132 countries exit Warsaw climate talks

Thank God.

Poor countries walk out of UN climate talks as compensation row rumbles on,

we heard from the Guardian and many others earlier in the morning. These 132 countries were apparently expecting that they would be paid "compensations for extreme weather events". It seems that they took this meme (so radical one that we haven't even heard much about it in the richer parts of the world) for granted and already demanded a new U.N. bureaucratic body to "oversee" the compensatory payments.

Many of the countries are governed by shamans who believe that thunderstorms are created by witches. Almost all of these countries are dominated by folks who just don't grasp science, not even at the elementary level. The IPCC was produced to support these beliefs – that Exxon creates hurricanes, McDonald's creates typhoons, the Great Devil is responsible for the floods, and the Little Devil (renamed to the rabid dog by the mullah-in-chief today) brought the wildfires to the world. And everyone will be living in a happy paradise once the assets of these villains are confiscated and redistributed.

Well, science says something different. All these weather events – much like the Earth and the Solar System – have been around for 4.6 billion years. Up to noisy fluctuations and some potentially understandable, mild, regular, persistent climate cycles, not necessarily periodic ones, nothing has detectably changed about the frequency or probabilistic distributions of these events in the last several thousands of years. If we improve the theory by the glaciation cycles, nothing has changed for one million of years.

The qualitative nature of the climate has been really the same for 4.6 billion years although in details, it was always changing. But there has never been an era in which extreme weather events were absent. There has never been any "paradise on Earth". And the weather without extreme events wouldn't be a paradise, anyway. Many of the higher life forms wouldn't even arise and evolve in such a "paradise".




A part of the climate industry is powered by greedy opportunists like Al Gore who once saw the opportunity to benefit. Many of the others are however classic leftwingers who just believe in the redistribution schemes. They don't know whether they believe that the richer nations are "guilty"; they want to believe it because it's their strategy to benefit.




Nothing essential has changed about these international conferences on redistribution for decades, perhaps centuries. Richard Feynman once attended such a conference (the overall theme was "fragmentation of knowledge") which has used the "threats of war" to advocate a global wealth redistribution. He wrote:

...There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.

The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”

I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries—that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.

The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking! You’ve gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don’t take it so seriously. Back away a minute and look at what it is.” So I thought about the conference, how crazy it was, and it wasn’t so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in something like that again, I’d shy away from it like mad—I mean zero! No! Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.

When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!

Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge of our group has the nerve to say that since we’ve worked out so much, there won’t be any time for public discussion, so we’ll just tell the public all the things we’ve worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn’t think we had worked out a damn thing!

Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines—our second basic “problem”—I said that I noticed something interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”

Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”

“Uh, well, as a general principle, or … I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?

There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.

Good that there was no IPCC half a century ago and that Feynman wasn't forced to attend the conference of these pompous fools because their pomposity and stupidity has grown so significantly in the last 50 years that Richard Feynman wouldn't have survived the conference.

The silver lining is that at least the Warsaw climate conference was capable of de facto ending sharply and cleanly. But the richer nations that assured the looting nations that they wouldn't get anything now suggested that things might change after 2015. So it's very likely that these attempts aren't over and the pseudoscientifically justified witch hunts will resume in a foreseeable future.



A British terrorist who could have been shot during her/their terrorist attack in the Arctic but instead, she was saved and now released on bail, probably because Putin found her cute. Do you think that she's grateful that her life that she was ready to sacrifice through her unlimited stupidity was saved?

Update Thursday: Poland sucked the very environment minister who hosts the talks, with the apparent intent to accelerate the fracking revolution and destroy the remainders of the Warsaw conference. The lame duck may still finish the COP meeting.