AB 32 cargo cult

You’ve probably heard of cargo cults. Wikipedia has a good definition:

A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors….

Cargo cult activity in the Pacific region increased significantly during and immediately after World War II, when large amounts of manpower and materials were brought in by the Japanese and American combatants, and this was observed by the residents of these regions. When the war ended, the military bases were closed and the flow of goods and materials ceased. In an attempt to attract further deliveries of goods, followers of the cults engaged in ritualistic practices such as building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment, and mimicking the behaviour that they had observed of the military personnel operating them.

This explains the continued support by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a majority of state legislators for AB32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.” AB32 mandates cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by year 2020. The reason, as the title indicates, is to reduce man-made global warming.

But Schwarzenegger, Al Gore and others want to believe that humans — we little specs on the planet — supposedly caused a great calamity of “global warming,” and that adopting green economies and technologies will make everything better. This is the Cargo Cult aspect of the global warming religion. Schwarzenegger is shown in the picture at right signing AB32, the Cargo Cult Incantation Document.

These folks see that things are produced in by an advanced technological civilization, but think that the production comes from enacting multiple controlling laws on industry, instead of by hard work and free markets.

Just as the primitive tribes believed that, by constructing a wooden cargo plane, the cargo would magically appear, the modern Cargo Culters believe that by enacting even more laws — such as AB32 — the goods we enjoy in modern industrial society will continue to appear. Just listen to the incantatory wording of the text of AB32:

By exercising
a global leadership role,
California will also
position its economy,
technology centers,
financial institutions,
and businesses
to benefit from
national
and international efforts
to reduce emissions
of greenhouse gases.

They’re like Cargo Culters chanting for the straw planes they built to zoom up into the air and bring the bounties of civilization. But nothing ever comes.

The hoax

Global warming is not only a cargo-cult superstition, but the biggest scientific hoax ever, making Piltdown Man look like the Pythagorean Theorem.  Especially since the Climategate scandal broke last fall, showing that the “climate change” data had been rigged from the getgo. Although at least Piltdowm Man never cost millions of jobs.

This week, even one of the main global warming boosters has recanted:

Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits.

Countless gallons of aviation fuel have been consumed carrying experts, lobbyists and politicians to apocalyptic conferences on global warming.

Every government on Earth has changed its policy, hundreds of academic institutions, entire school curricula and the priorities of broadcasters and newspapers all over the world have been altered – all to serve the new doctrine that man is overheating the planet and must undertake heroic and costly changes to save the world from drowning as the icecaps melt.

You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent.

But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.

Interviewed by the highly sympathetic BBC, which still insists on describing the leaked emails as ‘stolen’, Professor Jones has conceded that he ‘did not do a thorough job’ of keeping track of his own records.

His colleagues recall that his office was ‘often surrounded by jumbled piles of papers’.

Even more strikingly, he also sounds much less ebullient about the basic theory, admitting that there is little difference between global warming rates in the Nineties and in two previous periods since 1860 and accepting that from 1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming.

He also leaves open the possibility, long resisted by climate change activists, that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ from 800 to 1300 AD, and thought by many experts to be warmer than the present period, could have encompassed the entire globe.

This is an amazing retreat, since if it was both global and warmer, the green movement’s argument that our current position is ‘unprecedented’ would collapse.

Medieval Warm period

Of course, any person with even a passing knowledge of high school history knows that Icelanders and Norwegians colonized Greenland about 1,000 years ago back when it was a lot warmer that it was today. That’s the “medieval Warm Period” mentioned in the article. Then it got colder and the colonists left.

This 59-second YouTube also shows how, over the past half million years, the earth has been much cooler than it has been in recent millennia, and that a new ice age is something almost certain to happen: