Climate agit-prop in the Listeria

A visitor to New Zealand responds to the Listeria magazine’s lurid climate porn appearing as a cover story in a recent issue. Feel free to help the response go viral.

From:
Rupert Wyndham [mailto: xxxxx.xxxx]
Sent: Saturday, 14 May 2011
To: letters@listerner.co.nz
Subject: Attn. Editor
Dear Ms. Stirling
    I am a visitor to New Zealand, and only yesterday had sight of your 14 May edition of the New Zealand Listener with its entertainingly fanciful lead story, accompanied by appropriately lurid
graphics.
    Since this is a topic which raises much controversy, let me try and see if I can encapsulate in a few lines what it is that you would wish you readers to believe.
    You propose, it would seem, that marginal increases in the concentrations of what is no more than a trace gas, amounting in total not to 10% of the earth's atmosphere, not even to 5% - nay, not even to 1%. can bring about cataclysmic changes in global climate.
    So, what exactly is the percentage concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Why, to be sure, it
is a gasping, asphyxiating 1/27th part of a single percentage point.
    But even that's not the complete picture, is it? After all, as someone (such as you) who has addressed the data for herself will know, even human induced climate change proselytisers acknowledge that, by itself, the radiative potential of CO2 (vanishingly small anyway) fails to account for the "scenarios" promoted by them and by unquestioning and compliant organs of the media - such, indeed, as The New Zealand Listener.
    So, to get over this this little inconvenience, what should be done? Why, to be sure, invoke another critical life affirming compound (dihydrogen oxide) to provide a "positive forcing", thereby adding to the so-called greenhouse effect. Regrettably, the very scientists (well, anyway, let's call them that for the sake of convenience) can't actually tell you whether the forcing resulting from atmospheric water vapour is positive (so allegedly bringing warming) or negative (so allegedly bringing the opposite).
     Clouds, for example, have a cooling effect. Have these 'climate scientists' with their rinky dinky computers ever managed to incorporate them in their so-named General Circulation Models? Answer - the heck they have!
    And neither still is that the whole story, is it? For, while CO2 might have some modest radiative potential, that potential is governed by a relationship to concentration that is logarithmic not linear. In
simple layman's terms, the more you shove in, increasingly less do you get out.
    In other words, the system is self limiting - well, well, fancy that!
    So, to you, let me pose a multi-part question. Even at first sight, does this seem plausible? Possible? Or, is it, perhaps, just stark barking?
    Finally, let's pause briefly on your Gotham City phantasmagoric cover photo. This, from its appearance, could quite easily be a fictional montage designed, of course, to promote a propagandist scaremongering
agenda to an ill informed public. In any event, and as far as New Zealand is concerned, as a journalistic professional dealing with a matter of major public importance, you personally should be fully aware that the Flinders University, Adelaide, trans-Pacific tidal buoy project, after ten years of careful monitoring, was wound up a year or two ago after failing to find evidence of any increase whatsoever in rates of sea level rise. These data have since been confirmed by satellite readings - much disliked by AGW propagandists, since
they usually undermine the party line. Neither are such contra-indicative findings confined to the S. Pacific. If, in the face of such scientific findings, you have published your story, then you are guilty of lying. If you
were unaware of such data, you are guilty of professional negligence, and I speak as a one time journalist myself in publications somewhat more elevated (or, at any rate, more globally celebrated) than the New Zealand Listener.
    Actually, let's be candid. Your piece is not journalism at all, is it? It is mere agit-prop. In essence, as between what you have published (and, I suspect, publish routinely) and what your counterparts disseminated in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Maoist China any difference is negligible.
    Rupert Wyndham