The Swamp Page 3

One day an acorn fell on the head of a chick called Henny Penny.
Shortly afterwards, Henny Penny had convinced herself and all her friends that the sky had fallen in.

Prologue

By this stage, environmentalists are becoming uncomfortable about the criticisms being aimed at the Greens. This is caused by us making the false assumption that the Greens are environmentalists, and environmentalists are Greens. Nothing could be further from the truth, they are two completely different groups of people.

Naturally, environmentalists who think they are Greens will not like criticising themselves, and are likely to avoid critically examining the Greens’ claims. We are all environmentalists, but only a few are Greens.

We need to understand the differences between environmentalists and the Greens to keep an open mind in this discussion. For those who didn’t read Reading 3.1.4.10 earlier they need to read it now as Reading 3.3.0 . This Reading introduces this topic with more detailed explanations made on page 4 of the “Misbehaviour” section of the site.

Now to the “Henny Penny” craze in our society.

Introduction

Nothing better supports the assertion that Western citizens are becoming increasingly irrational than the speed in which Henny Penny tales are embraced by our citizens. We all should listen to Marie Curie who said;

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

In the 4,000 years of written human history there have been thousands of “Armageddon tales” that have attracted millions and, recently probably billions of followers. Every time the “End of the World” has not happened. In fact people have trouble identifying any difference between the day before and the day after when the World was supposed to end.

There are several lessons that can be learnt from these tales, but increasingly most of us rarely learn them.

1. On every occasion, the tales have been wrong
2. On every occasion, they have been very wrong.  That is, we did not see 80% of the world ending, or 50%, or a 5% ending.  In fact, it has been hard to detect any difference between the day before, and the day after, the magic date. 
3. Those people, or groups of people, who believe in these tales have extremely strong convictions that they are right and many, at first glance, have a convincing rationale for their beliefs. 
4. Notwithstanding, none of them have ever been right. 
5. Either through ignorance or by ignoring the history of the ‘End is Nigh’ tales, some gullible people are always attracted to the siren’s song of doom sung by such people.  And finally,
6. Those telling the tales are attempting to manipulate us through a form of blackmail that has nothing to do with the tale.

Many believe that the Green Movement, which is very different to the Environmental Movement, seeks to manipulate us by using Armageddon tales. The history of Green Armageddon tales are briefly described in Reading 3.3.1.

The Greens’ Henny Penny Tales

The following readings discuss six of the Green Movement’s Henny Penny tales in more detail – and not surprisingly – none came true.

Reading 3.3.2 discusses the “Silent Spring” campaign which claimed that all the birds would die and the longevity of American adults would drop from the high 70 years to the low forty years. Fifteen years later, the predictions had failed.

Reading 3.3.3 discusses the Malthusian campaign that predicted that half the World’s population would die from starvation. Fifteen years later, mass starvation did not occur and the World’s population was better fed and continued to grow.

Reading 3.3.4 discusses the “All the Minerals will be Gone in Fifteen Years” campaign, orchestrated by the Club of Rome. Today, after using minerals four times faster than the Club of Rome assumed, the reserves of minerals exceeds those at the start of this campaign.

Reading 3.3.5 discusses the “Acid Rain” campaign that predicted that all the forests would be gone by 15 years. A 25 year study by scientists using “acid rain” four times more acidic, than the feared acid rain, did not kill one tree – with some species benefiting from the higher acidity.

Reading 3.3.6 discusses the “Oil Depletion” campaign which claimed oil would run out within a decade. This campaign has been re-run five times in the past 70 years with only the depletion date being changed.

Reading 3.3.7 discusses the “Ice Age Armageddon” campaign which predicted ice would engulf us all by the year 2000. This campaign was started in a natural multi-decade cooling period.

As soon as the cooling period had come to an end and a natural multi-decade warming period had begun, the present global warming campaign was launched predicting we would be half way to “frying and dying” by the year 2000. That was quite a reversal from being crushed by ice to frying and dying by the same year 2000.

Yet we all believe these tales, while protesting that we are not irrational.

The Green movement, their scientists and supporters never suffer from prediction failure embarrassment because they never look at the results. As one doomsday passes they demand a new date for the prediction. The Green movement and their PR organisation are more than happy to feed this craving.

Some kind soul has created this website titled “The Extinction Clock” (https://extinctionclock.org/) to show how unsuccessful all these predictions have been. Not surprisingly, it lists 50 examples of recent Armageddon tales that have failed. If you are disappointed and have too little to do and want to die, then there are still 25 Armageddon tales planned for the future. Book now before you miss out!

Additional Lessons to be Learnt

There are two more important lessons to be learnt from believing in Armageddon tales and how we react to them. First all Armageddon tales sell us a ‘negative good’.

A Negative Good. When you buy a ‘negative good’ you don’t receive anything in return. What you might get in return is something nasty will not happen in the future. So you could buy 100 negative goods and live a happy life and receive nothing positive for your money – telling yourself you have bought “avoidance of 100 negative nasty events”. Reading 3.3.8 explains more about negative goods.

The “snake oil” salesman sells us a negative good when he sells us something to prevent something nasty happening in the future.

The second lesson to be learnt concerns how we react to the tale.

The Curse of the Surrogate Goal. When used correctly, surrogate goals can be very powerful management tools used during implementation. However, used improperly they can do far more damage than good.

The Green Movement will always encourage us to focus on surrogate goals while we react to their most recent campaign. Because the basis of their Armageddon tale is either non-existent or very fragile, they don’t want us to investigate it so they use surrogate goals to distract us from the primary goal.

If correctly used surrogate goals, are secondary goals that if achieved will help achieve the primary goal. However, the primary goal of the Green Movement is the surrogate goal and they know that it will not achieve anything for the primary goal – as a consequence, they don’t want us to look at the primary goal during implementation.

For example, as as surrogate goal we aim to reduce “emissions”. Why? Because emissions cause global warming that will destroy the planet. A reasonable plan we might say. However, today we know emissions do not cause global warming. So why are we still reducing emissions?

We have lost sight of our primary goal – preventing global warming. And, are over-focused unnecessarily on the surrogate goal of reducing emissions.

To gain a better understanding you need to read the practical examples in Reading 3.3.9.

You will also appreciate that irrationally focusing on surrogate goals and never checking the primary goals have cost us dearly in every Green campaign to date. Because of our growing irrationality, we have not learnt this lesson.

This Isn’t an Armageddon Story!

Sorry, but it is – you haven’t been listening. Just some (there are a lot more) of the Armageddon predictions;

• The Planet is doomed,
• All life will be gone, except for a few heat resistant microbes,
• Your grandchildren will see lakes boil and forests self-combust
• Two thirds of Australia will be under water after catastrophic sea level rises.
• By the year 2000, four billion will die as a result of runaway global warming caused by the melting permafrost.
• By the year 2000, the human species will be extinct, apart from a few thousand breeding pairs eking out an existence in the Arctic regions.
• Professor Garnaut briefing Cabinet Ministers in 2012 – the human race gone by 2070.
• Professor Flannery of the Government’s Climate Commission 2014 – the human race gone by 2050.
• UN’s Climate meeting in Paris 2016 – the human race gone by 2035.

For most people, the above is enough to convince them that this is an Armageddon story – don’t pretend it isn’t. All our reactions are based on this emotional nonsense.

Another Armageddon Tale – Y2K

Another Henny Penny tale, that does not involve the Green Movement was the “Y2K Problem” Once again irrationality prevailed and we wasted billions of taxpayers dollars. Reading 3.3.10 discusses Y2K.

Reading 3.3.10a discusses historical Armageddon tales

How Small are the Global Warming “Acorns” Falling on Our Heads

“That mankind is capable of affecting the climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.”  Richard Lindzen

We are running around declaring that the sky is falling in (e.g. Declaring a Climate Emergency or Climate Crisis) when the following “acorns” have fallen on our heads. Henny Penny would be proud of us, but our behaviour supports the assertion that Western citizens are progressively becoming more irrational.

Look how much we fear from so little.

• We are fearing temperature rises measured in tenths of one degree in a century, hundredths of one degree in a decade, and thousandths of one degree in a year. Yet anywhere in the World, on any day, humans live happily seeing temperatures ranges of more than ten degrees in a day, or more than twenty five degrees in a year as winter turns to summer. The maximum temperature ever recorded was 56.7 °C (134.1 °F) on 10 July 1913 in California, United States of America. The coldest temperature was minus 88^oC at Vostok Station, in Antarctica. Foolishly we believe the Greens when they tell us the human race will become extinct if there is a 0.5^oC temperature rise (UN sponsored climate meeting in Paris 2016). In the past, humans haven’t noticed much larger average global temperature rises.
• We fear rising sea levels measured in millimetres (not the metres that Henny Penny tell us).
• We fear “Catastrophic Weather” events where wind speeds increase by 1kph or annual rainfall increases by 1.5mm per year.
• We fear one CO₂ molecule in 2500 parts of the atmosphere will kill us
• We fear a temperature rise that is measured in billionths of one degree that CO₂ might cause by rising from 400ppm to 420ppm

More importantly, look how much money we are spending to avoid the pain of these small “acorns” falling on our heads. Not millions, nor billions, but trillions of dollars. Don’t we have more important ‘real’ problems to fix with this money, rather than spending it on ‘non’-problems?

The Greengrocer Test

If a greengrocer failed to keep his promises about supplying us with fresh fruit and vegetables, we would stop believing his hollow promises. Why don’t we take the same approach with the Greens with all their failed promises? Reading 3.3.11 expands on this enigma.

A Moment for Reflection

An Exercise

We all believe we are rational and use logic and facts to arrive at the truth. On this and previous pages we have refreshed our knowledge about irrational arguments and fallacious thinking. This is a good time to test ourselves. First read the commentary below (in italics) and use your critical thinking skills to identify any potential deception tools being used.

The US Senate was holding a hearing on the need to embrace alternate energy as a way of avoiding a global warming catastrophe. Ex Secretary of State George Schultz was there to support the idea. The commentary;

First, he was introduced “...as a well known Washington person, with vast knowledge who would have valuable insights on this matter“. In a nut shell George made the following points;

• When the floating Arctic ice melted there would be a catastrophic sea level rise,
• When he was told that there would be no sea level rise, he half accepted this saying there would still be a small rise.
• Moving onto safer grounds, George told the Inquiry that for twenty years scientists had been measuring the amount of Greenland’s glacier ice going into the ocean every year. On average, each year 140 billion tons of ice were going into the oceans and melting. If this continued, there would be catastrophic sea level rises.
• He added, the same was happening in the Antarctic compounding the problem
• He finished by stating that by embracing alternate energy sources much of the rising sea levels would be stopped.

Your task is to critically look at everything in italics, look for deception tools, and areas that you would need to check before you accepted George Schultz’s advice. A suggested answer is given at the end of “The Swamp Page 4“

Answers to the Test on The Swamp Page 2

We were asked to identify the irrational arguments used in the following conversations.

Conversation 1

A commentator in the newspaper tells our government they will a laughing stock if they present their climate policies to the Climate Conference in Glasgow.

Note: No discussion of the issue. 

If you hold this view you will be harmed (become a “Laughing Stock”).  The commentator is using a mild form of blackmail – If you don’t accept my views, you will be laughed at.

Argumentum ad Baculum.

The appeal to the harm that will befall you if you don’t accept an argument. For example, “You will be labelled a ‘denier’, be denigrated, loose your promotion or research funding etc.etc.  You have to believe us. Once again, no discussion about the issue.  This fallacy should not be confused with simply warning that harmful consequences could follow a statement – it becomes a fallacy when it implies that the harm alters the validity of the statement.

Sure enough, at the conference the government policies are laughed at when they are presented.

Note: No discussion of the issue. 

If we laugh at her long enough, it will prove that her views are ridiculous – and it doesn’t matter how valid her statements are.

The appeal to laughter:

The fallacy of trying to refute a viewpoint by ridiculing the opponent with humour, rather than by giving arguments against a viewpoint. For example, the ABC regularly invite one sceptic onto a panel discussing global warming, encouraging the audience and other participants to laugh at him rather than critiquing his viewpoints or ideas.  Once again, the issue is avoided. This fallacy should not be confused with the fact that some arguments are laughable, and when they occur, it is quite acceptable to point that out. It becomes a fallacy when it is used as a substitute for an argument or to obfuscate the real issue involved.

Conversation 2

On an ABC panel we are told we can’t believe that “dickhead” Abbot on any climate issue, because we all know he is wrong and, as a denier, he can harm the country.

Note: No discussion of the issue.

Don’t listen to him or discuss his ideas, just denigrate him.  Once denigrated, his ideas will be rejected.

Argumentum ad Hominem – abusive:

Attacking the man instead of the proposition, implying that if the advocate of a proposition is no good, then the idea he is proposing is necessarily no good.

The labelling of sceptics as “deniers” followed by denigration is a good example of this illogical argument. Their words and ideas are not discussed. 

This fallacy should not be confused with simply an attack on a person, be it on his veracity, scholarship, even on his character. Many people deserve to be attacked indeed it is an absolute requirement of justice that they be so. But ad hominem occurs where an attack is made not because of the person’s failings or culpability, but as a substitute for an argument.

“We all know he is wrong”

Note: No discussion of the issue.

We can also all be wrong, so this is an illogical argument.  We need to discuss the issue.

Argumentum ad Populum:

The appeal to the people. If everyone believes it, then it must be right, irrespective of what their beliefs are based on.  This leads to people implying that if enough people feel strongly enough that something is true it must be so.

The argument that it is not what really happened that matters but what enough people imagine happened.

All the scientists agree about global warming; therefore, they must be right. Apart from being incorrect, this statement combines the “ad Verecundiam and ad Populum” illogical arguments. Everyone agreed the Earth was flat, Y2K was a major problem, and stomach ulcers were caused by stress, but they all turned out to be fallacious.