If Toronto was part of Canada, why would a forecast of five centimetres of snow (that’s about two inches) require a special weather statement from Environment Canada?
Really, Toronto? Five measly centimetres and you need a special “OMG! Snow!” notice from the weather folks? That’s too silly for parody.
I mentioned it to Elizabeth before starting this post, and she suggested that it’s another attempt to set up the media template for next year: “Look at the huge increase in special weather statements for the GTA over the last few years. Clearly this proves [global warming | climate change | climate chaos] is real.”
The Zoological Society of London has drawn up a hit list of the 10 attractive coral species most likely to die quite soon. Well, of course it has. Nothing suits the ZSL’s spirit of misanthropy and catastrophism better than another mournful litany of all the species loss which is bound to occur as a result of mankind’s ongoing crime of having the temerity to exist.
Look: those of us on the other side of the argument like corals too. The difference is, we see them as something to celebrate and enjoy rather than things to be regarded solely through a prism of guilt, self-hatred and apocalyptic despair. Naturalists never used to talk this way. Until the Nazis — and, before them, the German romantics — started poisoning the wells, nature was something we could all happily appreciate without being made to feel by yet another eco-fascist that we were personally going to be the cause of its imminent demise.
If the ZSL wants to make a list of pretty corals, why can’t it just distribute it with facts about their habitats and their formation, maybe with lots of nice shiny pictures for us all to wonder at? Why must they lace their message with doom and misanthropy?
I suppose their excuse will be that these corals ARE endangered and that something must be done by YESTERDAY at the latest. But is this another of those overblown eco-panics in the manner of the floating island of plastic bags twice the size of Texas which in fact turned out to be 1/100th the size of Texas?
It’s an unfortunate fact that in order to get media attention to their cause du jour, the situation not only has to be defined as simply as possible, it also has to be positioned in such a way that the media want to get the message out. The easiest way to accomplish this is to go apocalyptic: doom, Doom, DOOM!
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James Delingpole has a bit of fun at London mayor Boris Johnson’s expense:
. . . what sounds like a fervent declaration of faith in the Warmist creed may on closer examination be a perfectly innocuous statement of the bleeding obvious cunningly calculated to appease all Boris’s rentseeking chums in the City who stand to make a fortune from the Great Carbon Scam and would be most displeased if the Mayor of London were to show signs of wobbling.
Yet wobbling is, of course, exactly what Boris is doing. Or rather — remember, this is the man so ambitious he makes Alexander The Great look like Olive from On The Buses — he is slyly repositioning himself to take advantage of the inevitable collapse of public faith in the Great Anthropogenic Global Warming Ponzi Scheme.
All those thousands of people who’ve had their Christmas ruined as a result of Heathrow airport’s pathetic inability to operate in the snow; all those thousands who have been stranded shivering for eight hours at a stretch on our motorways; all those thousands who can’t use their local municipal sports club because the staff — as is the wont of public sector workers — can’t be bothered to allow themselves to be inconvenienced by the inclement conditions; all those people who are going to look at their electricity and gas bills come the end of next quarter and be appalled beyond measure by how increasingly unaffordable they are; all those businesses big and small whose profits are going to be seriously dented by our political class’s ongoing failure to address our transport infrastructure (and no I don’t mean the irrelevant high-speed rail link to Birmingham; I mean the much bigger problem of our shortage of runways at the airports serving London).
All these thousands of people add up to a lot of disgruntled voters ready to ask hard questions about everything from the size of the state (so patently NOT being shrunk to any significant degree by Cameron’s useless Coalition of the Unwilling) to the three main parties’ position on “Global Warming”.
James Delingpole has a handy guide to assure you that man made global warming is still happening:
“It’s all actually a sign that man made global warming is very much a live issue and that there’s more of it happening than ever,” says a top scientist, who holds the British record for securing grant-funding for global warming research projects so he must know what he’s talking about.
“Look at the Met office,” the scientist goes on. “They’ve just told us that 2010 is the hottest year since records began in 1850 and even though the stupid Central England Temperature record tells us something quite different and even though the year hasn’t actually finished yet they must know what they’re talking about and they definitely can’t have fiddled the data because the Met office is part of the government and they wouldn’t lie or get things wrong which is why that barbecue summer was such a scorcher.”
The big problem is, the scientist said, is that the public are really stupid. They think just because Dr David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit said in the Independent in 2000 that soon there’d be no snow because of global warming, when what he actually meant was that soon there’d be lots of snow and that this would be “proof” of global warming. The interviewer just missed out the word “proof” that’s all because journalists are lazy that way.
Yes, yes, confusing mere “weather” with climate again, I’m sure.
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James Delingpole has some entertainment paraphrasing the Cancun climate talks:
Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said today in a quote I’ve made up but which is only slightly less absurd than what he actually said:
“Since the hacked Climategate emails, we expert Climate Scientists have come in for a lot of stick from sceptics and deniers in the pay of Big Oil who claim that we’re just a bunch of misanthropic eco-fascists for whom freedom of choice is a concept more abhorrent than a baby polar bear pickled in shale oil. But nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that it should be entirely up to the people of the earth how they choose to kill themselves. If they don’t wish to follow any of the fun suggestions outlined in the Royal Society’s latest paper ‘So you’ve decided to die for Mother Gaia?’, we’re more than happy to send round a team of our experts to do the job for them.”
Meanwhile, a spokesman for David Cameron said he believed an outbreak of mass extinction would be “Great for Britain. Great for jobs.” He pointed out that after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, there had been some kind of similar economic revival as a result of there being more land, or people dying, or class barriers breaking down or some such, but that the exact details would have to wait for the forthcoming report on history teaching by Simon Schama, entitled: “Why death is the very least Britain deserves for the despicable colonial record which shames us all!”
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Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. This is the theme of my forthcoming book on the controlling, poisonously misanthropic and aggressively socialistic instincts of the modern environmental movement. So how very generous that two of that movement’s leading lights should have chosen the anniversary of Climategate to prove my point entirely.
The first comes courtesy of German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer who has openly admitted what some of us have been saying for some time: that “Climate Change” has nothing to do with man’s modest and thoroughly unthreatening contribution to global mean temperatures, nor even with the plight of baby polar bears so sweet you could almost hug them if you didn’t know they’d take your arm off in a trice. All it is, really, is a Marxist exercise in minority grievance-mongering and wealth redistribution on a global scale.
Or, as Edenhoffer so helpfully puts it it Neue Zurcher Zeitung: (H/T Global Warming Policy Foundation):
First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
James Delingpole points to the successor to global warming/climate change as the cause of the decade:
And so it begins. With all the shamelessness of a Goldman Sachser trading in his middle-aged wife for a hot, pouting twentysomething called Ivanka, the green movement is ditching “Climate Change”. The newer, younger, sexier model’s name? Biodiversity.
When I say shameless, I’m talking so amoral it makes the Whore of Babylon look like Mother Theresa; so flagrant it makes Al Gore’s, ahem, alleged drunken “Love poodle” assault on the Portland Masseuse look like an especially delicate passage from Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love.
[. . .]
Suddenly it becomes clear why they kept Pachauri on at the IPCC. Because the IPCC simply doesn’t matter any more. Sure it will go on, churning out Assessment Report after Assessment Report, bringing pots of money to the usual gang of bent scientists prepared to act as lead authors. But the world’s mainstream media — especially all those environment correspondents who so lovingly transcribe the press releases of Greenpeace and the WWF as if they were holy writ — will have moved on, according to the dictates of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) fashionable crise du jour.
“Never mind ‘Climate Change’,” they’ll say to themselves. “Our readers and viewers aren’t really so into that now all the winters seem to have got so very cold. Biodiversity, that’s the thing.”
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James Delingpole posts the most interesting resignation letter you’re likely to see this year:
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.
Anthony Watts describes it thus:
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.
It’s so utterly damning that I’m going to run it in full without further comment.
Counter-intuitively, although the sun has been going through a period of decreased activity over the last few years, a new study in Nature claims that there’s been an increase in the amount of visible light and near-infrared energy:
New data indicates that changes in the Sun’s output of energy were a major factor in the global temperature increases seen in recent years. The research will be unwelcome among hardcore green activists, as it downplays the influence of human-driven carbon emissions.
As the Sun has shown decreased levels of activity during the past decade, it had been generally thought that it was warming the Earth less, not more. Thus, scientists considered that temperature rises seen in global databases must mean that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions — in particular of CO2 — must be exerting a powerful warming effect.
Now, however, boffins working at Imperial College in London (and one in Colorado) have analysed detailed sunlight readings taken from 2004 to 2007 by NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite. They found that although the Sun was putting out less energy overall than usual, in line with observations showing decreased sunspot activity, it actually emitted more in the key visible-light and near-infrared wavelengths.
These shorter wavelength forms of radiated heat penetrate the atmosphere particularly well to heat up the Earth’s surface — just as the same frequencies get in through car windows to heat up its interior. The hot seats and dashboard — in this case the seas, landmasses etc — then radiate their own increased warmth via conduction, convection and longer-wave infrared, which can’t escape the way the shortwave energy came in. This is why the car, and the planet, become so hot.
Thus the Sun, though it was unusually calm in the back half of the last decade, was actually warming the planet much more strongly than before.
If this research is confirmed, it certainly provides a lot of ammunition to the folks who don’t want to spend huge sums to try to cut down carbon emissions.
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I believe it was the historian Robert Conquest who said that every organization eventually behaves as though it is run by a secret cabal of its enemies. I have seldom seen any more convincing evidence of this than the “No Pressure” video released by the anti-global-warming activist campaign 10:10.
[. . .]
The reaction from AGW skeptics was no surprise; many fulminated that the mask had slipped, and this video is the agenda of environmental fascism writ large. Thoughtcrime brings death! Conform! Obey! Or die . . . and the survivors get pieces of their friends spattered all over them as a warning. I think we open a more interesting inquiry by taking the 10:10 campaign at their word. They thought they were being funny.
[. . .]
There’s a mind-boggling disconnect from the feelings of ordinary human beings implied here, a kind of moral and emotional incompetence. It’s as though the 10:10 campaigners were so anesthetized by the secretions of their own zealotry that they became incapable of understanding how anyone not living deep inside their reality-tunnel would react.
[. . .]
To update Lewis, your garden-variety power-mad monster might commit the atrocities in this video, but only because they are not funny — because they spread fear or demonstrate power and ruthlessness. The kind of idealism that aims to be “tormenting us for our own good” may be what is required before you think blowing up schoolchildren with the push of a button is funny.
As many have commented, how could this video possibly have been professionally written, directed, acted, filmed, and edited with nobody actually noticing how awful it was? Were they all so morally sure of the righteousness of their cause that the didn’t recognize (or care) how most people would react to their casual — even cheerful — butchery?
I have to imagine that this little propaganda number was put together by the anti side rather than the pro side:
You don’t agree with this program? No pressure . . . we’ll blow up your kids. James Delingpole thinks it’s great (but not for the cause it supposedly represents):
But with this new monstrosity, truly the great Richard Curtis has excelled himself. It’s so bad, it makes his previous shimmering masterpieces of emetica – Love Actually, The Girl In The Cafe, The Boat That Rocked – look like Battleship Potemkin. It makes the Vicar of Dibley look like a collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. It’s so deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful it makes you wish that the man could be given a ticker tape parade in every major capital city, in gratitude for the devastating damage he has (unwittingly) wrought on the eco-fascist cause.
Update: Apparently, James isn’t the only one who thinks this is sending exactly the wrong message — the campaign is trying to recall the clip:
That, at any rate, is what they keep trying to do — cancelling it whenever it appears on You Tube, pulling it from their campaign website and so on.
Unfortunately their efforts are being frustrated by people on the sceptical side of the climate debate, who keep peskily insisting on reposting the video where everyone can view it. And rightly so. With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.
I don’t think any of us will ever be able to look at another Richard Curtis movie in quite the same way ever again. It may even be that we will now never, ever be able to enjoy another episode of the Vicar of Dibley, because all we’ll be able to think about is Dawn French with a Panzerfaust beneath her cassock ready to blast off the heads of any members of her congregation who don’t believe in Man Made Global Warming. What a sad day this is for us all.
Update, the second: Iowahawk thinks this may well be a great subject for a Harvard Business School case study. Using the principles of “new journalism”, he carefully recreates the situation, constructing dialogue to fit the theme:
London, sometime earlier this year: The 10:10 Project, a nonprofit NGO focused on reducing carbon, convenes a high level meeting in their posh modern conference room. After reviewing PowerPoint on the results of their latest government grant proposals and white-liberal-guilt fund raising campaigns, the 10:10 marketing team reports that previous communication efforts have not been proceeding as expected.
“Perhaps what we need is a fresh new campaign,” offers one of the conferees. “Something different, provocative… something edgy. Something that will really get our message across.” This is greeted with great excitement. The finance director pours through spreadsheets and identifies a budget source. An executive screening committee is appointed who develop timelines and begin scheduling meetings with London’s top agencies and independent film production firms.
Several weeks later, after sitting through a half dozen agency presentations that have yet to meet their standards, 10:10’s highly paid executive brain trust arrives at a meeting at the sleek offices of London’s hottest agency Splodey, Youngblood, Gutz & Bones. After introductions, small talk, and pastries, SYG&B’s creative director — winner of 5 British Clio awards — strolls confidently to the television monitor at the front of the room and walks the 10:10 clients through a scene-by-scene video storyboard pitching a new promotional mini-movie that will solve their communication dilemma. The smoothness of the presentation masks the hundreds of late night man-hours and debating the SYG&B creative department spent in crafting it — but it was worth it.
“Brilliant!” exclaims the 10:10 executive committee chair, to the enthusiastic nods of his colleagues. “Add one more exploding child, and I think we have a winner.”
President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”
And that will be good, because it will give Holdren the excuse to introduce all the draconian measures he has long believed necessary if “global climate disruption” is to be averted: viz, state-enforced population control; a rewriting of the legal code so that trees are able to sue people; and the wholesale destruction of the US economy (“de-development” as he put it in the 1973 eco-fascist textbook he co-wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich Human Ecology: Global Problems And Solutions).
Holdren is not the only person having problems with the “world not warming and everyone growing increasingly sceptical” issue. So too is Dave “Grocer” Cameron’s excuse for a government. Its solution? Work out ways of brainwashing the populace with state-funded propaganda.
Matt Ridley is about the same age as I am, and he clearly heard all the same warnings, predictions, and prophecies of doom that I heard when I was a teen:
When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had — that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.
I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me — in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar — about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.
The next two decades were just as bad: acid rain was going to devastate forests, the loss of the ozone layer was going to fry us, gender-bending chemicals were going to decimate sperm counts, swine flu, bird flu and Ebola virus were going to wipe us all out. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the twenty-first century with the words `Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’
And as we all know, it all came true . . .
Ridley’s latest book is The Rational Optimist, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I didn’t always agree with it, but it was refreshing reading material. Recommended.
If you were hesitating about whether to get involved in Cap and Trade, hesitate no longer:
I have become a convert on the Cap And Trade thing. I am all in; pedal to the metal; go for broke; shoot the moon; a true fracking believer now.
This C&T shit has more revenue generating potential than prohibition ever did. You’ll generally be dealing with a better class of people who aren’t as inclined to settle their differences with machine guns, which is a big plus. Another big advantage over bootlegging is there’s no actual product involved, so all the usual logistics and end point sales issues involved with smuggling vanish.
It is truly a beautiful beautiful thing; even better than selling lots on the moon or mars, because the government doesn’t force people to buy real estate on the moon and mars.
If Al Capone were alive today, he’d be a carbon trader.
