Wednesday, 17 December 2025

The World State [A True Story] | New Class

by Martin Durkin

time
0:00	In recent films, I've started to build an argument that socialism is not about fighting for the interests of the workers. On the contrary, socialism is a form of organized gangsterism, a form of parasitism which benefits a large class of university educated tax spongers in our oversized public and third sectors. A class of people I've called the new class or blob. The class that forms our ruling establishment.
0:28	Critics of socialism argue till they're blue in the face that socialism doesn't work. Eye-watering levels of taxation, money printing, and profligate government spending does not cure poverty. It cripples economic growth and creates poverty. It's important to understand that socialists don't care.
0:46	The state is not there to fight poverty and inequality and stimulate growth. The state is there to support and empower the people who run the state. It exists to confer on them money and guardianship over the rest of us to make them the ruling class. We must stop thinking of government as a thing, of the state as a thing. It is a class of people driven by their own interests. A class of people who are paid for out of taxation and whose jobs and power are defined by the perceived need for government to look after us and regulate us. That is how they see the world. This is a class that presents itself as rational and wise and benevolent. But the new class is deeply intolerant, driven by fanatical passions. Its blind self-righteousness, its hunger for power, its hatred of its opponents. This, as we shall see, is a class whose quite deranged love of state power has given us fascism and communism. This is a class of effete, snobbish intellectuals who regard the demos as something alien to be controlled. Democracy for this class is something which they must pay lip service but which must be limited and subverted. The illusion of democracy must be maintained but the content emptied out. Our choice must be the uni- party. In so far as local national populations still have a meaningful say in their choice of government. The aim is to override even this to transcend national government completely to go over the heads of the people. This together with the new class's limitless ambition for power drives its yearning for ever more powerful transnational institutions, world government. But these are all sweeping statements. They need to be unpacked. They must be supported with evidence. So let's look at some history. Let's zoom back in time to the first world war or the aftermath, which is when the new class in its latest iteration took shape. Let's look at the social milieu from which the new class, the blob, evolved. I'm talking about that class of Europeans called the intelligentsia.
2:55	I looked at this lot in my last film which explored why the intelligentsia so hates capitalism. In this film, I'm looking at why the intelligentsia so loves the state. The first thing to say is that from early on, intellectuals have seen the state as something which is meant to support them. In the 1920s and '30s, the most famous intellectual circle in Britain and possibly worldwide was the Bloomsbury group. And the nearest the Bloomsbury group came to a manifesto was Clive Bell's Civilization published in 1938.
3:28	In it, he says this very candidly. He highlights the plight of the unmarketable, impunious , workshy intellectual. Unluckily, material security, leisure, liberty, all cost money. And ultimately in a market economy, money is to be obtained only by productive labor. God forbid work for a living. For Bell, getting a proper job was too hideous to contemplate since almost all kinds of money-making are detrimental to the subtler and more intense states of mind. Intellectuals like himself should have their minds on higher things. There are personal relations to be enjoyed, beauty to be contemplated or created, truth to be sought. Society for its own good, said Bell had to be reorganized to support folk like himself, the intellectual elite. The men and women who are to compose that nucleus from which radiates civilization must have security, leisure, economic freedom, and liberty to think, feel, and experiment. If the community wants civilization, it must pay for it. His friend Huxley agreed that society had a duty to support an idle class of intellectuals. You must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of honest work. In practical terms, this meant public funding for colleges and universities and research institutes and opera companies and libraries, the tax-funded arts, science and educational establishment. But there was something else. It is clear from the writings of intellectuals from the mid-19th century to the first decades of the 20th that there was another reason to embrace state power to the great distress of the old intellectual gentry. Capitalism wasn't just making the lower orders richer. The masses were also losing their sense of social inferiority. As we've seen through their sheer weight in the marketplace, the masses were bending culture to reflect their tastes.
5:27	Newspapers were pandering to them. They were expressing opinions. They were expecting to have their say in how they were governed and who should govern them. For nature, the advent of capitalism involved the great evil protracted slow rebellion of the mob and the slaves. Capitalist social mobility and the shift in political power that resulted led to the dominion of inferior men. Capitalism had dethroned the natural rulers and even the idea of ruling, or rather what they now call ruling, bartering and haggling for power with the rabble. He complained that everywhere the mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master.
6:06	Democracy was the tyranny of the least and dumbest. In his "Revolt of the masses", José Ortega y Gasset was alarmed that the ordinary man, hither too guided by others, has resolved to govern the world himself. He was distressed that mass man ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. This was an historic transformation. I doubt whether there have been other periods in history in which the multitude has come to govern more directly than our own. This was a deplorable development. The masses by definition neither should nor can direct their own personal existence and still less rule society in general. The masses were beastly ignorant, said Ortega. The average man finds himself with ideas in his head, but his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words.
6:56	Capitalism represented the brutal empire of the masses. Intellectuals like Ortega or capitalism as a form of barbarism, the collapse of civilized society, a drift towards disturbing anarchy ordered by nothing other than crass economic forces and the wants and desires of the many headed. Instead, a truly civilized society should be planned and ordered from above rationally by intelligent folk like himself. For snobs like Ortega, the First World War was in gift.
7:24	In the various belligerent countries, the state extended its power to a degree unprecedented in all history. As we've seen during the Great War, even the most hitherto free market countries adopted a command economy with governments assuming control of what was to be grown and manufactured, by whom, in what quantities, for what prices, and what might be sold and consumed, where and by whom. As A.J. Taylor observed, the state established a hold over its citizens, which although relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed, and which the Second World War was again to increase.
7:58	This enormous unprecedented expansion of the state sent a fisson of excitement through the intelligentsia. With total war came total planning and suddenly a new model for society presented itself.
8:11	The bloated administrative state would not only provide the intellectual class with an income. It would establish the intellectual in the gratifying role of expert, supervisor, overseer, regulator, and planner directing the rest of us from on high. a versed all powerful state controlled by a class of wise educated administrators. It was utterly thrilling and the intellectuals set to work articulating how this would work and how great it was going to be. HG Wells was one of the leading proponents of this new view. Wells wrote an incredibly influential series of books, anticipations, the open conspiracy, modern utopia, the shape of things to come, the science of life, and others in which he outlined a new kind of modern society planned and governed by an elite class of experts. Wells dedicated his shape of things to come to Ortega, whose revolt of the masses had been published in English the previous year. He shared Ortega's utter contempt for the masses.
9:08	Wells, who described himself as a socialist, considered the great mass of ordinary people to be a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven, helpless, useless, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying by sheer incontinents and stupidity. They were a leaderless, aimless multitude, a bulky, immovable excretion, nothing more than stagnant ponds of population. The new society imagined by Wells would abolish individual ownership and private profit seeking. But this was not in order to liberate the workers. On the contrary, the purpose was to contain them. He and his fellow conspirators, he said, had lost the delusive comfort of belief in that magic giant, the proletariat. The direction of society, he said, could not possibly be left in the hands of thugs, racehorse book makers, willful idlers, burglars, and the like. Such creatures were weedy, tragic, pathetic, cruel, and sheerely horrible. They were a drifting, so suspicious multitude. This view of the lower orders, by the way, was common to Bloomsbury intellectuals and his fellow socialists. Will's friend Virginia Wolf called the lower classes averse, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff, occasionally wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it. To the socialist J.B. Priestley, they were mostly small, rather misshaped, toothless men and women, harmless enough, but very unattractive in the mass. To the socialist and eugenicist George Bernard Shaw, they were the promiscuously bred masses. To John Maynard Keynes, they were the brutish proletariat. Instead of democratic rule by the lower orders, Wells called for government by an aristocracy of experts who would control the dull base masses below to save them from their present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives. The new ruling class would comprise a new numerous intelligent, educated, and capable social element conscious of itself and its distinctive aims. A class of state funded intellectuals, scientifically trained administrators, an elite of intelligent, creative-minded people.
11:16	This intellectual new class of guardians were to Wells the reasoning soul in the body of the race. Instead of mass democracy ruled by the new stupid, Aldous Huxley said an ideal state would be controlled by an aristocracy of the intellect. America's failing was its lack of an intellectual aristocracy.
11:35	Huxley even proposed the special breeding and training of a small cast of experts without whom a scientific civilization cannot exist. These experts would be responsible for the deliberate planning of our social life in all its aspects. Such views, by the way, were standard among the intellectuals of the age. In 1932, for example, Freud insisted that the mob eager for enjoyment and destruction has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior class. For Wells, democracy had to be suspended because central planning and control by the new class demands a more powerful and efficient method of control than electoral methods can give. Huxley agreed that the rule of an intellectual class might mean embracing some form of totalitarianism. We must abandon democracy and allow ourselves to be ruled dictatorially by men who will compel us to do and suffer what irrational foresight demands.
12:30	He said dictatorship and scientific propaganda may be the only way of saving humanity. For Clive Bell, such a tyranny of the intelligentsia was called for because there has never been a civilized democracy. Many great intellectuals of the time, Minten Shaw, Kipling, Belloc, T.S. Eliot spoke out against democracy.
12:48	But abolishing democracy is a tough cell to the electorate. So these intellectuals came up with a much better idea. keep the form of democracy, elections and such, but drain it of any real substance. Under the subtle guidance of the new class, said Huxley, democracy would become an empty ritual.
13:06	The sovereign people will go to the polling booths firmly believing itself to be exercising free and rational choice, but in fact absolutely predestined by a lifelong course of propaganda. This lifelong indoctrination of the population would be achieved by the domination by the state controlled elite of all education and media. In the case of Britain, by the state monopoly control of education and the BBC's monopoly control of broadcasting. As Huxley says of the ordinary citizen, by the time he reaches what is sometimes ironically called the age of reason, he will be wholly unable to think for himself. None but the approved state ideas will ever even occur to him. Keynes called this the nationalizing of knowledge. The new class of course controls public administration and the judiciary as well as our education system. They are the ones who frame and write legislation. Pity the politician or party who goes against them. Here we have the historical origins of today's uni party. But Wells and his friends came up with another ruse for subverting democracy. There was a danger that sovereign governments might still to some extent remain answerable to their voters. How much better if these governments could be overridden by a power mightier still run by Wells and his friends. Wells talks of the necessity of disavowing the sovereignty of contemporary governments of setting up authoritative central controls to supplement or supersede them. He said this great confusion that is democracy must pass away inevitably by its own inherent contradictions into the higher organism the world state of the coming years. For James Bham, if political problems were settled by scientific reasoning, we should most probably expect the political system of managerial society would take the form of a single world state. The world state, said Wells, would bring order to the anarchy of national sovereignty. It would comprise a series of world bureaus which would take into account all of the resources of the planet, estimate current needs, aortion productive activities, and control distribution.
15:09	The intelligent minority who ran the great central organization would tell people what had best be done here, there, and everywhere. Solve general tangles, examine, approve, and initiate fresh methods. And all of this meant the control of people. The organized world community conducting and ensuring its own progress requires a deliberate collective control of population as a primary condition. This would include limits on the general right of free movement. To facilitate this, every citizen would be forced to carry an unfalsifiable identity card, the details of which would be on a world government database with their activities monitored by the central observation bureau. Other bureaus would include educational control, which would draw together police, hygiene, schooling, and literature into one powerful nexus of control, and the education faculty of the control of health and behavior. The considerable powers of the world state would enable it to thrust its inquiring and compelling fingers more and more intimately into the recesses of human life. Our understanding of reality would be guided by the world state which would tell us what was true and false through the world encyclopedia establishment.
16:20	These views could easily be imposed since the world council would have the supreme advantage of holding all communications in its hands.
16:29	The job of the department of general psychology would be to study and guide how we think. But more than this, Wells dreamed of establishing a single state approved world religion. The modernization of the religious impulse which would imbue in people the desire for service for subordination to the coming single world state. This would facilitate what Wells called a ruthless mental disinfection of the world. You may call it a tyranny, said Wells of his grand vision, but in fact it represents a release from our base passions.
17:03	Tyranny is in essence liberation. He says his world government, he says, will not suppress men but obsessions. The reward for handing over our freedom to the world state would be freedom from a thousand fears.
17:17	George Orwell's two great novels, Animal Farm and 1984 was a direct response to the work of Wells and his fellow socialist intellectuals. Orwell tells us the truth is that to many people calling themselves socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves.
17:35	It means a set of reforms which we, the clever ones, are going to impose on them, the lower orders.
17:42	In Animal Farm, the ruling intellectual class were the evil pigs. The work of teaching and organizing the others fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognized as being the cleverest of the animals. The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge, it was natural that they should assume leadership. In his novel 1984, Orwell tells us who it was that created the terrifying society he depicts and formed the new ruling class.
18:12	It was the bureaucrats, scientists, teachers, sociologists, journalists, and others. In a word, the very people Wells imagined as the ruling cast, the intelligentsia, the new class. Wells was not a marginal figure. Quite the opposite. He was a personal friend of Winston Churchill. He used to lunch privately with Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he visited in 1933 and 1935 and 1937. He met with Roosevelt's cabinet to discuss the New Deal. Wells was given a gushing welcome by the Soviet Union which he visited three times at the personal invitation of Stalin and where he met both Lenin and Stalin for whom he expressed great admiration. H.G. Wells's friends included John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatatric Webb, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Aldous Huxley, Bernard Russell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fster, Sinclair Lewis, JM Barry, JB Priestley, Ezra Pound, John Strait, Leonard and Virginia Wolf. In fact, the entire Bloomsbury group. He had a long-running affair with Rebecca West. He was friends with Hollywood stars like Charles Lorton and Elsa Lanchester, some of whom starred in his films. His science fiction work, which is infused with his political ideas, made him famous. The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds. Orson Wells turned his novels into radio plays. Sam Goldwin offered him a five-year contract. His political manifesto, The Shape of Things to Come, was made into a major movie starring Ralph Richardson, Raymond Massie, and others, and would long to be found on lists of the best films of all time. The BBC regularly invited him to give talks on topics like, "What would I do with the world and effectively turned him into radio star?" Wells was not a marginal figure. In 1928, he drew up a highly influential manifesto for the emerging new class intelligentsia called Open Conspiracy. The open conspiracy he called for was among his fellow intellectuals and was absolutely explicit that its ultimate aim is the establishment of a scientifically planned world government. The book was a huge hit and was reprinted three times with excerpts published in the times.
20:14	Bertr and Russell read it with complete sympathy. Beatrice Webb called it inspiring. Several organizations around the world were established to further the ends of the conspiracy by the likes of Sylvia Pankhurst and others. and it formed the manifesto for the Progressive League, an organization which boasted as vice presidents H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Lyndon Wolf, Rebecca West, Harold Nicholson and others. As Wells and the Bloomsbury group were promoting their progressive league, Wells friend John Maynard Keynes, who was an enthusiastic supporter, was writing his general theory, which turned Wells's vision of a planned society into economic theory. Meanwhile, in the US, Roosevelt's brain trust of intellectuals, an idea of Wells, were overseeing a huge expansion of state control, sold to Americans as the New Deal. It wasn't that Wells was driving all this. It was rather that Wells was singularly brilliant at distilling the prejudices of his fellow intellectuals and turning them into a vision of a future society, a society where they were in charge. Wells was so successful because he caught the intellectual zeitgeist. Historians have a bad habit of putting things in different boxes.
21:22	The New Deal over here, fascism over there, communism somewhere else. But it's no accident that these phenomena were contemporaneous. They were different eddies in the same great wave of statism that washed over the industrial world after the first world war. Many intellectuals supported communism, but history has politely overlooked how many also admired the fascists. Rexford Tugwell, one of the main architects of the New Deal, was an admirer of Italian fascism and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt called Mussolini admirable and said he was deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.
21:55	Many intellectuals like Hyde openly supported the Nazis. In 1931, the writer Wyndham Lewis, whom TS Elliot lorded as the greatest prose-master of style in my generation, wrote his book Hitler in praise of the Führer. It must be remembered that fascists regarded themselves and were regarded as socialists, a fact that modern socialists seem to have forgotten.
22:17	Oswald Mosley, the leader of British fascism, had been a socialist labor MP and served in a labor government. In his fascist days, he knew and received advice from Keynes, who was himself an admirer of Nazi Germany. Mosley's early program was also greatly admired by Wells, who also knew him. Wells and Keynes and their fellow socialists, fascist and communist, were almost all deeply anti-Semitic.
22:43	When the Nazis proved less than popular, Wells tried to distance himself from them, but really it won't do. In 1938, Wells published with Julian Huxley, Eldest Huxley's elder brother, a book called The Science of Life, in which he expressed his enthusiastic support for eugenics when, and this was public knowledge, the Nazis in Germany had for some time been sterilizing undesirables and killing mentally handicapped people.
23:08	Wells and his friends were well up for this. In his book, A Modern Utopia, he asks, "... what should a society do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of vicious mind, its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, is lumpish, unteable, and unimaginative people?" His terrifying answer is, "The species must be engaged in eliminating them. There is no escape from that. And conversely, the people of exceptional quality must be ascendant. The better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest freedom of public service and the fullest opportunity of parentage. His ideal state would achieve the maximum elimination of its feeble and spiritless folk of every generation.
23:54	He did not merely envisage preventing base types from procreating. He also imagined the state systematically exterminating them. Death would mean the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things. The ruling elite would have a stomach for such eugenic slaughter because they will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while. But this holocaust of the inadequate, he says, would be carried out with a minimum of suffering. In a foretaste of the Holocaust, his fellow eugenicist D.H. Lawrence imagined using poisoned gas. I would build a lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace. Then I'd go into the back streets and the main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed. I would lead them gently and they would smile at me a weary thanks. It's worth remembering that not just Wells and Lawrence but George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, William Beverage and others were all advocates of eugenics.
24:49	It's not just eugenics. Almost all of the utopian vision of Wells and his friends can be found expressed clearly and unashamedly in Hitler's Mein Kampf.
24:57	Hitler called for a worldview which repudiates the democratic principle of the rule of the masses and aims at giving the world to the best people.
25:06	Hitler's aim was to place men of brains above the multitude and make the latter obey the former. Like Wells, Huxley, and the rest, Hitler argued that the common interest is surely not served by allowing the multitude to rule, for they are not capable of thinking, nor are they efficient, and in no case whatsoever can they be said to be gifted. The best constitution, the best form of government is that which makes it quite natural for the best brains to reach a position of dominant importance and influence in the community. As George Orwell observed, much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the state encouragement of science, all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Hitler's views were not some weird aberration. They were commonly held among large swathes of Europe's intellectual class. As Professor Kerry rightly observes, the tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not in many respects a deviant work, but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy. And the tragedy for us is that these ideas are far from dead. My name is Martin Durkin, and this is Guerilla Science.

Friday, 5 December 2025

The Greenhouse Effect

This is where I collect my notes on the Greenhouse Effect to compare the original IPCC Stefan-Boltzmann expanation of a +33C GHE with Uli Weber's refutation. In addition I should also talk about the complexities introduced when we try to incorporate a real model of the world into it (which included evaporative cooling). Right now it's merely a holding page. As I collect the arguments made since 2017. Made first in German. :

1. Uli Weber's refutation: I'll do this chronologically.

2009 - 2017: The Lunar Diviner Experiment
2019: EIKE forum

2019 Chris Frey's Summary (in German)

2020: Uli Weber's book All What Matters: The Facts about Global Climate Genesis

Dismantling the CO₂-Hoax, by Markus Ott 2023: Marcus Ott's video 2025: Any May's summary.

Monday, 31 March 2025

Stop Pseudoscience?

This as a response to a recommended book on Phlosophy of Science.

We need a whole series of blogs on this topic as even a conservative estimate says 14% of published science is outright fake. We know even more science concocts (with models), or plays with (statistics and processing) data. Joe Folley recommended "Philosophy of Pseudoscience", by Pigliucci and Boudry. I just began reading. But it does not look promising. I'm basically a Popperian (still). I believe science (or truth) must be validated with (empirical) evidence. Philosopher's call that Popper's demarcation. Those criticizing Popper tell us he's not up to it, and 'Popperian validation' (AKA: falsification) is an inadequate test for science. It may not be the ONLY test, but it's a key and necessary test.. Looking at the flood of trash, pretending to be science, or knowledge, coming out of academia, I prefer to stick with Popper. Empiricism gave us The Enlightenment, and modern civilization. We reject empiricism at our peril. By all means - ADD more guardrails. But some of the guardrails recently added: such as peer review - are fake. I see plenty of pseudo-scientific peer reviewed papers published. Empiricism may not be able to tell us what is true; but it's very handly at identifying what is clearly false. Basically: everything which avoids empirical validation should be considered fake. Demanding 100% empirical validation for all published studies may involve throwing out 0.001% of 'true' studies - yet by tossing all the other fake studies (the unvalidated ones) the net result will be much better science published. I genuinely believe 100% validation of all empirical studies, and 100% falsifiability criteria for all theoretical studies is the only way to avoid pseudoscience taking us back to the dark ages.

The scientific revolution and Enlightenment gave us modern empiricism. Criticize Popper at our peril. The burden must be on Popper's critics to show they have better tests for science.

I'll add some alternative (non philosophical) readings (to the book you cited):

John Ioannidis, 2005, "Why most published research findings are false", ( identifies the size of the problem )
Peter Boghossian, 2019, "Idea Laundering in Academia", ( identifies motives behind pseudo studies )
Philip Stark and Andrea Saltelli, 2018, "Cargo-cult statistics and scientific crisis" (statistics and modelling are key tools used by pseudo-scientists).
Andrew Gelman, 2016 "The winds have changed", (good historical overview tracing the issues back at least 6 decades)
James Heathers, 2024, "Approximately 1 in 7 Scientific Papers Are Fake", ( included because: it's recent, he disagrees with Ioannidis, he gives clear criteria for good versus bad science )

Philosophy of science is irrelevant, and almost obsolete when one realizes it's contributed so little to exposing pseudoscience, and in many cases, it's actually legitimized trash studies, and bad science. I'll still read the book (as Joe recommended it, but my skeptical senses are heightened), and the book will be inadequate to the task in hand - which is - to shine light on why there's a flood of trash coming out of modern academia.

Detail:

"The lack of interest for pseudoscience in some philosophical quarters derives from the tacit assumption that some ideas and theories are so obviously wrong that they are not even worth arguing about. Pseudoscience is still too often considered a harmless pastime indulged in by a relatively small number of people with an unusual penchant for mystery worship."
--PoP

<- It is not obvious, how a paper resting on cutting edge mathematics, obscure modeling, or Byzantine statistics is unscientific (AKA: it's wrong). Scientists who publish it often believe it's right. Few people have the wit to criticize the mathematics, the computer skills to see flaws in the modeling, nor the stats degree to call out bad statistics.
<- Far from being 'obviously wrong', much of it is tendentiously wrong, and is, in fact: ingeniously wrong.

Q: What do I mean by ingeniously wrong? A: Recently, both William Happer and Richard Lindzen talked about

So far the best idea I have is for a new journals: either one, two or three sister journals - or - a journal with 3 sections. The first one will publish falsifiable hypotheses. The second will publish empirical studies which attempt to falsify these hypotheses. The third will publish replications. A final section will be devoted to summations - summaries of successes and failures. It need not be peer-reviewed as such, but everything must be publicly debated in web forums - in a constructive manner.

Friday, 8 November 2024

Climate modeling fraud

"The data does not matter... We're not basing our recommendations on the data; we're basing them on the climate models."
- Professor Chris K. Folland; former IPCC lead author, UK Met Office Head of Climate Variability, later Climate Variability and Forecasting, and a modeling expert.

The scientific climate fraud is:

Proof we are right rests on our expertise: that we are better scientists than our critics.
We know so much about climate that we can write it as a computer program.
Our climate programs can then predict missing data for temperatures
This (above) explains why we're so emphatic that you agree on our predictions:
"you must believe in climate change" - we say. When you agree with us (them), then you condone our status as experts - which is why we have jobs as climate scientists in the first place. Our expert staus then enables us to make up reality to suit our bias, assumptions, and ideology.

Ultimately, everything rests on this basic greenhouse gas model Folland believed in. It is an incompetent model. It only survived because though police censor better models - such a Uli Weber's video | document | Uli Weber (German/web) | Uli Weber (German/pdf) | Lunar Diviner Experiment

Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud -- Andrew Gelman

"Scientific" ideology which enables this pseudoscience became so widespread that it took over physics.

Sunday, 13 October 2024

Democracy

"Democracy" has to be one of the most over-used and badly termed words ever invented.

democracy /dĭ-mŏk′rə-sē/

Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. A political or social unit that has such a government. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.

origin: From ancient Greek: dēmokratía, dēmos 'people' and kratos 'rule'). Democracy means people rule, or rule by the people. Deliberative democracy | Direct democracy |

I fact I once read a book on this; by a Marxist (oops - my mistake). It seems plausible to me, until I read a reviews to the book I'd just read which told me that was a load of BS - as Ancient Greek democracy was nowt like that and had been a total failure.

A peculiar thing about "democracy" is so many non-democratic forms of government call themselves democratic! As it everyone wants to be thought of as democratic, but barely anyone wants to be democratic. For example: North Korea, the country of is officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Is it really democratic (LOL)? This should be a massive concern Marxists because real democracy is a Marxist invention. Wikipedia - the notoriously undemocratic wiki site has a "Democracy Ranking" page. The Democracy Ranking is an index compiled by the Association for Development and Advancement of the Democracy Award, an Austria-based non-partisan organization. Each country is given an index and Norway (87.1) is top, with Switzerland (86.7) second. South Korea has an index = 70. North Korea isn't even in the rankings. The United States (self-styled home of democracy) limps in at 16th, below, even the United Kingdowm (my home), at 14th.

What do the common people have to say about democracy, where will they answer my questions?

I did some basic searches but could find very few common people disucussing democracy. For example: most websites with democracy in the url don't seem to have a public forum democracy forums does. But it's US dominated, and its logo is American too. It's going to be all about the USA, which, as previously noted, limps in at 16th in the democracy rankings. "The World Forum for Democracy" will take place at the Council of Europe, Strasbourg (France)". I think there's one each year. It seems to be an EU thing. open democracy, doesn't even seem to have a forum The International Democracy Forum aims to promote direct democray and it is an off-shoot of democracy-international.

It seems to me, a search to find the meaning of democracy should be interested in: what we know about it - books the ideal form in which it might take. AKA better democracy. There seem to be a few contenders here:

direct democracy,

real democracy,

representative democracy

voting

extending the vote

Democracy

"Democracy" has to be one of the most over-used and badly termed words ever invented.

democracy /dĭ-mŏk′rə-sē/

Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. A political or social unit that has such a government. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.

origin: From ancient Greek: dēmokratía, dēmos 'people' and kratos 'rule'). Democracy mean people rule, or rule by the people.

What do the common people have to say about democracy, where will they answer my questions?

direct democracy,

real democracy,

representative democracy

voting

extending the vote

Tuesday, 24 September 2024

Pirani gauge. Answer to Critics.

For me, the only valid criticism of Tom Shula's interviewis that a Pirani gauge filament typically has low emissivity; ε ~ 0.05. But earth has an emissivity close to 1. Emissivity: ε ~ 0.95 (on average).

In his original presentation, Tom provided a chart with 100 mW power loss at 760 Torr (1 atmosphere). labeled with sp→(for surface pressure). The chart also showed a power loss due to radiation of just below 0.4 mW (at 0.001 Torr and less). That is the red horizontal line labeled: COMBINED RADIATIVE AND END LOSSES

Assume: with a Pirani filament of ε = 0.05, the power loss associated with IR emission = 0.4 mW. Multiply both power and emissivity by 19. 19 x 0.4 = 7.6. It's perfectly legitimate to multiply like this because emissivity is a simple scalar multiplier in the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.

So we can expect a Pirani filament of ε = 0.95 has a power loss associated with IR emission = 7.6 mW; and that this will be seen at low vacuum ≤ 0.001 Torr. [Note 0.001 = 1E-03 in the diagram]. Where the red line and green curve meet horizontally. This is the pressure where all power loss is associated with COMBINED RADIATIVE AND END LOSSES, and we assume the end losses are negligible.

Had we used a Pirani gauge with a filament, ε = 0.95 the we expect a base radiative emission of 7.6mW. This would give a similar chart to that above but the red horizontal line would pass through 7.6mW on the vertical axis, and the green curve would still meet the red line at 1E-03 = 0.001 Torr.

So:
total power loss at 1 atmosphere (760 Torr) is 100 mW.
power loss due to radiation is 7.6 mW

This estimate gives a radiative heat loss = 7.6% which is still far less than the 79% climate catastrophe modelers give us; although still 19 times what Tom originally estimated. It still falsifies the greenhouse effect; but less dramatically.

We can, in fact, use a Pirani gauge with a high emissivity filament (such as an oxidized alloy of nickel; 80Ni:20Cr, ε = 0.9, or 20Ni:25Cr:55Fe alloy, ε = 0.90 to 0.97 ). It just so happens that oxidized NiChrome wire is available. But we'll need to calibrate it for ourselves. We'd need to make our own chart of power used versus gas pressure. Or, at the very least, to run the experiment twice - at atmospheric surface pressure ( ~ 760 Torr), and at high vacuum of, say, 0.001 Torr (or less). At such low pressure ALL power loss is assumed to be due to IR emitted.

Or, provided we know the precise emissivity of our Pirani gauge filament, we can just scale it as I did above.

Tuesday, 10 September 2024

Plagiarism

These are passages DiAngelo and Gay are accused of plagiarizing.

DiAngelo (her PhD):

Gay:

Projection

Psychological projection

is the process of displacing one's feelings onto a different person, animal, or object. The term is most commonly used to describe defensive projection — attributing one's own unacceptable urges to another.

More generally projection is the basis of empathy by the projection of personal experiences to understand someone else's subjective world.

Empathy

= understanding another person’s experience by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation. It depends on projection; which is generally an unconscious mechanism = when we do it, we're unaware we're doing it.

So our ability to project is key to healthy minds; in that it's the basis for empathy. But projection can also go bad, in more than one way, for example:

Projection Gone bad

Psychopaths don't seem to develop empathy. They project others to be like them = self serving; and consider empathy to be merely suicidal!
Defensive projection. We displace our unacceptable urges onto a different person, animal, or object.
Woke is due to empathy running amok = suicidal empathy. The basis is a notion that if everyone had infinite empathy we'd be in Utopia!

Suicidal Empathy

In a borderless world we'd be free to travel anywhere. Poverty would be abolished.
In a net zero world all energy would be renewable, and 'free' because it's running off the sun and wind (which is 'free').
In a sexually liberated world everyone is free to love anyone else; and be loved in return.

Notice how free is the operative word for 1 - 3 above! Always - the seductive language!

Luxury Beliefs

None of these (utopian) dreams: net zero (carbon) energy, borderless worlds, communism, infinite sexual liberation, ..., are practical. They're senseless. But the woke, project the lack of such impossible utopias as the cause for all malady! Therefore the norms - you and I - are the cause for their missing Utopia! Because we believe in reality, not in dreams! The utopian dreams are impossible to live - so can only be held as luxury beliefs.

When they can, they'll try to force their utopias onto us with actual laws. Yet because the utopias are impossible there are no, actual woke people. Their impossible utopian dreams are really luxury beliefs. Practically no one attempts to live luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs = impossible utopias - are another kind of projection gone bad. Why have luxury beliefs when they're impossible dreams? Because luxury beliefs are status beleifs; and the claim to a higher moral standard than others is moral grandstanding; which most of us do.

Friday, 30 August 2024

The Pathocracy

My Comment. The desciption of the 'communications class' here by Alex Phillips - of those who enable the elite - describes the mentality of people

who enable pathocracy

. It doesn't so much describe The Pathocracy itself.

Tulsi Gabbard gives a much better description of those at the top of the pathocracy.

Andrew Gold:

56:14 I think they want to believe that because "everyone's racist".

Alex Phillips:

56:20 Do you know what I don't understand with our political classes: the media class. The communications class, as I call them, whether it's marketing advertising, PR, journalism, the Arts. I think in order to get where they are in those particular industries. This is spreading out to most Industries now. In order to get where they are they've had to follow taboos and conventions that change all the time to climb up that greasy pole. And in doing so they've had to sort of be gaslit and gaslight. I think a lot of these people have done it to such an extent that they actually can't see anymore. They don't know. When you try speaking to these people and say but: "hold on, you know, this is how other people see things. This is how the working class might see things. This is the reality of the situation. Look there are Muslim militias. Here's some video evidence."

57:10 They can't see it. They've almost disabled themselves. Somehow they've brainwashed themself. I don't think people like Keir Starmer are sitting there, going: "Ha ha, I'm going to really mess this country up even more by failing to understand the plight of the working classes". I think somehow he is absolutely convinced of what he's saying. And this is the case with so many people out there. They're convinced of these things. They're convinced that there is a huge amount of injustice, and that white people are terrible, and that minorities are all victims, and you know these sort of broad brushstroke unnuanced generalizations that sort of adhere to some neo-religious moral hierarchy that we've all supposed to have learned overnight and imbued overnight. They believe in it so much they cannot see beyond it. They're staggered if you ever put real information in front of their eyes like the Cass Report on puberty blockers. I mean "Wow, science". All of a sudden we can see that we shouldn't be giving experimental medicine to children who are being brainwashed by things on social media. To me, that's common sense. Yet, it's amazing quite how many professionals just couldn't see it and I don't think it's that they didn't want to see it. They just can't. They've gone too far down the rabbit hole somehow. Yes.

Monday, 26 August 2024

Microplastics

A short, quick, debunk of Guardian scaremongering over microplastics, written by New Lede.

Plastics are macro-molecules which are NOT digested. So even were one to eat it, it'd pass throught the gut undigested, and out the other end.
Microplastics cannot be a threat because there are no mechanisms to get them into human "lungs, placentas, reproductive organs, livers, kidneys, knee and elbow joints, blood vessels and bone marrow" - where The Guardian imply they threaten us.
Fake health threats
- obscure actual health issues,
- needlessly scare people to makes us irrational, and
- misdirects our resources and attention away from actual health issues.
If the claims came from empirical studies then what were those studies? Especially any studies which claim microplastics are present inside people, and are evidentially harmful. The Guardian will never tell you.
One of the scientists quoted did:
- not report any microplastics inside people
- no toxicology studies
There are no toxicology studies reported in this inquiry. No study shows commonly used plastics to be harmful. In reality, harmful plastics would be instantly banned.
Instead of actual toxicology studies, the scientist quoted by The Guardian claim hypothetical harms from microplatics. It seems to me they want to make us paranoid, and to redirect our attention away from the real health issues to hypothetical ones. They could make people prey to demagogues.
Maybe they believe what they write? I don't know one way nor the other since they will rationally debate with no one. It's typical of fanatical & primitivist environmental activism we've had from the Guardian for many decades. It's cultish.

Consequentialism

Why is it?:

"Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions."
— T.S. Eliot

Seems counter intuitive. Surely most of the evil in this world is done by evil people: psychopaths and ASPD-types. Not really. Psychopaths get caught out quickly. ASPD-types, like the rest of us, can't see that they're harming other people. To do real evil one must enlist the support of people who believe they're doing good. For those cursed with consequentialist (utilitarian) morality: "ends justify the means", always. Today, good people are often consequentialist in their ethical beliefs. Consequentialism is the default morality of socialists. Indeed almost all socialism postdates the invention of consequentialism, as a philosophy, by Jermeny Bentham: Utilitarianism. Consequentialism is the natural philosophy of atheists. It just says do the most good for the greatest number of people. It does not say anything about consulting them, nor about checking that good was actually done.

Note: "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation", by Jeremy Bentham. Was published in 1789. Just in time for the French Revolution.

Sunday, 25 August 2024

Climate is cooling

Monday, 19 August 2024

Propaganda

☄️Key Rules of Propaganda:

Simplicity: Messages should be simple and easy to understand. Complex ideas are reduced to basic slogans or images.
Repetition: Repeating a message frequently helps it stick in the minds of the audience.
Emotional Appeal: Propaganda often targets emotions rather than intellect, using fear, anger, pride, or hope to influence opinions and actions.
Us vs. Them: Creating a clear distinction between ‘us’ (the in-group) and ‘them’ (the out-group) to foster unity within a group and demonize outsiders.
Selective Truth: Presenting only those facts and information that support the desired narrative, while ignoring or dismissing contrary evidence.
Loaded Language: Using words and phrases with strong connotations to invoke an emotional response and sway opinion.
Scapegoating: Blaming a person or group for problems, thereby diverting attention from other issues.
Appeal to Authority: Leveraging respected figures or experts to support a position, regardless of their actual expertise on the subject matter.
Bandwagon: Suggesting that everyone else is doing it, so you should too.
Card Stacking: Presenting information in a way that only highlights the positive aspects of an argument while suppressing any negative aspects.

☄️Techniques of Propaganda:

Name-Calling: Attaching negative labels to opponents to discredit them.
Glittering Generalities: Using vague, positive phrases that appeal to values but lack substantive information.
Transfer: Associating the authority or prestige of something respected (like the flag or a patriotic symbol) with something the propagandist wants to promote.
Testimonial: Using endorsements from celebrities or satisfied customers to promote a product or idea.
Plain Folks: Convincing the audience that the propagandist’s ideas are “of the people” and align with common values and beliefs.
Fear: Warning that disaster will result if people do not follow a particular course of action.
Bandwagon: Encouraging the audience to follow the crowd or join in because “everyone else is doing it.”
Logical Fallacies: Using flawed reasoning to construct an argument that may seem logical but is actually invalid.
Euphemisms: Using mild or vague terms to make unpleasant realities more palatable.
Exaggeration/Hyperbole: Making something seem much better or worse than it actually is to influence perception.

Saturday, 27 July 2024

Green activism - all activism - can often be Covert narcissism

When activism is not covert narcissism, it can be the worse: dark triad.

Typical traits of covert narcissists are:

An over-inflated sense of self-importance.
Lack of empathy.
A need for excessive admiration.
Sense of entitlement.
Surrounding yourself with superficial relationships.
Taking advantage of others for personal gain.
Resistance to change.
Hyper-focusing on fantasies of grandeur.

Friday, 3 May 2024

AGW CO2 somehow knows it's special!

Dumb question?

The IPCC claims that 95% of natural CO2 returns to surface sinks, but only 50% of fossil fuel emitted CO2 returns to the surface?

That’s how they calculate the fossil fuel warming effect. pic.twitter.com/qxQw7zhlgP
— True Science PEng, DFP, ADFS, MA, MBA. (@socratesccost) May 3, 2024

Tuesday, 26 March 2024

There's no Greenhouse Effect

If an atmospheric greenhouse effect existed for CO₂, it will be possible to measure the ‘back-radiation’. It will show up in both the thermal conductivity (λ) and isochoric thermal diffusivity (aᵥ) properties. Scientists will then be able to calculate it precisely using either or both these 2 physical properties of CO₂. But
Q: why do climate scientists not measure it that way; despite billions of dollars in funding lavished on them?
Q: Would attempting to measure it prove them wrong?

		amount present in atmosphere ( vol.)
	formula	ppm	relative to CO₂	λ (25 C), [ W / m K]	aᵥ [ m² / s ]
Nitrogen	N₂	780900	1855	0.0259	3.038 × 10⁻⁵
Oxygen	O₂	209400	497	0.0262	3.040 × 10⁻⁵
Argon	Ar	9300	22	0.0178	3.586 × 10⁻⁵
Carbon dioxide	CO₂	421	1	0.0167	1.427 × 10⁻⁵

λ :: thermal conductivity, determines how much heat per time unit and temperature difference flows in a medium;
aᵥ :: isochoric thermal diffusivity, determines how rapidly a temperature change spreads, expressed as area per time unit

Source:

Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO₂ Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics, version 4;
Gerhard Gerlich & Ralf D. Tscheuschner, 2009,
arXiv:0707.1161 abstract, pdf

Michal E Mann (Climate scientist)

I have to take these tweets on trust, since I'm blocked from following him. But Michael E. Mann is a famous, and iconic, climate scientist. A true darling of the Left, academic, establishment. His honourary degrees and awards outnumber my academic qualifications. His Wikipedia entry, shows only a fraction of awards actually doled out to him.

He's serious.@MichaelEMann is no different.... pic.twitter.com/zzDKh72BKR
— 𝔻𝕒𝕨𝕟𝕋𝕁𝟡𝟘™ 🇵🇭💖🇨🇦 Climate of Dawn (@DawnTJ90) March 26, 2024

Dispite (me) being a relative imbecile, due to the weight of awards Mann has, compared to mine, I state, with certainty, that carbon dioxide, cyanide and arsenic are 3 very different substances, which behave in no way like CO₂. With water, Carbon dioxide, CO₂, is the basis for life on earth; Cyanide and arsenic are toxic poisons.

Friday, 15 March 2024

Can 'Street Epistemology' cure motivated reasoning?

Whenever climate doomers are presented with actual data showing that things aren't as bad as they seem to think it is, instead of being relieved, they get angry. It's almost as if they are actually wishing for their alarming predictions to come true. It's a very odd mentality.
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) March 11, 2024

Why do climate doomers double down aggresively when presented with contra-evidence?

Mental Illness

It's evidently mental illness!; we just can't say what kind yet. My instinct says that - based on my experience of interacting with these fanatics. "Fanatics", is just what they appear to me. We give them our best, most compelling, empirical evidence. They don't simply ignore it; they're actually offended that we think about the issues but didn't come to their conclusion! I was so set on this explanation that I coined the term 'nihilistic personality disorder' for climate doomers! But, realistically, empirical pychological research doesn't favour my idea! Perhaps they suffer from fear instead? Possibly, as there is a lot of fear-oriented propaganda directed against fossil fuels.

Fear

Fear is a survival response.
Although fear is first experienced in our mind, it triggers a strong physical reaction in our body. As soon as we recognize fear, our amygdala (a small organ in the middle of our brain) alerts the nervous system, which then sets our body’s fear response into motion. Stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline are released. Our blood pressure and heart rate increase. We breath faster. Blood flows change — blood actually flows away from our heart and into your limbs, making it easier for us to throw punches, or run for our life. Our body is preparing for fight-or-flight.
As our amygdala senses fear, our cerebral cortex (the reasoning and judgment part of bour brain) is impaired — making it hard to make good decisions or think clearly. We see the results of this in: shouting, screaming, throwing our hands up, wanting to punch something. We want to act - not to think.
We cannot override fear. For example, even when we know there's no threat we can't rationalize that the apparent threat isn't real.

Yet, although propaganda and groupthink can condition people into fear against fossil fuel, I don't see how presenting a person with an argument against wind-turbines or solar power should also condition this same dogmatism we see, not only from activists, but also from well-educated academics.

'Street Epistemology' to the rescue?

In recent years, a group of psychologists, studied how we change our minds. They found that group ideas (we often see in activists) are particularly hard to change. When groupthink ideas are poo-pooed we don't consider the arguments in the same light they're presented to us. We defend those ideas; our minds get to work to explain to us why we're right and they're wrong! The more educated the person is - the more explanations they will evoke to explain why they're right. Philosopher Peter Boghassian, writes and studies this. "How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide". Peter B developed a technique he calls street epistemology, to have rational discussions on sensitive and often, firmly held beliefs. Essentially Peter B:

States a clear simple proposition.
Asks a person whether they agree or disagree,
and how firmly. He asks them to stand on a scale indicating the certainty of their position
This exercise is best done with two subjects who disagree with each other.
He asks each subject to guess why the other person holds their belief
Then asks each subject to explain, as best they can, why
Finally Peter B asks the question to each: "what would take, in terms of evidence, for each subject to move one step, on the scale, to a less certain position.

This technique helps us to clarify what and why (in terms of evidence or logic) we believe things. Several you-tube videos show this method in action.

Tuesday, 12 March 2024

Limits to Growth: Julian Simon and Victory Into Defeat

In Progress

Originally limits to growth were proposed as real things: such as available agricultural land, and available mineral and fossil fuel reserves. Germany, largely began the second world was to conquer territory in Ukraine, so enabling a German Empire to rival the USA in prosperity. The Nazis had genuine, and practical, Malthusian obsessions here. Thomas Malthus' orginal idea began in 1798. It's very simple. Human population grows Obsessions over limits returned in a big way in the 1960s with Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (1968), and Limits to Growth (1972, by the Club of Rome). Economist took a bet out with Ehrlich. Simon bet that no matter the scarce resource, that resource would be more plentiful in future, rather than less! Julian Simon won the bet. Most environmentalists now conceed to Julian Simon. For example, Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, poo-poos limits to growth ideas. This gives modern enviros a pseudo-progressivism. The Switch Beginning in the 1980s, the response of eco-doomers to Julian Simon was to switch the limits to imaginary ones - such as "pollution" (which often isn't a limit).

What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group's conclusion is 'no'. The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?

- Maurice Strong

In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interaction these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

- Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, Report for the Club, The First Global Revolution Constipating Energy

Consider the challenge of collapsing an industrialized civilization. This is where carbon dioxide (CO₂) becomes the focus. The civilization the Club opposed comprised nations built on and driven by the energy provided by fossil fuels. It’s reasonable to compare these nations to a car, the very symbol of all they detest. You can stop a car engine by cutting off the fuel supply, but that would be extremely difficult and elicit quick anger in a country, as anger when fuel prices jump demonstrate. However, you can also stop a car engine by blocking the exhaust. Transfer that idea to nations and show that CO2, the byproduct of combustion of fossil fuels, was causing runaway, catastrophic, global warming to achieve the goal. What nastier image than the belching car exhaust or the even more dramatic chimneys of industry?

- Dr Tim Ball This strategy to "stop a car engine by blocking the exhaust" has already been devised in the early 1970s at Friends of the Earth, but to stop nuclear power, not civilization as such. The called it constipating nuclear power. Constipation - Nuclear - Fossil Fuel - Pollution - Pychological Terror The greenhouse gas effect is way to constipate civilization by the application of psychological terror. It's particulary aimed at the young and impressionable. I began my investigation into the greenhouse gas effect by looking into books written about it. The outstanding thing about Bert Bolin's book is it's all about conferences held from the late 1970s onwards to clarify and estimate the size of the problem. This is in stark contrast to other books on the history of science and technology. Normal books invariably begin by describing findings from empirical research. It's clear that with the GHGE - long before any empirical research has been done, a group of scientists had already decided they had to find an problem. Examples: This switch, (1) began with protecting the ozone layer by banning CFCs (1986). (2) Then, in 1988, moved on to forcing renewables by demonizing carbon dioxide as a climate change vector. The EPA even coined the term "carbon pollution". This, in turn, led to the Zero Carbon cult. (3) Today we hear of "plastic pollution". Ideas such as carbon pollution (CO2) and plastic pollution rewrite the meaning of "pollution" into a floating signifier swear word. These imaginary pollutions are generally quite complex pseudoscience which economists and laymen cannot debate or oppose because they're posed as models. Indeed by posing pollution as a model one can hide the precise cause as a sub-model inside your model, or just a parameter. WHO go even further than this by simply claiming a certain casualty level for particulate emission when the evidence (studies) show no fatalities at low to medium particulate levels commonly experienced. (4) The WHO claim 8 million people die annually due to particulate emission "pollution". The US EPA, have actually funded at least $500 million in research to prove the particulate emissions are toxic. Steven Milloy looks at these pseudoscientific studies - which consistently failed to reveal any toxicity (at low particulate levels) https://www.amazon.com/Scare-Pollution-Why.../dp/0998259713 Why isn't pollution a limit to growth? Because the natural world is more dangerous than the man-made world. For example (1) the seas are full of mercury. We still eat fish. But sensible people limit themselves to 1 portion per week. If you want to eat more, then eat small fish (such as sardines) in preference to big fish. (2) Fungal toxins are some of the most carcinogenic substances found in nature. Fortunately we can limit our fungal intake to cultivated mushrooms, yogurt, etc. In practice - knowledge of the real world plus a little care - protect us from pollution. Yet - pseudo-science: ozone killing chemicals, greenhouse gases, killer particulates, and now "plastic pollution" - today dominate policy agendas, and terrify large numbers of people. Ultimately, Julian Simon won a battle but lost the war.

1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population, by Thomas Malthus
1962. Silent Sprint, by Rachel Carson
1968. The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich
1972. Limits to Growth, Club of Rome
1980. Julian Simon versus Paul Ehrlich wager
1981. The ultimate resource, Julian Simon
1986. The Montreal Protocol
1992. The Holes in the Ozone Scare, by Rogelio Madura and Ralf Schauerhammer
2016. Scare Pollution, by Steven Milloy
2017. Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The Origins of the IPCC, by Bernie Lewin
2013. “Waste issue” is part of antinuclear movement strategy of constipation, by Rod Adams.
2010. A History Of The Science And Politics Of Climate Change, by Bert Bolin