MORE ON MARKETING POSITIONING AND COMMUNICATING

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We have presented in some of our past Silkin Management Group blogs marketing information written by the President and CEO of On Target Research, a surveying and marketing company that we have successfully used as well as having recommended to many of our Silkin Management Group clients. I recently got another article from them and found it very educational for anyone interested in marketing basics. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Larry Silver
President, Silkin Management Group

For information about Silkin Management Group and the management services we offer, contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or visit our website at: silkinmanagementgroup.com

Here’s the article:

Paradise Lost

It’s the kind of tropical island you envision when you think of paradise.

White sandy beaches. Water so pristine it laps at the shores like liquid topaz. Lush, verdant foliage that blankets a nearby mountain where parrots in brilliant, multi-colored plumage await a Kodak moment.

And then the invasion starts.

Charging out of the rain forest at the bottom of the mountain are dozens of gorgeous young women in bikinis.

Cut to a semi-nerdy guy in a bathing suit standing on the beach spritzing himself with a bottle of we don’t know what.

Back to the babes, whose numbers are growing as they charge senor nerd like it’s the first day of the semi-annual Nordstrom’s Sale. The camera pans to the other side of our hero where another contingent of bikini-clad marauders are stampeding across the sands from the other direction.

Okay. They have my attention. It’s an ad for some kind of men’s cologne I figure, but the girls, now numbering a hundred or so, are making a fashion statement that those of us concerned with matters of…eh…style cannot possibly ignore.

They have reached him now. Our guy is surrounded by swarms of beautiful women. The camera switches to the viewpoint of the guy, whose vision is blurry. He puts on a pair of glasses. His vision sharpens only to see the girls frowning at him now. Some are disgusted.

They all turn and walk away as the screen displays the message that he “Should have gone to Specsavers.”

Specsavers is a discount vision chain and the glasses the guy put on were dorky, not, we assume, from Specsavers. Of note, this ad is a takeoff of a similar commercial for a deodorant (Lynx) of a few years earlier.

But here’s the deal: The Lynx commercial ends with the guy getting the girls. The deodorant attracts the women and they stay. The guy is in seventh heaven.

The Specsaver commercial ends on a loss. The women are disgusted and have turned away from him; our hero is bummed out. Yet, the creators of this advertisement think that this toxic ending will motivate viewers to want to buy the brand of glasses that the guy isn’t wearing.

Are they brain dead?

Why in the world would you associate your brand with a loss? The commercial must have cost some serious coin: it was shot in Columbia and there were 100 bikini-qualified gals in this spot. (My heart goes out to the poor casting director.)

But, you get my point. They transport more than 100 cast and crew members to South America and shoot a commercial that associates the sponsor’s brand with…paradise lost.

The company’s marketing director should be water-boarded with the spray the nerd was using on the beach.

Let’s take a quick look at something that is much simpler, costs next to nothing and communicates a message instantly.

It’s a print ad. A picture of a french fry, one end of which is charred to a crisp and smoking. In the corner of the ad is the familiar Heinz label which says “Hot Ketchup”.

A piece of simple marketing brilliance, says I.

A good ad does not tell the message, (He should have gone to Specsavers) it shows it, (burnt French fry); the visual delivers the message in an instant.

That said, the good, the bad and the ugly are not always this obvious.

Sometimes a professional eye can help polish the message and increase the response. On Target assists companies to fine tune their marketing so that it sings to their customers like Tony Bennett on a summer night in Central Park

We bring 25 years of marketing and PR expertise to a review of your marketing materials, websites, and proposed press releases for their ability to communicate to your public and drive sales and income.

This service is fast, dreadfully inexpensive and will help ensure that your marketing materials are doing their job – creating interest and reach for your product or service.

Call or email if we can be of service.

Best,
Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
818-397-1401



HOW THE HEALTH CARE BILL WILL AFFECT SMALL BUSINESS EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES

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I’m sure by now there are but a few people in the entire country who haven’t heard that the health care bill passed in Congress and was signed by President Obama. In fact the people who haven’t heard about it are likely the people who will benefit the most as they are the uninsured.

As the clients of Silkin Management Group are all small businesses and, as a consultant for Silkin Management Group, I was looking for a good comprehensive summary of how the bill will affect most small businesses in the country. I found this article on “CNN Money.com for Small Business” and think it is a fairly easy to read and understandable summary of the bill and its impact on small business. You can link to the article here: What health care reform means for your business

The article points out that the bill will only very marginally decrease insurance costs for small businesses – between 1% and 4%. That’s nice but certainly no great shakes.

Another key point is that starting in 2014, if you have more than 50 employees, you will be mandated to have health insurance for all employees or pay a $750 penalty per year, per worker. There’s a couple of things I suspect could happen: a) since premiums are more than likely much greater than $750 per year per employee, I think you’ll find most businesses of this size paying the penalty due to that being a lower cost way to go, and b) any business that is nearing 50 employees will likely not be in any sort of hiring mode in order to avoid this cost. That’s certainly not a smart way to incentivize business growth.

As we teach our clients at Silkin Management Group: if you reward production you are more likely to get increased production, but if you penalize production/growth, you will very likely not get any increase in productivity. I think most business people have an innate sense of this basic management rule. Unfortunately the people who make many of the laws that affect business have no business experience and/or innate sense of what works in the management of a business. The above noted “de-incentive” is certainly a sign of this.

There are many more areas in which the health care bill impinges on small businesses and the article noted above provides a good overview of these areas. I am suggesting to my Silkin clients to read through it and recommend it to anyone reading this blog.

Jack Hennessy
Consultant for Silkin Management Group

If you’d like to find out more about Silkin Management Group and its services, contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257. You can also visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com



WILL HEALTH CARE LEGISLATION BE DECIDED BY WHO HAS THE BEST ADS OR BRIBES?

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Today, as part of my frequent review and reading of articles that will affect my clients at Silkin Management Group, I concentrated on what the latest was on the battle for passing the health care legislation that is being so fervently pushed by our President. In doing so I ran across this article in the New York Times: Millions Spent to Sway Democrats on Health Care.

The article points out that on one side we have a coalition of groups opposing the legislation, led by the United States Chamber of Commerce, putting up millions and millions of dollars ($11 million just this month) to sway the “on the fence” Democrats to vote against the bill, and on the other side we have the pharmaceutical companies and labor unions contributing equal amounts in the attempt to sway these same people to vote for the legislation. I don’t know about you, but whenever I see the “Big Pharma” people actively supporting something like this, I know that there is something big, in terms of big, big dollars, in it for them.

And, to put the icing on the cake, the article points out that, “The White House has signaled to lawmakers that assistance for midterm elections — for example, presidential visits and fund-raisers — will be prioritized for those who support the bill.” Hey, it’s the old “vote for my bill and I’ll help you get re-elected” ploy.

I’m sorry if I’m being unduly cynical but I can’t help but be that way when I see that a big part of the future of this country’s health care is being determined by who advertises the best and who can twist enough arms and promise the yellow brick road to re-election. It doesn’t give me a lot of faith in the system. But what else is new?

I’ll keep advising my clients at Silkin Management Group to manage their businesses in a manner completely different than how our legislators handle the fiscal state of the country. In other words, don’t spend more than you make, don’t go into deep debt and produce honest, worthwhile products for your customers and make them happy.

Gary Crawshaw
Silkin Management Group Consultant

For more information about Silkin Management Group, please visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can access our Ask A Consultant feature there or email us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com



MORE ON HEALTH CARE REFORM

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We all know that the number one issue of the day, at least the number one issue being pushed by Washington is reforming health care. Since Silkin Management Group delivers practice management consulting and training to private health care practices, this legislation has been something that we are watching closely. As a consultant for Silkin Management Group I want to stay on top of this issue so I can advise my clients appropriately.

Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times that pointed out how the possibility of federal regulations on the cost of insurance premiums could end up conflicting with what insurance commissioners in each state are mandated by law to do. I believe this is part of why many are arguing for health care reforms to be decided and instituted at the state level rather than a sweeping “everybody is the same” approach on a federal level.

You can access this article at nytimes.com: State Insurance Experts See Flaw in Obama’s Plan to Curb Health Premiums

The essence of the conflict, as the author points out is, “Federal officials will focus on holding down premiums while state officials focus on the solvency of insurers, the ultimate consumer protection.”

I think you’ll find the article presents an interesting way to look at one aspect of the health care reform debate. I’ll be referring my interested Silkin Management Group clients to the article to get their feedback as well.

Scott Barnard
Consultant for Silkin Management Group

Silkin Management Group has delivered management consulting and training to over 4000 clients since 1982. For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com



GLOBAL WARMING

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SOME FASCINATING DATA

PART 1 & 2 & 3
I ran across an extremely interesting and fascinating article about global warming, climate change, bio-fuels, etc. that I thought I would pass along to readers of the Silkin Management Group blog sites. This is a fairly long article so I will split it up into several sections that can be read over the following several days. Part 1 was posted on February 26th at: silkinmanagementgroup.blogspot.com. Part 1 & 2 were posted on March 1st at blog.silkinmanagementgroup.com For ease of reading, Part 1, 2 are repeated here with Part 3 following below them. The next several sections will come out over the next few days. Part 4 can be found on March 3rd at practicemanagementblog.com

What is written here is likely to be taken as either very controversial, a “conspiracy theory” or hogwash by many. I am not taking sides one way or the other on it, but I thought it was interesting and relevant and well documented enough to present it to our readers to take a look at for themselves. I certainly found it eye opening.

Silkin Management Group is a management consulting company that has delivered management consulting and training to thousands of health care practices and small businesses over the last thirty years. Our blogs tend to be about relevant business issues such as marketing, dealing with staff, hiring and training, etc. But, when we run across them, we also like to present big picture items that effect us all. This is one of them.

For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Here is PART 1, 2 & 3 of this article, entitled “Anatomy of a Con Job”.

Larry Silver
President, Silkin Management Group

ANATOMY OF A CON JOB

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell

PART 1:

If you look with your understanding, the crimes against humanity are written across the rotting visages of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Like a couple of aging prostitutes, these leading architects of twentieth-century evil still sell their wares to those with an insatiable lust for the power of the crown.

THE CLUB OF ROME

Birth Mother of the Environmental Movement

The moldy twosome have something else in common. Both have been active members of an international think tank from the dark side of the force called the Club of Rome. Founded at the Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, in 1968, some of the other fraternity brothers and sisters include Al Gore, David Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there is no one better to give you the short version of the Club’s agenda than Gorby himself:

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”

Who let this guy out of Lubyanka?

Their more precisely stated goal is population control. The solution? Create an environmental catastrophe like, oh, say, “global warming” and blame it on the planet’s most heinous villain—man himself.

But I should let them tell it:

“In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. . . . But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for cause. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changing attitudes and behaviors that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Sounds like a good plan . . . if you’re Darth Vader.

In 1972, the Club took the world stage with the publication of a book they had commissioned to be written by a group of MIT scientists. It was called The Limits to Growth. Examining the planet’s population growth in relation to available resources, the report concluded that the planet would run out of resources sometime in the next 100 years, resulting in a catastrophic decline in population and industrial production.

As one reviewer put it, the authors examine

“. . . the impact of humanity on the world ecology and of steps taken toward remediating the accelerating approach to a train wreck that is mankind’s ill-managed and uncontrolled ‘footprint’ on this planet’s environment.”

Still, these trends and their consequences could be altered, it argued; we had to be less, do less and have less. The brand for this Orwellian path to planetary salvation was sustainable development.

Heavily promoted, the book reached opinion leaders in political, scientific and economic circles as it exploded around the planet like the Harry Potter of environmentalism. It sold 12 million copies in thirty languages despite the fact that the research had all the scientific rigor of a plagiarized term paper for a freshman biology class.

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” —Mohandas Gandhi

Assailed by top scientists, the research was shoddy in the extreme. Population expert and author Professor Julian Simon said, “The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print.”

Yale economist Henry Wallich reviewed the book saying, “. . . the quantitative content of the model comes from the authors’ imagination, although they never reveal the equations that they used.”

But it is a PR world and with the publication of this book, the modern environmental movement was born. Midwifed to life in a blanket of deceit, it was yet hailed as the savior, not of mankind, but of the planet it claimed was being fried to a crisp by humanity’s toxic binge of carbon dioxide.

The scientific fraud is its own malice, but few were able to see the underlying strategy—that the book would serve as the foundation of a global public relations campaign that would mesmerize legislators, educators, and countless organizations of goodwill and would eventually set the stage for the biggest rip-off in human history. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This then was Con #1: The scientific basis of the book that launched the environmental movement calling for “sustainable development” and a reduction of man’s leper-like carbon footprint on the planet was, and is, a scam, a hoax, a falsehood—environmental snake oil.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Which leads us to the second piece of the puzzle, Con #2. Who’d have thought that . . .

OIL

Is Not a Fossil Fuel

PART 2:

The immigration officer at Sheremetyevo took my passport and studied it for some time. He didn’t say anything; he just thumbed through the passport and then looked at a computer screen for a couple of lifetimes before stamping it and grunting me on to customs.

The KGB was still manning the borders the first time I went to Moscow shortly after the fall of Communism. Letting Americans walk freely into Mother Russia without official surveillance was driving the man crazy but he had to keep a lid on it.

In fact, Communism had been officially dead for only a few months when the shock troops of capitalism started storming the gates of opportunity in the former Soviet Union. The ghosts of Marx, Lenin and Stalin stalked the halls of the Politburo in horror as entrepreneurs from the United States, Japan and Western Europe tried to cut deals for every asset in Mother Russia that wasn’t nailed down. Banking, hospitality, timber and precious metals came under assault by peculiar partnerships of western capitalists and thugs from the once mighty KGB. During those early years, when Yeltsin (God love him) and his vodka were in office, it was a free-for-all.

The Oklahoma land rush of the 1890s had nothing on Moscow in 1992.

But even then, the oil industry stayed under control of the state—directly or indirectly. In fact, as recently as 2003, the bare-chested former KGB colonel and current premier—soon to be president of Russia . . . again—Vladimir Putin squashed a buyout deal between Russia’s Yukos and Exxon, the largest company in the world.

To understand the reason for this, we return momentarily to the early days of the Cold War when an isolated Soviet Union tasked their top scientists to identify the actual source of oil. Not a weekend homework assignment. After considerable research, in 1956, Russian scientist Professor Vladimir Porfir’yev announced that “crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial [originating with the earth’s formation] materials which have been erupted from great depths.”

If your eyeballs didn’t fall out when you read that, you might want to read it again.

He said oil doesn’t come from anything biologic, not, as conventional wisdom dictates, from the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and/or ancient plant matter. It comes from very deep in the earth and is created by a biochemical reaction that subjected hydrocarbons (elements having carbon and hydrogen) to extreme heat and intense pressure during the earth’s formation.

Russians referred to this oil (any oil, really) as “abiotic oil” because it is not created from the decomposition of biological life forms, but rather from the chemical process continually occurring inside the earth.

I know, easy for Porfir’yev to say. But it turns out it was more than just a theory.

Because shortly after the Russians discovered this, they started drilling ultra-deep wells and finding oil at 30,000 and 40,000 feet below the earth’s surface. These are staggering depths, and far below the depth at which organic matter can be found, which is 18,000 feet.

Interesting, eh?

The Russians applied their theory of abiotic deep-drilling technology to the Dnieper-Donets Basin, an area understood for the previous half a century to be barren of oil. Of sixty wells drilled there using abiotic technology, thirty-seven became commercially productive—a 62 percent success rate compared with the roughly 10 percent success rate of a U.S. wildcat driller. The oil found in the basin rivaled Alaska’s North Slope.

Let’s say they had a good hair day.

But it doesn’t stop there, not by a long shot. Since their earlier discoveries, the major Russian oil companies have quietly drilled more than 310 ultra-deep wells and put them into production.

Result? Russia recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the planet’s largest oil producer.

Maybe they are onto something.

Though there were papers written on this early on, almost all were in Russian and few made it to the West. And those that did were laughed at.

No more. With Russia’s rejection of the Exxon-Yukos deal (Putin did not want this technology and their abiotic oil experts exported to the West) and the access to information now available on the Internet, the word has begun to spread rapidly to the West. Still, it hasn’t taken hold yet.

Why not? This is huge. Oil is not a fossil fuel! And it’s renewable! Wow!

There are a couple of factors at play here.

Big oil has a vested interest in pushing the idea that oil is scarce, hard to find, and thus costly to produce—all of which, of course, means increased revenues and profits. This is a story in itself, but not the primary focus here.

More relevant to our story is the fact that a cornerstone of the environmental movement is this: oil is a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel that is scarce, and is in limited and ever decreasing supply. Moreover, its production creates carbon dioxide. Therefore its use, for virtually all productive purposes—agricultural production, real estate construction, auto, truck, train and air transportation, utilities, heating, cooling, communication, ad infinitum (all of them)—must be curtailed.

According to the thirty-year update of the book The Limits to Growth,

“A prime example of a nonrenewable resource is fossil fuels, whose limits should be obvious, although many people, including distinguished economists, are in denial over the elementary fact. More than 80 percent of year 2000 commercial energy use comes from nonrenewable fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal. The underground stocks of fossil fuels are going continuously and inexorably down. . . Peak gas production will certainly occur in the next 50 years, the peak for oil production will occur much sooner, probably within the decade.”

Scary stuff. Frightening. But as false as a hooker’s smile.

Oil is not a fossil fuel.

And it is “renewable.”

While I have never been a fan of Putin the Macho, the Russians have demonstrated the accuracy of their theory in the only place it counts—the oil field. Oil is not only abiotic, it continues to populate fields that were understood to be as dry of petroleum as a desert wind. In fact, some scientists believe it is the centrifugal force of the planet’s rotation that forces abiotic oil toward the planet’s surface on a continuous basis.

“There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” —the late Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post

So Con #2 is that oil is a fossil fuel (which it isn’t), that it is scarce and being depleted (which it isn’t), that it is nonrenewable (which it isn’t), and that, as a result, catastrophe looms (which it doesn’t) unless we drastically curtail our use of petroleum.

Lies one and all, which lead us to the granddaddy of con—Con #3:

GLOBAL WARMING—CLIMATE CHANGE

PART 3:

The heart-wrenching icon of a lone polar bear hovering in solitude somewhere in the rapidly disappearing Arctic has become the environmental movement’s most poignant pitchman.

The pitch, however, is bogus. The bears are booming.

According to the Wall Street Journal,

“Nearly everyone agrees that there are more polar bears now than when scientists first started counting: Estimates put the population between 20,000 and 25,000, up from several thousand 50 years ago. In Canada, where two-thirds of the world’s bears live, most populations have grown during the past two or three decades. Arctic residents say they are now bumping into bears wherever they turn.”

The polar bear “debate” cuts to the heart of the foundation on which the environmental movement rests: global warming.

While the Club of Rome’s clarion call for “sustainable development” in The Limits to Growth turned out to be more than a little thin on scientific credibility, and the theory that oil is a scarce and rapidly depleting fossil fuel is untrue, the holy grail of the environmental movement is Global Warming or, as they have renamed it due to the last eleven years of embarrassingly cooler temperatures, Climate Change.

It is the creed upon which the movement is built.

The scripture is as follows: The burning of fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide. This and other “greenhouse” gases create global warming, which will destroy the planet.

To wit, the production of these gases must be “capped.”

Legislation to suppress their use is a first step. Population control, a reduction of the planet’s population, is the real answer because man makes these gases. Fewer people mean less greenhouse gas. Less greenhouse gas means less global warming. Less warming means the earth is saved.

Amen.

Greenhouse gases, by the way, are any of the atmospheric gases, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide, that are said to contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is a name for the phenomenon outlined above whereby the earth’s atmosphere traps solar radiation and thereby overheats the planet. According to the theory, these gases in the atmosphere allow sunlight to pass through to the earth, but then absorb the heat radiated back from the planet’s surface.

Shazam! Global warming.

Sounds good. Cut CO2 and you save the world.

A clearly identified evil with an action plan to handle it.

Kind of like the Inquisition—fry the heretics, purify the faith.

Today, global warming heretics are burned in the media not at the stake, but the dogma is no less strident, no less authoritarian, and no less despotic.

SCIENCE SETTLED

Al Gore is the Moses of global warming. He, along with the high priests of the movement, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has pronounced that the science regarding man-made global warming is “settled.” There’s nothing further to discuss: global warming is real; man-made CO2 is the cause; carbon production must be capped. Done deal.

Al and the IPCC are simpatico on this—which is cool. Harmony in the ranks.

THE OREGON PETITION

But here’s the deal: 31,486 scientists have signed a document called the Oregon Petition lambasting the shoddy research behind global warming, stating quite simply that “. . . any human contribution to climate change has not been demonstrated.”

This is not a gang of political hacks, or George Soros–funded “activists.” No, the signatories include 3,667 atmospheric, environmental and Earth scientists; 4,796 chemists; 2,924 biologists and agricultural scientists; 903 math and computer scientists; and 9,992 in engineering and general science.

Of these, 9,029 have PhDs.

The petition states that there is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause global warming.

It goes on to say that there is substantial scientific evidence demonstrating that atmospheric carbon dioxide produces countless beneficial effects on the plant and animal populations of Earth. (In one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular touches of environmental magic, plants convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into oxygen—you know, the stuff we breathe.)

SENATE COMMITTEE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

In March of 2009 the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works posted a report of more than 700 international scientists dissenting on the theory of man-made global warming. Several of those joining in on this report were current or former IPCC members.

Several other groups of scientists have issued statements blasting the lack of credible science behind the theory that man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to global warming. Examples include the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change, and the Heidelberg Appeal.

THE IPCC COOKS THE BOOKS

You will notice, if you read articles about the environment, that “facts” regarding global warming invariably cite the IPCC as their source

In short, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the planet’s opinion leader on the subject of man-made climate change.

Or at least they were.

On November 19, 2009, one of the largest scientific scandals in history exploded across the international media when thousands of internal e-mails were leaked exposing the organization’s blatant manipulation of climate data. The e-mails revealed that the IPCC had skewed bucketloads of climate information to promote the idea that global warming was a result of an increase in man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This wasn’t a bunch of stoners in a frat house passing the filched answers to the Geology 101 midterm around. These guys were recognized as the world’s leading “authorities” on climate change, caught red-handed in an intentional plot to mislead environmental groups, governments and the public at large about the current and future state of the planet’s temperature.

This brief excerpt from Canada’s National Post rather tells the story.

“The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

“The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

“The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world—Wikipedia—in the wholesale rewriting of this history.”

THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD

Like a cheap Las Vegas lounge act, the pernicious cult of climate change ideologues at the IPCC desperately tried to hide the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—ditch it, make it disappear. This was the warmest period in modern recorded history and is very well known by climatologists.

Trying a page from Houdini’s playbook, the IPCC created a phony graph of historical temperatures that made the MWP—presto!—vanish.

Cute.

You see, during the MWP temperatures were much warmer than they are today. Agriculture flourished and the Norsemen, taking advantage of the ice-free seas, settled Greenland. There is no evidence of a rise in sea level at that time. None. And ice sheets around Greenland were largely absent. Greenland, get it?

Temperatures soared, but where was the man-made carbon dioxide? Oil had yet to be discovered, factories had not been constructed, and the first Model T was centuries into the future.

There followed a mini ice age, and by 1500 the settlements in Greenland were gone and the Thames froze all the way to London.

There was no “man-made” factor in any of this. These ebbs and flows of the earth’s temperatures were all a product of naturally occurring phenomena, which is discussed in detail below.

But as to the IPCC,

“Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.” —The Oregon Petition

FEARMONGERS

In fact, the same mindset that is now promoting the catastrophic consequences of global warming were using the same arguments, almost word for word, to promote the dire consequences of global cooling just a few decades ago.

In 1975, Reid Bryson wrote in Global Ecology:

“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.”

Yeah, baby! CO2 is causing global cooling.

Or consider Kenneth Watt, writing on Earth Day in 1970:

“If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. . . . This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Good call, Ken.

There are more, but you get the idea.

These people, then and now, are fearmongers. They get some kind of perverse joy out of frightening people—in this case, frightening them into acceptance of the greatest con job of all time.

Listen to the climate chaos merchants reviewing a book by a global warming jihadist named James Hansen, who subtitles his book “The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity.”

“Dr. James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“With urgency and authority, Hansen urges readers to speak out—taking to the streets if necessary—to protect the Earth from calamity for the sake of their children and grandchildren.” —Kirkus Reviews

Calamity, chaos and catastrophe: the cocaine of the global warming media extremists.

STATS

The crisis and catastrophe crowd don’t like to talk about the fact that water vapor (not carbon dioxide) accounts for 95% of all greenhouse gases. This is naturally occurring water vapor—99.99% of “greenhouse gas” water vapor is natural. Only .01% (one-hundredth of one percent) of greenhouse water vapor is man-made.

But carbon dioxide is the anointed villain of the piece. It must really pack a punch, because CO2 only makes up 3.6% of greenhouse gases. And here’s the kicker, only 3% of the carbon dioxide—3% of the 3.6%—is man-made. This means .1% (one-tenth of one percent) is man-made CO2.

This, according to the harbingers of climate doom, is what is driving “climate catastrophe.” International conferences are called, governments allocate billions, and corporate PR departments gush over environmental agendas in a universal tsunami of green.

It’s as if someone had turned a programmed cult of global warming druids lose on the planet to shriek the horrors of carbon dioxide to a populace that doesn’t know or can’t confront the blatant lunacy of what they are saying.

In turn, the lapdog media regurgitates the chaos and calamity to millions. Their sole aspiration is to shovel as much death, destruction, filth and depravity into the public’s mind in the shortest possible time. Except somewhere in their collective soul they know . . . and they are sick with shame.

“We allow the most atrocious lies uttered by political and moral prostitutes to go unchallenged. These lies are endlessly recycled in the commercial media until they become ingrained in the public conscience as truth.” —Charles Sullivan, author and philosopher

Can I get an “Amen”?

THE SOLAR CONNECTION

I’m a California boy. I love the sun. During spring break in college, some friends of mine and I would body surf our way down the west coast of Mexico, turning coffee brown in the process, and return to campus as sun-baked bronze gods. The co-eds would swoon. . . . Okay, maybe not swoon, but getting dates was definitely easier.

It never occurred to me in those halcyon days that the sun might play a leading role in an article I would later write about global warming. But it does.

The fact is that Earth has experienced natural warming and cooling cycles all throughout recorded history—cycles that have driven temperatures much higher than anything we are experiencing today.

And what is the source of these fluctuations in the earth’s temperature? Water vapor? No. Carbon dioxide? Eh . . . sorry. Hair spray? You’re joking.

What causes temperature changes on the earth is . . . the sun.

Scientists have discovered that the sun has regular cycles of sunspot activity. Sunspots are regions on the sun’s surface of intense magnetic activity; the more sunspots, the more “active” the sun is.

Sunspots and solar radiation activity virtually parallel temperature changes on Earth. That’s right; it is the sun that is the source of global warming and cooling cycles—not mankind’s “carbon footprint.”

If greenhouse gases were the cause of global warming, how is it that from 1940 to 1975, when there was a dramatic increase in the production and release of CO2, the earth experienced a significant cooling period?

Warming periods on Earth are a direct result of an increase in solar radiation, which prevents cloud formation. Cloud formation has a cooling effect on the planet. This is further borne out by the fact that other planets in our solar system all appear to heat up at the same time. But they’re not driving Chevys on Pluto or burning coal on Mars.

This, then, is Con #3: Global warming is a vast, strategic PR campaign, nothing more. It is not a planetary temperature phenomenon. Sorry, Al.

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” —Bertrand Russell

So, what gives? Why all the misleading information and climate change hysteria?

Let me introduce you to Con #4. . . .

END PART 3

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

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