Inconvenient Lies

Today, on a daily online news-sheet I usually browse, as part of my daily information sourcing, someone chose to include a repeat of the video featuring Carl Sagan with his interesting and moving Small Blue Dot monologue.

Here it is, and it has lost none of its original pathos or energy over time. This was first aired in 1994. But I am not going to show the usual video, although here is the link if you want to see that. For those who may be interested, the video below is what is said to be a ‘lost lecture’ which includes the very same monologue, set in the darkness of an auditorium, with only his voice and a single screen image on display- I have set it to start at an appropriate position, leaving a short introduction. You may also wish to hear the whole of his talk, but I suggest you just let the video play for the first time. And this may have actually been the first time those words were spoken.

I believe Carl Sagan to have been a man of considerable integrity, and certainly his Cosmos TV shows held me entranced those many years ago.

But now comes a difficult moment, and a moment of what I refer to as ‘inconvenient lies’. Dr Sagan was called to address a committee of the US Senate in 1985 on the subject of The Greenhouse Effect. The video is below. It is clear from the very start that he is uncomfortable with what he has been asked to do – with a noticeably unmoved, perhaps even hostile, Senator Al Gore watching on. Sagan’s eyes, his darting glances, never as far as I could see, looking anyone in the eyes, his frequent looking down at his notes, and other features of his demeanor, reveal he doesn’t believe a word of the pathetic, incoherent, sciencey psycho-babble he is spouting. And the looks on the faces of those whom he is addressing, show equal disbelief. It is a script he is reading. A script given to him to read (I reckon by the shady Al Gore). He makes a few comments which go off script, in order to cover his embarrassment, and they are noticeable to all.

I detected only one moment of truth, related to the subject, when he said – “… and that’s why it makes sense to study past climate change on the Earth”. Although his reasons for making that statement are quite incomprehensible. Something to do with the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth and climate sensitivity. Say what! And it was at that point that the camera took a shot of his notes, which I could not in any way decipher. We need to study ‘past’ climate to see what earlier climate conditions were like. Not that that has ever played more than a minor role as part of modern climate studies. Such are usually based on nothing more than theoretical computer modelling. Which is fast, but quite useless. And not at all the right course of action anyway. I’m sure he didn’t mean ‘to study all the way back to 1850’ either. All studies based on changes around or since that date or any other recent time are absolutely worthless and lead to the sort of confusion that has been implanted in the minds of much of the world today. It’s nonsense. A study of real climate history, millions of years of it, would give the lie to all that. That study has been done of course, but nobody – well nobody with the funding to take it where it ought to be – takes any notice of it.

There is no such thing, or at least nothing of any importance in climate affairs, as a Greenhouse Effect, and the Earth’s atmosphere remains largely unchanged throughout the period of supposed global warming, which is not at centre in any case of the incomprehensible points he makes. No case has ever been proved that there is any link between atmospheric gases, however they emerge or wherever they go to, and the temperature variations associated with climate change. There is no such link.

Watching this, I felt his heart is not in this freak-show at all. How soul destroying this must have been for the man? But don’t take my word for this. Watch the sad episode for yourself.

Note: I do not blame Dr Sagan for this. I’m sure he was put in an impossible position by worthless opportunists like Al Gore.

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Inconvenient Lies

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