Presenting the climate changes we’ve been experiencing in the last decades as a threat to the Planet and letting the global warming alarmists use this bizarre argument as a justification for their attempts to substantially change our way of life, to weaken and restrain our freedom, to control us, to dictate what it is we should and should not be doing is unacceptable. Their success in influencing millions of quite rational people all around the world is rather surprising. How is it possible that they are so successful in it? And so rapidly? For older doctrines and ideologies, it took usually much longer to get such an influential and widely shared position in society. Is this because of the specifics of our times? Is this because we are continuously “online”? Is this because religious and other metaphysical ideologies have become less attractive and less persuasive? Is this because of the need to promptly refill the existing spiritual emptiness – connected with “the end of history” theories – with a new “noble cause,” such as saving the Planet?
The environmentalists succeeded in discovering a new “noble cause”. They try to limit human freedom in the name of “something” that is more important and more noble than our very down-to-earth lives. For someone who spent most of his life in the “noble” era of communism this is impossible to accept.
Good suggestions from Mr Klaus but…
I would just like to point out this is not a new movement. Environmentalism goes back in the UK way back into the C19th. It is in Blake’s “Dark Satanic Mills”, it is in Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement. It is in the postcards distributed to WWI soldiers to be sent home. Yes, the Salford lads or Hackney lads got cards showing idealised images of rural England with the implicit (not too implicit) that this is what they were fighting for.
It is older than communism and has taken longer to gain real traction. There have been attempts before but AGW has proven, finally, to be the ideal vehicle because of it’s very nature – unprovable (generally unfalisifiable) catasrophism, llinked to more control for governments. A nice little earner (I mean big earner) for the corporations they are in bed with and I think critically a general lack of confidence in the West breeding guilt about “having too much”.
Oh, and it’s not just the UK. I suspect similar Land und Volk trends go back to the C19th in Germany and culminated in the NAZIs who had a very green agenda and dreamed of a Greater German pastoral idyll. A sort of giant anti-semitic version of The Shire. Would it be fair to say that one of the fundamental differences betwe the Sovs and the Nazis was that the former were essentially urban and the latter essentially rural.
It all goes back to Orwell; a fearful population, is a controllable population.
Now that the Cold War is over, something new had to be created for us to be made afraid of.
All of the above. Nick, I don’t think he ever implied this being new, he is just astonished by the almost sudden rapidity with which it took hold of the minds of so many people all over the world, almost all at once. And I agree with him, it is quite amazing.
Unfortunately, these AGW alarmist views are so widespread, so effectively propagated, entrenched and given illusory high-level scientific credence that it is going to take a significant amount of time for the tide of reason to turn.
As Klaus says, it’s not all bad news. The tide is definitely turning. In the meantime its important to maintain opposition, continue to reveal the consensus doesn’t exist, and ensure that alarmists are held to account.
Is there an inventory, database, website (whatever) where alarmist claims have been logged and can be revisited to examine how accurate (or otherwise) they are?
Someone with enough time on their hands, and perhaps modest funding, should trawl environmental papers and publicity material over the last 10 – 15 years or so and hold them up to scrutiny. Perhaps this has been done – though I’m not aware of it…?
I’d suggest it was hippy boomers emerging into positions of genuine responsibility and influence in teaching, media and politics.
In other words, hippy stick-it-to-the-Man nonsense doesn’t seem so amusingly harmless and fun when it becomes the mainstream rather than a colourful reaction to the mainstream.
As noted above, eco-mentalism itself isn’t new; we had all sorts of wild claims in our geography books at school too (chiefly about how everything was going to run out by 1990) but it was taught by people who could add a layer of pragmatism to it; once they all retired, you’re just left with people who think corporations control us through brainwaves.
I still don’t see it as all that fast a change. AGW simply is one of several attempts over the last 40-50 years to justify interventionist policy on scientific grounds. There was a thread begun yesterday on the co-opting of science by Statists, and really goes back further than 40-50 years. AGW is simply one face on a larger philosophy that has been growing for quite some time.
In my life we had acid rain, ozone depletion, topsoil degradation, overpopulation, plankton depletion, and global warming. I view it that the same general sources kept tossing something on the wall until something stuck, it simply was AGW that finally took hold.
As for the rapid spread, consider how history has other examples of a perceived quick spread of ideas, periods of rapid cultural growth and rapid cultural decline – the relatively quick changes in the 14th century that led to our current modernity on the one hand or the relatively quick dissolving of culture and society during hermitic movements on the other. But they all have roots that go further back.
But I suppose the question is why did the particular AGW meme spread so quickly, and I think it has less to do with being online than it does with the centralizing toward Statism over the last century and a half. The machina is in place for some particular interventionist movement to take over. If it’s not AGW it will be something else very soon. The infrastructure is in place, all it needs is leadership. The time was ripe for some movement, the proto-science Socialists have been active for decades, and its AGW face was the one on hand when ripeness of Statism came a-calling.
I feel quite uneasy about “climate denialism” (a bad phrase, but used for want of a better one). If it turns out we’re wrong about AGW then it will destroy the freedom movement for a generation at least.
“If it turns out we’re wrong about AGW then it will destroy the freedom movement for a generation at least.”
Nonsense. We won’t (can’t) know we’re “wrong” for decades, and even that assumes we have been successful in gathering enough strength to turn back any significant environazi legislation (cap-n-trade, successors to the Kyoto protocols, etc). Long before then the “freedom movement” (such as it is) will either have triumphed or perished.
Sidebar: When is Václav Klaus going to get his Nobel Peace Prize?
Alisa,
Kinda what Brad said. What I guess I had in mind was something like the Greens have the mentality of WWI generals. The cause fought for remains the same and the tactics fundamentally the same “Do as we say or we doomed” whichever scare it is but… They have that WWI general, “One more big push” mentality and despite all the others having failed for a variety of reasons AGW has found the opposing trenches unmanned and achieved a breakthrough.
Laird,
Would Václav Klaus really want to be admitted to a pantheon that included Kissinger, Carter, Arafat, Gore…
Well, one of the prophets of the one true cause has at last been suspended from Wikipedia. I find the picture Connolley has chosen of himself hiking in the Pyrenees with his knitted mini-me, Mr Weasel, quite revealing of the man. Why is the inflated vermin looking away from the camera while the cuddly minibeast is cutely smiling at the viewers?
(Just read the Wiki entry on the Mediaeval Warm Period. Sorry!)
Nick: yes.
I knew one was missing from my list: Comrade Barack! Arrgh!!!
What did he get it for? Bending over in the direction of Mecca, parting his cheeks and taking it up the arse from Islamists for all of America?
Then they told him to piss off. Sorry, Bazza, no second date.
Modern concern about the impact we might be having on the environment goes quite far back.
There was Rachel Carson and her Silent Spring in the early 60s.
I guess it is inevitable that with the weight of mankind working on the planet there will be some effects. For every action there is a reaction, and all that.
The nasty is that the controllists have co-opted this whole awareness in order to establish their empires with actually no real concern for the world we live in but rather their own lifestyle enhancement.
They took it on as a viable vehicle to further their agendas and set their propagandists to work.
From what I have read Al Gore has a lifestyle and carbon “footprint” that is far greater than most people. Certainly than I do.
Which is why I really have no problem living my life the way I do, incandescent light bulbs or no, because I know my impact on the environment is far, far less than any of the Green celebrities, Bono, Sting, Geldof, included.
Yes, I would imagine we are having an effect, good or bad I do’t know.
But the truth of the personal-wealth-enhancing AGW prophets of doom is that they are about money and control, and zip all to do with any genuine love for anything.
John,
I don’t think it logically follows that more people (and higher tech) do impact more or at least more badly. The first settlers to cross the Bering Straights butchered their way from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Who do you reckon did for all those weird critters in South America? Or mastodons or all sorts of stuff. The idea that primitice types live in harmony with nature is romantic codswallop.
Indeed it is almost verging on Malthusian. Would Thomas Malthus have believed Britain could support 60 million people and still have extensive National Parks and such?
Wealth and technology brings with it the capacity to do more with less space.
Check this out:
http://www.countingcats.com/?p=786&cpage=1
I agree, Nick.
I’m not necessarily saying the change will be bad, just, that I guess there will be change of some sort.
If we behaved with similar abandon with the technology now to hand, as those settlers across the Bering Straits, then it would be a disaster.
Primitive types have no more interest in living in romantic harmony than we do. A lot less I would think because they would be hungrier. The only thing was they were less capable of changing things.
“Wealth and technology brings with it the capacity to do more with less space.”
Yes, absolutely. Agreed.
The Green Revolution that now feeds us is indeed a technological marvel.
It might be likened to quantative easing the problem, but hey, we all die sometime!
(Apologies to John Maynard)
“Primitive types have no more interest in living in romantic harmony than we do. A lot less I would think because they would be hungrier.”
– John B
QOTD?
Nuke Bono from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. Sanctimonious twat that he is.
We have simply been sold a ‘policy’inasmuch that the salesman asks the loaded question (insurance technique) “Of course you’re interested in saving our environment (saving money) but, if there was a better way of doing it of course you would at least want to know about it, isn’t that true?” (who would say ‘no’ to that?)
“Of course it is….now let me explain how you can easily achieve that & have complete peace of mind; moreover, being experts in this field, we can manage all the details for you so that you don’t even have to think about it ever again, only watch your benefits accrue….just put your name here.”
Personally I don’t have much against AGW and am very much on the fence regarding it’s validity, but I do have lots of issues with the “solutions” which are generally bad and ill thought out; often little more than politicians and special interests latching on to a convenient issue like a Remora on a Shark so they can syphon off some pork for themselves.
So what’s new? That’s a tradition as old, if not older, than environmentalism.
There are two questions here:
Firstly, is the theory of man made globel warming true or false?
Secondly, are the polices suggested by the establishment (activists, leftist politicians and politically connected corporations) the right response if theory is true?
On the first question – I do not know, as I am deeply IGNORANC about natural science (a person must face his ignorance honestly – and I am ignorant about natural science).
But on the second quesion….. – no “Cap and Trade” and the “Chicago Carbon Exchance” and so on are a vast SCAM.
Truly “Crime Inc” – partly for the resdistribution of wealth to various regimes around the world, and partly to redistribute wealth to certain politically connected corporations (Goldman Sachs, General Electric…..)
And such schemes will not solve the problems that exist (or will exist) if the theory of man made globel warming is correct.
It is a bit like the following……
A man is worried that he might have AIDS.
He might have AIDS or he might not – he (being as ignorant of such matters as me, does not know).
So he decides to rape a virgin in order to cure himself….
The (or rather “a”) problem here is that even if the theory that he has AIDS is correct, raping a virgin will not cure him.