The Story of Our Coming Times

The picture is Sustermans' Galileo

The world is full of lies, late and soon. It opens your eyes, to consider how much deceit and self-deceit is practised, however. Sometimes, just following government figures for 'apparent deficits' and balances of payments and then realising that they don't count public-private investment or the effective underwriting of banks does it for people. At other times, an assessment of whatever the conventional wisdom happens to be and the ferocity of its proponents when questioned is the thing that brings illumination.

I think that there are two themes--not necessarily exclusive ones--which will shape the history of our times when it comes to be written. The credit crunch, bizarrely, in itself might not; most people today don't remember or have never learned about the panics of 1819, 1837, and 1873 (The first 'Great Depression') that helped shape America and the British Empire, let alone that of 1857 that put America on the road to civil war. Some haven't even heard of the South Sea Bubble.

The two themes I'm referring to are peak oil--today acknowledged by another oil company--and global cooling. The cultists and liars currently sticking to their invented religions have taken to denigrating both ideas (I don't normally do such abuse on this blog, but I feel driven to it) yet, well, facts speak for themselves. Here's a depiction of recent solar activity;



You can see that the line of solar flux is flat, practically. In the recent spat of warming, it was very very high indeed. Go to the excellent www.solarcycle24.com to confirm the graph. Next, here is a correlation--much, much better than unadjusted correlations of CO2 and heat, by the way, which generally do not correlate at all in the manner often propounded;



You'll notice that periods of intense cold containing violent revolutions correspond quite closely to periods of reduced solar activity. There were such periods of cold at the end of the Roman Empire and again at the end of the Middle Ages, by all accounts, but we have not the observations and therefore cannot be sure of any link going back more than a few centuries with the sun.

Here, finally, is a graph of recent global temperatures matched against predictions of warming which are currently being trotted out again as the northern hemisphere recovers from a cold winter, a bit like medieval relics being shaken at people on the eve of the reformation when the strains in the western part of the Church were showing. You can find it on the excellent www.Wattsupwiththat.com, which is run by a meteorologist;



Open your eyes and tell the truth or say nothing. But try not, most of all, to give your mind to lies. Since April, and the renewal of grant applications and scientific budgets approaches, you are going to be hearing lots about global warming, and the potential of, oh, I don't know, foetal stem cell genetics amongst other things, for the next few weeks in the western media. Do not give in.