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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.”
The first comment to the Guardian piece said, “So much for evolution.”
“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.”
Votes for bacteria now!
“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.
With the newly-enfranchised bacteria supporting him, I’m not surprised.
“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.”
Nice to see Bolivia following Britain’s England’s example and instituting an Established Church.
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.
Every day is Earth Day in North Korea
– Samizdata commenter ‘newrouter’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Emma Jay grossly misled Delingpole as to the nature of the programme.
It does occur to me though that in the internet age, this kind of thing, while remaining possible, will be hard to sustain in the long run. Anyone who is ever approached by Ms Jay can immediately put her name into Google and discover that she cannot be taken at her word. In the internet age a TV producer or journalist stands or falls on their integrity.
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.
(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.
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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.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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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