The Algorism of Global Doom

American Thinker ^ | December 18, 2007 | James Lewis

[neverdem]

Heads I win; Tails you lose. That's the guiding principle of Algorism.

When the story of our time is written -- as soon as future historians can stop laughing -- Al Gore will be Exhibit #1 for the unprecedented nuttiness of our politics.

In Florida in 2000, Al Gore just knew he was destined to win the presidency, just like Mom and Dad told him all those years ago. The Big Media were actually convinced that Gore had won before the votes came in, based on their usual dubious polls. It was only a question of how many recounts it would take to prove what they already knew, and how many rules had to be busted for Mr. Gore to  assume his rightful place in history.

In Bush v Gore the US Supreme Court finally decided enough was enough, by a vote of 7-2. You don't get to replay the game until you win. The Supremes and George W. Bush have been ferociously hated for that ever since by our friends on the Left, who apparently never play card games. If you're allowed to deal the deck over and over again until you win,  you're not playing poker, but some sort of childish game of self-delusion.

Which is not a bad description of Al Gore's new incarnation as the Steaming Green Messiah of Doom. "Steaming" not because it's hot in Oslo, where he received his Nobel Peace Prize, but because Al himself generates a whole lot more heat than light. If Mr. Gore's fury and rage could be turned into useful energy it would do much to wipe out his ample carbon footprint.

Algorism means "I'm always right, no matter how the facts turn out."

The trouble is that Algorism has now invaded science. This is very bad. Everybody knows that the conclusion of Global Doom is taken for granted by good and decent people everywhere -- why else did the Bali circus happen, other than to divide up the loot that is bound to follow? If there were no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow the UN wouldn't be interested.

It's just that the scientific proof isn't quite there yet.

Science Magazine just published another Global Doom Scenario. This one predicts for the nth time that Australia's Great Barrier Reef is really, really doomed for sure this time. Where have we heard this before?  There are now more than twenty Global Warming models -- we never hear about the ones that don't predict Global Doom, because Science magazine isn't interested. Those results appear in less august journals. (See this or this for exmaples.)

Like any ecosystem, coral reefs evolve and adapt, which is how they have survived for hundreds of millions of years. Coral organisms got started during the 'Cambrian explosion' of half a billion years ago -- that's 500,000,000 years. Corals have gone through Ice Ages and warming periods over and over again during that half billion years.  Micro-organisms like corals can adapt to changing temperatures with amazing speed, because they reproduce so quickly. They are not "fragile." They are immensely adaptable. Otherwise they wouldn't be here. 

Coral reefs cover an estimated 300 thousand square kilometers -- five times the size of West Virginia. They are far too complex to model in detail.  The truth is that we can't model even a single ecosystem anywhere in the world, because they are much too complicated, the genomes of their inhabitants are unknown, and it's not remotely possible to track every single variable. So this is again a wild guess with the same result. Algorism: I win,  you lose.

Suppose that the Great Barrier Reef modelers looked at a lot of evidence before they came out with the Doom Prediction. Then they sent it to Science. If their model predicted "It's OK, everybody's safe!"  you can bet it wouldn't have been published there. In that case, one of the other 600 Doom scenarios collected by Dr. John Brignell might have been headlined in Science to celebrate with the Bali conference, and to suppress the secret doubts of True Believers everywhere.

Thus the Algorists are running after that elusive smoking gun with all the desperation of Osama Bin Laden seeking his Caliphate. Bin Laden will never give up his belief that he has been chosen by Allah to rescue the world from the infidels and to establish the Caliphate. Al Gore won't either.

In his Nobel Peace Prize speech in Norway, to the warm applause of shivering Norwegians, Al Gore told the world again how he really won Florida in 2000. That was seven years and many bloody terrorists attacks ago, but Gore can't forget. Thousands of innocents have been killed in New York City, Washington, D.C., Baghdad, Kabul, Madrid, Paris, London, Moscow, Kashmir, Algeria and Pakistan, all by jihadis who hate America. Iran is a couple of years from getting nukes, and Pakistan just had another assassination attempt on President Musharaf, probably by Al Qaida. But for Nobel Laureate Al Gore, nothing has happened since December 11, 2000.

Global Dooming has a very simple explanation. There's nothing new about it. It is just the human desire to create a millenarian narrative that fits our political biases, whipped on by the Politically Correct elites of this world, fed by a huge infusion of money into climate modeling and other dubious science, plus unprecedented media hype, and finally, the intimidation of thousands of rational skeptics.

This "madness of crowds" happens all the time. Charles MacKay wrote about it in 1841, in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Economics bubbles and busts are just one kind. But we can see a lush diversity of other superstitions and mass delusions.

It is a shame that it is now corrupting normal science. In healthy science the burden of proof is always on the proposer of any hypothesis.  But now the burden of proof on the skeptics in the case of human-caused global warming. But you can't prove a negative. As soon as the skeptics disprove one false claim, the Global Fraudsters are allowed to jump to another one, as long as they predict the same conclusion.

In real science the deck is never stacked against the skeptics. Rational skeptics are welcomed when people know what they are talking about. They can only help to sharpen the issues.

So this is not a scientific debate any more. Like the real estate bubble, the sub-prime mortgage bubble, the Year 2000 bubble  and all the rest, there are billions of dollars riding on the outcome of the Global Doom scenarios. That's why all those expensive folks lived it up in Bali, with their private jets, luxury hotels, and massive carbon footprint.

Algorism: Heads I win, Tails you lose.

Sucker!

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/

[thewitz]

Kind of pig droppings, but more man-bear like.

[snowsislander]

Algorism means "I'm always right, no matter how the facts turn out."

The trouble is that Algorism has now invaded science. This is very bad.

Mr. Lewis, "algorism" is already a real word with a long and dignified history in mathematics, and I don't find your new definition useful or edifying.

Looking at www.onelook.com, it shows 19 general dictionary hits for "algorism" (and even one from A-Word-A-Day):

General (19 matching dictionaries)

1. algorism : Encarta® World English Dictionary, North American Edition [home, info]
   
2. algorism : Wiktionary [home, info]
   
3. algorism : The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus [home, info]
   
4. algorism : The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language [home, info]
   
5. algorism : Infoplease Dictionary [home, info]
   
6. algorism : Dictionary.com [home, info]
   
7. algorism : UltraLingua English Dictionary [home, info]
   
8. Algorism : Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia [home, info]
   
9. Algorism : Online Plain Text English Dictionary [home, info]
   
10. algorism : Rhymezone [home, info]
    
11. Algorism : AllWords.com Multi-Lingual Dictionary [home, info]
    
12. algorism : Webster's 1828 Dictionary [info]
    
13. algorism : Hutchinson's Dictionary of Difficult Words [home, info]
    
14. algorism : Hutchinson Dictionaries [home, info]
    
15. algorism : Luciferous Logolepsy [home, info]
    
16. algorism : WordNet 1.7 Vocabulary Helper [home, info]
    
17. algorism : LookWAYup Translating Dictionary/Thesaurus [home, info]
    
18. algorism : Dictionary/thesaurus [home, info]
    
19. algorism : Worthless Word For The Day [home, info]
    

Miscellaneous (1 matching dictionary)

20. algorism : A Word A Day [home, info]
    

[Into the Vortex]

Think of the word the same way you would think of, and use the word “lead”. More than one meaning! Does that help it edify and become more useful?

[A Navy Vet]

"In Bush v Gore the US Supreme Court finally decided enough was enough, by a vote of 7-2. You don't get to replay the game until you win. The Supremes and George W. Bush have been ferociously hated for that ever since by our friends on the Left, who apparently never play card games. If you're allowed to deal the deck over and over again until you win, you're not playing poker, but some sort of childish game of self-delusion."

THE best summary of what actually occured. Let the Liberal DU's eat that.

[driftless2]

My own view, not original to be sure, is that Gore was driven crazy by his loss in 2000. He knows he lost, but he had the most votes. He cannot reconcile that fact in his mind, so he went on the GW crusade. That was the only way to keep what was left of his sanity. And that’s almost completely gone.

[Ditter]

Excellent, thanks for posting.

[PeaceBeWithYou]

Al’s Still Sore, Soreforevermore?

[HisKingdomWillAbolishSinDeath]

Just replace tulips with carbon credits and you get the picture. Hopefully it won’t reach this level of blind greed.

In 1623, a single bulb of a famous tulip variety could cost as much as a thousand Dutch florins (the average yearly income at the time was 150 florins). Tulips were also exchanged for land, valuable livestock, and houses. Allegedly, a good trader could earn six thousand florins a month.

By 1635, a sale of 40 bulbs for 100,000 florins was recorded. By way of comparison, a ton of butter cost around 100 florins and “eight fat swine” 240 florins. A record was the sale of the most famous bulb, the Semper Augustus, for 6,000 florins in Haarlem.

By 1636, tulips were traded on the stock exchanges of numerous Dutch towns and cities. This encouraged trading in tulips by all members of society, with many people selling or trading their other possessions in order to speculate in the tulip market. Some speculators made large profits as a result. Others lost all or even more than they had.

Some traders sold tulip bulbs that had only just been planted or those they intended to plant (in effect, tulip futures contracts). This phenomenon was dubbed windhandel, or “wind trade”, and took place mostly in the taverns of small towns using an arcane slate system to indicate bid prices. (The term windhandel is similar to the recent term vaporware: both have much the same metaphor.) A state edict from 1610 (well before the alleged bubble) made that trade illegal by refusing to enforce the contracts, but the legislation failed to curtail the activity.

In February 1637 tulip traders could no longer get inflated prices for their bulbs, and they began to sell. The bubble burst. People began to suspect that the demand for tulips could not last, and as this spread a panic developed. Some were left holding contracts to purchase tulips at prices now ten times greater than those on the open market, while others found themselves in possession of bulbs now worth a fraction of the price they had paid. Allegedly, thousands of Dutch, including businessmen and dignitaries, were financially ruined.

[Nailbiter]

There are greedy people out there. And there are people who feed on greedy people out there.
I would bet that it will happen.

[kitkat]

And people who buy carbon offsets are going to feel REALLY stupid when they find they are worthless.

[Nailbiter]

I will defy you to get anyone to admit after the fact LOL

[goldstategop]

The Global Warming scam is the 21st Century version of the Piltdown Man.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[baldeagle390]

Ha! Shows you what you know. I just got 1,000,000 carbon credits for free!

http://freecarbonoffsets.com/home.do;jsessionid=8073112BDA52ECF419BF58E8C6824C88

In your face!