Quotulatiousness

March 9, 2026

A lot of real problems could be fixed with $16 trillion

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, John Robson observes that there are huge numbers of problems — real, measurable problems — that could be ameliorated or completely solved by the application of $16 trillion dollars. But instead, the governments of the western world have pissed that up against the wall on unsuccessful efforts to address climate change:

In the Epoch Times Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation writes “Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex. And for what?” A splendid question. Of course some people would say “Well, to keep the sky from catching fire, duh”. But since the reduction in emissions has been trivial, it wasn’t a great bargain. Plus, Moore being an actual economist, he drills in on the key point: “But it’s much worse than that. In economics, there is a concept called opportunity cost: What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off?” So, after carving “Opportunity cost” over the entrance to our academy, we ask anyone who enters to suppose that you are a do-gooder, and a green one at that. And suppose that someone had offered you sixteen trillion bucks back in 1995 to do good with. Whatever you wanted. Malnutrition in Africa. Plastic in the oceans. Loss of habitat. Safe drinking water for people in South Asia or even on Canadian aboriginal reserves. Literally anything. What could you have accomplished, or at least attempted? This question was long ago posed by Lomborg, albeit only with $75 billion imaginary dollars, to a panel of experts who concluded climate change was far down the list of spending targets. And yet governments said no thanks and spend all $16 trillion fighting “carbon pollution”. And for what?

In their defence those same governments might be tempted to point to the lack of warming and say something like “See, it worked! Sure, $16 trillion is a lot but we saved Earth from runaway heating so be grateful.” However they are also the ones who lament that the planet continues to warm, heat, bake and boil. So even if they’re right, they’re wrong. And either way, the money really was all wasted.

Of course they might say no, see, it would have been way worse without that spending. And as we’ve noted before, one of the many slippery things about climate alarmism is just how fast they think changes in CO2 produces changes in temperature and via changes in temperature, changes in weather. It’s very difficult to pin them down on just when the really troubling impacts began to be palpable, not least because they generally say we’re already in a climate crisis that’s about to hit. But even the models, and here we include hysterical ones like RCP8.5, do not generally suggest that the temperature today would be a whole lot higher if we’d stayed on the emissions track from 1995 instead of, well, staying on it, with Western nations declining due to increasing energy efficiency not political grandstanding and China, India and others more than taking up the slack.

To be fair, it would not be illogical for such persons to say, or shriek, that it proves $16 trillion was just peanuts, we should have spent $160 trillion or $48 quadrillion or 4 Triganic Pus or something of that sort. And they did.

For instance, just over two years ago Bloomberg actually ran a column saying “$266 Trillion in Climate Spending is a No-Brainer”. And we agreed, sardonically, since the whole world GDP seems to be around $96 trillion as nearly as anyone can estimate it. (We are not convinced most alarmists who toss such numbers around, like former Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna who wanted “trillions in infrastructure investments from both governments and the private sector”, can tell you off the cuff to within an order of magnitude what, say, the current US or Canadian GDP is.)

February 24, 2026

Canada’s climate follies, a brief update

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, John Robson looks at the Canadian federal government’s lofty climate goals and their pathetic strategies to achieve those goals and the vast chasm between the two:

Chinese electric vehicles are likely coming to Canadian roads, like these BYD models.

Forgive us for being fixated on Canada’s climate follies just because we live here. But they are revealing, including the U-turn on EVs that we mentioned last week where the government yanked the steering wheel so hard they did a 360 from banning gasoline vehicles by law to banning them by regulation. Raising the question whether they actually know what they’re doing and, if so, whether they regard themselves as commendably devious or just way smarter than everyone else. We hope not the latter because the policy is going to fail big-time. As Randall Denley just warned in the National Post, “To summarize, the Carney plan relies on electric vehicles (EVs) that Ontario plants don’t produce, a sudden and dramatic new appetite for buying EVs and an imagined export market that doesn’t exist. To top it off, the federal government will provide $2.3 billion in EV rebates that will encourage Canadians to buy cars made elsewhere.” Apart from that, a stroke of genius of the sort that, through decades of diligent effort, has made the nation tragically poorer without hitting any of our targets including the one where they get more humble.

As a Globe & Mail news story blurted out:

    A new study published Friday by the Canadian Climate Institute says Canada is not on track to meet any of its climate targets – not the 2026 interim emissions reduction target, the 2030 Paris Agreement commitment, or even the long-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Oh. Pretty hard to make that one sound like an achievement, isn’t it? Or to sound as if the people who pulled it off should be trusted with the next one.

Now as we’ve complained before, the “Canadian Climate Institute” bills itself as some sort of dispassionate neutral observer when in fact it’s a creature of the state. And, worse, one of those lavishly-funded outfits (we deniers may have all the money, but they got $30 million from the Canadian government and we did not … uh no, that was just one grant, the total’s higher) that exists to push the government to do things it wants to do anyway but needs the appearance of “civil society” support to pull off.

Thus, the Globe sonorously informs us, the problem isn’t that the targets were impractical or the politicians and bureaucrats inept. Heck no. As usual with Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision” of public policy, all you need is love:

    The report suggests Canada has moved away from its climate goals thanks to “a slackening of policy effort over the past year, marked by the removal or weakening of climate policies across the country”.

Which gives the impression they had been on track to meet their goals up until some recent backsliding, whereas in reality they have never shown any sign of meeting them. After all, what policies have actually changed since Carney took over as Prime Minister in ways that could possibly affect long-term trends? And how close was Canada to meeting “its climate goals” before this disastrous swerve into the camp of the deniers?

It’s not even true that “Canada” as a collective has collective “climate goals”. The government has climate goals, and they come bundled with a host of other policies at election time, especially since even our “Conservative” party is terrified of challenging climate orthodoxy. Public support for those goals is weak, sporadic and prone to vanish when real costs hove into view. But ignoring that piece of typical collectivist prose, Mark Carney has spent most of his prime ministership flying around virtue-signaling in the presence of others doing the same. (No, really. It’s been less than a year and he’s taken almost three dozen flights.) He hasn’t been in the office shredding this and demolishing that.

January 15, 2026

Having it both ways, thanks to the miraculous powers of “climate change”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Remember those news reports from a few years back, when the media urgently informed you that your home town was “warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet”? Sure you do, because every major outlet latched on to the idea and juiced it for that local angle. In the days before the internet and social media, it would have worked, too. This is an example of the amazing powers of climate change, but far from the only one. Apparently the wonders of climate change can both speed up and slow down the rotation of the entire planet:

Here is a headline from Forbes 4 August 2022:

Here, five short days later, is a headline from The Independent 9 August 2022:

It is possible to reconcile these two messages, if you are are dedicated The Science follower who greatly fears being called a science denier.

This is how: that on or before 8 August 2022, you swear the earth is spinning faster, and you say that any who doubts this is a troglodyte MAGAtard, and that 9 August 2022 and after, you swear the earth is spinning slower, and say that any who doubts this is mouth-breathing redneck.

The Science is self-correcting in this way.

Now what is amusing about this is not the hubris and over-certainty of scientists, which because scientists are people have characteristics in them no different than in non-scientists. What matters to us are (a) the alleged causes of the changes in rotational speed, and (b) AI.

[…]

I have been trying, with little success, to explain that AI is programmed to be sycophantic, to give users a feeling that what they (the users) believe is right, and that they are right to believe whatever it is they want to believe. Press any of these AI models strongly and consistently enough, and you can get them to “admit” just about anything — that they haven’t been hard coded not to notice. DIE is still with us, even, or especially in, AI.

AI has sworn that earth is both speeding up and slowing down, promising both were true with searches I did (for the article titles) separated by less than a minute.

Now this is partly to blame on the training material, because scientists themselves are claiming the same things AI found. Which brings us to the alleged causes of both.

Climate change.

Well of course it was climate change. Climate change, as we discovered earlier, is responsible for all things on earth. All bad things, that is. Climate change simultaneously causes earth to spin both slower and faster. Climate change is therefore a branch of quantum mechanics, where outcomes both happen and don’t happen, depending on which scientist is looking.

January 4, 2026

“You will eat the bugs, peasant!”

Filed under: Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to yet another “bugs are yummy, peons, you are going to eat them” post:

Contemplating this picture, I had a realization about the people who want you to eat bugs.

The fact that the bugs are disgusting to you is the whole point. Enlisting you as the principal enforcer of your oppression is the program. Fucking with your head is the actual goal, not just a tactic.

It doesn’t matter whether or not Western prejudice against eating insects is irrational. In an alternate world where we routinely eat insects, the people who want you to eat the bugs would find some other kind of disgusting garbage and play to make you eat it.

Because this isn’t sustainability or any of that bullshit. The degradation is the point.

However, even the powers-that-be can’t magically create economic conditions in which insect factories earn profits:

In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.

h/t Tom Nelson

    How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
    By Anna Heim, TechCrunch

    The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.

    Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.

It’s only money …

    And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).

The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.

QotD: The boomerang effect

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve noticed a common phenomenon. Let’s call it the boomerang effect.

Lament the rise of an opinion or policy without noticing how your preferred policies helped cause it.

Vaccination rates down — because you wrecked the reputation of vaccines during the pandemic by over claiming.

Anti-immigrant feeling leading to difficulties for legal immigrants — because you welcomed millions of illegal immigrants and prevented them being deported.

Prosecution of political opponents — because you did it too.

Dislike seeing people cancelled for their opinions — because you started it.

Rising climate scepticism — because you censored reasonable criticism of climate extremism.

Anger at trans rights activists — because you shouted down concerns about men pretending to be women in sports and prisons.

Government attacks on universities — because you turned them into ideological madrassas.

Patriotic nationalism turning uglier — because you told people flags were racist.

Criticism of judges — because they became nakedly political.

Defunding of biotechnology — because you failed to call out dangerous gain-of-function virology as the likely cause of the death of 20 million+ people.

Etc etc

Matt Ridley, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-27.

December 17, 2025

“The ‘liberal international order’ – a technocratic oligarchy sustained by tightly interlocked institutions”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Last week, Len D. Pozeram wrote about how the real (but mostly unacknowledged) American empire is facing unprecedented challenges and may indeed be in serious decline:

“The Empire’s Mask is Slipping”, The Libertarian Alliance

For generations, Americans were sold a saccharine myth: that our nation’s vast global presence — its military bases on every continent, its endless wars, its economic interventions — was all done in the name of “freedom” and “human rights”. This was the sales pitch. Washington, we were told, was the benevolent policeman of a dangerous world, upholding a Pax Americana designed to uplift humanity.

But for those willing to look beyond the rhetoric, the truth was never hidden — only ignored. This narrative was never more than a sophisticated marketing campaign, engineered to pacify a domestic public and legitimize imperial conquest abroad. From the very beginning, the post-WWII global order was not about freedom, but about power — and who would control it after the collapse of the old European empires.

With the fall of the British Empire, America did not merely “step up” to defend the West — it seized control of the imperial machinery and rebranded it. The British financial aristocracy gave way to a new though related American elite, its nucleus formed around Wall Street banks, the military-industrial complex, Big Oil cartels, and, increasingly, a rising Zionist lobby with ambitions stretching far beyond Tel Aviv.

Under the guise of “containing communism” or “defending democracy”, this new managerial class waged a quiet war against genuine national independence movements across the globe. Countries seeking to control their own resources, chart their own destinies, or resist Western financial domination were systematically targeted for destabilization or outright annihilation.

Guatemala in 1954. Iran in 1953. Indonesia in 1965. The Congo. Chile. Nicaragua. Greece. Even Australia, whose 1975 constitutional crisis remains a textbook case of covert Anglo-American regime change. The public, of course, was kept in the dark. History books were rewritten. Journalists who strayed from the script were destroyed or silenced. CIA fingerprints are now visible in dozens of these cases — operations sanctioned not to spread freedom, but to preserve a system of elite extraction and control.

This system — often referred to in polite company as the “liberal international order” — is, in fact, a technocratic oligarchy. It is sustained by tightly interlocked institutions: the Federal Reserve, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, and a sprawling Intelligence Community whose true loyalties lie not with the American public, but with transnational networks of finance, energy, and geopolitical strategy. To the extent that ideology plays a role, it is the convergence of evangelical apocalypticism and messianic Zionism — two religious currents that have dangerously informed U.S. foreign policy since the Reagan era.

Yet today, this system is beginning to eat itself. The ideology of endless war, and top-down control has run up against hard limits: financial, and political. The de-dollarization trend in the Global South, the rise of multipolar alliances like BRICS, and the exposure of elite criminality — from Epstein to the endless intelligence scandals — are all symptoms of imperial overstretch and rot.

We are watching the slow collapse of an empire built not on democratic values but on lies, coercion, and institutionalized greed.

From a slightly different viewpoint, Spaceman Spiff maintains that the narratives that have been used to direct and control political thought in the west are in the process of collapsing:

Image from Postcards from the Abyss

As reality intrudes the naivety behind many sacred cows is exposed. The emperor is naked and his supporters look equally naked. The narratives driving their fantasies are failing.

The big three issues common in the West illustrate why people are noticing.

Diversity and immigration

The promotion of diversity as a strength is a consequence of blank slate thinking, a belief disparate populations are substantially the same with most observable differences due to environment only.

This is at odds with what we observe, the significant range in ability and proficiency between distinct groups that becomes apparent when we interact. So artificial variety is sold as a positive in an attempt to downplay the homogeneity that gets better results.

The consequence of this is quotas, where arbitrary rules are enforced to ensure a diverse outcome.

This destroys competency even if we ignore the potential for conflict when foreigners are imported in large numbers.

The main effect of pushing this absurd policy seems to be the rise of ethnic awareness among those who must step aside to accommodate it. How could it not? When people are excluded because of their ethnicity it becomes important to them.

This is not what advocates of diversity intended but is already happening.

Climate

Climate and energy policy is based on anti-scientific magical thinking. With the current emphasis on carbon dioxide we are told a tiny portion of our atmosphere is responsible for most of the future changes that will cause widespread harm. There is no evidence for such claims.

The reality of climate is different from the narrative. It is resilient, as many things are. Our obsession is arrogance. A belief we matter more than we do.

Intellectuals are prone to get lost in their theories of how the world ought to work. Activists then latch on to their utopian ideas to gain some sense of meaning in their lives.

Society also has people lacking conscience who will profit from anything no matter how much damage it causes. Combining these two, dreamers with schemers, is often lethal. Seemingly opposing forces, left-wing activists and capitalist profiteers, can cooperate even if they embrace distinct beliefs.

As many memes remind us, if you have corporate sponsorship you are not the resistance. This is precisely what we see.

Narratives begin to collapse as we witness ruthless corporations promote feelgood nonsense about climate while fleecing taxpayers in the background. Many are noticing.

And the effects of suicidal climate goals are difficult to hide. Every closed factory or power station kills another element of credibility.

Socialism

Socialism is based on the idea an educated elite can make decisions for us all while simultaneously conditioning us to be better versions of ourselves. It ignores all of history and everything we have learned of human psychology to embrace a literal fantasy utopia that no one has even come close to realizing.

Nothing sums up the bankruptcy of our intellectuals more than their inability to reject this failed ideology.

But it also shows us the Anglo-Saxon instinct to restrict others’ control over us is the only way to counter it.

It teaches us of the wisdom of documents like Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, designed to constrain the powerful regardless of their motives, ambitions or mental state. Rare moments of historical sanity that remind us what effective countermeasures can look like.

It would seem this lesson must be relearned every few generations. But we are learning it. Real life is reminding us why we must limit government and its agents no matter how inconvenient.

Bad ideas are inevitable. It is the ability of activists and the powerful to enact them many are now waking up to as narratives visibly fail.

November 5, 2025

QotD: Progressive anger

Filed under: Education, Environment, Europe, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This year, as last, bees — tens of thousands of them — made their home between a window in my house in France and the shutters. We called a local bee-man and he came to try to capture the bees in an artificial hive. This is not a straightforward operation and success is not guaranteed, because it is necessary to capture the queen, which is not always possible. Without the queen, the bees are lost. They fly off in a swarm, buzzing angrily (I anthropomorphize, I admit) as they search for their lost leader and somewhere new to settle.

As they did so in this case, I could not help but think of the analogy with our present situation. We have a huge fund of very angry people buzzing about in mobs looking for somewhere on which their anger can settle. It seems an epoch ago that it landed on #MeToo and turned all men into Harvey Weinstein. Then, under the direction of little Greta, who somehow managed to combine an autistic manner with hysteria, opposing tendencies reconciled no doubt by the ineffable self-pity of the privileged, global warming provided a temporary resting place. However, with the killing of George Floyd, climate change seems as passé as Mussolini’s spats. (“Too many spats, too many spats!” someone once said of him.) But if no new thing is found after all the statues have been pulled down, the books burned, and the films withdrawn from circulation, climate change could return faute de mieux. On the other hand, free-floating anger is highly inventive as to the reasons for its existence: It can attach itself to almost anything, as flies can walk upside down on ceilings. Being no prophet myself, I have no idea what will be the next object of angry righteousness by people brought up to believe in moral relativism.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Bees With Degrees”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-07-02.

September 13, 2025

“It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, Carson Jerema identifies the common thread among all of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s efforts since becoming Liberal party leader:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Prime Minister Mark Carney may not be as obnoxiously progressive as Justin Trudeau, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t stubbornly left wing in his own right, though he has managed to convince many critics otherwise.

Over the past decade, the Liberals were particularly self-righteous over climate policy, so much so that the deviations made by Carney since assuming office have been met with praise — or, on the left, with scorn — that he is somehow pro-business and represents the return of the centre-right Liberals. Some even think he’s a conservative. Others have suggested that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is now entirely redundant.

This narrative is just more proof of how utterly captured the media is in this country by the Liberal party. It is true that Carney gives the appearance that he is abandoning many of the government’s environmental policies. He set the carbon tax rate to zero, paused the EV mandate and, on Thursday, he refused to endorse his government’s own carbon-emissions targets.

None of this, however, should be taken as evidence that Carney represents some sort of rightward or pro-business shift in the Liberal party. He is not proposing to let markets determine what infrastructure projects get built. Nor is he proposing to minimize regulations to attract investment.

Instead, Carney wants to command the economy by himself, laying bare the reality that what attracts left-wing politicians to climate policy is not saving the planet from carbon, but using environmental objectives to manage the economy. It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now. For Carney specifically, before he entered politics, “decarbonizing” markets was quite remunerative in his various banking roles.

Noticeably absent from the five infrastructure projects that the prime minister said on Thursday would be fast-tracked under the Major Projects Office was an oil and gas pipeline. Also noticeable was the fact that all five of the projects had already been approved, but the government tried to pass them off as something new anyway.

Even if the projects had been all brand new, the lack of a pipeline would still be of no surprise, as what private investor would be willing to back a pipeline when the Liberals’ Impact Assessment Act, tanker ban and emissions cap all exist to conspire against energy projects of any kind?

One thing that became incredibly obvious early in Justin Trudeau’s premiership was that the prime minister — and his ministers in general — really did seem to believe that talking about doing something was as effective in solving problems as actually doing the thing. Many had hoped that Mark Carney would be different … but as Dan Knight points out, he may actually be worse:

From there, [Poilievre] broadened the attack. He spoke of an entire generation priced out of homeownership, of immigration growing “three times faster than housing and jobs”, of crime rising, and of what he called “the worst economy in the G7”. And then he turned squarely on Carney: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“, citing an 8% increase in government spending, 37% more for consultants, and 62 billion dollars in lost investment — the largest outflow in Canadian history, according to the National Bank.

The message was simple: Liberals talk, Conservatives build. Poilievre painted Carney as a man of speeches and promises, not results. “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“, he said.

It was an opening statement designed less to introduce policy — those details came later — and more to frame the battle. For Poilievre, Carney isn’t just Trudeau’s replacement. He’s Trudeau’s sequel, and in some ways worse.

[…]

Pierre Poilievre didn’t hold back when asked about Mark Carney’s record. His words: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“. That’s not a throwaway line, he backed it with numbers.

According to Poilievre, Carney inherited what he called a “morbidly obese government” from Trudeau and made it worse: 8% bigger overall, 37% more for consultants, and 6% more bureaucracy. He says Carney’s deficit is set to be even larger than Trudeau’s.

Then the jobs number: 86,000 more unemployed people under Carney than under Trudeau. That, Poilievre argued, is the real measure, not the polished speeches Carney gives. His line: “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“.

September 12, 2025

Britain’s network of weather stations is becoming less and less reliable

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Well-sited weather stations can provide useful raw data on temperature ranges, wind speed, precipitation, and other measurables, but that “well-sited” makes a huge difference. Older weather stations situated in areas of rapid urban expansion will often be less reliable as they become part of the urban heat island and report higher temperatures due to locally generated heat sources rather than the ambient temperature they were able to record before. This is what has apparently happened to far too many of the UK’s temperature measuring sites, according to Chris Morrison in The Daily Sceptic:

The latest WMO Class figures at the Met Office shown in block graph form. The higher the class number, the less reliable the station reports become.
Image from The Daily Sceptic

In March 2024 the Daily Sceptic shocked the science and political world by disclosing that nearly 80% of the UK Met Office’s temperature measuring sites were so poorly located that potential “uncertainties” could corrupt the readings by a numbers of degrees of centigrade. World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Classes 4 and 5 in its CIMO scale come with “uncertainties” up to 2°C and 5°C respectively, and a Freedom of Information (FOI) request found that 77.9% of its sites were in these two “junk” categories. It should have been a wake-up call demanding immediate improvement of the nationwide network, not least because the Met Office frequently catastrophises its temperature figures in the interest of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Alas, no. A new FOI has found that the Classes 4 and 5 junk sites have increased significantly over the last 18 months and now total an appalling 80.6% of the entire network. Pristine Class 1 sites – which measure a credible ambient air temperature with little chance of unnatural heat corruption – are just 4.9% of the total, having fallen in number in this short period from 24 to 19.

Hundreds of millions of pounds have flowed through this Government department over the last 18 months but little effort seems to have been made to improve its basic and important meteorological measuring function. What is worse is that the Met Office doesn’t seem to understand the scale of the problem. Over the 18 months, it appears that 20 new sites have been opened in its now 387-strong network. Seventeen of these have been given WMO classifications, of which a frankly ludicrous 64.7% are starting life in the Class 4/5 junk lane.

The WMO rates weather stations by the degree of possible temperature corruption caused by nearby unnatural or natural influences. Classes 1 and 2 are considered what we might call pristine, with no significant errors arising from artificial influences. The latest figures show that the Met Office has just 12.1% of its sites in these two unadulterated categories. Class 3 comes with an uncertainty of up to 1°C and accounts for 7.23% of the total. The real shocker is Class 4 where the percentage of the total has risen from 48.7% to over half at 50.1%. Class 5 has no defining conditions and could be located next to a blast furnace door. It has risen over the last 18 months from 29.2% to 30.5%. The WMO states that a Class 1 location can be considered a “reference site”. A Class 5 site is said to be a location “where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”.

Despite this, Class 5 “extremes”, often caused by temporary but obvious heat spikes, litter the Met Office databases and record books. Of course such Class 5 data, unsuitable for providing an accurate temperature for a “wide area”, are loaded into databases producing “hottest evah” days, months, seasons and years. Their final destinations are the global datasets that exaggerate recent warming, again to promote Net Zero. Sprinkling the Class 4 and 5 fairy dust over the figures adds a bit more of the urgency required for elite political purposes.

August 28, 2025

History of Britain VII: Fall of Roman Britain

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Thersites the Historian
Published 23 Feb 2025

After its efflorescence during the 2nd Century, Roman Britain entered steep decline during the 3rd Century and the benefits of Roman civilization had all but vanished by the time that the Romans withdrew their forces and support.

August 7, 2025

QotD: The lost-then-found-again Hittite civilization

Filed under: Books, History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… Mycenaean Greece was as much an outlier as sub-Roman Britain: the civilizational collapse in the Aegean was unusually prolonged and severe compared to the fates of many of the other peoples of the Late Bronze Age. Here I have helpfully reformatted Cline’s chart of how resilient the various societies proved:

Let’s take a brief tour through the various fates of these societies. I’ll come back to the Phoenicians at the end, because their example raises interesting questions when considered in contrast with the Mycenaeans. For the moment, though, let’s begin like civilization itself: in Mesopotamia.

Before the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Assyrian and Babylonian empires had numbered among the Great Powers of the age: linked by marriage, politics, war, and trade to the other mighty kings, they spent much of their time conducting high-level diplomacy and warfare. As far as we can tell, they did well in the initial collapse: there’s a brief hiatus in Assyrian royal inscriptions running from about 1208 to 1132 BC, but records resume again with the reign of Aššur-reša-iši I and his repeated battles with his neighbor to the south, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I (no relation). But although the kings of the late twelfth century continued much as their Bronze Age predecessors had — waging war, building palaces, going hunting, accepting tribute, collecting taxes, and ordering it all recorded in stone and clay — the world had changed around them. No longer were there huge royal gifts sent to and from fellow great kings, “My Majesty’s brother”1 overseas; now their diplomatic world consisted of tiny petty kings of nearby cities who could be looted or extorted at will.

Mesopotamia didn’t escape unscathed forever: beginning around 1080 BC, texts begin to record severe droughts, invading Aramaeans, and total crop failures. There was a major drought in 1060 BC, and then both the Assyrian and Babylonian records record further drought every ten years like clockwork — sometimes accompanied by plague, sometimes by “troubles and disorder” — until the end of the eleventh century BC. Most of the tenth century was equally dire, with chronicles recording grain shortages, invasions, and a cessation of regular offerings to the gods.

But unlike the Mycenaeans, and in spite of real suffering (ancient Babylonia is estimated to have lost up to 75% of its population in the three hundred years after the Collapse), both Mesopotamian empires were able to hang on to civilization. There were still kings, there were still scribes, and there were still boundary stones on which to record things like “distress and famine under King Kaššu-nadin-ahhe”. And when conditions finally improved, Assyria and Babylonia were both able to bounce back. When at last the Assyrian recovery began under Aššur-dan II (934-912 BC), for example, he (or more realistically, his scribe) was able to write: “I brought back the exhausted people of Assyria who had abandoned their cities and houses in the face of want, hunger, and famine, and had gone up to other lands. I settled them in cities and homes which were suitable and they dwelt in peace”. Clearly, Assyria still retained enough statehood to effect the sort of mass population transfer that had long been a feature of Mesopotamian polities.2

Over the next few centuries, the Neo-Assyrian Empire would come to dominate the Near East, regularly warring with (and eventually conquering) Babylon and collecting tribute from smaller states all over the region. At its peak, it was the largest empire history had ever known, covering a geographic extent unsurpassed until the Achaemenids. The Babylonians had to wait a little longer for their moment in the sun, but near the end of the seventh century they overthrew their Assyrian overlords and ushered in the Neo-Babylonian Empire. (Less than a century later, Cyrus showed up.)

So how did Babylon and Assyria hold on to civilization — statehood, literacy, monumental architecture, and so forth — when the Greeks lost it and had to rebuild almost from scratch? Unfortunately, Cline doesn’t really answer this. He offers extensive descriptions of all the historical and archaeological evidence for the diverse fates of various Late Bronze Age societies, but only at the very end of the book does he briefly run through the theories (and even then it’s pretty lackluster). He does have a suggestion about the timing — the ninth century Assyrian resurgence lines up almost perfectly with the abnormally wet conditions during the Assyrian megapluvial — but why was it the Assyrians who found themselves particularly well-positioned to take advantage of the shift in the climate? Why not, say, the Hittites?

Sometime around 1225 BC, the Hittite king Tudhaliya IV wrote to his brother-in-law and vassal, Shaushgamuwa of Amurru, that only the rulers of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria were “Kings who are my equals in rank”.3 A mere thirty years later, though, his capital city of Hattusa would lie abandoned and destroyed. Modern excavators describe ruins reduced to “ash, charred wood, mudbricks and slag formed when mud-bricks melted from the intense heat of the conflagration”.

And with that, the Hittites essentially vanished from history.

They were so thoroughly forgotten, in fact, that when nineteenth-century archaeologists discovered the ruins of their civilization in Anatolia, they had no idea who these people were. (Eventually they identified the new sites with the Hittites of the Bible, who lived hundreds of years later and hundreds of miles to the south, out of sheer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)4

What happened to the Hittites? Well, Cline suggests the usual mélange of drought, famine, and interruption of international trade routes, as well as a potential usurpation attempt from Tudhaliya’s cousin Kurunta, but the actual answer is that we’re not sure. Given the timing, they may have been the first of the Late Bronze Age dominos to fall; given the lack of major rivers in central Anatolia, they may have been uniquely susceptible to drought. Hattusa may have been abandoned before the fire — its palaces and temples show little sign of looting, suggesting they [may] already have been emptied out — but many other sites in the Hittites’ central Anatolian heartland were destroyed around the same time, and some of those have bodies in the destruction layer. But whatever the order of events, Hittite civilization collapsed as thoroughly and dramatically as the Mycenaeans’ had done, and with a similar pattern of depopulation and squatters in the ruins. Unlike the Mycenaeans, though, the Hittites would never be followed by successors who inherited their culture; the next civilization of Anatolia was the Phrygians, who probably arrived from Europe in the vacuum following the Hittites’ fall.

There was one exception: in the Late Bronze Age, cadet branches of the Hittite royal family had ruled a few small satellite statelets in what is now northern Syria, and many of these “Neo-Hittite” polities managed to survive the Collapse. A tiny, far-flung corner of a much greater civilization, they nevertheless outlasted the destruction of their metropole and maintained Hittite-style architecture and hieroglyphic inscriptions well into the Iron Age.5 (They would be swallowed up by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the late eighth century BC.) And though the Neo-Hittite kings ruled over tiny rump states, we’re now able to translate inscriptions in which they referred themselves by the same titles the Bronze Age Hittite “Great Kings” had employed. The records of their larger neighbors, which had a much greater historical impact, seem to have followed suit: the Neo-Hittites in Syria probably actually were the Hittites of the Bible! Chalk up another one for nineteenth century archaeology.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.

    1. I really think we should bring back monarchs referring to themselves as “my Majesty”. So much cooler than the royal “we”. Or combine them: “our Majesty”!

    2. The Babylonian Captivity, much later in the Iron Age, was far from historically unique.

    3. The list actually reads, “the King of Egypt, the King of Babylonia, the King of Assyria, and the King of Ahhiyawa” — the strikethrough appears in the original clay tablet! A generation earlier, under Tudhaliya’s father Hattusili III, the Hittite texts had consistently referred to the king of Ahhiyawa as a “great King” and a “brother”, but apparently the geostrategic position of the Mycenaean ruler had degraded substantially.

    4. We now know that the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language and referred to themselves “Neshites”, but the name has stuck.

    5. I went looking for a good historical analogy for the Neo-Hittite kingdoms and discovered, to my delight, the Kingdom of Soissons, which preserved Romanitas for a few decades after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Neo-Hittites lasted a lot longer.

August 6, 2025

Actual data demolishes the “climate catastrophe” narrative

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Conservative Woman, Paul Homewood summarizes the findings of a new report for the US Department of Energy:

A report by five independent, eminent scientists has blown apart the myth of catastrophic climate change, destroying the case for Net Zero in the process.

Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, Ross McKitrick, John Christy and Steve Koonin are all highly respected leaders in their respective fields. Their report was commissioned by the US Department of Energy (DOE) but written with no editorial oversight by the DOE and with no political influence whatsoever. Although it specifically covers the US, its findings have worldwide ramifications.

The 151-page report, A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate, reviews scientific certainties and uncertainties in how anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions have affected, or will affect, the nation’s climate, extreme weather events, and selected metrics of societal well-being.

Maybe the most relevant part concerns extreme weather. According to the report: ‘Most extreme weather events in the US do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by US historical data. Additionally, forest management practices are often overlooked in assessing changes in wildfire activity. Global sea level has risen approximately 8 inches since 1900, but there are significant regional variations driven primarily by local land subsidence; US tide gauge measurements in aggregate show no obvious acceleration in sea level rise beyond the historical average rate.

A few graphs from the report tell the story, and you can see them at the end of this article.

  1. US landfalling hurricanes show no long-term trends, either in frequency or intensity;
  2. Heatwaves were much worse than now before the 1960s;
  3. Temperature extremes are reducing, as a greater number of extremely hot days is more than offset by fewer extremely cold ones;
  4. There has been a marked decline in the number of the strongest tornadoes, EF3 to EF5, since the 1970s. The increased numbers of weaker tornadoes is the result of better observation methods, including Doppler radar, not an actual increase;
  5. US droughts were much more severe for most of the historical record going back to 1895;
  6. While wildfire activity has marginally increased since the 1980s, it was considerably worse up to the Second World War. Most of these long-term changes are caused by fire management practices, not climate changes;
  7. Tide gauges all around the US show the same story – a slow and steady sea level rise beginning in the mid 19thC. The rate of rise can vary considerably from station to station because of local factors. New York and the rest of the Atlantic Coast, for example, has been subsiding since the Ice Age; Galveston is sinking as a direct result of groundwater withdrawals.

The scientists pour scorn on weather attribution computer models, which have become the media’s go-to source for climate apocalypse stories. These attribution models routinely claim that extreme weather events have been made more likely because of global warming. They are dismissed in the report, which highlights the lack of high-quality data and reliance on deficient climate models. Other scientists have not been so kind!

July 22, 2025

Bitter reality is coming for the laptop class

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Spaceman Spiff foretells the end of the managed paradise of the “unsophisticated sophisticates” of the privileged laptop class who have been able to keep their dream alive at the expense of everyone outside their rarefied and protected bubbles:

There seems to be a section of society populated with gullible conformists who believe many of the manufactured narratives designed to manage society.

Most are the credentialed products of universities. The laptop class of professionals who operate the corporations, institutions and key organizations.

Their worldview is comprised of stories which are downloaded and stored as mental models. Adhering to these narratives can then devolve into belief systems that are placed beyond criticism. This in turn can easily degenerate into a kind of fanaticism.

Ideas like mass migration and the destruction of reliable energy sources are crazy and yet they are primarily in existence thanks to the efforts of this layer of society, the professionals who implement policies desired by the ruling class.

While some among them are cynically exploiting today’s fads for their own ends, many seem to be true believers.

How can they believe these things so completely? What is going on?

Rebels searching for causes

Most of today’s great crusades seem to have the same characteristics. They are easily downloaded and consumed, they are socially rewarded within some circles, and they are not immediately obvious as issues at all.

The most popular are pre-prepared to an almost comical degree and thoroughly focus-grouped to ensure minimal friction among their consumers.

Many even come with slogans attached. Diversity is our strength is every bit as artificial as two weeks to flatten the curve, but it goes down easily with no thought required, which is the point.

The ideas that stick are the ones most useful to demonstrate virtue. Showing off to your peers you are non-sexist, non-racist and non-homophobic helps secure your place in many professional hierarchies where visible in-group membership matters.

The most prized causes appear to be non-obvious where the conclusions are not reachable with the evidence available.

This confusing aspect makes many question some new idea or policy, but in the laptop class often triggers a sense of smugness that they see beyond the obvious to the obscure thanks to their impressive intellects. Criticism can then be dismissed as simplistic providing a rewarding sense of superiority.

Much of the above is evident in the belief systems of today’s professional classes.

[…]

What to make of all this?

Does any of this matter? Yes it does. It is this section of society that ultimately puts in place the ruinous ideas of the ruling class.

They are in the corporate offices, the local councils and the schools. They are running the television stations and the publishing houses. They are captured by groupthink. Everyone they know thinks as they do. All criticism is easily dismissed.

Very little can penetrate this bubble. Except one thing.

Over time reality intrudes. Models should be updated to accommodate new findings and observations, but that is challenging when they have been uncritically downloaded to satisfy psychological needs.

Contrary evidence threatens one’s sense of self so scrutiny is avoided. When these avoidances ultimately fail some dig even deeper. Magical thinking seems to be everywhere.

The ultimate effect is either a reassessment of one’s worldview, or a psychotic break from reality. We see examples of the latter; Trump Derangement Syndrome is one well known borderline psychosis but there are others.

July 19, 2025

No issue is so important that we can’t have a proper debate on the merits

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Lorenzo Warby refutes the claim that some issues are just too important/too urgent/already decided:

One of the features of the “progressive” politics of the unaccountable classes — those who are just paid for turning up — is the demand that there be “No Debate” about various issues. The most obvious instances are “No Debate” about Trans and “No Debate” about climate change — hence demands that climate scepticism be outlawed.

All such “No Debate” claims are crap. First, any “No Debate” claim is presumptive evidence that what you are pushing is either not true or, slightly more subtly, is a mountain of bullshit erected on a molehill of truth. Robust cases for claims about the world are not afraid of debate.

Various moral urgency claims are mounted to support such “No Debate” claims. How do we determine moral urgency? From the evidence. If the evidence is clear, debate will not threaten that alleged urgency. On the contrary, it will reveal the urgency more clearly.

The underlying philosophical dynamic underlying “No Debate” claims is Critical Constructivism — the claim that reality is socially constructed; that all statements and knowledge claims are, in fact power claims; and that the righteousness of a claim can be determined by their (alleged) effects on (morally differentiated) social groups.

The underlying social dynamic is the use of affirmed beliefs to determine and display righteousness. If affirming X shows one to be one of the righteous, then not believing X shows one to be of the unrighteous. This is typically expressed in various terms of moral abuse (racist, Transphobe, Islamophobe, etc) whose use in media and academe has soared since 2014.

This is not because Western societies have become more bigoted — on any reasonable measure they have become far less so over time — but because the politics of Righteous Affirmed Belief has dramatically surged and so has therefore the stigmatisation of dissent.

To claim that affirming X shows ultimate moral propriety requires stigmatising not-X. For something is morally proper — indeed morally trumping — only if the opposite is morally improper. Thus is moral propriety is enforced by stigmatisation. Hence silence is violence — one must profess righteousness. Hence also words are violence — if affirmation of belief is the ultimate marker of righteousness then expressed disbelief becomes the ultimate marker of abusive malevolence. These dynamics lead to a great deal of preference falsification — people publicly affirming, or at least not opposing, claims that they do not privately believe.

May 24, 2025

Forget it, Fraser Institute: as Trudeau explained, there’s no business case for Canadian LNG

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper reports on a recent Fraser Institute study on the benefits of expanding the production of Canadian liquid natural gas, but as the meme might put it, the feds don’t want benefits, they want to eliminate Canadian LNG production:

A new report says that if Canada really wanted to save the climate, the most effective thing it could do would be to sell as much natural gas to Asia as humanly possible.

The 46-page study, published on Thursday by the right-leaning Fraser Institute, is premised on the notion that Canadian natural gas exports could singlehandedly reduce Asian dependence on coal.

If Canada could double its LNG production, write the authors, it would divert enough coal from Asian power plants to stop 630 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year from entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

For context, that nearly represents Canada’s entire carbon footprint. According to the most recent figures from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the country was responsible for 694 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2023.

“Instead of focusing on reducing domestic GHG emissions in Canada by implementing various policies that hinder economic growth, governments must shift their focus toward global GHG reductions and help the country cut emissions worldwide,” the report says.

The Fraser Institute’s calculation is based on the simple fact that natural gas is an easy substitute for coal, and can produce the same amount of energy with far lower emissions.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration maintains a ranking of fossil fuels by the quantity of emissions they produce for every one million BTUs (British Thermal Units) — roughly the amount of power needed to heat a standard house for several days.

Generating one million BTUs by burning coal will produce between 93 and 103 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Doing the same with natural gas will produce just 53 kilograms.

Canada currently produces about 17.9 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas. Most of this is consumed domestically, while 39 per cent is exported, mostly to the United States via pipeline.

The Fraser Institute calculated that if Canada could double production and “send the surplus … to Asia”, it could potentially supplant more than 200 million tonnes of coal every year.

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