We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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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.
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.
Second, after said quarter century you notice that despite having the entire resources of the educational and media institutions of the planet and the blind agreement of other scientists and billions of dollars poured into trying … you have not been able to establish your case. Heck, you haven’t even been able to falsify the null hypothesis. In fact, after a long string of predictions of doom, none of which came to pass, and at the tail end of a 15-year hiatus in the warming, the US public doesn’t believe a word you say. Oops. Over two-thirds of them think climate scientists sometimes falsify their research. Oops.
In response, you say that the problem is that scientists have been too retice … too re … sorry, it’s hard to type and laugh at the same time … you say that scientists have been to reticent, that they haven’t been alarmist enough or aggressive enough in promoting their views.
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.
[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
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.
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.
I enjoyed the implication that there are others who do not wonder at all, no sir, no sliver of doubt that the original goals might not be met has ever crossed their minds.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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