Time to contemplate a gobal conspiracy one more time ...

(Above: xkcd here).

First the pond was alarmed by the news that the international climate science conspiracy had spread to network Ten.

As we noted at the time, it was sickening to learn that Magdalena Roze was a conspiracist, and as bold as brass, as you could read, paywall permitting, at Crikey here.

Where was the Bolter? Where was Gina?

Of course the pond had been put on high alert by climate scientist expert Donald Trump, and Fox News, thanks to Jon Stewart, who was still available at time of writing on YouTube here.

But the real shock came when a correspondent reminded the pond recently that the international conspiracy had penetrated the US military, and at an extremely high leverl:

America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate change. 
 Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, in an interview at a Cambridge hotel Friday after he met with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities, said significant upheaval related to the warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’ 
 “People are surprised sometimes,” he added, describing the reaction to his assessment. “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.” (here)

Shocking, alarming, profoundly disturbing, all the more so because Sam wouldn't stop talking about it:

...when it comes to pragmatic military planning, Locklear said he is increasingly focused on another highly destabilizing force. 
 “The ice is melting and sea is getting higher,” Locklear said, noting that 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 200 miles of the coast. “I’m into the consequence management side of it. I’m not a scientist, but the island of Tarawa in Kiribati, they’re contemplating moving their entire population to another country because [it] is not going to exist anymore.” 
 The US military, he said, is beginning to reach out to other armed forces in the region about the issue. “We have interjected into our multilateral dialogue – even with China and India – the imperative to kind of get military capabilities aligned [for] when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations,” he said. “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.’’

This was back in March 2013, so the pond immediately went looking for evidence that Sam had been dismissed for his shocking conspiratorial campaign.

Sacked, shown the door, perhaps sent off to the UN to organise the black helicopters that send the cushy, well-paid scientists off on their comfy Antarctic gigs to live the high life ... as only you can, if you're a climate scientist or a penguin.

Nope, there he was and as bold as brass, still being quoted as an expert only the other day in the raving right wing rag The Washington Times, in Ominous warning: Admiral concedes U.S. losing dominance to China.

Indeed only the other day, Sam had another crack climate science in a speech reported here on January 16th 2014:

Climate change and other environmental events have significant implications on the security environment in the Asia-Pacific region, Locklear said. 
About 80 percent of the world’s natural disasters happen in Pacom, he said. “And the impact on humanity, because of the numbers of people and where they live -- many of them live in the littorals, a growing number of them live in the littorals -- the impact of these on humanity is significant,” the admiral said.

Think about it! The US military!

All the expert words of 'Lord' Monckton, Miranda the Devine, Cardinal Pell, Tony Abbott, the Bolter and many others who understand climate science is crap, and yet the US military has a high profile mole who shamelessly exhibits his conspiratorial leanings for the whole world to see.

Oh sure, Sam keeps talking about the dangers of China and the weakening of the USA, and pretends to be patriotic, but surely that must be a cover, a way of concealing how the conspiracy now has stooges at the highest level.

What's even worse, it seems that China is also in on this international conspiracy, a trend noted way back in 2011:

Calculations she (Washington research fellow Miriam Pemberton) cites in an October report titled “Military vs. Climate Security: The 2011 Budgets Compared,” reveal that the U.S. climate change budget has more than doubled—from $7 billion to $18 billion—since 2008. Military spending in that same time period has risen from $696 billion to $739 billion. For every dollar spent on climate in 2008, the U.S. spent $94 on the military. That will drop to a $41: $1 ratio this year. 
“Obviously, this is progress,” Pemberton said, but it isn’t enough to stay competitive. The Chinese are spending one-sixth as much as the United States on their military and investing twice as much on clean energy technology. For every dollar China spends on climate, between $2 and $3 goes toward its military. 
“The extreme tilt in our budget toward military spending is leaving us way behind in two of the major growth markets of the global economy,” she said, referring to solar and wind technologies. “For the sake of our economic health and competitiveness … (and) security, we need to tilt the other way.” (Military v Climate Security: U.S. and China Worlds Apart, also reported here).

This sort of situation calls for the Batman, or at least the Bolter, and praise the long absent lord, the Bolter is back, and back in the usual business, to fight the delusional fight, as you can read in The gobal warming faith sees warming even in ice:

Global warming is actually a faith.

What's that you say? The pond performed a horrible typo while typing out the header to the Bolter piece in that link?

Nope:

It is, of course, only a minor stupidity.

The real higher, grander, infallible, infinitely unimaginable stupidity is to quote a reverend at a theological seminary, and use this as a brush to tar the rest of the world as being part of the "gobal warming faith".

The even deeper more meaningless stupidity is to juxtapose 'ice' and 'warming' on a simple dialectical 1 and 0 basis, as if heat and cold are separate parts of the climate that never come together and never interact. It's the "even in ice" line that's the killer here ...

How low can you go? Bet you can't go lower or sillier than the Bolter ... and as you'd expect, his source is the very same climate denialist site that went into hysterics over Sam, as you can read here if you want to lose a few more precious brain cells.

So now you know where the Bolter faithful do their reading and pick up their stories.

It turns out that "gobal" is a common enough typo, but the pond fancies it as a brand new word, a kind of extension of "gob", a lump of viscous or slimy substance, as in a gob of phlegm.

Surely what the Bolter offers on a daily basis is a gobal of phelgm ...

Meanwhile, speaking of faith, as the Bolter often does, how about this?

Why Climate Change Skeptics and Evolution Deniers Joined Forces :

There is the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" theory. In other words, anti-evolutionists and climate deniers were both getting dumped on so much by the scientific community that they sort of naturally joined forces. And that makes sense: We know that in general, people gather their issue stances in bunches, because those stances travel together in a group (often under the aegis of a political party). 
But there's also the "declining trust in science" theory, according to which political conservatives have, in general, become distrustful of the scientific community (we have data showing this is the case), and this has infected how they think about several different politicized scientific issues. And who knows: Perhaps the distrust started with the evolution issue. It is easy to imagine how a Christian conservative who thinks liberal scientists are full of it on evolution would naturally distrust said scientists on other issues as well.

Welcome to the faith Mr. Bolt. The pond looks forward to a fearless expose on why evolution is a fraud...

Oh wait, your site has already done it: Denier Andrew Bolt posts pro-science story, Creationist posters demonstrate his blog a hot spot of ignorance.

Gosh darn it, tricky business, this faith routine ...

(Below: cartoon by Ben Smith)