Instead, what actually prevails is a fervent though hollow belief according to which majority consent is the be-all and end-all of political wisdom and legitimacy.
A welcome invitation for democratically elected politicians to extend their effective powers ever wider.
The political agendas advertised to the electorate are, of course, hardly a reflection of the true powers that a democratically elected government inherits from a long-standing history of runaway state expansion. These agendas highlight a small number of hyped issues, only to divert attention from the much larger number of competencies assumed upon being inaugurated by majority consent. "But, I have been democratically elected," effectively becomes an excuse to exert influence far beyond anything that can be seriously regarded as backed by intended consent.
In this way, democracy has moved in a direction opposite to where it ought to go if it is to serve as a means of empowering the electorate. Most democratic decisions should be taken in a local context, where people understand the issues at hand from immediate acquaintance of the contentious questions and the persons affected by them, the personal risks and consequences, morally and materially, entailed by advocating this cause or another.
The touchstone of democratic procedure - and democracy is a counting device, by the end of the day, nothing more - the touchstone, therefore, of the procedure's merits in any given context is whether it promotes personal responsibility or incites the opposite: the shunning of personal responsibility - deference, cowardice or indifference, as the case may be.
The big democratic issues to be decided by the population in its entirety ought to be restricted to the question, how government can be restrained so it would do the least of the damage it is capable of, and what provisions should be in place to guarantee that government protect liberty and facilitate the ability of the people to look after themselves.
If a democracy is not subject to the rule of law, i.e. a set of principles intended to protect individual liberties, restricting government to actions that preserve and foster a free society, and if instead democratic approval is a blank cheque for the ruling to do what they like, democracy is bound to regress to the level of a pluralistic dictatorship, a mechanism by which to replace holders of unrestrained power with new holders of unrestrained power.
Little wonder that those inebriated with a democratic license to power increasingly grow accustomed to hubris, conceit and delusions of grandeur reminiscent of or even wilder than those characteristic of central planers of the Soviet type.
Democratic leaders, like Merkel or Blair, try to outshine one another in megalomaniac promises that surpass their terms of government and accountability by decades, let alone their true powers over whatever issue in question.
One vows to reduce global temperature by two centigrade, only to tickle the other to promise a reduction by three centigrade.
In actual fact, they are using far away future scenarios - that are in reality under nobody's control - in order to leverage self-aggrandizement. Soviet planers had the relative humility to restrict their powers over the future to a five year time horizon. Germany's chancellor, Merkel, seems to tend toward the time frame of Hitler's tausendjähriges Reich (a plan for the Reich's next thousand years) by giving precise directives on how to fix the weather in 2050. Maybe she should do a little advance training by ordering meteorologists to ensure that the weather tomorrow or the day after is in line with what she thinks it should be.
What we are facing with respect to global warming is not an environmental crisis, but a political one.
Unfortunately, there are few indications that the population is getting indignant out of a sense that their intelligence is being insulted.
Even the rare critical responses (in Germany) - to what would be ludicrous if it were not monstrous - turn out to be entangled in unquestioned suppositions of a dubiously subservient kind. Thus, there are some who argue:
How is controlling global climate supposed to be feasible when something comparatively easier such as simplifying the tax code proves impossible to accomplish by the very politicians who purport to act as the masters of global climate.
The tax burden and its rightfulness is not questioned, the demand is rather to make it easier for us to understand the levies we "owe" our government, getting more efficient at being obedient. There is a German word for it: Sklavenmoral - the moral attitudes of slaves.
The Sun Queens and Sun Kings of this world feed on Sklavenmoral. This is why environmental issues are prone to be accounted for in terms of human folly, guilt and the need to regiment human beings, who are depicted as the originators of apocalyptic vices unless shaped into wisely governed collectivities.
Genuine insight into the environment is secondary, at best. The true motive is to present man as evil and, therefore, in need of tutelage.
The same media that, twenty years ago, assured us of the prospect of the world freezing over, are now talking us into deadly global warming. Then as now, cause and culprit are sought in human behaviour - axiomatically.
In fact, the astounding reversal in climatological divinations of global perishing was brought about by a politician with an agenda of accusation: Margaret Thatcher, fighting the coal miners on the brink of civil war, heard of a fringe conjecture by a Swedish scientist, who surmised that anthropogenic CO2 emissions may contribute to global warming. Ms. Thatcher was looking for arguments to strengthen her case against coal and in favour of nuclear power, and discovered a convenient "truth". Desperately hoping for scientific substantiation of the Swede's humble conjecture, she embarked upon subsidizing supportive research, which, in the meantime, has grown to represent a multi-billion industry. For more on this, consult the documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle", available on YouTube.
Today's Sun Queens and Sun Kings may soon discover that the task they think incumbent upon them is really to get the sun to shine a little less brightly. Rather a tall order for those passionately dedicated to leaving nature untouched by man, revealing the contradictions of people who do not wish the supposed equilibrium of nature to be meddle with by human interference, with the exception of their interfering conception of this equilibrium. (Nature, like the economy, is not an equilibrium affair, but one of permanent change and turbulence, which should not be forgotten when taking equilibrium snapshots of strictly limited heuristic value to begin to understand elements of the Universe.)
It is a question of time until the junk science championed by them will be discredited - at which point they will move on to new scare stories which, they hope, will take more time to debunk than is needed to accumulate powers that seem reasonable while the fake apocalypse has the majority still in its grip.
My prediction is that the massive cuts in pension entitlements awaiting us will be couched in terms of green "emergency" requirements or a "humanitarian" war.
The Center of Global Food Studies has this report: (http://www.cgfi.org/cgficommentary/canadian-climatologist-says-sun-causing-global-warming)
Another scientist has added his voice to the Global Warming debate. Canadian climatologist Tim Patterson says the sun drives the earth’s climate changes—and Earth’s current global warming is a direct result of a long, moderate 1,500-year cycle in the sun’s irradiance.
Patterson says he learned of the 1,500-year climate cycle while studying cycles in fish numbers on Canada’s West Coast. Since the Canadian West had no long-term written fishery records, Patterson’s research team drilled sediment cores in the deep local fjords to get 5,000-year climate profiles from the mud. The mud showed the past climate conditions: Warm summers left layers thick with one-celled fossils and fish scales. Cold, wet periods showed dark sediments, mostly dirt washed from the surrounding land.
Patterson’s fishing profiles clearly revealed the sun’s 87 and 210-year solar cycles—and the longer, 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles found since the 1980s in ice cores, tree rings, and fossil pollen.
“Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators is not unique,” says the climatologist from Carleton University. “Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.”
But there was a problem. By themselves, the variations in solar irradiation were too small to account for the big variations his research team found in the Canadian fish catches.
“Even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century’s modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate changes. Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered,” says Patterson.
“In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2000, Vizer, Shaviv, Carslaw and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies . . . varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system. . . . These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation, which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet.”
“When the sun is less bright, more cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form and the planet cools. . . . This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere . . . was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age.”
The Canadian expert concludes, “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.” Instead, Earth’s sea surface temperatures show a massive 95 percent lagged correlation with the sunspot index.
Patterson says climate change is the most complex field we’ve ever studied. He notes that a 2003 German poll of 530 scientists from 27 countries found two-thirds of the respondents doubted that “the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.”
Attempting to stop global warming with the Kyoto Protocol, he warns, could be as useless as King Canute commanding the tides to cease.
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