Dr. Tim Ball | May 18, 2019
“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.” Arnold Toynbee
Until Trump, and very obviously with his exception, weak, ignorant, pandering, people lead the western nations. They want leadership positions but with no intention of doing the job, or, for that matter, any talent to do it.
We are a long way from Toynbee’s “last product of civilization.” Worse, we are moving further away every day. What can you say about America, supposedly the most advanced civilization in the world, with a regular TV program about 600-pound people in prime time? Is that filling leisure intelligently? What can you conclude about western leaders listening to and, worse, heeding Swedish teenager, Greta Thuneberg about climate change who claims she can see carbon dioxide in the air? This skill may be because she is a 16-year old child who, regrettably, has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Asperger’s Syndrome. We know this because her mother, who needs for child abuse, told us so in the family book ‘Scenes from the heart. Our life for the climate.’ Historically, it was a child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. Now the ill-informed, used and abused, children are pointing out the emperor is wearing a cloak of green.
None of this is surprising as the world moves past madness into insanity. A US Senator, Elizabeth Warren, is running for President. This after admitting she claimed a non-existent native heritage to jump the line at Harvard Law School and to get called to the Bar. There is another Senator also a lawyer, Richard Blumenthal, sitting on the Judiciary Committee where he cynically sits in judgment of other people’s truth and credibility. He claimed involvement in live combat in Vietnam when he was never even in the country. How can such exposed and admitted liars continue to retain positions of power? Sadly, it is easy, have you watched debates and proceedings in any legislative body from the US Congress, through the British Parliament and beyond. It is a zoo of childish one-upmanship and petty name-calling, but what makes it worse is they think it is clever. No wonder the ratings of all such bodies are so low.
The major reason for the problem of poor leadership is that natural leaders, who are born, not nurtured, know the populace is not ready to be led. They also know that anybody who steps forward to lead immediately becomes the target of a media who believes its divine function is to destroy anybody and everybody. Understandably, they are not prepared to put their heads on the media chopping block. The impact on society is more than the loss leadership. This creates a vacuum that is almost immediately filled by people who want to lead but have nothing but ambition. These people want the job but lack the skills. They say whatever you want to hear or what they think you want to hear. The sincerity is as thin as the ability. Most of these are the people that Daniel Boorstin identified as being famous for being famous. They are so shallow that they are more vulnerable than most to misinformation and false stories that can become the basis of a political campaign. The biggest of these is the human-caused climate change issue. They, along with everybody else, didn’t understand it, but they deliberately exploited it. Everybody thought climate change was a problem, they didn’t care because it was a superb political opportunity.
A Yale University test on climate titled “American’s Knowledge of Climate Change” proved it. The test was designed to find out from
a national study of what Americans understand about how the climate system works, and the causes, impacts, and potential solutions to global warming.
The test given to 2030 American adults resulted in catastrophic results. A full 77% of them achieved a grade of only D or F (52%). I know from 50 years of talking to and dealing with politicians at all levels that their knowledge is as bad. In one way it is worse because politicians take stronger, more definitive positions that preclude an open mind.
With this ignorance, these leaders established energy, environment, and economic policies that are completely unnecessary, very expensive, and all at the expense of identifying and dealing with real problems. For example, the world was led to believe that it was overpopulated and unable to feed itself. The major culprit in this lie was by Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, which predicted the failure of food supply, mass starvation, and societal collapse by the end of the 20th century. This distracted us from the real issues that are storage and distribution, so we are just now dealing with them. The world produced enough food for triple its population. In most of the world upward of 60% of this never made it to the table. It is lost in the field and during storage to insects, diseases, and decay. Even if the product made it out of the field a high percentage, probably some 20%, was never distributed. Store and transport the food more efficiently, and you solve most of the problem. We know this is true because in developed nations refrigeration reduced loss by 30%.
Ignorance is a problem in itself but it is compounds itself because people, especially leaders, will lie and deceive to hide that ignorance. When the leaders learned that carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas was increasing, and global warming was inevitable they didn’t know enough to even ask the right questions. They didn’t know that it was only 4% of the total greenhouse gases and the human portion was only 0.4% of that. They didn’t know the people presenting this information deliberately limited themselves to only looking at human causes of climate change thus ignoring all natural, that is non-human causes. It was like buying a car after a garage assured you it was good. They didn’t tell you they only looked at one bolt on the right rear wheel to make that assessment.
The leaders didn’t know they were caught up in the green hysteria of the environmental movement and climate change was just a small part. However, they did know that it was political suicide not to do anything considered as saving the planet. The attempt was what mattered not the accuracy of the information. Unfortunately, that situation applies in all aspects of the public perception of climate change.
Leaders know virtually nothing about climate as they demonstrate every day. They don’t even know that the claim that CO2, especially from human sources is causing climate change, is completely without theoretical basis. They don’t know that water vapor is 95% of the greenhouse effect and is effectively left out of the official studies, along with natural causes. They also don’t know that the only evidence that supports the claim comes from a computer model deliberately programmed to show that a CO2 increase results in a temperature increase. If the leaders who used climate change to produce their devastating policies did even cursory research, they would know how wrong it was. They would know that every forecast made by those models was wrong. If they looked at the Third UN Climate Report, they would find this statement.
In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.
I know that no world leader read this because if they had, they wouldn’t daily display their ignorance. We are led by ignorant, uninformed, people who introduced legislation and rules that cost trillions. In doing that they ignored real problems, so millions die and suffer unnecessarily. The best example was the lie about DDT identified in Rachel Carson’s that triggered the environmental hysteria. She claimed DDT caused her husband’s cancer and death. There was no proof, but it got DDT, the major scourge of malaria-carrying mosquitos, banned worldwide. Since then at least 130 million people have died unnecessarily. Paul Driessen called this eco-imperialism when these ignorant leaders imposed their ignorance on other leaders.
We are led by fools and incompetents who deliberately choose to stay stupid by not looking at even the simplest of information. Now with the Internet it is easily available so the only excuse left is personal incompetence.
