionary force will always be too small to achieve decisive results.

 

Surveying our possible enemies, Canadian peacetime expenditures preferentially belong on a navy that can strike a heavy blow at a particular center of gravity.

-          XXX –

 

Is There A Future For The Army?

 

Vincent J. Curtis

12 November 2012
 

Like Canada, the United States is in the throes of developing a new armoured combat vehicle for ferrying troops around the battlefield.  Canada calls them Close Combat Vehicles, while the Americans call them Ground Combat Vehicles.  The future of the army does not look bright.

 

Recently, the two companies competing for the new supply contract released estimates of the weight of their entry for replacement of the M2 Bradley.  Either one will be heavier than the M1-A1 Abrams tank.

 

The General Dynamics design calls for a weight of between 64 and 70 tons, depending upon the armour package.  The BAE proposal calls for a weight of between 70 to 84 tons.  The M1-A1 Abrams tanks weighs in at between 60 and 75.5 tons.

 

Though the new GCV designs call for carrying nine troops, as compared to six in the M2 Bradley, the Bradley weighs in at only 30 tons.

 

What this means, and foretells, is that the protection of infantry troops in future combat is getting out of hand.  These numbers are signs that the political cost of casualties is driving the financial cost of future wars out of sight, even for the United States.

 

Wars over the next thirty years that would involve western troops are seen as being re-runs of Iraq and Afghanistan by the planners.  In these wars, the overthrow of a weak regime is followed by a long occupation of the country as modern, (read: western style) governments are put into place and given time to take root.  While this is going on, reactionary movements come into being and somehow find the weapons and explosives to inflict casualties upon the western troops.  Heavier armour for everything has thus far been the answer.

 

The great German Chancellor of the 19^th Century, Otto von Bismark, once said of the Balkans that they were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.  Modern western democracies hold much the same attitude towards non-western countries that are insistently backward and culturally obtuse.  To name names would be superfluous and take up too much space.

 

Taking casualties for the sake of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan proved politically acceptable until the size of the resistance and the qualities of the regimes supported became clearer.

 

As casualties mounted, all sorts of expensive new vehicles were developed and rushed to the theatres of Iraq and Afghanistan to counter the threat of cheap Improvised Explosive Devices.

 

The cost of keeping western troops from being wounded or killed in IED attacks is getting so high, it calls into question the worth of sending in an expeditionary force to bring the sweetness and light of western democracy to non-western countries.

 

It is not as though there is a cultural vacuum in these countries that western culture fills.  On the contrary, these countries possess a very old culture, one that just happens to hold them back relative to the west, and western culture would displace some of it.

 

The Judeo-Christian ethic and Hellenic reasoning that undergirds western culture is hostile to the underpinnings of this old culture.  Consequently, it is quite unlikely that in any period of occupation western countries would consider reasonable, the political fruits of western culture will take firm root in these old soils.  And trying to force it to take root spawns these resistance movements that kill our soldiers.

 

Political idealism must yield to the realities of costs.  It simply costs too much money and too much blood to bring the backward portions of humanity into a condition the western world would regard as reasonable.

 

The threat of terrorism and the threat of nuclear proliferation that these otherwise backward countries pose to the western world remains, however.  What can be done militarily to neutralize these threats?

 

Since military occupation is no longer an economically feasible means of reducing or controlling the threat, a large land force is not a major part of the solution to this problem.

 

If invading a foreign land, destroying its armed forces, occupying it’s capital and large portions of its countryside, and imposing a regime that western bayonets support is not sufficient as a means of putting down terrorism, then some other means must be found.

 

Whatever this means turns out to be, we know what it is not: a large, mobile army with overly armoured troop carriers, tanks that are used as IED triggering devices, and troops that wear 60 lbs of armour as basic kit.  If Iraq and Afghanistan represent the wars of the future, the army will be substantially out of work.

-          XXX –

A version of this was published in Esprit de Corps Magazine

 

Why was “Climate Change” part of the SOTU Speech?

 

Vincent J. Curtis 


13 February 2013
 

 

President Barack Obama included measures to address “climate change” in his State of the Union address last night.  The wonder of this inclusion is how such a canard as “climate change” persists in serious public discourse.

 

Almost exactly sixteen years ago, I wrote an article criticizing the-then recently signed Kyoto Protocol, and that piece was eventually published in the Hamilton Spectator under the headline “Environmentalists may regret their purely political victory.”  There was no doubt in my mind – then or now – that “global warming” as it was then called – was not based in good science; and the drive to accept “global warming” was transparently political.  The economic consequences of accepting “global warming” was the crippling the economies of the Western world.

 

I forecasted accurately in that article that the Kyoto Protocol would fail precisely because crippling of Western economies was not something that politicians of Western countries would actually do.  The consequences for environmentalists I foresaw would be a tilt toward more nuclear power generation, which was anathema to environmentalists then and now.

 

Important today is a comment made almost off-handedly in the article, but which in due course has proven to be the real scientific alternative to the theory that ‘evil mankind is destroying the planet’.  I said that changes in the energy output of the sun provided a better explanation for the phenomenon of “global warming” if it really existed than anthropogenic carbon dioxide.  (i.e. the burning of fossil fuels by mankind creating carbon dioxide, which would trap heat on earth.)

 

This solar explanation was available to anyone who understood basic thermodynamics.  The sun warms the earth.  If the sun went cold, so would the earth.  Consequently, if the sun got warmer, so should the earth. 

 

Now, the sun getting warmer is a little more complex than it sounds, which is why I used the expression “energy output.”  Energy in the form of light can range from cosmic rays to radio waves, with X-rays, visible light, and infra-red light in between.  Though all of these are forms of energy, the effects of the absorption by a body like the earth of each of these different kinds of light are different.  Thus there are qualitative differences between the different kinds of light, even when the quantity of energy from the light is the same.  (Physicists will recognize here the basis of the Photoelectric effect, tanning beds and microwave ovens!) The most efficient transmitter of heat is infra-red radiation.  Consequently, a change in the spectrum of light emitted from the sun can change the sensation of heat here on earth, even if the quantity of energy emitted by the sun remains the same.

 

We don’t know that much about the processes that occur within the sun.  We do know that the earth has undergone several periods of glaciation and warming.  We know that there was a medieval warming period, when Vikings settled in a verdant “Greenland” and also a Little Ice Age that ran approximately 300 years and ended in the middle of the 19^th century.  None of these changes in climate are explicable through anthropogenic carbon dioxide; but all are explicable due to changes in the energy output of the sun, either in quantity or quality.

 

We simply do not have enough data on the sun’s output to be able to dismiss, as climate changers do, variations in the energy output of the sun as a bona fide competitive theory.

 

Another problem I had with the theory of climate change then, and now, was the use of tree ring data to estimate average temperature.  I happen to have an old fashioned mercury thermometer.  It measures temperature from -10°C to +120°C.  The glass has black scribes on it running perpendicular to the length of the thermometer, in 2 degree increments.  At a good angle under bright light, I can estimate to within 0.5°C the temperature of the liquid in which the thermometer is immersed.  Having seen tree rings, I do not know how you can estimate a temperature to within 0.5°C with a tree ring, let alone to with 0.1°C, which is what the climate scientists say they can.  The width of the ring is related to the rate of growth of the tree, which is supposedly related to the average annual temperature the tree experienced.  But tree rings are not uniform in width; nor are their edges as sharp as the scribes on my thermometer; we do not have a mathematical relationship between ring thickness and “average temperature” (whatever that means); and tree growth seems to depend upon water, sunlight, and soil fertility as well as temperature, and suddenly there are too many variables here to account for, and control.  It doesn’t end there: to get an estimate of average global temperature, one would have to sample trees from all over the globe, including Antarctica, the high Arctic, and perhaps also the 70 % of the earth’s surface covered by ocean because the earth is not “at equilibrium” (as thermodynamicists would say.)

 

In other words, there are a lot of reasons for a scientist to take the climate models offered by tree ring data as little more than an interesting theory.  On the balance of probabilities, the scale of likelihood is tilted strongly against taking the quantitative predictions of “global warming” caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide seriously.

 

But what about the principle of precaution - that you can never be too careful in these things?  If I am wrong, and the “global warming” theory is true, then the world will go to hell in a hand-basket, right?  We have to take precaution against that potentially fatal error.

 

The trouble with invoking the pre-cautionary principle is that most people use it the wrong way.  When you are presented with hooey, you need to be cautious about using hooey to base your judgement on.  If scientific polling is right within 95 %, nineteen times out of twenty, then the one poll that seems totally out in left field in comparison to the rest is the one you discard, not the one you embrace.  That’s the scientific way; the other way, the way used by those who invoke the precautionary principle, is counter-intuitive and unscientific.

 

Armchair scientific considerations led me to disbelieve straightway the theory of “global warming caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide.”  Over the last sixteen years, the famous “hockey stick” graph, which supposedly demonstrated global warming, was shown by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick to be a product of mathematical chicanery.  Irreplaceable raw data was destroyed by the principle scientists behind global warming theory; and in “climategate”, the private emails among the global warming advocates, released by a Russian hacker, present the appearance of a conspiracy to suppress inadequacies and to discredit opinions and persons opposed to global warming theory.   Finally, 1998 proved to be the hottest year (as such things are measured) in the last two decades; global temperatures have been lower ever since, inconsistent with the theory.

 

I can understand that certain opinions are fashionable, but why should serious people even be asked to entertain discredited theories?  This is where the underlying political consequences of “global warming” come into play.  The purpose of the “global warming” theory was not science, but to undermine the basis of western prosperity: energy production.  Fossil fuels are practically the sole means of transport fuels, and a large proportion of electric energy production comes from the burning of either coal or natural gas.  There is a strong co-relation between growth in energy consumption by a society and growth in economic output and wealth by and in that society.  If growth in energy consumption is artificially crippled, then so is economic growth.

 

There is a wide streak in modern western philosophy of pessimism and self-loathing.  A powerful segment of American public opinion, that includes many prominent politicians, is given to the loathing of America’s immoderate success as a country and society, and this opinion has been become marked and prevalent since the Vietnam War.  In short, it seemed to me that the urgency behind “global warming” and its consequences was a manifestation of the wide-spread political desire to bring America low.

 

The desire to bring America low, by heaping opprobrium upon her and trying to cripple her economic success, is political, having nothing to do with science.  As a scientist and some-time thinking man, I find intolerable the perverting of truth and science for the attainment of a political end, whether laudable or not.  I have my opinions about the desire to bring America low, but “global warming” or that slight-of-hand trick “climate change” are kept from complete disgrace for reasons having nothing to do with scientific merit.

 

An entirely separate question is why people would want to bring America low?  That question is not political and certainly not scientific.  It is psychological.  In President Obama’s speech, “climate change” was the justification for crony capitalism in the green energy sector, and for economic distortions to advance the allegedly good cause.

-          XXX –