Confessions of uncontrite climate alarmists 71
They admit they got it wrong. The earth is not warming at the rate they said it was, and they still haven’t proved that human activity contributes significantly to such warming as there is.
But they still want the nugatory Paris Agreement to lay its tyrannical restrictions on an obedient world.
James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:
Climate alarmists have finally admitted that they’ve got it wrong on global warming.
This is the inescapable conclusion of a landmark paper, published in Nature Geoscience, which finally admits that the computer models have overstated the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and that the planet is warming more slowly than predicted. The paper – titled Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C – concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true. In order for that to happen, temperatures would have to rise by a massive 0.5 degrees C in five years.
Since global mean temperatures rarely rise by even as much as 0.25 degrees C in a decade, that would mean the planet would have to do 20 years’ worth of extreme warming in the space of the next five years. This, the scientists admit, is next to impossible. Which means their “carbon budget” – the amount of CO2 they say is needed to increase global warming by a certain degree – is wrong. This in turn means that the computer models they’ve been using to scare the world with tales of man-made climate doom are wrong too.
One researcher – from the alarmist side of the argument, not the skeptical one – has described the paper’s conclusion as “breathtaking” in its implications. He’s right. The scientists who’ve written this paper aren’t climate skeptics. They’re longstanding warmists, implacable foes of climate skeptics, and they’re also actually the people responsible for producing the IPCC’s carbon budget. …
In other words, this represents the most massive climbdown from the alarmist camp. …
We have known for several years that the climate models have been running far too hot. This rather belated admission is welcome, but a cynic would wonder why it was not made before Paris. I suspect part of the motivation is to keep [the] Paris [Agreement] on track. [Although] most observers … have realized that it was not worth the paper it was written on.
Yet, amazingly –
This new study is designed to restore the belief that the original climate targets can be achieved, via Paris and beyond. …
We would guess that is so because the real objective of the Paris Agreement is political.
However, the study does prove that the skeptics have been right.
We climate skeptics have been proved right yet again, that’s the main thing. Oh, and by the way, snooty alarmist scumbags: that word you were looking for to describe the current state of global warming science is: “Sorry.”
The joy of suppressing the Greens 24
Speaking of self-righteous busybodies, one of the most egregious is Greenpeace. Wielding amazing power to influence political decisions internationally, these bigoted prigs cause millions of the world’s poorest to die by preventing them from having the means to save themselves. Their unproven and in any case imbecilic excuse is that the marvelous saving products of science and technology are harmful to Nature. It could be argued – and we do – that they are committing mass-murder by moral arrogance. Who makes it possible for them to work their evil? For one, the Obama administration.
That is a quotation from one of our own posts: The evil that Greenpeace does, January 16, 2010.
What we asserted about Greenpeace doing evil applies to the environmentalist movement in general.
Now one of the many changes for the better that we expect President Trump to effect, is a shifting of funds from “climate change” programs to – say – crushing ISIS.
James Delingpole has similar hopes and expectations. He writes at Breitbat:
Donald Trump really is going to make America great again. It wasn’t just a campaign slogan: Trump is for real — and one of the great pleasures in the coming years is going to be the joy of watching all those pundits who think he’s going to be a disaster being proved wrong again and again.
Nowhere will this be more evident than in his policies on energy and the environment. …
I made a trip to Washington, D.C. just before Christmas to check out the lie of the land. What I wanted to find out was just how serious Trump is about slaying the Green Blob which has caused so much misery and expense in the U.S. and across the world for the last thirty or forty years. And after a series of private briefings with administration insiders and members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I came back heartened.
Here’s how one of them put it:
Trump is going to send his tanks into the swamp from Day One. He knows there isn’t time to lose and he knows that every day that passes those tanks are going to get sucked deeper into the slime…” [by ‘the slime’ my anonymous informant meant, of course, the liberal/DC establishment which will do everything in its power to frustrate Trump] We’re going to go in fast and we’re going to go in hard. They won’t know what hit them.
And let’s make something clear to all those “sensible” conservatives — the centrist squishes who supported #NeverTrump and who will insist, even now, on telling us how uncomfortable they feel about the new regime, as though having a left-wing, establishment crook like Hillary would have been preferable — Trump is the ONLY Republican candidate who would have made this stuff happen.
Compare and contrast what would have happened if a “safe” GOP candidate like Jeb Bush was now on his way to the White House.
During the presidential campaigns, Jeb Bush was asked what his policy on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be if he got elected: “I’ll hire the best people. And I’ll do the right thing,” he said.
In other words, Jeb Bush would have done precisely zilch to rein in one of the most destructive, overbearing and uncontrollable agencies within the U.S. government.
Trump is different because, unlike his mainstream GOP former rivals he feels absolutely no need to compromise or to green virtue-signal. He has never made any bones about his conviction that “climate change” is a con and that the US economy has been held hostage by eco-loons and that blue-collar Americans have been denied jobs because of the environmental policies imposed on them by uptown pajama boys.
So what are his plans for energy and the environment?
Well in fact, it’s no secret. He set them out very clearly in the speech he gave on May 26, 2016 in North Dakota.
Here is my 100-day action plan:
- We’re going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.
- We’re going to save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda.
- I’m going to ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone Pipeline.
- We’re going to lift moratoriums on energy production in federal areas
- We’re going to revoke policies that impose unwarranted restrictions on new drilling technologies. These technologies create millions of jobs with a smaller footprint than ever before.
- We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.
- Any regulation that is outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers, or contrary to the national interest will be scrapped. We will also eliminate duplication, provide regulatory certainty, and trust local officials and local residents.
- Any future regulation will go through a simple test: is this regulation good for the American worker? If it doesn’t pass this test, the rule will not be approved.
What’s so brilliant about this — and why Trump’s critics underestimate him at their peril — is that it expresses more clearly than any leading conservative politician has ever done before that environmentalism is essentially an attack on jobs and growth.
At one point, it states it more explicitly still:
Here’s what it comes down to.
Wealth versus poverty.
And:
It’s a choice between sharing in this great energy wealth, or sharing in the poverty promised by Hillary Clinton.
Trump gets it in a way that more “sophisticated” conservative leaders have failed to do for four decades: greens are the enemies of prosperity; they are most especially the enemies of people like the non-liberal Americans who live outside the big cities.
“Democrats have been waging a war on rural Americans for years. And the Bushes didn’t do a damn thing to help them. Trump actually promised he would do something and the voters got that. These are his people and he gets the problem,” says one of my informants.
“If you dig up stuff, if you make stuff, if you grow stuff then for the first time since Reagan you have a president who has actually got your back.” …
The Trump presidency will mark a turning point in global energy policy and in our attitude to the environment in general and policies like renewables in particular.
One thing we can confidently predict in the next few years is that the Greenies are in for a world of pain and disappointment. And it really couldn’t happen to a bunch of more deserving people.
Applause! Standing ovation!
What’s eating up the greens? 8
James Delingpole is a splendidly outspoken, iconoclastic writer. We enjoyed his columns in The Spectator (of the UK). Now he is writing for Breitbart.
We quote him from that source with pleasure on Donald Trump and the non-issue of “climate change”:
Donald Trump isn’t just skeptical about global warming.
He is what the alarmists would call a full-on climate change “denier”. He has tweeted, “I’m tired of hearing this nonsense.”
No world leader has ever been this outspoken on climate change. The only other one to have come close to this position was former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott – but he just didn’t have the support base to maintain it and was ousted in a coup staged by one of the climate alarmist establishment, Malcolm Turnbull.
But with a climate skeptic running the most powerful nation in the world, the $1.5 trillion per annum climate change industry is going to start to unravel big time. A Trump presidency is likely to be good news for fossil fuels (and heavy industry that needs cheap energy to survive); and very bad news for renewables.
$1.5 TRILLION dollars wasted ANNUALLY on Chicken Little’s warning that the sky is falling! (Or its equivalent.)
To get an idea of the horrors to come for the greenies, look at how they reacted to the prospect of his new Environmental Protection Agency Dismantler-in-Chief Myron Ebell.
Ebell is an old friend of mine who works on climate and energy issues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The fact that he’s an old friend of mine probably tells you all you need to know about where he stands on global warming.
Here’s how Newsweek views him:
Ebell is sometimes described as climate denier-in-chief, and he revels in it, crowing in his biography that he’s been called one of the leading “misleaders” on climate change and “villain of the month” by one environmental group. David Goldston, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, says Ebell “doesn’t believe in climate change and wants to reverse the advances we’ve had in environmental protection and decimate — if not utterly destroy — the Environmental Protection Agency”.
Destroy the EPA! Wouldn’t that be lovely?
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, Ebell’s employer, “has done everything it can politically and through litigation to block any forward movement on climate and to try to harass anybody who is trying to get forward movement”, Goldston says.
Ebell is also the chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, more than two dozen nonprofit groups “that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies”, according to the coalition’s website. Those positions line up nicely with Trump’s goals, which include “saving” the coal industry, reviving the Keystone XL oil pipeline and expanding offshore oil drilling.
They do, they do! All glorious goals.
Ebell has attacked nearly every aspect of Obama’s environmental policies and accomplishments. He has said that the president’s decision in September to sign the Paris climate accord — which commits nations to sharp reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change change —
(Trump, Delingpole, Ebell and we maintain they are not)
— was “clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate’s authority” because treaties need approval by two-thirds of the Senate. (The White House argued that it was an agreement, not a treaty.) In a speech in August at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump said he would cancel the agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to UN. climate change programs.
Yup, greenies. That climate change gravy train you’ve been riding these last four decades looks like it’s headed for a major, Atlas-Shrugged-style tunnel incident …
And that will be lovely and glorious too.
P.S. The UN must be destroyed.
Warmists navigate the future through vindictive ice 14
The Secretary General of Evil HQ – aka the UN – decrees that there shall be no more skepticism about man-made global warming.
With his pronunciamento, the Truth of it becomes established beyond doubt.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Sunday that climate change skepticism is over, the day after the United States joined China to ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions.
Climate change sceptics dispute the widely held understanding that excessive levels of emissions in the atmosphere cause global warming and harm the environment, and have become increasingly side-lined at international summits.
“The debate over climate phenomenon is over scientifically and environmentally,” said Ban … at a news conference ahead of a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, a ship carrying fanatical believers in man-made global warming, who want to prove that arctic ice is disappearing due to wicked (normal) human activity, is ice-bound in the Arctic sea.
James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:
An Arctic expedition designed to raise awareness of the perils of man-made climate change is being frustrated by unexpectedly large quantities of ice.
The Polar Ocean Challenge, whose aim is to circumnavigate the Arctic in a sailing boat while the summer ice-melt allows, is being led by veteran explorer David Hempleman-Adams. He justifies the expedition thus:
Permanent irreversible change in the sea ice landscape of the Arctic seems inevitable. This is already having global economic, political, social and environmental implications. A significant change in my lifetime. I see this possibility to circumnavigate the Arctic as one I wanted to take despite the risks associated with it in order to increase the world’s attention on the effects of Arctic climate change. There may be a possibility still to curb this progressive warming and melting in the Arctic. But even if this is not possible the next most important thing is to at the very least highlight the need to “Navigate the Future of the Arctic responsibly“.
Well, yes, of course, David. That’s just the kind of eco-friendly blah which will have landed your expedition sponsorship from a City of London finance firm. But what if, as the real world evidence increasingly suggests, your prognostications of climate doom are flat out wrong?
Already the expedition is around 4 to 6 weeks behind schedule having been held up in the Laptev Sea by the kind of ice which experts like Cambridge University’s Peter Wadhams – of whom more in a moment – assure us will soon disappear permanently from the Arctic in summer.
Here, for example, is an entry from their August 18 ship’s log:
Well I came up on watch this morning at 0800. ice, ice and more b****t ice.
And here:
We had to turn round from the ice by the coast last night and find somewhere safe to moor/anchor. There were strong winds so we needed to find somewhere else to sit them out, and the answer was a stamukha. We knew it might drift, and it did, so when it had drifted into a more dangerous situation, Ben (who was on anchor watch) woke Nikolay and we’ve moved off it to go and have a look at the ice situation just up ahead again.
A Stamukha is an iceberg that is touching the bottom.
And here’s one from crew member Ben Edwards, who is 14 years old
We’re still running into ice, aaaagggghhhh! We’ve had patches of clear water just large enough that you can’t see the other side, just large enough that you start to think maybe we’ve seen the last of the ice, and then it looms out out of the horizon like a piece of homework that you’ve been trying to avoid doing by moving to India only to find that school exists there as well. Hmpf. We’ve put in three new tracks today each one further south than the last in the vain hope that we’d finally escape the ice by running away from it. Unfortunately it seems that ice is a vindictive substance and refuses to leave us alone.
Poor Ben. …
The world’s big media organizations so love to ramp up scare stories about this non-existent problem …
On BBC Radio 4’s Today program this week we heard from Cambridge professor Peter Wadhams that the Arctic is more doomed than ever before.
But apart from being something of a conspiracy theorist – he once claimed that secret agents, possibly in the pay of Big Oil, have been bumping off climate scientists, presumably because they know too much [not, it must be said, a major handicap of any alarmist climate scientist I’ve ever encountered] – he has an embarrassingly dismal track record on forecasting Arctic ice melt. Indeed, … even within the climate alarmist community he is now considered such a liability that even hardcore enviro loons prefer not to be associated with him.
Yet the BBC goes on featuring him as if he were an expert whose predictions should be taken seriously.
For the record … Arctic Sea Ice coverage … is already pretty extensive – raising understandable questions about whether Polar Ocean Challenge is going to be able to complete its mission before the winter freeze sets in. …
Note too that summer sea ice coverage has increased and thickened quite a bit since Wadhams first started peddling his “ice free North Pole” predictions in 2007.
… The point [such expeditions] are trying to make is an utterly meaningless one.
All this nonsense you regularly hear from alarmists about the polar regions being navigable by ship for the first time because of global warming is historically and scientifically illiterate. Here, for example, is a history by the Ecotretas blog going back to the 1490s of all the various ships and explorers which have previously negotiated the North East Passage. … It also looks like it was pretty toasty up there during the “Arctic Heat Wave” of 1923.
One of these days, someone’s going to get themselves hurt on one of these polar Ship of Fools expeditions. But until that day, I say: “Bring them on!” If idiots want to freeze their balls off, take City investment firms and insurance brokers for a ride, and make utter dicks of themselves for our delectation and amusement while making a mockery of current climate “science”, then I’d say they are performing a truly valuable public service.
Anyone dare to tell Ban Ki-moon about the Polar Open Challenge being stuck in the vindictive ice up there?
The UN must be destroyed!
A long good-bye to Mann-made global warming? 161
Will the myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming be laid to rest?
The solar physicist Willy Soon debunked it recently. The warmists fell upon him like a swarm of hornets. Unable to disprove his science, they poured contempt on the sources of his funding, being possessed of the peculiar theory that if a scientist’s work is funded by government it is moral, but if it is funded by business and industry it is not only immoral but for that very reason invalid. The implication is that a scientist who accepts money from non-government sources is being bought, and will make dishonest findings to suit his backers. Those who accept government money, on the other hand, cannot be similarly charged because the motives of government are always pure as the waters of a mountain spring.
Now comes more evidence against the AGW theory:
This is from Breitbart, by James Delingpole:
A new scientific paper has driven yet another nail into the coffin of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory.
The paper – Rethinking the lower bound on aerosol radiative forcing by Bjorn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, published in the American Meteorological Society journal – finds that the effects of aerosols on climate are much smaller than those in almost all the computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Aerosols are the minute particles added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels (as well as by non-anthropogenic sources, like volcanoes). The reason they are important is that they are so often cited by alarmists to excuse the awkward fact that the world has stubbornly failed to warm at the disastrous rate they predicted it would.
Apparently – or so the excuse goes – these aerosols are masking the true extent of runaway climate change by cancelling out the effects of man-made CO2.
Here, for example, is a NASA expert in 2009:
Using climate models, we estimate that aerosols have masked about 50 percent of the warming that would otherwise have been caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat near the surface of the Earth
Here is a report on a study from another institution – NOAA – with a long track record of ramping up the alarmist cause:
A new study led by the U.S, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that tiny particles that make their way all the way up into the stratosphere may be offsetting a global rise in temperatures due to carbon emissions.
Aerosols are often used to explain the lack of “global warming” in the cooling period between 1940 and 1970 (when the growth in industrialisation and all that extra man-made CO2 ought to have begun taking effect).
They have also been used in [a] 2011 paper – whose co-authors include one Michael Mann, which gives you an idea of its quality and reliability – for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). It claims that the reason there has been a “hiatus” in global warming since 1998 is because of the effect of aerosol emissions. This got one of the BBC’s resident alarmists Richard Black very excited. He wrote it up in an article entitled Global warming lull down to China’s coal growth. (Oddly he forgot to surround it with scare quotes, or finish it with a question mark.)
The new Stevens paper has been described as a “game-changer” by one expert in the field, Nic Lewis.
According to the IPCC’s models, the effect of aerosols on climate could be as much as 4.5 degrees C. But Stevens paper suggests that this is a considerable overestimate and that the reduction they effect on temperature cannot be more than 1.8 degrees C.
This pretty much kills the alarmists’ “the aerosols ate my homework” excuse stone dead. If the cooling effects of aerosols turn out to be much smaller than the IPCC thinks, then what this means is that the rise in global temperatures attributable to man-made CO2 is also much smaller than the alarmists’ computer models acknowledge.
As Andrew Montford comments here:
Jim Hansen, Bob Ward, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt, your climate alarmism just took one helluva beating.
So will the AGW theory be abandoned?
In the light of Bjorn Stevens’s new research, coming on top of other accumulating evidence such as Willy Soon’s, the answer should be yes.
But we think the right answer is, sadly, no. Because it was never expounded just to convince us that we were dangerously (and wickedly) over-heating the planet; it was always to give the would-be controllers of our lives – governments, and projected world-government – an excuse to extend their power over us.
The Daily Caller reports:
The United Nation’s climate chief says that reordering the global economy to fight climate change is the “most difficult” task the international body has ever undertaken.
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” Christiana Figueres, who heads up the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution,” Figueres said.
So there you have it.
Going with the wind 217
The article by James Delingpole from which we quote is about property rights and what he rightly calls the “green religion”; matters of concern equally on both sides of the Atlantic:
Property rights are a cornerstone of our liberty, our security, our civilisation. …
Here’s the Virginia Bill of Rights, precursor to the US Declaration of Independence:
“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Here’s Samuel Adams:
“The Natural Rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.”
And here, most trenchantly, is the philosopher who inspired them, John Locke:
“Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience …”
Time for a revolution, then, for the theft of our property rights is exactly what is happening to us now under our notionally “Conservative” prime minister and his increasingly desperate and damaging attempts to position his collapsing administration as the “greenest ever.” I’m thinking especially of the ongoing renewables scam.
The wind farm industry is surely the worst offender. Some vexatious twerp complained the other day about my claim that wind farms reduce property values by between 25 per cent and 50 per cent. Actually, if anything, I’m understating the problem here. I know of cases where properties have been rendered unsaleable by wind farms. But whatever the exact figures, I think those of us not in the pay of Big Wind or trotting out propaganda for the preposterous and devious Renewable UK would all agree that the very last thing we’d want on our doorstep would be a wind farm and that we certainly would never dream of buying a property near one. QED.
Since not a single one of the wind farms blighting Britain would have been built without state incentives (in the form of Renewable Obligations Certificates, Feed In Tariffs, and legislation which makes it very hard for communities to prevent wind farms being built in the area) we can reasonably say therefore that wind farms represent a wanton assault by the state on property rights. We expect such confiscatory measures “for the common good” from socialist regimes. But from a Conservative-dominated Coalition it’s a disgrace.
The Coalition itself is a disgrace. How a co-called Conservative Party ever decided to team up with a Liberal Democratic Party that is well to the left of the opposition Labour Party would be beyond comprehension to anyone who didn’t know that the so-called Conservative Party of Great Britain is not remotely conservative. In fact its leader, David Cameron, is an ardent fan of Saul Alinsky, the communist revolutionary who inspired Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
But it’s not just the wind farm industry which is complicitous in this scam. … The hydro power industry turns out to be very nearly as damaging, unpleasant, slimy and untrustworthy as its nasty elder brother Big Wind. … yet another taxpayer-subsidised boondoggle for rent-seeking scuzzballs, which produces next to no electricity and which – just like wind farms – causes immense damage to wildlife (in this case fish rather than birds or bats). …
The hypocrisy of it! Environmentalists going to endless lengths to protect a smelt while they feed other fish and innumerable birds to their terrible engines. Above all, they hurt people. Delingpole gives a particular instance where property rights are harmed:
Nottingham Angling Club … in 1982 forked out £150,000 for the fishing rights to a one and half mile stretch of the river Trent above a weir which is now about to be converted to hydropower. The quality of their fishing will almost certainly diminish. And there are stories like this from all over the country. Whether its wealthy fly fishing enthusiasts who’ve paid a fortune for a prime stretch of river in Hampshire or Dorset, or an ordinary working man’s club like the one in Nottingham, people are going to suffer as a result of this state-sponsored drive for renewables. Again, as with wind power, the only reason these hydropower schemes are going ahead is because of the government subsidies and incentives for those canny or cynical enough to get in on the scam. So again, what we have here is a clear case of the state arbitrarily confiscating people’s property rights because of its desire to be seen paying lip service to the green religion.
But the harm to people caused by governments pursuing the green superstition is far greater than that. It is general, affecting the price everyone has to pay for electricity. Not just property rights but liberty itself is going with the wind.
All over America, city councils, implementing Agenda 21, are trying to increase the amount of energy they provide from “green sources” at ever greater expense. What’s more, they hope to ration it, to keep us colder in winter and hotter in summer.
This is the newest form of religious persecution.
Christian evil 20
The caption to the picture of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the abominable Rowan Willams, is by James Delingpole. In a clear-sighted article in the Telegraph, he writes:
It seems to me that behind that wild, comedy-wizard beard and those gnomic, overintellectual pronouncements and … platitudes lurks a malign spirit of genuinely evil purpose and influence. And I’m not the only one to have noticed.
Martin Durkin … in a characteristically brilliant essay titled Evil Dressed Up As Good … notes the paradox of the modern Church: that while expressing much concern for … the plight of the poor …, it persistently champions policies guaranteed to make the poor poorer …
The Archbishop of Canterbury is writing a book in which he lambasts the government for shrinking the State. In its current ‘shrunken’ form, the state accounts for around half of the UK economy. This is evidently sinful. It should be bigger, presumably like the economies of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. Anglicanism has become extremely political. The Archbishop’s Council has just reprimanded the government for vetoing changes to the EU treaty last December and warned them not to think of leaving the EU. In his speech at the St. Paul’s service to mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee, the Archbishop cursed bankers and said we ought to look after the environment and be less greedy. …
It is not just any old politics the church embraces. It is the big State, high tax, green, protectionist, Keynesian politics of the left and fascist right. But as many people have pointed out, once the sanctimonious veneer is stripped away, these polices have been shown not to be in the interests of ordinary people. Socialism promised to liberate and enrich the masses, but it was discovered long ago that it did the exact opposite. Indeed so many of the bishops’ rants seem to be directed against the interests of the world’s poorest. The E.U. (so beloved of the bishops) is a protectionist club which, it is well known, has caused untold misery to African and Asian farmers, and has also raised the cost of food enormously for everyone in Europe (needless to say, the poorest are hardest hit). The green bandwagon, onto which the bishops have jumped with such fervour, is clearly directed against the world’s poorest people on so many fronts – preventing them from using DDT to keep malaria at bay, preventing them from using inorganic fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides and GM crops in order to grow more food, preventing them from using the cheapest forms of electrical generation in order to join the modern world, and so on. …
Anyone with eyes to see realises that we’re on the edge of a precipice here. …
Friends, allies: we have our work cut out. Victory is by no means certain. But the consequences of failure are unthinkable.
We could suggest a few other persons who have at least equal claim with the Achbishop to the Universal Gold-Medal Championship of Evil, but we certainly accept that he’s well qualified to compete.
The climate of deception 159
Look up and see the wonder. Pigs are flying.
The latest report by the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) actually tells the truth. It is “a far cry from the IPCC’s usual slipshod, scaremongering standards.”
Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.
A few quotable quotes from the report:
“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”
“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”
“The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:
“Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses … but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.”
So what this IPCC report is saying is that WE DO NOT KNOW if there’s an anthropogenic signal in extreme weather patterns, and that there does not seem to be a trend towards increased extreme weather events such as tornados and tropical storms.
Our quotes come from an article by James Delingpole in the Telegraph.
Here’s more:
They’re calling it Global Weirding now, as I suppose, inevitably they were bound to do in the end. Well “global warming” stopped working in 1989 when the globe stopped warming. Climate change was always a bit of a non-starter because climate does change regardless of whether or not we all drive 4 x 4s, or buy carbon offsets … And Global Climate Disruption, as some pillock tried to christen it, was never going to catch on because, well, it’s just too blatantly contrived and desperate isn’t it?
So Global Weirding it is. The concept was popularised last week in a characteristically dire and parti pris BBC Horizon documentary which purported to have lots of new evidence (or ‘hearsay’ as it would more likely have been termed in a court of law) showing that our weather is getting more extreme – weirder. It seems to have been broadcast to coincide with a new IPCC report which has been excitedly written up in newspapers like the Guardian and the Detroit Free Press as evidence that we are heading towards climate disaster.
Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heatwaves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of scientists has said.
The greatest danger is in highly populated, poorer regions, but no corner of the globe is immune. The document, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heatwaves, deluges and droughts, and blames man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.
But this is pretty much the exact opposite of what the IPCC report actually says. …
How can the warmists bear it? How do the left-biased media deal with this document?
James Delingpole has told us how – they lie.
The liberal MSM is reporting the opposite. How come?
Well here’s the weird part. The misinformation comes from the IPCC’s summary of its own report .. which has been regurgitated, in classic churnalism style, by all the usual lazy MSM suspects.
It begins:
“Evidence suggests that climate change has led to changes in climate extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in the past half century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said today.” …
Thing is, the warmists are losing and growing desperate.
As we know, the great global warming alarmism Ponzi scheme is looking extremely vulnerable at the moment. Global warming has stopped. There’s a growing public backlash against eco-taxes, ugly flickery lightbulbs, higher energy bills, bat chomping eco-crucifixes [?] and all the other paraphernalia of the environmental religion.
And unfortunately … what these kind of people do when they get backed into a corner is not surrender but get nastier and more devious.
We’ve seen this recently in the Fakegate affair. … And in the Planet Under Pressure comedy conference staged last week by comedy organisations including the Royal Society, mainly in order to try to breathe new life into the stagnant, green-tinged corpse of climate alarmism. …
Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be “treated”, according to an Oregon-based professor of “sociology and environmental studies”. Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South. …
As Paul Joseph Watson notes at Prison Planet: “The effort to re-brand legitimate scientific dissent as a mental disorder that requires pharmacological or psychological treatment is a frightening glimpse into the Brave New World society climate change alarmists see themselves as ruling over.”
Due to the fact that skepticism towards man-made global warming is running at an all time high, and with good reason, rather than admit they have lost the debate, climate change alarmists are instead advocating that their ideological opponents simply be drugged or brainwashed into compliance.
Some at least may concede that their cause is lost.
Look for more pig-flights this year.
Frightening sympathy 53
The British Conservative James Delingpole, with whom we usually agree, writes at the Telegraph about the dismal view he takes of the Republican Party candidates in this year’s presidential election.
His assessment of them is so dismal that he thinks that letting Obama, “the POTUS from hell”, wreck the country for another four years would be a better choice than electing any of them.
We cannot wholly agree with him this time because we think no one on the political horizon could be worse for America than Obama, but we like his article and see his point:
Let’s get one thing clear: Obama unquestionably ranks among the bottom five presidents in US history. In terms of sublime awfulness he’s right up there with our late and extremely unlamented ex-PM Gordon Brown – which is quite some doing, given that Brown singlehandedly wrought more destruction on his country than the Luftwaffe, Dutch Elm Disease, the South Sea Bubble, the Fire of London and the Black Death combined.
Agreed: the damage President Obama has done to the US economy with everything from Ben Bernanke’s insane money-printing programme, to his cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, to his ban on deep-water drilling to his crony capitalism hand-outs to disaster zones like Solyndra to his persecution of companies like Gibson is incalculable. And, of course, if he gets a second term the damage he and his rag-bag of Marxist cronies at organisations like the Environmental Protection Agency manage to inflict on the US small businessman trying to make an honest buck will make his first term look like Calvin Coolidge on steroids.
So why do I think this would be preferable to a presidency under Mitt Romney? Simple. Because I’ve seen what happens, America, when you elect yet another spineless, yet ruthless, principle-free blow-with-the-wind, big government, crony-capitalist RINO squish. His name is Dave Cameron – and trust me, the cure is far worse than the disease.
Of course it may not seem that way at first. You’ll be so busy dancing round in circles singing “Ding Dong the witch is dead!” that euphoria and relief will completely overwhelm your intellect and your powers of observation. You’ll read endless articles by David L Brooks, the New York Times’s pet pretend-conservative, telling you how Romney is just the kind of uniting, post-partisan, pragmatic POTUS America needed. And you’ll believe it because you’ll want to believe it. This may last for some considerable length of time. In Britain, many Cameroon conservatives … continue to perform this auto-lobotomisation even now.
But then, little by little, something rather unpleasant will begin to dawn on you. The label on the can may have changed but the contents taste remarkably similar. Similarly emetic, that is.
Yes, I know from the other side of the pond David Cameron may look just the kind of stand-up conservative you’d like running the US. But that’s only because the stories you hear about him are extremely selective. For example, I’m constantly surprised by US talk show hosts telling me how tough on militant Islam Cameron is because of some speech they heard Dave give once about the problems of multiculturalism.
But surely we should judge our political leaders by what they actually achieve rather than (Tony Blair-style) by what they tell us they are achieving.
Here are some of David Cameron’s achievements so far:
He has prolonged the economic crisis …
He has urged quotas for women in the boardroom, apparently in the belief that the State has either the knowledge or the right to decide how business conducts its affairs.
He has presided over a massive wind-farm building programme which, besides destroying the British countryside and enriching his father-in-law, is causing energy bills to soar to the point where old people are dying of hypothermia.
He has surrendered at almost every turn to the Carthaginian terms offered to Britain by the European Socialist Superstate.
He has proved himself incapable of expelling the Islamist hate-preacher Abu Qatada. [See our post The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite, January 18, 2012.]
The list is by no means exhaustive. I would go on but, actually, this was never meant to be a “collected examples of the unutterable crapness of David Cameron” blog. Rather, it’s supposed to be a more generalised warning about the dangers of short-termist thinking.
Yes, of course, conservative/libertarian America, I fully understand how desperate you are to rid yourself of the POTUS from hell. But what you need to ask yourselves – and I don’t believe many of you are: you’re a bit like an hysterical woman who’s just had a tarantula drop on top of her in the bath, you just want to GET RID OF IT NOW! – is what ultimately you’re trying to achieve.
I’m presuming what you really want is stuff like: smaller government; a genuine – as opposed to an illusory, QE-driven – economic recovery; sensible environmentalism (ie conservation but not eco-fascism); liberty; an end of crony capitalism; a diminution of the power of Wall Street; a resurgence of American greatness; a renewed sense of confidence and purpose.
You’re not going to get any of that from a Romney administration.
But you will, provided you’ve got the patience, get it in 2016 from President West or President Rand Paul or President Palin or President Ryan.
Only it might be TOO LATE.
(Hat-tip Andrew M)
The road to Eco Hell 124
“What I felt … was the sort of detached, sardonic amusement an alien might feel on viewing from outer space a once-great civilisation destroying itself over an issue of immeasurable triviality. That issue, of course, is ‘Climate Change’.”
So James Delingpole writes at the Telegraph.
He goes on magnificently:
Never before in history, I doubt, has so much money ever been squandered, so much suffering and poverty exacerbated, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many lies promulgated and so much environmental destruction wrought in order to deal with a problem so microscopically miniscule. Really, if Barack Obama were to declare war on Belgium because he’d always found Tintin Au Congo offensively racist, or if David Cameron were to launch a nuclear strike on Mykonos because all those white-painted buildings were “way too gay”, you still wouldn’t be even half way close to equalling the quite breathtaking stupidity, purblind ignorance and suicidal wrongheadedness of the disasters currently being inflicted on the world by our boneheaded political and administrative classes on their holy mission to “combat climate change.”
Let’s concentrate on the British example since, thanks to Cameron’s determination to lead the “greenest government ever”, we’re further down the road to Eco Hell than most, and let’s look at the reasons behind those electricity and gas price rises.
These are outlined here in this must-read piece by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser, which lists the various mechanisms (Renewables Obligations, European Emissions Trading Scheme, Feed-In Tariffs, etc) which, this year alone, will drive up our domestic energy bills by around 15 per cent and business energy costs by 20 to 25 per cent. Every one of these mechanisms is based on the so-far-very-much-unproven hypothesis that Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide emissions are contributing dangerously to “Global Warming” and that this “Global Warming” is an undesirable thing. In other words, our political classes are imposing on both our domestic expenses and on the broader economy swingeing costs whose sole justification is the threadbare theorising of a small number of heavily compromised scientists brandishing dodgy computer models.
“How did those charlatans get away with it?” That is the question historians will be asking in generations to come. … And: “How can it possibly have been that, during the worst global recession since the 1930s, the world’s political leaders were able to impose such enormous, unjustified extra costs on their ailing economies without serious criticism from the commentariat or rebellion from their electorates?” …
The answer to that question lies largely in the deceitful propaganda put out by the Left, its hurray-chorus the media, and their useful idiots who hold political power:
Here we have Tim Yeo MP – a Conservative MP, allegedly, and one with an influential position on Britain’s energy policy – joining up with various violently left-wing members of the Opposition to promulgate exactly the same almighty whopper: that the reason are energy prices are skyrocketing is down to a combination of insufficient regulation and corporate greed.
Let me just repeat that: here is an influential member of Britain’s Tory-led Coalition essentially arguing that what Britain needs right now is a less free market and more regulation. …
Prime Minister David Cameron is not the brightest spark in the generally rather damp fireworks of British politics. He is the leader of the Conservative Party, yet he has expressed admiration for … wait for it … you’ll find it hard to believe … Saul Alinsky (the Marxist revolutionary inventor of “community organizing”, guru to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). See here and here.
Delingpole concludes:
Say what you like about David Cameron … but if there’s one thing he’s good at it’s being more slippery than a jellied eel in a tub of KY Jelly. And he’ll need this skill in spades if he’s not to go down in history as the Prime Minister who, in the name of a non-existent problem, presided over the devastation of the British countryside with bat-chomping eco-crucifixes for rent-seeking toffs (aka wind farms) and the destruction of the British economy thanks to the imposition of wholly unnecessary costs and regulations.
Actually there’s probably no saving the British economy. Or Britain. Unless it abandons Socialism/Greenism, it will be poor; and whether or not it abandons Socialism/Greenism, it will be Islamized. Few British politicians – few Britons – want to face up to those all-too-real threats. It’s easier to pretend that the problem is climate change and the solution is wind-farms.