If You Are Told The Evidence Is Overwhelming, First Check It Actually Exists

There is but one thing I am extremely grateful to anti-tobacco jihadists for. That being the way they have opened my eyes to the nonsense that is fed to us every hour, of every day, of every year, by those who advocate the removal of our freedoms in the name of their own particular righteous initiative.

With countries following Portugal's highly-successful experiment in decriminalising drug use, and London streets also being de-cluttered after 'road-sharing' was proven to be an astronomical improvement to both quality of life, and safety, everywhere it has been attempted, it's clear that liberal/libertarian policies are hugely advantageous.

Yet all of the main three parties in the UK (and the SNP in Scotland) do nothing but hector, nanny, restrict and ban at the behest of a variety of vested interest alarmists who crank up the urgency exponentially every waking hour.

Why? Because we have MPs who are too busy reading doomsaying statistics and computer-predicted outcomes of policies espoused by single interest lobbyists in suits, rather than investigating the motivation behind the nagging and pestering.

Those who like to drink in deserted post-smoking ban pubs because the air is cleaner won't ever bother to cast a second glance at the fake statistics, junk science, and downright lies that sit behind this daft counter-productive situation in which we now find ourselves. Which, of course, has not saved, and never will save, a single life. But if you scratch the surface, it's not hard to work out why they do it.

Invariably, it's money.

I have the tobacco control nutters to thank for helping me to notice that if someone says "the debate is over", it means that they don't want the debate to occur. I have them to thank for knowing that when the sentence "the evidence is overwhelming" is uttered, it normally means there isn't any.

Anti-tobacco nutters have therefore made me extremely sceptical of the global warming/cooling/changing theologians, considering both use the exact same methods. And this article tends to prove me correct in my hypothesis.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, ...

There's the 'money' motivation.

... scientists at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world's first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It's known in the trade as the "Jones and Wigley" record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a "discernible human influence on global climate."

I suggest you read the whole thing, but there are some jaw-dropping objections and obstacles placed in front of those who wished to question the 'research'.

Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that "+/-" came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones's response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

This is the 'overwhelming' evidence remember. The stuff which has led to the debate being 'over'. Except no-one with a critical eye is allowed to inspect it ... the very point of peer review.

Further attempts were made.

In June 2009, Georgia Tech's Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn't have the data because he wasn't an "academic." So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were "confidentiality" agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre's blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

So, as with other areas which MPs are certain that the threat is real and imminent, it probably isn't. The evidence is not overwhelming quite simply because there is almost no evidence in the first place.

Righteous myths pass into QI style common misconceptions, legislators get into a confirmation bias frenzy of ever-escalating proscription of the public in pursuit of an unattainable goal (the 'I'm more proactive than you' syndrome), and no-one is allowed to nay-say for fear of being accused of attempting to inflict misery and death on their children or the third world's children.

And throughout all this, liberal values and the respect for individual freedoms are further rent asunder while paid-for 'researchers' continue to get rich pumping out falseties on behalf of those who wish to perpetuate whichever scam the holder of the purse strings holds dear.

Stinks, dunnit?