(2)

"Don't vote Green until they drop the anti-science zealotry", says Tom Chivers of the Telegraph.

Well, obviously. The first three words would have sufficed. It is not that I disagree in the slightest with the thrust of Mr Chivers' article - he rightly condemns a Green Party plan, now apparently dropped, to have some sort of mass vandalism party directed against an experimental crop of GM wheat. Ironically, but not surprisingly, the point of the experiment was to try and produce a type of wheat less reliant on pesticides. That the Greens are Luddites should surprise no one. It did surprise me that it surprised Mr Chivers. How does one get to be assistant comment editor of the Telegraph? I would have thought that the knowledge of political affairs required to qualify for that post would disqualify one from being able to write, other than as a joke, the following:

I actually like the Green Party. My dad used to be, and may still be, a member. They're well-meaning and many of them share my taste for unkempt beards. I think I put Jenny Jones as my first choice in the London mayoral elections.

But the trouble is that they're scientifically illiterate and have what seems to be a fear of technological process.

Mr Chivers shared his Platonic cave with Mr George Monbiot of the Guardian. He has recently noticed that Noam Chomsky and John Pilger are quite happy to flirt with genocide denial so long as the deniers oppose the United States.

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The Heartland Institute has aroused much controversy with its recent anti-global-warming billboards, such as this one:

Here is their announcement concerning these billboards, and the fact that they have now taken them down.

Many climate skeptics are most unhappy. Ross McKitrick, for instance, is "absolutely dismayed":

I am absolutely dismayed. This kind of fallacious, juvenile and inflammatory rhetoric does nothing to enhance your reputation, hands your opponents a huge stick to beat you with, and sullies the reputation of the speakers you had recruited. Any public sympathy you had built up as a result of the Gleick fiasco will be lost–and more besides–as a result of such a campaign. I urge you to withdraw it at once.

Strike the tone in your advertisements that you want people to use when talking about you. The fact that you need a lengthy webpage to explain the thinking behind the billboards proves that your messaging failed. Nobody is going to read your explanation anyway. All they will take away is the message on the signs themselves, and it’s a truly objectionable message.

You cannot simultaneously say that you want to promote a debate while equating the other side to terrorists and mass murderers. Once you have done such a thing you have lost the moral high ground and you can never again object if someone uses that kind of rhetoric on you.

I'd be very interested to hear what others here - fellow posters, regular commenters and for that matter irregular commenters – think about this. Is this an own goal, as we say in soccer-playing England, or has the Heartland Institute actually accomplished something valuable and important with this operation?

Me, I am genuinely unsure, but at present think that this operation may actually play out rather well.

For instance, I would never tangle with McKitrick over things like bristle cones, but is he right to say that the big advert above is "fallacious"? Surely not. "Believing in Global Warming" is a muddled phrase. ( I have long preferred C(atastrophic) A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming).) But it just about serves.

My over-all hunch as of now is that these billboards seem outrageous but actually, they are not. They seem down and dirty. Because they pull no intellectual punches, they seem like some of the more disgusting statements perpetrated by CAGW-ers against their skeptic enemies. But, they make various points which are true, and very important, and they tell no lies.

The big point they make, I think, is that all this talk about cute polar bears and melting ice caps and so on, quite aside from usually being mistaken, is not nearly as nice as it seems. It is a part of a huge argument, and not a nice argument at all, which says that modern industrial civilisation is evil and should be trashed, and the human species savagely culled to the tune of millions, sometimes billions. Or: not.

Most of the people who fret about polar bears have no serious designs on western industrial civilisation, nor do they have fantasies of mass genocide. However, all those who do now want industrial civilisation trashed and humanity culled, and a global despotism of people like themselves superimposed upon the ruins, use CAGW as either an excuse or a reason for their nightmare projects. The psycho-politicians who launched the various global institutions which funded the "science", and the mass propaganda, behind the CAGW scare had exactly these murderously destructive ends in mind. (For a brief summary of this story, I suggest, once against, the excellent Watermelons.)

One of the few Big Points about which I entirely agree with the more fanatical CAGW fanatics is that this is indeed a very important argument. However, I think it very important that my side should win and that theirs should lose.

The CAGW scare is indeed not a small spat about polar bears. It is a very big confrontation, right up there with such things as Civilisation versus Communism. Indeed, again as these posters indicate, the CAGW scare is in many, many ways, Communism 2 (and to a somewhat lesser degree also Nazism 2).

This is why, exactly as these posters highlight, a succession of history's recent villains, great and small, have aligned themselves with the CAGW scare, and have in some cases been strongly influenced by it.

I presume many on the CAGW side are now also getting very angry about these billboards. But again, this was one of their purposes. You shouldn't be this horrid, eh? Well no, maybe you shouldn't. Comparison is invited, between these insultingly true billboards and the insultingly false abuse that has been hurled over the years at people who have opposed the whole CAGW scare, people like Ross McKitrick for instance. Far from lowering the tone of the CAGW debate, I suspect that these billboards may well end up raising it.

I always have my doubts about that "moral high ground". Yes, it's good to have it, but not if you leave all the other ground in the possession of the enemy.

Also, I think that a great many people will read that Heartland webpage.

I may, after I have studied that webpage and further reactions to it some more, change my mind about all this. But I thought it worth posting my half-formed thinking-aloud thoughts nevertheless, and also hearing anything others have to say here in response.

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It is at first denied that any radical new plan exists; it is then conceded that it exists but ministers swear blind that it is not even on the political agenda; it is then noted that it might well be on the agenda but is not a serious proposition; it is later conceded that it is a serious proposition but that it will never be implemented; after that it is acknowledged that it will be implemented but in such a diluted form that it will make no difference to the lives of ordinary people; at some point it is finally recognised that it has made such a difference, but it was always known that it would and voters were told so from the outset.

- Yesterday (see below) I quoted a paragraph written by James Delingpole. The above paragraph, originally written to describe the onward march of the European Union, is quoted by Delingpole, in his book Watermelons (p. 45), to help him explain how AGW went from crankery to globally imposed policy. Delingpole found it in The Great Deception (p. 605) by Booker and North. They got it from a Times editorial, published on August 28, 2002.

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Something almost all effective polemicists have in common is a degree of optimism. They believe that their polemic can - at the very least might - make a difference. You can be as clever as all hell, but if all you do is cleverly convince yourself that your side in the argument is doomed, then mostly you will contribute only a lowering of morale.

Which is one of many reasons why, as JP noted the other day, I like Delingpole so much. He may be a bit naïve sometimes, a bit too boyishly enthusiastic for some tastes. But far better that than been-there said-that done-that seen-it-all certainty that there is damn all any of us can do about anything. Delingpole is always on the lookout for where a difference is there to be made in whatever argument he is involved in, and eager to make it.

In Australia for instance:

... in Australia, climate change is probably a more pressing political issue than it is anywhere else in the world. Australia after all is a ruddy great island made of fossil fuels. It has an economy which is dependent on fossil fuels. Therefore, when Australia finds itself burdened with an administration which decides to put a swingeing tax on fossil fuels - Gillard's hated Carbon Tax – in the name of saving the earth from "Climate Change" then clearly Climate Change becomes of pressing concern not just to enviro-loon activists but also to ordinary, sane people who worry about tedious stuff like paying their bills, keeping their jobs and ensuring that their kids have some kind of economic future. The Queensland election result was, I suspect, just the beginning. The tide against the Great Global Warming Scam - the biggest and most expensive outbreak of mass hysteria in history - is turning and, right now, Australia is the best place in the world to go for a beachside view.

I don't know if Delingpole is entirely correct about Australia being the best place on earth to set about saving the earth from the pseudo-earth-savers, but I like his attitude.

I have been ruminating quite a bit lately on the phenomenon of argumentative pessimism, and what causes it.

Pessimists will tell you that the reason they are miserable is that their team is losing the argument, and that nothing can be done about this. Which may, in this or that case, be true. But if, like the Delingpoles of this world, you think you might win, you might. If you think you won't, then you still might, but it's a lot less likely. If others win, it is likely to be in spite of you.

But I think there are many other and rather less honourable reasons for argumentative pessimism, less honourable simply because they are based on making various sorts of mistake.

One common error, similar to that made by the critics of the free market when they confuse their own inability to imagine an entrepreneurial (rather than state-imposed) solution to this or that problem that is exercising them, is to confuse one's own personal inability to win some particular argument with the claim that therefore this argument is unwinnable, by anyone on your side. This is a form of arrogance. "If I can't win this, nobody can." Really?

Another error, I think, is the tendency to remember argumentative defeats but to forget argumentative victories. Victories mean that you tend then to move on to other arguments. But when you lose an argument you are liable to brood about it, and to remember it, and to hang around until you can reverse things. The cure for this is not necessarily to abandon fights that you are losing or have lost but believe that you might win in the future. Don't be pessimistic about your chances of reversing matters. But it is worth recalling all those arguments that your team has won, but which you personally have then forgotten about. This exercise will remind that you although not all arguments are won, arguments at least can be won, because they have been.

I agree, before lots of commenters queue up to say it, that naïve optimism, especially when it takes the form of believing that total argumentative victory is just around the corner when actually it is not - that people "just need to be told" etc. - is also a mistake.

But one of the many reasons why excessively naïve optimism is such a big mistake is because it is yet another cause of pessimism.

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Those who have been following its descent into CAGW hystericism know that the "Royal Society" has long been, in Bishop Hill's words this morning, a rather grubby advocacy outfit. Nevertheless, kudos to the Bishop for noticing three grubby advocates who have recently become fully signed up Royal Society Grubby Advocates, i.e. "Fellows".

That "Royal" tag still impresses casual bystanders, a lot. So, is it now time to start slagging off the Queen for allowing her prestige to be abused by these grubby advocates? I think so. If it's a story that these grubby advocates are "Royal" (and you can bet these new GAs will now use their Royal tag at every turn) then it should also be a story that the Queen is a stupid old cow for allowing this to happen. No doubt the Queen has googlers on her payroll who track what is being said about her, out here in un-Royal world. Well, now, oh Royal Surfers, Keepers of the Queen's Internet or whatever you are called, I am saying that. In my youth I used to make fun of this woman by saying she and her shambolic family ought to be privatised. Maybe I'll crank that up again.

Businesses, boroughs, symphony orchestras and the like, have to work hard doing good things, or at least not bad things, to earn the adjective "Royal", or to say that what they do is "by appointment" to Her Majesty, etc. etc. So, it either is, or ought to be, possible to be told that you have worked so hard at bad stuff that you may no longer use such words. So, over to you Queen.

"The Society" has a rather different ring to it, I think. More like something in a Monty Python sketch. As would be entirely appropriate.

(19)

WUWT has a posting about how Jim Hansen of NASA says that the skeptics are winning the argument, i.e. the argument against him and his fellow CAGW-ers. In the midst of the largely agreeing comments at WUWT (yes you are losing you jackass, and it serves you right, etc.), there was, on the other hand, this from Peter Donaldson (April 10, 3.19am):

I disagree with Hansen, he might believe not enough is being done to reduce CO2 but the global warming concept has been accepted globally, it is rarely challenged in the media it is accepted generally by the media and “saving the planet” and "reducing carbon footprint" are bandied about everywhere, and are foremost in the design of all new product be they cars, buildings, airplanes whatever. There is a huge global industry of solar energy devices and it is expanding rapidly.

The skeptical view is sidelined, reserved for oddballs, at least that is the public conception. It seems to me that this is now a bandwagon rolling on and nothing will stop it, even if warming has stopped or if there was cooling.

The punctuation is a bit sketchy, but the point is a good one. There are times when I suspect that Donaldson will be proved right, and that although winning the argument at the merely intellectual level is totally necessary to overthrowing the vested interests excused by the CAGW scare, these interests may just prove to be too firmly entrenched.

And then I read this, also at WUWT, about how many of Hansen's colleagues (and not just any old colleagues) at NASA have come out publicly in favour of climate skepticism, and against the bogus certainties of the CAGW tribe:

49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.

The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance.

If NASA changes its public tune, that has to be big.

It's Hansen who is now starting to look like a sidelined oddball. As Instapundit (that's him linking to the same WUWT story) would say: well, good.

Let's hope the political decisions and the money decisions now start to tell the pessimistic Peter Donaldson that he is being too pessimistic. I'm sure he would be delighted if that happened.

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Last week I took a trip up to the top of the Monument, which is a memorial to those who died in the Great Fire of London. I of course took lots of photos. And in a posting on my personal blog (now revived from recent hibernation), I also had a moan about the new wire netting that they have installed at the top of the Monument, in place of the old, more digital camera friendly, prison bars that used to be there.

Here is one of the snaps I snapped that day, featuring this new wire netting:

Now, it so happens that earlier last week, the night before my trip to the Monument, I also watched a TV show about bees. Most of it was about African bees migrating across the Savannah, with lots of lurid close-ups of bees looking like alien monsters. But, as this lady explains, at the end of this show they bolted on a short and quite different segment about how bee keeping, waning in the British countryside in the face of mechanised agriculture and pesticides, is now on the rise in the big city. It was like two entirely separate shows. Very peculiar. Luckily for me, I found both shows interesting.

Anyway, take a look through the centre hole in the photo above. What do you see? I'll tell you what you see. You see beehives. Here's a closer look at them:

And at two of them even closer:

The first of those three beehive snaps was taken by mistake, as it were. As in: I only realised that bee hives were involved in it when I got home. But, provoked by having watched that TV bee show, I photoed the two subsequent bee hive snaps on purpose.

The anti-technological-progress, anti-capitalist take on this story is that technological progress, capitalism etc. is making life hell for bees in the countryside. And for the time being, technological progress stroke capitalism is indeed turning the countryside from bee heaven into something rather less bee hospitable, although it may soon work out how to refrain from doing this and how to switch the countryside back to being bee heaven again.

Meanwhile, cities like London, with all their gardens full of varied flowers, are becoming new bee heavens.

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Bishop Hill and WUWT are both making much of this:

To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers.

If CAGW-inspired regulation is to make any sense, it must be universal. There must be a World Government. There are those of us who have long believed that this was why CAGW was devised in the first place.

Time was when economic success was believed to result from such "cooperation", and to impossible without it. So, the language of tyranny was economics. Then - alas for the tyrants - it became clear that economic success and tyranny are opposites, although that lesson has still to be completely learned.

Now, the language of tyranny is a different kind of "science".

(13)

I dislike windmills because they are inefficient, destabilise the grid and put up my electricity bills. That I think, should be enough to stop building the things. That they kill bats and birds is not something that we should making too much of a fuss about. Buses, aircraft, and just about everything that moves does too. If we ban windmills because of the threat they pose to wildlife then logically there is an equal case to do the same to really important things. Remember, the Green lobby don't actually love animals, they hate humans and anything they can do to screw up our society they will do.

- Bishop Hill commenter "AndyS"

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Spring is in the air, and there is a spring in the step of the climate skeptic blogs these days, the two big ones on my radar being Bishop Hill and Watts Up With That. Peter Gleick's trickery, already written about here by Natalie Solent, combined with the willingness of so many on his team to try to promote him as some kind of hero rather than condemn him as the failed fraudster that he is (see also this posting about Michael Mann), means that although climate skepticism hasn't won, it continues to win. Slowly but surely, C(atastrophic) A(thropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) is being reduced from "science" to a racket.

Declarations of complete victory are surely premature. Much depends on how you define victory, and who or what you consider to be the enemy. If you care only about scientific truth, but not about the world being littered with damaging and expensive bureaucracies dedicated to perpetuating and enforcing lies, you may well indeed believe this battle to be nearly over. If those bureaucracies (to say nothing of the larger financial and ideological interests they serve) still trouble you, as they do me, you will regard the war as hardly having begun.

Some are saying that continuing to argue about the mere science of it all is a distraction from the more serious task of unmasking the motives and machinations of all those personages to whom all this fraudulent science has been so useful. I disagree. I say that showing this "science" to be dishonest leads naturally on to the question of who patronised it and to what end, given that the mere truth of things was emphatically not the only thing that concerns all those concerned. If the science of CAGW was now, still, universally accepted as honest, the underlying intentions of the various factions and characters responsible for foisting it upon the world would not now be attracting nearly so much scrutiny.

An immediate next task for the skeptic tendency is to itemise and publicise, in greater detail than hitherto, who is making money out of CAGW, a process that is already well under way. The longer term goal is to unmask the politics of it all. The bigger goal behind this hoax (and many others) was, and remains, to turn the entire world into a corrupt tax-and-spend superstate, run for the pleasure and enrichment of anti-progress, screw-the-poor-in-the-name-of-the-poor, global despots. That many very useful and desperately sincere - very useful because so desperately sincere – idiots are and always have been involved in this project is not in question. These idiots need to be challenged intellectually rather than merely denounced as crooks and tyrants, although showing them that crooks and tyrants is who they are really supplying aid and comfort to may also help to straighten them out.

In the post, and I should have read this book months ago: Watermelons. James Delingpole has been a key figure in ensuring that the CAGW ruckus (and the Climategate story in particular) escaped from the ghetto of blogs like the ones I linked to above, into the general arena of political discussion, and even to infect parts of the general public, now so curious to know why their heating bills are going ballistic. The thing about Delingpole is that not only has he done a fine job publicising the various scientific criticisms of the CAGW faith. He also understands what set the whole thing in motion in the first place. He gets the money of it. Above all, he gets the politics of it. When I have read this book, I'll surely want to say more about it here.

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To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero.

- Matt Ridley hails The Beginning Of The End Of Wind. Let's hope he's right. The piece is quoted from at greater length by Bishop Hill and at WUWT.

See, or rather, hear also: Matt Ridley's eloquent recorded talk a while back, on the general subject of environmental scaremongering, of the sort that has been used to excuse the wind farm disaster, also linked to by Bishop Hill.

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I may be obsessed with this but the world is not. If I knew how to do one of those word cloud things for UK headlines over the past week or so, I think it would look like this:

Syria Ryan Giggs Euro Horsegate Olympic tube strike PC Rathband climate scientist controversy Levenson

Although in truth the font for "climate scientist controversy" would be too small to see. Partisans on both sides make the distinction I referred to earlier between lies about the way world is and lies as a ruse of war, so to us it matters whether the disputed document is proved to be fake or not, but all most people will remember in six months' time is that there was some scandal or another. If they remember that much.

That said, whichever narrative wins among those who are interested does filter through to the general public eventually, if only as a vague preconception as to whether a controversy about a climate scientist will feature the scientist as villain or hero. I do not want either result but so it goes. Most human beings choose to be rationally ignorant about matters that do not immediately affect them.

So, on the understanding that whichever narrative wins among the partisans will be simplified almost to nothing, and that most people are not indifferent to truth, which narrative should those sincerely convinced that anthropogenic global warming is a threat want to be true?

So far, this has been decided solely on the basis of team loyalty. I am sure examples of blind loyalty can be seen on both sides but in this post I only wish to look at it from the side of those who believe in a serious danger from AGW. The lengths to which a wish to defend Gleick have been taken by some are illustrated by a post by Dr Greg Laden, who posts at a site called scienceblogs.com and clearly values his identity as a science blogger and all round rational person. He first put forward a fiendish and elaborate conspiracy theory and then pulled back and claimed it was all a joke when he saw some members of his own side were taking it seriously. Aside from the sheer lameness of his passive-aggressive "can't you guys take a joke" coda, there is an unintentional parallel here to the way that Gleick, by his continued silence, leaves his own side to overreach in their efforts to defend him.

If Gleick is telling the truth, I don't think it is good for their side at all.

There are two main scenarios.

Scenario (1) This is a glimpse into the way the happy world of climate science works all the time. First someone sends an anonymous and vague document to Gleick. Whether it is sting or genuine leak does not matter to this argument. An outsider might think a person sending anonymous tittle-tattle to the Chair of a Task Force on Scientific Ethics would be on a hiding to nothing, but X knows better. That correct expectation tells us something bad about the general culture. Then, we are told, Gleick's idea of what constitutes a good means of verifying the document is to set up a fake email address and impersonate someone. Then in his turn he sends it out anonymously, lying to his own side in the process by representing himself as "Heartland Insider". [Added later, prompted by this comment from "Fluffy": he also by his own account lied to his own side by mixing up the anonymous tittle tattle with real, if stolen, documents and presenting them as of equal status.]

He does all this under no particular pressure. It just seems like a good idea. That tells us something yet worse about the culture. And Heartland? Who cares? The harm done to the belief in climate science is not undone by harm also being done to some advocacy group.

Scenario (2) One man, seething with wounded pride, goes off the rails in an effort to get personal vengeance. Peter Gleick goes phishing to get dirt on his enemies, and when the dirt he gets isn't dirty enough he makes some more up. His actions from then on are the same as in the first scenario but the fact that they are done under strong emotion makes it a personal tragedy rather than a reflection on the general standard of ethics in climate science. Embarrassing, but containable.

(16)

1. The soundtrack to this post is "Can't Get It Out Of My Head" by the Electric Light Orchestra. The format will be a vomiting out of points as I think of them, numbered to bring some sort of order to the chaos. I expect to add more after publishing this post. (Update 28 Feb: some new points added.)

2. The title to this post was very nearly The Lying Will Continue Until Trust Improves, being a riff on this catch phrase, but since I do not think most of the people involved are consciously lying - though Gleick is - I decided against. AGW advocates better look out, though, because the widespread perception that some of them might be lying about global warming is going to be reinforced if a significant percentage of them continue to praise lying by Gleick.

3. Likewise the even more widespread perception that many of them might be credulous and deluded about global warming is going to be reinforced if a significant percentage of them continue to be credulous and deluded in public about very weak arguments in favour of the strategy memo being genuine.

Take the "evaluation" by DeSmogBlog that the memo was authentic. I have put scare quotes round "evaluation" because the word suggests it was done an impartial third party, but it is just the same guys as usually write the blog. It goes to a lot of trouble to show that the strategy memo "also uses phrases, language and, in many cases, whole sentences that were taken directly from Heartland’s own material. Only someone who had previous access to all of that material could have prepared the Climate Strategy in its current form." - without seeming to realise that nothing in that contradicts the assertion that it is a fake.

To show that the reaction from AGW advocates was not always as unmindful of the future credibility of their side, read this blog post, The Cytokine Storm from a site called "lies.com". The author, John Callender, is a liberal in the US sense and is quite a strong, longstanding and well-known AGW blogger, so doubly opposed to most here but definitely not some random bloke on the internet. His reaction to DeSmog blog's" evaluation" was,

Having studied the contents of the strategy memo, and the arguments for and against its authenticity, my reaction to DeMelle and Littlemore’s argument was immediate and unequivocal: they’re wrong, and obviously so. They must either be actively lying or passively bullshitting (that is, willfully disregarding the truth to assert a position they favor, without bothering about facts).

4. Let's jump back a step. My own position is that I think there is a severe and urgent danger to the world concerning global warming - namely the poverty and repression that will result from the measures that power grabbers and sincere crusaders put in to protect us against it. I am also somewhat concerned about global warming.

I think the current mainstream view of anthropogenic global warming is equivalent to a stock market bubble, with fear instead of optimism making it expand. The madness of crowds caused its "price" to become detached from underlying reality. I wish I'd bought shares in Imminent & Dreadful DoomCo. Ltd in 1995. I wish I'd then sold them in 2009. To say that they are massively overpriced, if falling, is not to say that they don't have some genuine underlying value.

5. This affair matters and the point within that matters most is the disputed memo. There are two sorts of lies concerned, lies about the way the world is and lies as a ruse of war. Gleick having lied as a ruse of war diminishes trust a bit; proof that he has lied about the way the world is will diminish it far more - because lies about way the world is are the sort of lies AGW advocates are suspected of telling.

6. Did you notice? Gleick is already known to have told one lie about the way the world is. He signed his email dump "Heartland Insider".

7. I agree with everything Megan McArdle said (and quoted from Stephen Mosher) about the reasons to suppose the memo is not genuine. There is one simple, psychologically plausible hypothesis that explains the existence this sloppily worded, unauthored, undated, untraceable-because-scanned memo containing wonderfully quotable lines that put the Heartland Institute in a very bad light, plus chunks of barely altered text from the other documents but scarcely anything else numerical about Heartland - and what there was erroneous, plus flattering mention of Gleick, plus a whiff of paranoia about the hated Koch brothers and Gleick's particular enemy in Forbes magazine, plus terms like "anti climate" that no actual AGW sceptic would use, plus Gleick's idiosyncratic punctuation. Gleick wrote it. He phished the rest of the package, saw it would be insufficiently appealing to journalists, and whipped up something that would. Think of the Danish Mohammed cartoons. They weren't quite enraging enough on their own, so provocateurs added a couple of fake ones too. People do such things.

8. You think he wouldn't do something so crazy and damaging to his career? Think about what he is already known to have done. And think also about the sad story of Orlando Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, who still is a highly regarded historian. He rubbished his rivals' books on Amazon and praised his own, then, despite having signed the reviews "orlando-birkbeck", denied with legal threats ever having done so. Then he got his wife to say she'd done it. Then he confessed. People do such things. Well-regarded academics do such things.

9. As well as the simple, psychologically plausible hypothesis that explains everything stated in (7) there are other hypotheses that do explain the nature of the memo but are neither simple nor psychologically plausible: they centre round the idea of the poison pill. Some enemy of Gleick's, either at Heartland or a elsewhere (but highly involved with the AGW issue), plants a fake but not obviously fake memo with mention of him as a sop to his vanity and which pushes his buttons in other ways and is written in a sly copy of his style. The desired result presumably being that he would release it, be unable to prove it and get sued and/or discredited. Another possibility might be that the memo has accidental rather than deliberate errors and is designed to defame Heartland in exactly the way it did, but X would prefer to pass the risk onto Gleick.

Apart from the implausible necessity of positing two separate individuals willing to carry out a sting (Gleick's sting against Heartland plus X's sting against Gleick), all of these scenarios suffer from having the underpants gnomes as management consultants. When concocting these plots who could guess what Gleick might do? The plan involves delivering into Gleick's hands a physical object that might metaphorically or even literally have your fingerprints all over it. What if he hands the memo over to the cops for testing?

10. Why hasn't he handed the memo and the envelope over to the cops for testing? Why hasn't he sued Heartland for having accused him of something significantly worse than what he has confessed to? One factor that makes me believe Heartland is that they are pushing. They hesitated at first, consistent with some frantic phone calls along the lines of "none of you were idiot enough to write this, were you?" and then leapt in with open accusations and a call to the FBI. They do not seem scared of what the police might uncover. Gleick does.

11. Chris Cooper made me smile in his comments to my earlier post about the crowdsourcing exercise. He said, "like the dozens of commenters on Anthony Watts's post, I can't wait to see the results, and I can't wait for someone else to do the work." Hampered by ignorance of any computer related procedure I do not use daily, I did get as far as launching the program. But I couldn't get it to save. So having laboriously loaded up several samples of my own writing in order to train the program, I lost them all when I closed the computer. I might try again later. The first person to get a result was Shaun Otto, who claimed - happily given his opinions - that the most likely author was Joe Bast of the Heartland Institute. Here is a link to his Huffington Post blog post on the subject. (He also posted on his own blog, but this has more comments.) Greg Laden's was another similar result from an AGW advocate.

I was (honest, guv!) working out an objection for myself even before Sam Duncan said, "I don't think an automated analysis coming up with Bast as the likely author of the whole thing really tells us anything. Almost from the start the document has appeared to be genuine Heartland stuff interspersed with incriminating fakery. It's like scrawling “I think our masters in Moscow should see this - Harold W.” over the minutes of a 1970s Labour Party conference: an egregious slur, but 99.9% genuine."

I have a question about this. If I were to select out all the parts of the strategy memo that seem to me most like Gleick's style and (assuming I can get it to work) put them into the program, has my act of selection for "being like Gleick" begged the question?

(Update 28 Feb: In the last paragraph of this post at the Heartland Institute "Fakegate" site, Joe Bast discusses this and points out where more examples of his and other HI staff members' writings can be found. He does not seem to fear the results. There is also a link to a copy of the strategy memo with text that is originates from the other documents left with a white background and new text written by the memo's author highlighted in yellow. Note that white does not mean "genuine, unaltered copy", it means "wording obviously taken from another document". In the case of the figure about the Koch donation the white text is deliberately or accidentally wrong. )

12. It was claimed by different groups that (depending on allegiance) either Gleick's admission or Joe Bast's statement saying the strategy memo was a fake were subtly worded by sneaky legal brains so as to allow for them to conceal guilt without literally lying. I was unconvinced by either argument. Outside the more childish law dramas this just gets you laughed at. Look at the scorn heaped on Gordon Brown's attempt to claim that he had actually said, "no more Tory boom and bust". As if that would improve his credibility! I do not believe this sort of quibbling succeeds in law either - people sometimes do get off on technicalities but not that sort of technicality.

I'm tired and it just started being tomorrow, so that's me done for now.

*
Back again – and up too late at night again. This was not what I intended to write. I started off with arguments, as I intended, but then I got distracted into trying to enter into Gleick’s feelings. I then took a look at the vivid piece of prose I had produced and belatedly took the oft quoted advice to authors to “kill your darlings.” Apologies Mr Callender. Anyway, here is what I have left.

13. We observe that the fake memo contains several errors that reveal it as a fake. These errors were sufficiently obvious that they were spotted within days.

A key difference between the theory that Gleick is the author of the fake memo and that a conspirator is the author is that Gleick composes the memo in the grip of passionate emotion but the conspirator acts in cold blood and at leisure. The errors that we see are more likely to have been made by a man under stress.

14. Why do I say Gleick was under stress? Well, wouldn’t you be if after thirty years of self-conscious virtue you were irrevocably engaged in a scam that is quite possibly going to put you in jail? Surely something specific must have triggered this drastic break with his life as lived so far. The trigger could have been – I think most likely was - the flamewar between Gleick and James Taylor. Or, who knows, a blazing row at work or home.

15. The suprising prominence given to Gleick’s name and to Forbes Magazine features in both hypotheses. It is a major factor that narrows it down to those two. Under the hypothesis of Gleick as forger, I assume the way his own grievances loomed huge in his mind betrayed him. It seemed not only safe but inevitable that he must mention his own role in the battle. For comparison, it is a standing joke that someone involved in a bitter divorce can’t seem to stay away from the subject.

16. At first sight it looks as though the grievance-vindicating tone of the paragraph about “Expanded climate communications” might equally well be explained by the devilishly accurate aim of a conspirator at stoking Gleick’s frustrations. Not only is Gleick meant to be flattered by the reference to him and happy to see it spread far and wide, he is meant to see the references to him being finally “allowed” to speak and to Heartland's desire to "keep opposing voices out" and to think, “Hah! I knew it all along – they were indeed trying to prevent this debate”, and then, crucially, to want to tell the world how this happened so that he would rashly publicise the document and duly be denounced as a faker.

17. But I think this picture is projecting what we do know now about Gleick's state of mind back into the past, to a time when we didn’t know it. The main reason we think Gleick felt a particular frustration about hostile forces seeking to "prevent this debate" is that he told us so, in his admission that he went phishing. It would have taken something close to telepathy to have guessed beforehand that he felt hard done by on those specific grounds and craft a message designed to pander to that.

A simpler explanation is that the frustration about debate being prevented expressed in his admission and the similar frustration about opposing voices being kept out that was bubbling in that paragraph of the memo have the same origin, both being written by the same frustrated man.

(21)

This sounds like fun: An online and open excercise in stylometry/textometry: Crowdsourcing the Gleick “Climate Strategy Memo” authorship

If enough people participate, it might become a story in itself.

UPDATE: I would like to add a few more thoughts.

- First, as I said in the comments, battle has been joined. Joe Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, has openly accused Peter Gleick of forgery in this video interview for the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. There is no going back for either of them. Gleick must now sue Bast for libel if he is to maintain what's left of his reputation.

- Second thought: the key question in determining whether Gleick's story of receiving the strategy memo in the mail is true or not is whether the strategy memo was created before or after the authentic documents. Thus Gleick to prove his innocence, or Bast to prove Gleick's guilt, must concentrate their attentions on the period between "the beginning of 2012", when he says he got the strategy document, and the creation of the other documents.

For one thing, we need an actual date of receipt rather than "the beginning of 2012". If it can be proved that there is information (e.g. specific figures) or chunks of exact wording in the strategy document that was not in existence at the date that Gleick says he received it, then he did not receive it but created it. Of course we also need to see the paper copy and the envelope it came in. Dr Gleick has no reason to refuse to provide this; if he has been the victim of a fraud or sting himself he should wish to uncover the culprit.

(9)

After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you've lost the power to convince them of anything else.

- Megan McArdle

(19)

Do you ever find the structure of a situation in the news fascinating in its own right, as you would the plot of a novel, almost irrespective of how it pans out in the real world?

Some documents were tricked or leaked out of an anti global warming thinktank, the Heartland Institute. Most of these documents have been admitted to be genuine, and while opinions differ as to how shocking they are, they were certainly not stuff that the Heartland Institute had wished to share with the world. So far the tables are turned on the the Climategate affair.

Only...

The juiciest document, the one that had the really damning quotes (it spoke of "dissuading teachers from teaching science") is different from all the others. Megan McArdle, not herself in the sceptic camp, says it is looking faker by the minute.

If it does turn out that it is a fake, then the tables are turned on the table turners. But... but... why would anyone be so daft? Having pulled off the trick, got the goods, why put your gains at risk for such a trivial advantage as that of providing a quotable summary?

One of the reasons for the veracity of this particular document being in doubt is that it is sloppy. It contains errors of fact and is written in an unprofessional style. Still, that happens sometimes. "Organisation Contains Sloppy Writer" is not exactly a headline to make them hold the front page. Maybe the sloppiness is a reason to suppose it genuine. But let us run with it being fake for a while - was the faker in a hurry for some reason? It reminds me (and a lot of people) of the Rathergate memos. What a daft error it was to publish them in the default Microsoft Word font of 2004 when they were meant to have originated in the 1970s. I thought then and still think now that they were a first draft released too soon. Could something similar have happened here?

The Guardian pulls in its horns a little. Its story now carries a rather grudging little update saying that the Heartland Institute now claims one document is a fake. The Guardian does not make it as clear as it ought in my opinion that the doubtful document is the very one that had all the good quotes.

At this point, like all good detective stories, a whole new sub plot bubbles up. The climate sceptic blogs have a suspect and name him with what seems to me ridiculous confidence given that the stated evidence against him is vague; mostly a matter of similarities of style. Now who's risking all they have gained for a trivial advantage? If their suspect turns out to be wrongly accused, the story, which they had snatched back and made into one about fakers rather than leakers, will be forfeit again.

And so it goes - and so it stalls, last time I looked. The person named has not responded to emails; he appears to be offline. But why shouldn't he be offline? Do you spend your Saturdays checking your email to see if you have been accused of any career-ending shenanigans in the last few hours? Meanwhile other strange portents are seen; open letters are published then retracted and both sides go about with an air of knowing more than they are letting on.

Agatha Christie would put in the second murder about now.

UPDATE, 21 FEBRUARY:

The second body duly falls.

That "person named" to whom I alluded so delicately was Peter Gleick. He has now admitted obtaining the documents by deception. I note that the very thing that led to his name being mentioned as a suspect were similarities of writing style between Gleick's published writing and the "different" email. Nonetheless he claims that he did not alter any of the emails he obtained. As to that, here is a page listing 100 interjections of the sort that express emotion without actually pinning one down to having said anything. Choose as appropriate. I quite like "hmm" and "ahem" myself, but my favourite must be "uh-huh" (affirmation) differing by only a breath from "uh-uh" (negation).

Hat tip to Douglas2 in the comments.

(3)

We already have a 'Samizdata quote of the day' for today, but, yes, here are seven more. I wrote them down over last Christmas, and then forgot about them. Ant then today, I encountered them again. They still make me smile, so here they all are for you good people.

First, a couple of things said by Patsy Stone, the amazing fashion monstress played by Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous. Over Christmas there were two new episodes. So much for my "complete" box set that I found in a charity shop last year.

On the terribleness of the recent riots in London:

Oh I don't know. Nothing wrong with a bit of extreme shopping.

On the drugs issue:

Have you seen the price of methadone? It's cheaper to buy crack.

Also on a fashion theme, from one of those Father Christmas in a New York Shopping Store movies, said by the Lady Boss:

I don't know if large women care what they look like, but if they do, let's exploit them.

That's the spirit. And depending on how the project turns out:

This is either the smartest decision I've ever made or the stupidest decision you've ever made.

Which has to be a very old joke, but like I say, it made me smile.

Next, this from the Headmistress of St Trinian's (played by Rupert Everett), about her (I think) brother (also Rupert Everett), to her brother's daughter:

Your father has a short memory masquerading as a clear conscience.

Finally a couple of overhearings from BBC Radio 3. Here's something from the recently deceased Gustav Leonhardt, about and with whom they did a commemorative Music Matters show, featuring a recorded interview with him. Leonhardt is explaining why the biographical details of the lives of the great composers don't interest him that much, only their music.

When you meet a genius, you don't know he is one. He is only a genius when he is at work.

Finally, here is Professor Robert Winston, ruminating on science, in between introducing some of his classical favourites with Rob Cowan:

Uncertainty is a good place to be. It worries me when governments take a very assertive position on the basis of very weak evidence and then stick to it.

The phrase "climate science" was never uttered, but you got the distinct feeling that this particular Public Voice is thinking that CAGW is a band-waggon that it now makes more sense to get off rather than to shout from. I must remember to email the Bishop about that.

Something tells me that the CAGW-ists will, any year now, start having short memories masquerading as clear consciences.

(11)

Someone who well deserves to be high up on the climate usual-suspects list is Bill McGuire, who is Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College, London. He's giving a lecture at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, on 21 February. The blurb for this on the RI website reads as follows:

Tuesday 21 February 2012
7.00pm to 8.30pm - Good availability
Lecturers: Prof Bill McGuire

Twenty thousand years ago our planet was an icehouse. Temperatures were down six degrees; ice sheets kilometres thick buried much of Europe and North America and sea levels were 130m lower. The following 15 millennia saw an astonishing transformation as our planet metamorphosed into the temperate world upon which our civilisation has grown and thrived.

One of the most dynamic periods in Earth history saw rocketing temperatures melt the great ice sheets like butter on a hot summer's day; feeding torrents of freshwater into ocean basins that rapidly filled to present levels. The removal of the enormous weight of ice at high latitudes caused the crust to bounce back triggering earthquakes in Europe and North America and provoking an unprecedented volcanic outburst in Iceland. A giant submarine landslide off the coast of Norway sent a tsunami crashing onto the Scottish coast while around the margins of the continents the massive load exerted on the crust by soaring sea levels encouraged a widespread seismic and volcanic rejoinder.

In many ways, this post-glacial world mirrors that projected to arise as a consequence of unmitigated climate change driven by human activities. Already there are signs that the effects of climbing global temperatures are causing the sleeping giant to stir once again. Could it be that we are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one?

In this talk, Bill McGuire argues that climate change is once more setting the scene for the giant to reawaken, and we can already see the signs.

Tickets: £10 standard, £7 concessions and £5 Members

Make a night of it! Come for a cocktail or something delicious, modern and British to eat in the bar. The bar and café at the Ri has the perfect atmosphere for a night out.

...Seeing this prompted me to send an email to Prof. McGuire:

Dear Professor McGuire

My eye was caught by the description of your forthcoming lecture at the RI on the 21st. It sounds fascinating: I hope I can get there.

But I think somebody at the RI has let you down. According to the blurb at http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayContent&id=00000005647:

>> Twenty thousand years ago our planet was an icehouse. Temperatures were down six degrees; ice sheets kilometres thick buried much of Europe and North America and sea levels were 130m lower. The following 15 millennia saw an astonishing transformation ...

- and then:

>> In many ways, this post-glacial world mirrors that projected to arise as a consequence of unmitigated climate change driven by human activities. Already there are signs that the effects of climbing global temperatures are causing the sleeping giant to stir once again. Could it be that we are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one?

I assume some air-headed press officer at the RI thought it would be a good marketing ploy to bracket a serious scientific account of the effects of a sea rise of the order of 100 metres with the effects of the rise projected by the IPCC for the lifetimes of our grandchildren.

Makes those Daily Mail climate-change deniers look sober by comparison!

I know it might be hard for you to inject some sanity at this late stage, but can you do anything to get the RI Web page corrected?

Best,

Chris Cooper

______________________________

Chris Cooper
Science writer and editor

[... & full contact details]
______________________________

I suppose this could be classified as a troll, if person-to-person emails can be trolls. Certainly, it was meant to be provocative. And it was a tiny bit deceptive in that I was pretending to believe that BM wasn't personally responsible for his own publicity, whereas I don't doubt for a moment that he drafted it himself, judging by his past output (for example, " 'Tiny' climate changes may trigger quakes".)

But one man's troll is another man's well-aimed rapier thrust – and I had one, small, precisely defined target for my challenge: "bracketing a serious scientific account of the effects of a sea rise of the order of 100 metres with the effects of the rise projected by the IPCC for the lifetimes of our grandchildren."

Anyway, Prof. McGuire didn't rise to the bait, and didn't reply. His self-publicizing climate-alarmist hype on the RI site is unchanged. I don't know whether I can bear to be at the event.

(5)

With a whoop and a holler the Guardian reports that Bjorn Lomborg's climate sceptic think tank is to close. Before anyone tells me, yes I know that "climate sceptic" is not a good description of Lomborg's opinions. The article itself is more accurate.

It seems the Danish government cut off funding:

... Denmark's general election last year ushered in a new administration less keen to support his views. Earlier this month, the Danish government confirmed that it had cut more than £1 million in funding for Lomborg's centre. As a result, he only has funding in place until the end of June.

Good news for the Danish taxpayer, one might think, but I suspect that the stream of kroner diverted away from Lomborg's think tank is unlikely to be returning their way.

The Guardian commenters, mostly warmists in a much stronger sense than Lomborg, assume that this closure (if it happens) is a benefit for their cause. I doubt that is entirely true. They are living in the world before the internet. In that world, the major weapon in the battle of ideas was the catapult. The difficult bit was throwing your ideas hard enough and far enough. These days, though the loss of a big catapult is still a blow, anyone who cares to fight can find a little catapult and, er, my military metaphor has gone the way of the mangonel, but the new difficult bit is not projection but acceptance. Getting believed. If your problem is that the people are already half inclined to think that your opinion has a little too much of the pravda, the official line about it, the last thing you want to do is have it known that the opposition were silenced by anything other than argument.

(0)

Newcastle did not beat Manchester United today, because the long term trend is for Manchester United to beat Newcastle.

- Bishop Hill's quote of the day today. He found it here. This is the game being referred to.

(17)

Commenting on this reaction from Bishop Hill to a not-all-that-biased-by-their-standards BBC show about windfarms, regular BH commenter Philip Bratby says:

Only an idiot would consider building offshore wind farms (unless there is some other idiot prepared to give you huge sums of money to do it).

Bratby then mentions a website about a campaign called "Slay The Array". Slay The Array seems to be an alliance between those who oppose these giant propellers on aesthetic grounds, and those who oppose them on economic grounds, and they have set their particular sites on a vast clutch of propellers (the "Atlantic Array") which some gang of well-connected thieves and/or lunatics intend to build in the spot where the Severn Estuary turns into the Bristol Channel.

Personally I quite like the look of these giant propellers. But then, I like pylons, and skyscrapers, even scaffolding. As for wildlife, some of it will suffer if they build all these propellers, but other life forms will benefit, just as with every other human impact upon the environment.

However, I am entirely persuaded that, economically, these erections are ridiculous, in fact utterly fraudulent. So, for me, the biggest objection to them by far is this one:

The dash for wind energy is massively subsidised, making wind power three times more expensive than other power, paid for by increasing  all our fuel bills, pushing millions into fuel poverty.

If Artists Against Windfarms (who get a mention at the Slay The Array website where it says "our friends") oppose these stupid, larcenous but to me rather handsome propellers on artistic grounds, that's fine by me.

(5)

Nothing is sustainable.

- Willis Eschenbach

(7)

In Ecuador in 2003 a trial began against Texaco who were accused of dumping toxic material in the Amazon. They were ordered to pay $18bn in damages. Chevron bought Texaco, and they are fighting back. Their evidence includes out-takes from the documentary movie Crude. Wizbang links to some of the video (via Small dead animals, via Counting Cats). One of the video's protagonists talks of using smoke and mirrors and bullshit in the Ecuadorian court to explain away the fact that the scientific reports only showed localised contamination.

Chevron have some web pages with the background and more videos. I like it when companies bluntly defend themselves so publicly. None of this is to do with fracking, but it does shed some light on the opponents of oil exploration.

Meanwhile, an Investors Business Daily piece (via Junk Science) suggests that as of May, the Environmental Protection Agency was not aware of a proven case of water being affected by fracking, and that recent concerns about this may be due to contamination from the chemicals the EPA used when drilling its own wells. Update: Now Instapundit is saying that the EPA struck gas!

All of which suggests we need to be on our toes when faced with evidence of the dangers of fracking.

(24)

Really.

(13)

Incoming email from newly signed up Samizdatista Rob Fisher (who can only do emails right now) about how Oxfam is proposing a global shipping tax. Watts Up With That? has the story.

Says Rob:

This is extraordinary. Read the whole thing but in particular the money flowchart diagram.

Bishop Hill calls this Oxfam creating famine.

Says Anthony Watts:

These people have no business writing tax law proposals, especially when it appears part of the larder goes back to them. This is so wrong on so many levels.

Says Bishop Hill commenter ScientistForTruth:

These [snip - please tone down the language] are in principle no different from the pirates operating out of Somalia, wanting to skive money off international shipping. And just as Oxfam would be solicitous to ensure that no-one gets their hands on the dosh unless they sign up to an eco-fascist agenda, so the pirates will be sure to share the booty only with their mates.

I do enjoy those Bishop's Gaff Bishop's Rules bits in his comments section. Perhaps "what a bunch of total snips" will catch on as an insult.

(24)

Leo Hickman of the Guardian is apparently angry (as Bishop Hill mentions here) that the Spectator published an article by sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner, an article I recycled the concluding paragraphs of as a(n) SQotD here on Thursday, and Leo Hickman isn't the only one. The general mood in the CAGW camp is: get Mörner!

To this end a commenter ("schoolswot" – today 11:10am) at Delingpole said this of Mörner:

This is the guy that claims that dowsing works but doesn't actually want to prove it?

To which commenter "rastech" (circa 1pm) replied:

Dowsing does work, and you can prove it yourself (everybody can do it, some are just better at it than others).

The guy that taught me how to do it (yeah I was surprised I could do it), was a water well driller. He told me exactly where the springs were that he was going to drill, where two springs crossed, their depth (18ft and 24ft), how much water an hour they would produce to start with (it improves the more you pump), PLUS, where there was an even better spring to drill, if those two didn't work out (it would have been twice as expensive to drill it, as it was almost 50ft deep) too reliable, as they were both in sandstone (but ideal for drinking water as it is beautifully filtered - you should taste the tea!).

He was spot on (you know when you hit a spring as the colour of the rock changes as you go through it - I watched every stage from start to finish on many wells with him, as all my neighbours had boreholes drilled by him and I helped him with them, as he got me practicing the dowsing on them).

Let me guess, from a position of complete ignorance and inexperience in the subject, you are an 'expert', right?

Well don't feel bad about it, I felt exactly the same until I felt that damned divining rod dive for the deck with me holding it.

PS. What convinced me to try him, wasn't a money back guarantee. I didn't have to pay him AT ALL until he had delivered a good water supply. He got years of work in the area from that borehole, and he never let anybody down.

So, it's now officially official. Dowsing, like cold weather, is now right wing.

All this in a comment thread attached to a Delingpole piece about Jeremy Clarkson, and about how all the shouting about Jeremy Clarkson is really about diverting attention from the fact that the recent public sector strike, some time last week, was a failure. Although, Guido reckons Clarkson is now laughing all the way to the bank. They haven't so much diverted attention from the failure of their strike as given a ton of free publicity to someone who said, admittedly in his characteristically OTT manner, that the strikers were idiots.

Please try to keep your comments on topic. The topics being: Leo Hickman, the Guardian, Nils-Axel Mörner, dowsing, whether tea really does taste better if made with water filtered through sandstone, James Delingpole, the BBC, public sector strikes, Jeremy Clarkson, whether it's okay for Jeremy Clarkson to joke about people being taken out and shot without really meaning it, Guido Fawkes, how to get tabloid publicity by the ton, paper money collapse … well, I didn't mention paper money collapse until now, but I thought I ought to.

(18)

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that ‘there is strong evidence’ of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: ‘Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.’

We must learn to take the environmentalists’ predictions with a huge pinch of salt. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That was last year: where are those refugees? And where are those sea level rises? The true facts are found by observing and measuring nature itself, not in the IPCC’s computer-generated projections. There are many urgent natural problems to consider on Planet Earth — tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions not least among them. But the threat of rising sea levels is an artificial crisis.

- Sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner rips into the climate catastrophists.

See also this piece, which drives a dagger into the heart of the climate catastrophe fraud.

(12)

This is an attempt to get an Instalanche, so he will probably ignore it just to make the point that he doesn't do Instalanches for anything that flat out asks for it. Although, on the other hand …

Either way, two recent objects of linkage at Instapundit in recent times have been Climategate and Goldman Sachs. Well, this Climategate email, spotted by Bishop Hill commenter "GS" (3:27pm), concerns Goldman Sachs, so the Prof ought at least to be interested:

Goldman Sachs #4092

date: Mon, 18 May 1998 10:00:38 +0100
from: Trevor Davies
subject: goldman-sachs
to: REDACTED,REDACTED,REDACTED

Jean,

We (Mike H) have done a modest amount of work on degree-days for G-S. They now want to extend this. They are involved in dealing in the developing
energy futures market.

G-S is the sort of company that we might be looking for a 'strategic alliance' with. I suggest the four of us meet with ?? (forgotten his name) for an hour on the afternoon of Friday 12 June (best guess for Phil & Jean - he needs a date from us). Thanks.

Trevor

Instapundit has also long been interested by the BBC, as a phenomenon of more than local interest. So I would also recommend to him, and to people generally, a read through of the Bishop Hill comment two down from that one above, this time from "ThinkingScientist" (3:41pm). He copies and pastes an email from a BBC Producer to Keith Briffa, about how Briffa must "prove" (the BBC Producer's inverted commas) in a BBC TV show that there is something very extreme about the supposed current warming spurt. In other words, Briffa must put the C (for catastrophic) in CAGW.

GW for global warming has clearly been happening, although it is not nearly so clear that it is still happening now. (Anyone who denies the second is routinely accused of denying the first.) A for anthropogenic GW is widely believed in, but its scale and even existence are matters of fierce controversy. It's that C for catastrophic on the front of AGW that this is all about. For a power grab this big, there has to be a C in there.

LATER: And, we have our Instalanche. Many thanks sir. (And thanks to the commenter who corrected my earlier wrong spelling of Instalanche.)

(23)

Watts Up With That: "They’re real and they’re spectacular!" Scroll down to find the bit torrent link to the FOIA2011.zip file, though it is not working for me right now.

Leo Hickman in the Guardian: not happy.

James Delingpole in the Telegraph: happy.

(2)

In its varying degrees, the political, legislative and social applications of environmental science studies in this 21st century should be carefully compared to that of Eugenics in the late 19th and through the mid- 20th centuries.

- Redoubtable serial commenter 'RRS'

(3)

Well thank you IPCC authors for letting us know what is really behind that “very likely” assessment of attribution [of] 20th century warming. A lot of overbloated over confidence that cannot survive a few years of cooling. The light bulbs seem to be just turning on in your heads over the last two years. Think about all the wasted energy fighting the “deniers” when [you] could have been listening, trying to understand their arguments, and making progress to increase our understanding of the causes of climate variability and change.

- Judith Curry, the climate-change non-alarmists' favourite climate scientist, commenting on an article by Paul Voosen on Greenwire: "Provoked scientists try to explain lag in global warming".

(11)

Favourite climate-related quote of the week so far:

The claim that AGW is consistent with heavier snowfalls wasn't mainstream until it needed to be true.

It's a comment, from Nicholas Hallam, on this, at Bishop Hill. Heh.

Although, actually, the recent Bishop Hill posting that I find most interesting is this one, which is about a bunch of solar power grant guzzlers begging to have their grants renewed at the level they have become accustomed to. Something along those lines. The absence of any widespread public support for these chancers will reveal just what a propaganda beating the greenies have been taking for the last few years, not least from blogs like this one. Most people will react to these green supplications, if they react at all, only by saying something like: "Oh you're losing your jobs, bad luck, join the club, but actually what we really don't like is our fuel bills doubling."

Until now, it's all been sane people begging the politicians to stop chucking money down the green drain. Now the politicians are starting to rearrange things a tiny bit against the interests of some of the politically less well connected greenies, and these greenies are now also starting to beg. Yes, folks, it's the reversing of the burden of proof. We no longer have to convince them that all that "settled science" isn't so settled after all. They have to convince us that they aren't scam artists. Or deluding themselves. Or a bit of both. Good luck guys.

Billions are still being tipped down the green drain. This is only the very beginning of the end of the great green scam, which will probably never completely disappear. But, once the politicians realise how little support there is for green subsidies, they will get bolder, and cut them some more. And the greenies will scream some more. And the arms of the general public will remain folded, their faces blank with contempt.

About time.

LATER: More:

"We built a business on the back of David Cameron's promises. He has betrayed us twice. Anybody thinking of investing in government-sponsored green opportunities, I would advise them to run away."

Or government-sponsored anything else, come to that. Welcome to politics, mate.

(12)

First, you unilaterally declare that there is some huge looming disaster a long ways in the future. Using a variety of methods fair and foul, you obtain the full cooperation of other scientists, governments, educational institutions, and the media the world around. With all of you, the whole chorus, baying for skeptic’s blood in full voice, you spend a quarter century trying to convince the people of the oncoming Thermageddon.

That’s the problem? After 25 years of unbridled alarm from scientists and everyone else from Presidents to my kid’s teachers, the problem is that scientists are not alarmist enough, they’re too reticent to state their true opinion? Really? That’s the reason the public doesn’t believe you? Is that your final answer?

- Willis Eschenbach takes a sledgehammer to the nut that is James Hansen, a nut who, alas, continues to be employed in a prominent and influential position by NASA.

The word Thermageddon has been around for quite a while, but it's new to me. I like it.

(12)

[G]reen thinking represents a challenge to the status quo? That's a laughable idea. From schools and universities to every corner of the Western political sphere, the climate-change outlook is the status quo. It's the new conservatism, its aim being to conserve nature at the expense of further developing and transforming society.

- Brendan O'Neill

(9)

So I suppose the jet she flew in on from her home in Colorado worked on rubber bands.

- a commenter called 'SouthendViking' on the Telegraph, remarking about actress Daryl Hannah, who was arrested at a protest where she reportedly said:

Before she was arrested, Hannah told WRC-TV the protesters want to be free from the "death and destruction" that fossil fuels cause. The group is calling for clean energy instead.

Greens... they want us living as serfs in a pre-industrial society.

(8)

Sit down. I am about to astonish you. Via the Drudge Report, I found this: Seattle's 'green jobs' program a bust.

A green jobs scheme has failed. Over the shock yet? I've always meant to ask one of the enthusiasts for these schemes why they do not also support a job-creating proposal to forbid the generation of electricity by any means other than men on treadmills, but I have not done so for fear of giving them ideas.

I was lying earlier. I am not surprised at all and do not expect you to be. The best that any government "job creation" scheme can ever do is "create" a few jobs in some specific place or profession while the spotlight is on that place or profession - at the cost of destroying the wealth that actually creates long term jobs, but in a conveniently spread out way so no one much notices. Greens strive to convince us that there are external costs paid by the community as a whole when jets fly or factories produce geegaws. "Look at the whole picture," they urge. "Don't be bedazzled by the transitory benefit accruing to a few and fail to see the larger but subtler harm being borne by the many." They have a point. I wish they could apply it to 'job creation'.

Apparently, however, this Seattle scheme was even a bust in its own terms. It withered even before the spotlight moved on.

The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.

McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But more than a year later, Seattle's numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.

That was not the only part of this article rich in irony. Look at this:

"Who's benefitting from this program right now – it doesn't square with what the aspiration was," said Howard Greenwich, the policy director of Puget Sound Sage, an economic-justice group. He urged the city to revisit its social-equity goals.

....Greenwich said the energy retrofit market has turned out to be extremely complicated, with required hammering out of job standards, hiring practices, wages and how best to measure energy benefits.

Market? Where was the market there? The things that have "turned out" (talking as if it all happened by chance) to be "extremely complicated" (that I can believe) are the workings of the interlocking tangle of government rules and protections that people like him and his "economic justice" group advocate. Job standards. Hiring practices. How best to measure energy benefits on some government form. It is sad for all those whose hopes are dashed by these schemes, like the mugs here in the UK who trained as assessors to issue Energy Performance Certificates, or like the unfortunates who got burnt metaphorically and literally in the great Australian insulation debacle. (Not surprisingly, Tim Blair, chronicler of that saga, also has a post about this Seattle fandango. Mine was started first, though.) But what a joke when the very thing that reduces the progressive silver bullet to a twist of mangled brass is... all the stuff that progressives wanted all along.

On second thoughts, I need not worry about giving them dangerous ideas. The great 'men on treadmills' job creation scheme would never get moving. It would have to be persons on treadmills regardless of gender, age, religious belief or sexual orientation for a start. And what about disabled access?

(6)

The good news: those polars bears killed by "global warming," were not.

From the AP:

Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into "integrity issues."

... observations suggested the bears drowned in rough seas and high winds and "suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues."

Bad news for some, I reckon.

(17)

Ezra Levant:

There are about 100 professional anti-oilsands activists in Canada, who do nothing but attack Canada’s oil industry. Typically they pose as grassroots environmentalists. But the facts are different.

Most environmental activists are actually paid professionals. And most work for foreign lobbyists.

He is talking only of Canada, but even so, it puts a whole different slant on things, doesn't it? Read the rest of the piece for a few details.

I also think it puts a different slant on the constantly heard - and utterly ridiculous - claim that in the absence of Old School Dead Tree Media news reporting, there will no longer be any news, just bloggers blogging and twitterers twittering, about nothing.

There will still be plenty of news. But it may be somewhat different news.

(10)

Seriously, I mean man, SERIOUSLY Asia doesn’t give a fuck about your white, western, self flagellating, puritanical eco religion.

- commenter 'twostix' on this Catallaxy thread

As someone who has lived in the rapidly developing part of Asia for the best part of four years thus far, I cannot stress how strongly the above is true. Oh, sure, people worry about Climate Change (in fact, I would say they are less skeptical about it than the average westerner), but virtually no one would sacrifice development in its name.

I have said it before, and the greens really need to get it through their thick skulls - if global warming is real, it is now inevitable. For the reason so eloquently stated above.

(14)

Owing to my habit of listening to the BBC radio news at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, on account of me liking to record CD Review, I just heard about this:

The heads of 15 green campaign groups have written to the prime minister warning the government is in danger of losing its way on environmental policy.

I do hope so.

The letter says the coalition should promote a green economy with "urgency and resolve" if it is to follow its vow to be the "greenest government ever".

The groups include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB.

Downing Street says it stands by its record of protecting the environment and delivering a low carbon economy.

A year ago, David Cameron said the environment would be a top priority.

I love the phrase "a top priority", in particular the "a". And when a government says that it "stands by its record", that often means that it realises that it's a stupid record and is about to attempt a somewhat different record. It will never apologise for past errors, but is now wanting to make different errors, now that the political wind has altered somewhat. It was trying to get elected. Now, it is trying to at least to appear to balance the books that the election has placed in front of it.

David Cameron is the sort of politician who cannot be relied upon even to break a "vow", but this news sounds, if not good, then at least like an improvement. There has been quite a little furry of news lately to the effect that his government is starting to have doubts about its electoral promise to wreck the British economy in the name of junk science, by making modern life illegal. Given that the British economy is already being wrecked in the service of junk money, I guess they are starting to reckon that one self-administered catastrophe is probably as much as the country can take just now.

Presumably similar calculations are going on in all other countries. Again, I hope so.

(4)

There is a nice exposé in the Telegraph indicating that tax money and the tax funded BBC are funding key people and institutions in the warmist/environmental movement. The article provides a useful who's-who of establishment figures with their snouts in the public trough...

...but what a pity they did not just read the indispensable Biased-BBC blog because the Telegraph could have written this exposé more than a year ago.

(8)

During a discussion with other board members of the National Space Society, someone noted this lecture by Albert Bartlett, a retired Physics prof. at the University of Colorado-Boulder on the subject of "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy," After watching it, I felt a discussion was in order on how someone can say things that are absolutely correct and yet not map them correctly to the boundary conditions in the reality we actually inhabit.

I had been putting this off due to an overly busy schedule but I finally had a little time free this morning and watched all eight sections. 1-6 are math; the remaining two are primarily politics. What I find wrong is what is missing. We all know how exponentials work and we all know that they do indeed stop in real life. In electronics a rising exponential means clipping, feedback, etc as the circuit response transitions from linear to nonlinear.

It is also present in economics and in demographics both of which have the S curve as a fundamental form. The S is a combination of a rising exponential and a falling exponential glued together at an inflection point. This is the 'growth' curve that matches the Bell Curve he shows for oil production. The two are closely related mathematically.The inflection point on the S-curve is the peak on the Bell.

A very big missing fact in his discussion is that population growth peaks in the mid to late part of this century by all the demographic studies I have seen. I was part of a University wide collection of summer seminar givers on this subject at CMU back in the early 1980's (I presented in one course on the implications of the space option naturally). The UN projections that were part of our study guide showed a family of curves of which we seem to have followed the lower growth curve in the ensuing decades.

Even then it was known that the biggest factor reining in population growth is women's education and per capita wealth. One could even say the faster economies of the third world grow, the sooner they are likely to get through the demographic transition (ie the S curve in populations) and the lower their final population will be. Europe went through the transition a century ago; the US in perhaps the 40's (I would have to research that timings, I do not remember them precisely). China has gone through it also now and the population is still going up only because there is a coasting phase due to previous growth. In the terms I used earlier, they have passed the inflection point of the S curve or the peak of the Bell Curve.

Europe faces a collapsing population, a falling exponential, something that was not really predicted 30 years ago. Russia has a demographic disaster on its hands. Very few places still show population growth and those are primarily in the Middle East. It is no surprise this an area dominated by a culture where women are allowed the least control of their lives and bodies and are least likely to be educated.

The good professor also ignores economics although they show indirectly in his curve. Economics, not a bunch of self-congratulatory tree huggers, is the driving force behind a growing efficiency in products or the useful part of that efficiency at least. The market gives a price signal on a resource; capitalists then innovate to find ways to do the same with less or with different so they can make more money. This was the most important message from Julian Simon's writings.

I found it interesting how he went out of his way to denigrate Julian Simon rather than engage the very real ideas Simon espoused. Most notable was the uncomfortable fact of the bet Simon won against Paul Erlich on the declining real price of resources. Perhaps the difference is that Simon's world is one in which nonlinear dynamics rule. Simple linear models of classical physics are simply not a good model for economics or civilizations over the long term.

So, absolutely, long term exponential growth would be a bad thing if it ever really happened. But it will not. Population on the planet will stabilize; per capita use of resources will rise for a while after that until everyone in the world comes up to the wealth level of us hated capitalist Americans who have the temerity and the creativity to make our lives better than those with crap governments and worse cultures. They will emulate us, not vice versa.

Market signals and competition will drive down the per capita use of resources and the energy per unit of production; if we get lots of solar power satellites the actual energy per capita may go way, way up... but not necessarily as an exponential, or at least not one that runs for a long period of time.

I foresee stable planetary populations living at levels of wealth beyond the wildest dreams of our most creative billionaires. Since I just saw "Atlas Shrugged" yesterday afternoon, I very much hope we do not make our billionaires go on strike. They are the ones who make real things happen. Without the generations of their kind we would all still be spending our days watching the backside of a mule.

(12)

Yesterday I received a spam-email, with a link to this, which begins thus:

The public sector has a key part to play in the fight against climate change, as well as ensuring the security of the country's energy supply. The Public Accounts Committee has criticised the UK's 'unacceptably slow' progress towards meeting its renewable energy targets. Understanding the scale of change required, and the public sector's role in leading the way, is vitally important.

And the Gadarene Swine are moving towards the cliff edge with abysmally insufficient urgency.

Later:

Greening the heat supply is extremely important – heating accounts for roughly half of Britain's carbon dioxide emissions. The Department for Energy and Climate Change recently announced the launch of the world's first Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), which aims to increase renewable heat generation from 1% to 12% by 2020. The £860m scheme aims to encourage the installation of equipment such as renewable heat pumps, biomass boilers and solar thermal panels to reduce emissions and support the existing 150,000 jobs in the heating industry.

Once again, we observe that Law about how, when you name a government department after some problem, this guarantees that the problem will only get worse.

All of which just goes to show the power of momentum. The mere arguments in favour of such policies have taken a hammering during the last year or two, and I daresay that the event that this piece of spam was alerting me to won't have quite the buzz that its organisers had been wanting when they first set it up. Doubts - in the form of puzzled and angry questions about what to do about the rising tide of climate denialism, but doubts nevertheless - may be heard during it. And that matters, because unless there is global unanimity on this issue, curbing some of the CO2 emissions of little old Britain will be so extremely pointless as actually to seem somewhat pointless to some of those who favour such a policy. But, too many bets have been placed, too much Green Money is now swilling around, for this foolishness to end at all soon.

In the recent Local Growth White Paper, the government emphasised its commitment to delivering a huge expansion of renewable energy over the next 10 years. Recognising that community renewable energy projects play a vital role in meeting the national need for secure and clean energy, they will now be allowed keep any business rates generated. Moreover, the planning system has caused hold-ups in the past, but imminent changes to planning powers will make it simpler to take advantage of such opportunities.

In other words, this Good Cause is now deep into the racket phase. Which means that the end is in sight, but not before a lot more money has been given to some very undeserving people.

(38)

From - where else - The Guardian: Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth

"Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered."

"Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities".

The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities."

"Little opposition is expected to the law being passed because President Evo Morales's ruling party, the Movement Towards Socialism, enjoys a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament.

"In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being.

The draft of the new law states: "She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation."

(4)

Computer modellers have long been accused of inventing extreme weather events at some deliberately vague point in the future. But here is an Australian story about how another kind of modelling invented extreme weather conditions at an exact moment in the recent past, that other forms of actual measurement didn't register.

The claim by SEQWater in its official report that a "one-in-2000-year" rainfall event occurred over the Wivenhoe Dam at a critical stage on January 11 has been widely reported in the media and cited by senior public servants to justify the near loss of control of the dam at the time.

But no such rainfall event was measured by any rainfall gauges. Instead, the claim was manufactured by SEQWater after it modelled the rapid rise of levels in the dam, repositioned rainfall data to an area immediately upstream of the dam, and then doubled it.

After extrapolating in this unusual way to achieve an extreme number, the SEQWater report states: "Rainfall of this intensity and duration over the Wivenhoe Dam lake area at such a critical stage of a flood event was unprecedented.

"The resulting run-off could not be contained without transition to (an operating strategy that led to the operator opening the dam's gate for huge releases)."

But:

Senior independent engineer Michael O'Brien, who has spent the past nine weeks analysing the performance of the dam and SEQWater, said that while the rainfall was heavy, he did not believe it was extreme and he doubted it was ever close to the range claimed by the operator.

This is no mere academic spat. SEQW's allegedly flawed decision making contributed hugely to the serious flooding that recently hit Queensland.

Mr O'Brien, who has mounted a strong case that the devastating floods in and near Brisbane would have been almost completely avoided with better management of the dam, said the one-in-2000-year event was an "invention" that could not be taken seriously.

The modelling-trumps-measurement vibe to all this is the reason that climate skeptics like Anthony Watts are already onto this.

Delingpole hasn't yet had a gloat about it all, but doubtless he will, because this just begs to be amplified into a big story, of the sort that the world's Old School Media will either run with, or make further climate-prats of themselves by ignoring.

(8)

Every day is Earth Day in North Korea

- Samizdata commenter 'newrouter'

(21)

It is 8:30 pm in London and 'Earth Day' has begun. Every single light in our house and garden have now been turned on.

(13)

I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron - I think he is both.

- A comment on a Christopher Booker article. Bishop Hill already has this as his quote of the day, but I think it really deserves to get around.

It is often assumed by opponents of big government that all those on the government payroll are automatic believers in big government, because it suits them to be. But it just doesn't follow. They may start out believing in big government, but what they then learn when part of big government may cause them to have second thoughts.

LATER: Yes, I have demoted this posting, as it were, basically by pretending that this went up an hour sooner than it really did. This is because I have been updating the posting that is now next, and because I consider that posting, although no more important than this one, to be be more urgent.

(15)

Caroline Lucas MP, Britain's only, (or "first" as the Guardian puts it) Green Party MP, writes "Scrapping the fuel duty rise will hurt Britain economically". In the article she says,

Some of the loudest voices are calling on the chancellor to scrap the planned fuel duty increase, due in April. But that essentially means using tax-payers' money to fix a problem that we cannot control – the long-term upward trend in oil prices.

A commenter called Fomalhaut88 pointed out one strange aspect of her article at 12.53AM. He or she wrote,

Only in the mind of Ms Lucas could not raising a tax further be defined as "using taxpayers money".

Some words from Ms Lucas that occur a line or two down are even more bizarre:

"A report commissioned from the Policy Studies Institute for the Green Alliance calculates that using a fuel duty cut to bring pump prices back to December 2009 levels would cost the taxpayer almost £6bn in the first year alone."

Spot the error in this sentence. I have put the relevant bit in bold to make it easier for you. I don't really think you need that help in spotting such an absurdity, of course. But by Gaia, some people do.

(27)

Did Steve Holliday, Chief Executive of the National Grid, let the cat out of the bag or deliberately set it amongst the pigeons when he said, on Radio 4 last week, that our National Grid is going to have start being "smarter" about who gets electricity and who doesn't? Delingpole reckons he's an imbecile, and maybe he is. I didn't hear the actual Radio 4 interview, so do not now know if he was blurting out an embarrassed admission or proud proclamation of inanity, or on the other hand offering a more careful and considered warning, thus to alert politicians to the consequences of their excessive policy greenness of recent years. Whatever the old school newspapers (that story, by the way, says that Delingpole is right) make of this story, it is already going walkabout in the new media.

Slowly, the counter-attack against global greenery is taking shape. First it was Climategate, which is now, finally, finding its way inside the heads of the kind of people who rule the world. The scientific excuses for greenery are collapsing, not just in the heads of skeptics, but in the heads of the kind of idiot politicians who originally accepted these excuses without bothering to scrutinise them. Now the consequences of greenery are becoming clearer. Blackouts. Nothing says "failed politicians" like power cuts.

For Britain, a big moment will arrive when it is finally, truly accepted, by enough British people to make this acceptance stick, that these blackouts are being imposed upon us by, and by means of, the European Union, and that our Prime Minister is not our Prime Minister, any more than the District Commissioner of your province in India was your District Commissioner. Today, the news is, yet again, that David Cameron is going native. I'll believe this when it starts having consequences, in the form of Britain doing things that the EU forbids, and when they threaten to chuck us out, and when Cameron says: go on then, I dare you. I wouldn't put this past him. He seems to be the kind of leader who follows his followers.

But, more generally, I am not angry about this tendency for the world more and more to be ruled as a single entity by the kind of people who now rule it. Telephones and atom bombs have seen to that. The former technology has long meant that they can talk to each other rationally, and the latter one has for more than half a century meant that they must. These people are now, more and more, all on the same side. I just wish they were ruling the world rather better than they actually actually are now ruling it.

In the matter of greenery, the world's rulers have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate a huge folly, and personally I am very grateful to the probably imbecilic Steve Holliday for having made this fact that little bit clearer.

(4)

If you are interested in seeing the polemics around climate giving way to improved climate science – and lets face it, a lot of the comrades around here find the polemics more fun - do not miss the storm being kicked up by Judith Curry on her blog Climate Etc. Curry is 'Professor and Chair' of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a bête noire (or at least a 'crazy aunt', as she puts it) of climate alarmists, as she is one of those competent insiders who keeps putting spokes in their wheels. She has three threads running on the topic of 'Hiding The Decline', referring to Phil Jones's notorious Climategate email. The basic message to her fellow climate researchers is: stop trying to defend the indefensible. Some money quotes:

It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document. Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one). The authors defend themselves by stating that there has been no attempt to hide the divergence problem in the literature, and that the relevant paper was referenced. I infer then that there is something in the IPCC process or the authors’ interpretation of the IPCC process (i.e. don’t dilute the message) that corrupted the scientists into deleting the adverse data in these diagrams.

McIntyre’s analysis is sufficiently well documented that it is difficult to imagine that his analysis is incorrect in any significant way. If his analysis is incorrect, it should be refuted. I would like to know what the heck Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. were thinking when they did this and why they did this, and how they can defend this, although the emails provide pretty strong clues. Does the IPCC regard this as acceptable? I am sure do not.

....

The subject of climate change is a complex and important topic; the public is counting on scientists to provide the best available information. When the public saw ... climategate, with "hide the decline" being its slogan, there was a substantial loss of public trust. This is not a good thing for climate science, nor for policy deliberations.

The response to climategate (of which hide the decline is the slogan) of the climate scientists and the broader climate establishment has been to say to the public "not to worry, the science is still sound, nothing has changed." No one is standing up to acknowledge the problems and talk about addressing them so that this kind of thing does not happen in the future. Restoring trust would have been easier a year ago than it is now.

Referring to supposed parallels between the hockey-stick controversy and a controversy over the relationship between hurricane intensity and global temperature:

When I ponder the hockeystick debate, and its differences with the hurricane debate, and then I read those emails, well, I don’t have much sympathy. They could have taken a different path in all this. The hurricane group (and certainly myself) are no saints, but they did the right thing and it didn’t take them all that long to do it.

It takes courage to take on her own profession's establishment like this.

(14)

Remarkable developments are in train at London's Royal Court Theatre, in the form of a play that is about climate science, but is not Watermelon propaganda. In a guest posting at Bishop Hill, Mr and Mrs Josh (Mr Josh also does the cartoons at Bishop Hill) provide a fascinating and enticing review of The Heretic, a new play by Richard Bean:

Book your tickets now, this play is a must-see comedy.

It has everything - more accurate climate science than a BBC documentary (ok, that's not exactly hard), brilliantly funny and wonderfully staged.

The drama centres on university climate scientist, Dr Diane Cassell, played superbly by Juliet Stevenson, whose research on sea levels in the Maldives shows no rising trend in sea levels.

This puts her at odds with Professor Kevin Maloney, Head of Dept Earth Sciences, played by James Fleet (sinisterly morphed from Hugo, in the Vicar of Dibley) whose main aim is to attract more funding to the department by toeing the consensus line on Climate Change.

When she publishes her research and expresses her skeptical views, notably on Newsnight to Jeremy Paxman, she becomes the focus of some very direct persecution.

Add in Phoebe, her daughter, and Ben, her carbon-obsessed first-year student, plus an ex-marine security guard and the stage is set. Pure comedy ensues as Ben follows the logic of his beliefs, refusing to keep warm, travel in any petroleum-based transport, and considering suicide since his vegetarian diet causes excessive methane production. Phoebe is ahead of him; severely anorexic she is at real risk of not making it. Both characters are played with worrying fragility that conveys lives overshadowed by fear, battling to understand the issues or find a set of rules to live by. Their plight is all too similar to that of Diane, struggling to work out if the death threats from environmentalists should be taken seriously.

In a feat of Montfordian proportions nearly all the major recent climate change stories are woven into the play: the lack of sea level rise, the politicisation of science by the IPCC, Glaciergate, the logarithmic effect of CO2 (in a way you will never forget), the misanthropy of some environmentalist groups, the 'one-tree' hockey stick, and, of course, Climategate. But the issues are put on the table, without arm twisting, encouraging the audience to go out and do their own research.

Maybe I am reading far too much into this, but this sounds like it could be something of a cultural turning point in Britain. For decades now, there has been a self-reinforcing feedback loop shutting out anything but left wing friendly dramas from the live theatre in Britain, or so it has seemed and felt to one of those who has felt shut out. No anti-lefty dramas - e.g. praising Thatcher or heroic entrepreneurs or working class vigilantes, or denouncing bossy social workers or manipulative communists or ridiculous civil servants or psychotic and tyrannical Islamists, or pointing at the state itself as the prime mover in the banking crisis - have made sense to the theatres, because the audience for such things hasn't been there, and because writers have been disinclined even to bother writing such things. What's the point? And because there is no non-lefty drama, the audience for such things never comes. It stays at home surfing the net or watching its preferred telly shows and movies. If it is like me, it blogs.

Crucial to the willingness of another audience to show up to see this play is that it can be urged to do so on the internet, despite the major official organs of British theatre publicity, notable the BBC and the Guardian, apparently trying, just as they have tried with Climategate itself, to be very sniffy and dismissive. If a new audience does show up in strength at the Royal Court to see The Heretic, then that could result in Britain's theatres saying: hey, I wonder if there are other non-lefty-friendly "issues" out there that we haven't done before, because the BBC and the Guardian haven't allowed us to?

Never forget that theatre folk love a big row, provided only that the row isn't too big, as it would be if they took at serious whack at Islam. They love to push the boundaries, not too far, but just that little bit beyond what is entirely safe. They love to make mischief, to get everyone shouting at each other. They love to take the piss out of whoever happens at any particular moment to be the pompous and hypocritical elite, because, potentially, maybe, that will sell tickets, contrive bums on seats. Okay, most British thesps are lefties themselves, but many of those lefties are theatricals first, lefties second, and in quite a few other cases, on the quiet, so I surmise, not actually proper lefties at all, really, even though they dress like lefties and talk like lefties.

A earlier key moment in British theatrical history happened in the late nineteen fifties. British live theatre was then the Conservative Party at play, watching third-rate Noel Coward imitations consisting of brittle, well-dressed upper middle class chat in implausibly opulent living rooms with big floor-to-ceiling French windows at the back, centre stage. That is a caricature but not that much of one. But suddenly, or so it felt, all that was smashed to pieces by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and all that followed from it. Look Back in Anger was also, by the way, first presented at the Royal Court. Perhaps my view of all that is a bit myopic, because the nearest theatre to my home when I was a kid was the Windsor Rep, which, I seem to recall, showed third-rate Noel Coward imitations just about all the time. But I suspect I have it about right, even if those closer to theatrical happenings then had felt in their water that the Angry Young Man upheaval had been coming for some time and thus remember it as a somewhat more gradual thing. I'm not saying that The Heretic is in the same class, as a play or as a culturally explosive event, as Look Back in Anger. I haven't seen The Heretic yet. But this new play may perhaps, with hindsight, come be seen as one of the bigger paving stones that paved the way for something that is more like Look Back in Anger.

Goodness knows, Britain certainly contains plenty of anger just now.

Conveniently for me, the Royal Court Theatre is in Sloane Square, which is only a longish walk or a short bus or tube ride from where I live. I'm giving a talk on Monday. As soon as that's out of the way, I will pop around to the Royal Court and fix to see The Heretic for myself.

(34)

From the latest Radio Times, concerning a Radio 4 programme entitled In Denial: Climate on the Couch, to be aired at 9pm this evening. I will listen, and I will set my radio recorder.

Radio Times blurb:

Jolyon Jenkins investigates the psychology of climate change efforts, asking why some people seem unconcerned even though scientists are forecasting terrible changes to the planet. He questions whether environmentalists and the Government have been putting out messages that are counterproductive, and whether trying to scare people into action might actually be causing them to consume more.

My suspicion is that what I and all others who listen to this programme will hear will be an explanation of the failure of the Greenists to convince that omits the crucial matter of the mere truth, and what is now sincerely believed to be the truth by more and more of the mere people. The phrase "In Denial" does strongly suggest this. And "On the Couch" suggests that they think that some people, presumably all who deny, are mad.

You know the kind of thing: People don't think there's anything they can do! - No wonder they're being crazy! - We have not communicated successfully! - We have not got our message across properly!

It probably was rather a bad idea to make it look like they want to blow up children who disagree with them. But what if, despite such communicational ineptness, they have got their message across, but people just think it's a pack of lies? If that is what people now think, then no amount of improved communicational expertise that doesn't deal with the mere truth of things will make much difference.

But, my suspicions may prove to be unjustified. As of now, I live in hope that the truth, both what it is and what it is now believed to be, will at least get a semi-respectful mention, in among all the psychologising.

LATER:

This programme isn't about climate science so it's going to assume that the scientific consensus is true.

And a moment later, someone described (it may have been Jolyon Jenkins) this consensus as "undeniable". Which was an odd word to use, given the title.

Well, at least it has just been admitted that people sometimes say that it's all being exaggerated, even if it is assumed that this is mistaken and evasive. That it might be an honest opinion is not up for discussion, because that would mean discussing climate science.

So, the early and pessimistic commenters here are right. It looks like being a long discussion of what a bunch of true-believers can do to save the world, given that a huge tranche of people has decided that the world doesn't need saving, but will have to be convinced in the true-believer stuff is to even make sense let alone accomplish anything.

The elephant in their room is that they have lost this argument, in the sense that they need unanimity in this, but are drifting further and further away from unanimity. They are ignoring this elephant. They are behaving like that economist, stuck on a desert island with various other sorts of experts, who is wondering how to contrive a tin-opener. "Let's assume we have a tin-opener." This won't work.

LATER: Thinking about this some more, I should perhaps stress that the people who sincerely disagree that CAGW is happening were not called mad, as I feared they might be. They were simply ignored. All were assumed to really believe in CAGW, but to be using some kind of psychological doublethink to evade what they knew they ought to be doing really. Like I say: let's assume we've won.

(34)

It's hard to escape the conclusion that Emma Jay grossly misled Delingpole as to the nature of the programme.

Emma Jay's looks to be gone, as does that of Rupert Murray, the guy who dissembled his way into Monckton's confidence. I wonder what these question marks over their trustworthiness will do for their career prospects.

- Bishop Hill, in a posting entitled Integrity in the internet age reflects on the lack of integrity that was involved in the making of two recent BBC attempts to drive a stake into the climate sceptics. The thing about Bishop Hill is that he does not make such judgements lightly. He does not indulge in thoughtless abuse, and constantly posts little homilies discouraging it among his commenters. If he says you lack integrity, the chances are, overwhelmingly, that you do.

Presumably, many will want to defend these deceptions as being beneficial in the same way as has been claimed on behalf of whoever it was who revealed all those Climategate emails. But the fact remains that if you are dealing with either of the two above mentioned people, you should not trust them to tell you the truth about what sort of progamme they are really making. Their cover is now, as Bishop Hill says, blown.

(50)

(NB - new Special Bonus Thoughts were added to this post the morning after it was written. Scroll down.)

This will end in tears, says Bishop Hill.

Your trouble, bish, is that you are too nice. I think it's going to be hilarious. Tough on the kiddies, maybe, but having to stand next to daddy while he does the embarrassing thing will make a man of a munchkin faster than you can say "no pressure":

Time to Fight Back: How We Can Take on Those Who Are Sabotaging Our Response to the Climate Crisis

My partners in this effort will include the group Kids vs Global Warming, whose iMatter march aims to put a million kids in the streets on Mother's Day to demand that our leaders address climate change as if our children's future matters; Grist, America's leading environmental news website; The Nation; and other organizations still to be determined.

On the ground in Washington I will be joined by local young people—activist members of Generation Hot. Our plan is to confront the climate cranks face to face, on camera, and call them to account for the dangers they have set in motion.

Our initiative, Confront the Climate Cranks, will do just that: confront the cranks on camera and accompanied by some of the children they have put in danger. We will video all of our confrontations and then quickly make them available to the public—by posting them on YouTube and sharing them with mainstream and alternative media and the social networks of our partner organizations.

And by conveying our message through children and parents, we can reach the ordinary Americans whose support is essential to overcoming the power of money and insider status in Washington. We hope you'll join us.

ADDED LATER: I had some more serious thoughts overnight. Here they are. The way it is meant to work, Mark Hertsgaard's strategy, is this: the Concerned Green Parent can attack all the more fiercely because of the presence of the kid as symbol of threatened innocence, while for the Evil Denier the presence of the child means that he or she must be very restrained in hitting back, for fear of (a) hurting the poor kid's feelings by saying what you actually think of his daddy, and (b) being filmed doing so. Metaphorically this strategy is like firing your missiles from a school. Metaphorically, I said; it is only words - but, like firing your missiles from a school, it is an unconscious compliment to your enemies: it demonstrates your trust in them to behave well even when you do not.

In practice, however, the Hertsgaard strategy will backfire. It will backfire so painfully and so predictably that I doubt it will happen more than once, if at all. For one thing, audiences react badly to blatant emotional blackmail. If the world were just, that backblast would hit only the parent who is willing to use his or her own offspring as a combined shield and stage prop and then put the results on the internet, but the world is not just. Go onto YouTube and find some innocuous clip of a sweet little boy or girl playing the violin or something. Even then, when the subject is utterly uncontroversial, among all the nice comments saying "awww, cute" you will still find a few mean ones. How much meaner they will be when the subject is highly controversial. Not a pleasant thing for the kid to find when googling his or her own name ten years later.

That is why the ethical course is to pour scorn on this idea before it is put into practice, so it never is. We - and by "we" I mean all those who oppose green fanaticism, including anti-fanatics who do believe in climate change - do lose a potential propaganda victory thereby. Price you pay for being the good guys. At least we can enjoy directing an invigorating burst of ridicule at Mr Hertsgaard now.

ONE LAST THOUGHT AND THEN I REALLY WILL GET ME COAT: I was thinking of little kids in the two paragraphs above. The case is slightly different for older children, the clear-eyed, firm-jawed young activists of "Kids vs Global Warming" and its "partnering organizations" as mentioned in Mr Hertsgaard's article, given that they are of an age to know what game they are participating in if they come along to one of these doorstepping sessions, and usually to know damn well that the people they waylay will hesitate to verbally strike back with full force. One does have to hold back a little for the sake of their tender young pysches - but a measured dose of ridicule for them, alongside their parents, will do them good in the end.

(23)

I heard the BBC's A Point of View on Radio 4 this morning, Sunday. It is a 10-minute talk for general edification, falling between the religious service and the current affairs programme. The pop philosopher Alain de Botton has tenure on the current run. He called today's piece "The ecological sublime" - a strange name, since it was concerned not with the sense of awe but with the anxiety and even terror aroused by environmentalists. I recommend hearing this short piece (available for a week, I believe) for the sake of the picture he paints of the desperation promoted by the deep greens' jeremiads: a state of mind in which, as he says, we cannot fly to Florence to view Titians, raise our eyes to the snows of Kilimanjaro, transport milk by lorry to supermarkets, or enjoy an unusually warm spring day, without immediately fearing that we are implicit in crimes more enormous and devastating than nuclear bombing, while we are more powerless than any footsoldier caught up in a war crime - powerless because "we need collective solutions" and they are near-impossible because they would require the cooperation of over six billion people. He talks of Armageddon, of species suicide. The natural world no longer evokes forces greater than ourselves but only suggests our own powers - and those powers are terrifying. The new environmental awareness threatens to drive us into despair.

De Botton is not pointing to these baleful effects in order to condemn the doom-mongers. He swallows the whole thing hook, line and sinker.

And what is his remedy? He does not offer any philosophical resistance. His first remarks on opening the talk are on the general irrelevance of his own vocation: we should be drinking up the solid science of the ecologists rather than bothering about philosophers like him. He thinks the philosophical job is done by sketching out the situation created by the new environmental awareness. He recommends that we turn to artists - those gullible groupies of the greens! - to give us heart.

De Botton has another suggestion: that we counter our megalomania by meditating daily on selected astronomical objects, driving home to ourselves how very big they are and how very far away. That will keep us in our place, he thinks; it is his secular alternative to religious meditation.

This sorry suggestion would not work for me. I have always been fascinated by astronomy and I know quite a few of its big numbers. They never made me feel humble.

Perhaps if de Botton thought philosophical thinking were more important than he does, he would think it important to investigate the environmentalists' descriptions of reality, and think critically about their nostrums. He might conclude that environmental pessimism is a libel on the state of the human race: things are in good shape, they are looking good for the future, and, rather than feeling despondent, we can feel proud of ourselves.

(25)

Indeed. And not just the price of all the other kinds of gas.

Am I the only one who suspects that a lot of the climate change hubbub whipped up in recent years was really just a cover for getting young lefty-inclined scientists to find other kinds of energy, not actually to save the planet, but rather to enable the rulers of the West to tell those pesky Arabs to take a hike? I don't read the right sort of blogs and websites to know for sure, but I doubt very much that I am.

Anyway, now, another kind of energy has come on stream, of the sort that conflicts with all the climate change hubbub, because it is disturbingly similar in its imaginary climatic effects to the stuff that our rulers want to be able to stop buying from the Arabs.

The BBC's Roger Harrabin quotes the Chief Economist at the International Energy Association, Dr Fatih Birol:

"There's suddenly much more gas available in the world than previously thought," he told BBC News.

"It's cheaper than it was and the supply is more assured. And it's only half as polluting as coal. There will be strong debates between energy and climate and finance ministries round the world about whether investment should continue to support renewables when the situation on gas has so radically changed."

That settled science is already turning out to be not so settled after all, and this just might be part of the reason, don't you think? Governments, for their own reasons that have nothing to do with the actual argument, are now switching from being climate change fanatics to what the climate change fanatics call climate change deniers.

The moral is: if you want to spread some ideas, any ideas, don't rely on governments to help you. They will help you, if and while it suits them. But if and when it stops suiting them, you'd better be ready to win your argument all by your little old self.

(43)

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, boasts that his Transport for London is doing its bit to keep London up and running over Christmas, but complains that Heathrow has spoilt the London Transport picture. Why? Because it believed the Met Office:

... Why did the Met Office forecast a "mild winter"?

Do you remember? They said it would be mild and damp, and between one degree and one and a half degrees warmer than average. Well, I am now 46 and that means I have seen more winters than most people on this planet, and I can tell you that this one is a corker.

I am now 63 and I can tell you that snow lands and then settles in London, before Christmas, just about … never. Well, hardly ever. Until now. I should have made that clearer in this earlier posting here. The point is that this is not normal. I quite realise that they have somewhat more snow in Minnesota over the winter. But in London, in December, snow on the ground has been a rarity.

Back to Boris:

Never mind the record low attained in Northern Ireland this weekend. I can’t remember a time when so much snow has lain so thickly on the ground, and we haven’t even reached Christmas. And this is the third tough winter in a row. Is it really true that no one saw this coming?

Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.

Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its "mild winter" schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year's mythical "barbecue summer", and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.

We here at Samizdata have been studying the sun and how it causes cold winters, as in linking to people who are studying the sun and how it causes cold winters, for quite some time now.

Cold weather is now officially anti-left in its political orientation. So, on this issue, we here can either be warm, or correct. Take your pick. Personally I'm still mulling it over. The lefties will either be, against all current trends, warm and right, or will shiver and be wrong. (Sounds a bit like a certain Sondheim lyric.)

(11)

Hello, what is this? BBC comedians (Armstrong and Miller, no less) making fun out of the failure of Global Warming to be ... warm?

Spotted by the ever-alert Delingpole, who has the video up at his blog. It's under a minute long and is a must-see, if you've not already seen it.

I wonder if it was that earlier viral video, the one in the classroom with the exploding kids, that alerted these guys to the comedic possibilities of this debate? The reaction to this latest piece of (I trust) internet virality will be interesting.

(28)

The Telegraph is weird. It has Booker and Delingpole raining curses down upon the whole climate science watermelon scam. But elsewhere on its plantation it has someone or something called "mytelegraph" saying things like this:

Scientists have called for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions, as world leaders meet in Cancun for the latest round of talks on climate change.

Do you agree that rationing is the best solution? Should governments be investing more in green technologies? Is there any point in agreeing carbon limits if some countries opt out?

What should leaders be trying to agree?

My thanks to "bravo" (who commented on Delingpole's latest posting) for alerting me to this absurdity, and for in particular recommending that we all look at the comments on it.

Such as this:

They should agree how lucky they are to have such a fine old time on taxpayer money, then go home and get real jobs.

Or this:

Not to meet again?

To throw in the towel?

To admit they've being rumbled and now the greatest scientific scam of all time is collapsing faster than anyone could have predicted?

Or this:

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Those being a few of the shorter ones. Many are longer. Many are far more abusive.

There is not one comment among the fifty odd that have so far accumulated that make suggestions of the sort that "mytelegraph" seems to have wanted.

On this particular matter at least, the best are now full of passionate intensity, while the worst now lack all conviction. It's all over bar the defunding. In other words it is not all over by any means. It will take decades for the world to recover from this scam and clean up all the mess it has caused. But totally winning the mere argument is a necessary and excellent start.

(18)

Indeed:

Photographed by me this afternoon.

But, as we all know, this is weather, not climate.

It's only the climate if it gets too hot.

(8)

Europe is full of stupid bloody windmills.

- text message from Michael Jennings on an Autobahn

(23)

Yesterday evening, I attended a discussion group at the home of Libertarian International president Christian Michel. Christian likes to invite intelligent people with a cross-section of views to these events, and although this occasionally leads to heated argument, the conversation usually remains relatively polite.

Last night, the subject of biodiversity came up, and someone made a comment about how human activity is causing every increasing extinction of species. I decided to be Devil's Advocate to a small extent and I asked a simple question.

"Can you name any large animal that has become extinct recently?"

Nobody else in the room could successfully answer the question. One or two animals that became extinct between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were mentioned, as were a number of endangered but not extinct species. After they failed to provide any such animals, I mentioned one myself (the Yangtze Dolphin). For what its worth, one can find quite a few large animals that went extinct between about 1800 and 1960 due to human activity. There have been very few since 1960, however. There may be issues with how long it takes for an extinction to be officially declared, or it may be that conservation efforts are working. Or both. But it is far from incontrovertibly clear that extinctions are occurring at an unprecedented rate. There is a lot of uncertainty.

However, I was assured that there is clear evidence of extinction if I looked it up, and some such, and I was assured that it is smaller animals that are mostly becoming extinct and this is what matters. (On the other hand, if this is so, why do the tigers and other large animals get all the publicity?)

After playing the game slightly longer ("Okay, name any species of insect that has become extinct due to human activity, ever") I backed off. However, as I was doing this, somebody made a curious comment, which was this:

"Michael, you can't make claims like this without providing evidence".

This was curious, as I had not made any claims. I had simply asked somebody else for evidence for what they were saying. We have been here before, oddly enough.

However, the question is a very effective one. Many people have accepted the idea that species of animal are going extinct at an alarming rate, without knowing any actual examples. Most people can at least sense the contradiction if you point it out.

(8)

Too bad there already is an SQoTD for today, but here's a classic bit I'll copy and past for you anyway:

We are almost getting to the situation where we will be seeing unemployed environmentalists walking the streets. As with unemployed actors who describe themselves as "between jobs", one might expect them to admit to being "between scares".

That's the EU Referendum man, Richard North, ruminating about how the environmental debate is now going quiet, and about how the forces of darkness are now going to have to find themselves a different line of bullshit to work with. "Biodiversity" won't nearly suffice. How true. Although, as he'd be the first to remind us (I found that link in this), "climate" money is still being thrown around like there's no tomorrow, and if that carries on there probably won't be. Anyway ... as I was saying. Between scares.

That phrase could really get around. It deserves to.

(35)

When I attack the concept of 'Biodiversity' – and note the inverted commas, that’s kind of key – I’m not voting, as the eco-fascist would-be suicide bomber James Lee so touchingly put it, against “The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.” What I’m railing against is the way a noble-seeming concept has been subverted by the watermelons of the green movement in exactly the same way as "Climate change" has and with precisely the same aims: to extend the powers of government; to raise taxes; to weaken the capitalist system; to curtail personal freedom; to redistribute income; to bring ever-closer the advent of an eco-fascist New World Order.

I’ve got nothing against biodiversity. But I’ve an awful lot against "Biodiversity."

- Delingpole, having done so much damage to the last Big Green Thing (see posting below), turns his guns onto the next one. But will Greenery of any kind now be trusted enough to serve as the next big excuse for global statism?

(62)

Yesterday, ah yesterday. All was happy anticipation then. Yesterday there was this article in the Guardian. It began,

There will be blood – watch exclusive of 10:10 campaign's 'No Pressure' film
Here's a highly explosive short film, written by Richard Curtis, from our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign

Well, I'm certain you'll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It's also got a decent sprinkling of stardust – Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others.

But it's pretty edgy, given 10:10's aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.

However today, the article has this added to it.

Sorry. Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called 'No Pressure'.

With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain's leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis - writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn't and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.

As a result of these concerns we've taken it off our website.

We'd like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.

At 10:10 we're all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

Onwards and upwards,

Eugenie, Franny, Daniel, Lizzie and the whole 10:10 team

(20)

The author of this article, "An alternative to the new wave of ecofascism", Micah White, is rightly horrified by the ideas of Pentti Linkola. Note that the url of that link, which seems supportive of Linkola although I do not know if it is his own, describes him as an ecofascist. The page of quotations seems to back up that description fairly well, and it will not come as a surprise to readers of this blog that Mr Linkola advocates that we learn alike from "the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades."

It is sad, then, that Micah White's own article, though certainly expressing nicer opinions than Mr Linkola's, itself advocates the suppression of speech that Mr White does not like. Emphasis added in the following quotes:

The future of environmentalism is in liberating humanity from the compulsion to consume. Rampant, earth-destroying consumption is the norm in the west largely because our imaginations are pillaged by any corporation with an advertising budget. From birth, we are assaulted by thousands of commercial messages each day whose single mantra is "buy". Silencing this refrain is the revolutionary alternative to ecological fascism. It is a revolution which is already budding and is marked by three synergetic campaigns: the criminalisation of advertising, the revocation of corporate power and the downshifting of the global economy.

Democratic, anti-fascist environmentalism means marshalling the strength of humanity to suppress corporations. Only by silencing the consumerist forces will both climate catastrophe and ecological tyranny be averted.