Lying: Good, Bad and Bogus

The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him.

George Orwell - Notes on Nationalism

My Thoughts On Lying

Although the main purpose of this blog was to draw attention to things that are untrue, I find it oddly difficult to come straight to the point and call these untruths lies. This is partly because I'm meek and mild and don't want to be sued, but there are a couple more objections.

One is that it's difficult to determining when someone is actually lying and when they are just wrong. It can be a fruitless task trying to separate the genuinely deceitful from the credulous or ignorant.

The other is that whilst the act of lying can be a tool of propagandists, accusing others of lying can be an even more effective propaganda trick. Claiming your opponents of doing what you continuously do is a great way of confusing the issue, and at its most successful allows your faithful side to disbelieve any evidence used against you, with the added benefit of allowing your followers to feel superior. Your enemies are such gullible fools believing their own sides propaganda.

You should be prepared to call out obvious lies, but it's more important to explain why the lie is false rather than just shout LIAR, LIAR. Look for evidence, ask for sources, don't assume that everything that agrees with your world view is true.

Dr Tim Ball's Thoughts On Lying

The above attempt at philosophizing came to mind as a result of a recent opinion piece by Dr Tim Ball, in Watts Up With That - Time to Straighten out Damage from the Big Lie of Global Warming Starting With Voltaire’s Admonition.

Voltaire's Admonition, is define your terms, though in true Dr Ball style he misquotes Voltaire, and then as I will show ignores the admonition. For the record Voltaire said:

Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably.

We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged — Define your terms.

...

The abuse of words is an inexhaustible subject. In history, in morality, in jurisprudence, in medicine, but especially in theology, beware of ambiguity.

Voltaire - A Philosophical Dictionary, Abuse of Words

Fans of Ball's ability to misquote famous people in order to give his articles a spurious air of authority will not be disappointed by this article. Aside from Voltair he manages to misquote Mark Twain and more problematically, Dr Joseph Goebbels. Along with several quotes used to attack opponents, that don't say what he claims they say.

Dr Joseph Goebbels Thoughts On Lying

Yes, that Goebbels. Dr Ball uses a made up quote by Goebbels in order to prove his point that lying is wrong and to suggest that by implications anyone who tells lies is behaving like a Nazi

The person who has fallen for the Nazi-like Big Lie is Sir David Attenborough, and the Big Lie is that there has been any warming over the last 41 years. (Pause to let the implications of that sink in).

Having made this astonishing claim, Dr Ball says:

One option when a big lie is exposed is to admit it; however, the nature of the lie prevents that happening. You understand that when you learn of the original historical definition and objectives of the Big Lie.

He then presents the alleged Goebbels's quote, with no source or context.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.

Source unknown, falsely attributed to Goebbels

This quote has been endlessly attributed to Dr Goebbels, and has been debunked many times, including a website dedicated to explaining that Goebbels Didn't Say It. Even the Wikipedia link that Dr Ball provides, doesn't mention the quote, and points out what Dr Goebbels actually said about Big Lies. The inevitable irony is that this quote is a big lie that has been repeated so often that people have come to believe it.

But, I have a bigger problem here, which gets back to what I said at the start. Here's what Ball says about the quote.

The definition is by Joseph Goebbels and describes the big lie of Nazism with its ultimate goal of a Third Reich to rule the world for a thousand years. It applies just as effectively to the big lie about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) with its goal of establishing a world government through the UN.

The problem is that Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi; why would he be describing Nazism as a big lie? Goebbels as chief propagandist for the Nazi party probably doesn't consider himself to be lying. In fact he claimed that telling the truth was the most effective propaganda, and when he did talk about big lies it was to attack English propaganda.

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Dr Joseph Goebbels - From Churchill's Lie Factory

So the question is, does Dr Ball agree with Dr Goebbels? If so, which Dr Goebbels, the phony one who describes Nazi propaganda as a big lie, or the real one who accuses the English of sticking to a big lie?

Ball's AGW Lie Factory

Because Dr Ball's articles do resemble the techniques of Goebbels, accusing your opponents of liying big and sticking to it. It's a hall of mirrors, where he repeatedly says things that most people would regard as untrue, whilst saying anyone who disagrees with him are big liars.

• He repeatedly refers to the false idea that CO2 can cause warming, yet the only evidence he provides for this is the non-sequitur that because he cannot find evidence of it happening in the past, then it's impossible to happen now.
• He claims that climate and weather are deliberately confused as part of a political policy, comparable to 1984's Newspeak, yet is happy to imply a single month in the USA proves there has been no global warming for 41 years.
• He says that the AGW promoters knew from the start it was a lie - but his only evidence of such a deception are a couple of out of context quotes neither of which suggest anything of the kind.
• He says that Sir David Attenborough doesn't appear to have any science training, yet a simple glance through his Wikipedia page shows he has a degree in natural science from Clare College, Cambridge.
(To say nothing of over 60 years of making educational documentaries.)
• He says the term Greenhouse Effect was coined to fit the political narrative of Global Warming, which he thinks only started in 1988. But the analogue of a greenhouse goes back centuries.
• He says the term climate change replace the term global warming in 2004 with respect to the IPCC. This isn't true, but Dr Ball insists it proves creators and promoters of the big lie knew their theory was wrong.

Appendix - Dr Ball Says No Global Warming in 41 Year

The big lie Dr Ball insists that Sir David has fallen for is that there has been any global warming in the past 41 years. He says:

Will somebody in contact with Attenborough, preferably someone who claims to know about climate, show him the latest lower Troposphere temperature graph. The data is available to anyone who wants to check it ...

Well lets do as he suggests and check the data. He's referring to the satellite data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Here's their graph of temperature over the satellite era, just over 40 years.

The University of Alabama in Huntsville

UAH is used because it shows the least warming, but it's obvious from the graph that there has been warming. The rate of warming over this period is 0.128°C / decade - that can be interpreted that on the whole UAH shows over 0.5°C warming since 1979.

But here's how Dr Ball interprets the data, without explanation he says:

It shows 41 years of no temperature increase, a period that covers most of Attenborough’s adult life and the period when he travelled the world filming nature. During that time, CO2 levels continued to rise in complete contradiction to the original theory.

It actually shows 40 years and 3 months, starting in December 1978, when Attenborough had spent over a quarter of a century traveling the world making documentaries. But the main problem is that the graph doesn't show global temperatures. The graph Ball shows is actually showing temperatures for the contiguous USA (USA48).

UAH - Contiguous USA Lower Troposphere Monthly Temperature

He doesn't acknowledge this important distinction despite it being labelled as such in the graph, and instead implies that a lack of warming over the USA means there has been no global warming. Except the graph and UAH data do show warming over the USA - more in fact than the global average.

So why is Dr Ball so instant that it proves there has been zero warming? He doesn't say. I suspect he just relies on his difficulty in seeing warming in the graph. This is why USA data is preferred to global data, because there is much more month to month variation over a small part of the globe. This makes it more difficult to see the wood for the trees. And the way the graph is presented makes it even harder to see - monthly data is presented as a series of chaotic lines, with no attempt to analyze the data, say be drawing a trend line or other smoothing.

Here is my graph of the same data, showing a rolling 5 year average for both global and USA48.

There are many, many ways of demonstrating there has been global warming over the last 40 years. Almost nobody, including most contributors to WUWT deny this. Dr Tim Ball might have some weird definition of global warming, but if so he needs to follow Voltaire's admonition and define his terms.