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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Shannon Vyff of the Immortality Institute gave a talk yesterday in London on the advocacy work that she undertakes, promoting unlimited lifespans. At a basement room in Birkbeck, to an assorted crowd of extropians, greens and interested parties belonging to Extrobritannia, we heard from a person who actually leads the CR life.
Calorific restriction is controversial but the contrast for Shannon lay between her and, perhaps, her audience. As Brits, we are not particularly active in giving time or money to deserving or undeserving causes, and it was quite breathtaking to see an upstanding example of American voluntarism. From my perspective, it was gratifying that Ms. Vyff decided to devote her energy to causes closer to my heart: life extension and anti-aging.
Her other focus is on the introduction of these ideas to a wider audience of primary school children, proving an inkling of the wonders that technology can provide. This is coupled with the joy of thinking positively about the future and working for it and, to my mind, counts as an important antidote to the killjoyous scaremongering of the luddite greens whose tool of social control is to make children ashamed of life itself. Perhaps there are better written books, but not in this field. Vyff wishes to harness the motivational power of science fiction for a new generation.
Like the Libertarian Alliance, the Immortality Institute remains an outlier. Despite debates over entering the mainstream, the group decided to retain its name, a wise decision. As these concepts become more accepted, other groups will spring up to advocate more moderate agendas, but the promotion of pure life extension remains a valuable project in and of itself.
And now for something completely different…
George Monbiot – a deserving pinata of folks ’round these parts for quite some time – has written a reflective article in the Guardian (seen on Instapundit). Admittedly, the guy deserves some credit for being one of the first of the really hardcore global warming spruikers to unreservedly concede that the CRU leak is an enormously damaging episode for the pro-AGW folks, and not something that can be high-handedly dismissed. Which has pretty much been their exclusive stock-in-trade when dealing with those who are unintelligent enough to disagree with them up until now.
Certainly, Monbiot has been a lot more contrite than I would have expected him to be under the circumstances. However, he doesn’t get down into any real soul-searching. In his article, he continues to smear the “climate change denial industry” – rather high-handedly, too (he ran out of contrition about halfway through the article and reverted to form). He could not resist having a good sneer at those who disagree with him. It would have been a much better article if he had stopped to ask himself how much of his current beliefs are predicated on the shoddy code behind the computer models that supposedly prove the theory of AGW, or if his perspective might be different without the vacuum of opposing voices that have been squelched from Reputable Science. And he certainly failed to show any sign that he’s anywhere near the point of posing that most awful of questions to himself, namely “Could I be wrong?” – even if only to reconfirm his beliefs. No, for him it is clear that the science is still settled.
Monbiot’s reaction, I suspect, will be a model for others of his ilk to follow. I hope I am wrong, but I doubt anything much will come out of this Climategate kerfuffle in the longer term. The scientists involved in the leak will take their professional cyanide capsules, and there will be a bit of public head-hanging and self reflection from the rest of the major players, after which the “science” behind AGW will be declared “pure” again. Aided and abetted by the majority of the world’s political leaders, who have invested so much in the AGW industry that it is now surely Too Big To Fail. So bail it out and back to business, already.
Last night I channel hopped into Question Time, the BBC’s late night political panel show, and caught the beginning of the question they had about climate, etc.. And I can report that, although maybe only temporarily, there has been, I think, a definite change of atmosphere in the argument about climate change.
Melanie Phillips and Marcus Brigstocke said, respectively, yes and no, to the question about whether global warming was a scam. Neither Brigstocke nor Phillips said anything I haven’t heard either say several times before. Brigstocke made much of the fact that the articles he agrees with about melting icecaps were all “peer reviewed”, which Melanie Phillips wasn’t able to come back on, as she was surely itching to do. But Brigstocke wasn’t the sneering, jeering, arrogant shit I’m used to. Melanie Phillips was heard reasonably politely, and the general tone of the event was thoughtful and hesitant rather than dogmatic and intolerant of dissent. David Davis made a point of criticising the use of the word “denier” to describe people who might disagree with you. Science, he said, can’t work like that. Science is never settled, he said. Nobody objected to those claims in any way.
But it wasn’t so much what they all said. It was more how they said it, and the general atmosphere of how it was received. The audience was the usual pro-warming crowd, but its partisanship was not the monstrous thing I usually see on Question Time, and it included at least two brave souls who thought quite differently, because they said so out loud. First, there was the questioner, who dared to use that word: scam. And at the end there was a bloke who claimed, mentioning those familiar (to us lot) historical stories about the medieval warm period, that “only one point of view is allowed”. But as he himself proved, both by how he spoke and by how he was allowed by all others present to speak, i.e. without jeeringly self-righteous interruptions, that he was a bit out of date.
Put it this way. A mere wordsmith like me struggles to get across what the change was. But a theatre or movie director would have known at once that something quite big had happened, and would have been able to itemise quite a few more specifics to back up that observation than I can, to do with body language, tone of voice, crowd noises, and so on and so forth. I hesitate to say that “things will never be the same again”. But I do think this might now be true.
Listening to Brigstocke talking about the problems he said the Inuits have been having, and about retreating icecaps and water that is less saline than usual because of so much ice melting into it, made it clear to me that the question now is: How much evidence is there, still, for the global warming thesis, that has not been taken out, not contaminated (so to speak) by those wretched CRU conspirators. (Later: in connection with that, see this. Even later: I’m not completely sure, but I rather think this may be one of the very best pieces yet on all of this. And whatever you do, don’t miss the final paragraphs about all those bewildered environmental correspondents. Real Samizdata quote of the year stuff.) → Continue reading: Question Time and questioning the Times – how the climate of opinion has changed
Following on from Michael Jennings’ item about how science research is actually conducted, I was reminded of a post I did several years ago about a fine Gregory Benford book that drew very much on the issue of political game-playing and science research. Timescape is a fine novel, and will resonate with those bemused by the antics of AGW alarmists and their media cheerleaders.
From the file pl_decline.pro: check what the code is doing! It’s reducing the temperatures in the 1930s, and introducing a parabolic trend into the data to make the temperatures in the 1990s look more dramatic.
– Recycled to a separate posting today by ClimateGate blogstar Bishop Hill from among the comments on his earlier and ever expanding posting entitled The code. The Bishop adds: “Could someone else do a double check on this file? Could be dynamite if correct.”
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
– These are adjustments being made to five year average temperatures over the last century. I do not need to say where this comes from, do I? Blimey.
Good grief, it seems as if one of the main doomongers in the MSM, George Monbiot – known in these irreverent blogging shores as George Moonbat – is feeling a bit angry and let down by the revelations of those emails connected to the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit. To give GM credit, he’s been more blunt about his anger than many of them might be, so fair play to him. But as Bishop Hill comments, Monbiot’s comments point to his gullibility.
As as been noted before, we free market types would be far kinder towards the Greenies if so much of their agenda was not intertwined with a desire both to load up more regulations and taxes on us. The antics of scientists allegedly trying to bury inconvenient evidence are not harmless: these people have consequences.
There is, in my view, a continued genuine core of necessary work that needs to be done in trying to map Man’s impact on the climate and figuring out what is the best way to cope with it. It is a mistake for free marketeers to take the lazy assumption that AGW is not something one needs to be concerned about. But there is no doubt – maybe it is just the recession – that some of the fizz, some of the moral superiority, of the AGW alarmist crowd has gone. AGW alarmists might be less quick to dub anyone who doubts their views as “deniers”. As far as the interests of genuine scientific understanding are concerned, that is a definite improvement on where things were a a few years ago.
I want to say more about this massive story. And yes, the general opinion now seems to be that this was not a hack, but rather an inside leak.
First point, this is indeed massive. As Devil’s Kitchen in particular has been repeating, both in comments here and at his own blog, this is not just a few maverick scientists gone bad, off the edge of the central enterprise. The idea that a few little scientific baddies can be sacked, thereby allowing the main, big, uncorrupted fleet of Global Warmist truth seekers to sail on with their dignity unsullied, is delusional. These guys, the so-called “Hockey Team”, are at the very centre of the whole AGW-based global taxation, global command-and-control system that we are about to be severely threatened with at the forthcoming Copenhagen Conference. That process has slowed at bit recently, but it is still very much still in motion. This drama is now being described by blogger after blogger, and by blog commenter after blog commenter, as “the biggest scientific fraud in history”.
Indeed. Said DK, commenting here on that earlier piece of mine:
The point is that this relatively small group of “scientists” control the entirety of the alarmist agenda.
That is why this is significant.
These people control the scientific arm of the IPCC, all of the major journals, etc. and the emails show that they have actively conspired to prevent any view other than theirs from being put across.
Exactly. A major exercise in World Government, no less, is being made to look like the dodgy little racket that it has long been believed to be by the few critics who have been scrutinising it carefully, and suspected of being by many more, me included. The great horde of politicians and bureaucrats and lobbyists and ecofascists (basically an entire generation of politicians and political activists) are being made to look like credulous idiots.
With every hour that passes without a coherent argument emerging from the Hockey Team to the effect that these emails – any of these emails – are fake, then their genuineness looks that much more real. And now, the process has already begun of analysing other material that has been leaked too, which looks now like being even more significant. As I said in my earlier piece here, all the anti-AGW bloggers I read during the first hours when the story broke began their reactions by saying “This stuff could be fake and it could certainly include fake stuff.” Indeed. But as the hours and days of stunned silence or stuttering evasion go by, from the skewered scientists and their bewildered allies in the media, the chances of any of these emails or any of this other stuff being bogus is becoming vanishingly small, to the point where if it is eventually claimed that some of it is faked, the response will probably be either: you forgot about that; or: you’re lying. Again.
Many scientists, commenting in recent days on blog postings, have been declaring themselves baffled. Why all the fuss? Is it some kind of big scandal that scientists are – shock – human? They sometimes use less than noble methods in their fights with one another, making their own opinions seems more solidly justified than they really are, their own data seem more precisely in accordance with their theories than they perhaps should, or would in a morally perfect world. And especially in what they thought were private emails to one another. So? That’s science. It’s a tough old world, and sometimes, yes, they do fight a bit dirty. As do we all. So, why this huge blogo-fuss about pretty nearly damn all?
Why the fuss is because of the vast, globe-spanning policy conclusions that have been plucked from these in themselves rather minor deceptions. The fraud revealed isn’t just in the fiddling of some numbers. There is also the faking of that precious scientific consensus that has so dominated public and official thinking about climate and climate policy during the last decade. The world is being sold a gigantic economic and political upheaval, backed by the claim that all this scientific rough-and-tumble, this slightly dodgy infighting, was in fact a blandly uniform scientific consensus. And the “scientists” (who more and more now look like politicos who have barged their way into science) are the engineers of this political fraud, not just the contrivers of the scientific opinions around which they have assembled their bogus consensus. → Continue reading: More about the CRU leak – how big arguments are won and lost and how the mainstream media are already responding
I recently read David Friedman’s latest book, A Future Imperfect, and thoroughly enjoyed it. He has now posted a series of lectures he has given at different venues, touching on many of the subjects in the book, as well some that were not in the book. Subjects, for example, such as encryption, copyright, how technology is changing legal systems, society, our view of family life, and the like. Definitely worth downloading some of these lectures if you have the time. Ideal for playing on the MP3 player on the way to the office. A definite improvement on listening to the BBC’s Today programme, that is for sure.
In the meantime, here is a quote from the book that I particularly liked. It is about nanotechnology and some of the fears people have, including the “grey goo” issue:
“Before you conclude that the end of the world is upon us, you consider the other side of the technology. With enough cell repair machines on duty, designer players may not be a problem. Human beings want to live and will pay for the privilege. The resources that will go into designing protections against threats, nanotechnological or otherwise, will be enomously greater than the (private) resources that will go into creating such threats – as they are at present, with the much more limited tools available to us. Unless it turns out that, with this technology, the offense has an overwhelming advantage over the defense, nanotech defenses should almost entirely neutralise the threat from the basement terrorist or careless experimenter. The only serious threat will be from organisations willing and able to spend billions of dollars creating really first-rate molecular killers – almost all of them governments.”
(page 272.)
If you want to see how different the world now is from how it was before the internet, look no further than this story (now bouncing energetically around the world):
It is claimed that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and there is a massive file of emails and code up on a server in Russia. If what has been posted is real then the balloon is about to go up.
Excerpts of the emails have been posted here. They include a CRU scientist welcoming the death of a prominent sceptic, discussion of how to fiddle results and so on.
Amazing. If true.
As someone says, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.
Those were my first sentiments exactly (although I don’t think that being glad when an opponent has dropped dead is all that surprising – I’m sure we all know that feeling), and the sentiments of practically everyone else in the anti-AGW blogosphere when they first heard about this. Now, it is looking ever more likely that it is true, all of it.
Not least because the first big response from the hackees has been to cry, not: load of made-up bollocks, but rather: stop thief! Yes, we have been hacked, and that’s outrageous. The story is that we have been hacked. (Lots of people are suddenly discovering the case for intellectual property rights.) The BBC’s first version of this story goes with this angle, and with pretty much nothing else. AGW scientists (good) robbed by anti-AGW fanatics (bad). But this response has not killed the story. It has only given it legs. If there’s nothing to it, why be so fussed about the hacking?
Even if the mainstream media try to bury this, they can’t stop us anti-AGWers from talking about it amongst ourselves, and my bet is that they will quickly abandon the attempt to ignore the content of this material, and instead make copious use – perhaps even acknowledged use, with links – of the work even now being done by all those damned bloggers. If they don’t do this, they will merely look foolish. It’s a different world, from the one where all the journalism was done by “journalists”, and only those journalists could decide what journalism would be done.
Sure enough, the New York Times already has a report about this, and James Delingpole already has a piece up at the Telegraph blog. (Thank you Instapundit.) This won’t now be buried, even if the story ends up being that a lot of trivia was hacked, and then a lot of incriminating stuff was forged and added, which is looking less and less like the story with each hour that passes.
Two particularly good bloggers on this story so far have been Bishop Hill (already quoted above) and Devil’s Kitchen, the Bishop for the trawling through that he is already starting to do, and DK for the way he (among many others) is already teasing out what it all might mean:
What these emails do show is that there is not consensus amongst scientists and that, privately, they think that certain papers are crap. No word of this gets to the media, or to the people being soaked for ever more cash to pay for these delusions.
What these emails really show is why such information never gets to the public: it is because climate scientists – like doctors – close ranks when attacked.
Not only this, but these emails also clearly show that climate scientists have been doing their absolute best to ensure that those who would question their findings cannot find the data.
The Bishop even has a new book out about AGW trickery, entitled The Hockey Stick Illusion. Coincidence? Well, yes, and one that is liable to mean lots of further work for him, riding whatever wave these new revelations may cause. But a nice coincidence nevertheless. This could now become a global best seller.
I already know what some of our cup-mostly-empty commenters here will say about all this, or want to say. Yes, the anti-AGW camp may now be starting to win the argument, but “they” still command the institutions they need in order to impose AGW-based tyranny. True. But those institutions can never be neutered, closed, etc., if they do not first lose their argument. (Think: USSR.) This is already rather good news, and potentially very important in its longer term impact.
For other early AGWer reactions, read this, together with all the comments.
The “watermelons” – green on the outside, red on the inside – can sometimes be uncomfortable elements, prone to occasional frictions. The old left, with all its many faults, did at least favour industry and material wealth. And the cause of wealth creation can clash with the Green agenda, though let it be noted that the best way to tackle environmental problems, in my view, is for us to get as rich as we can.
Well it seems that the liberal-leftist film director and actor, Robert Redford, has caused some sharp intakes of breath among the climate change alarmists by airing a “denialist” movie at his Sundance TV channel.
Enjoy!
(H/T: Big Hollywood).
An earlier version of this item referred to the Sundance Festival, not the TV channel. My error.
It is the weekend, lighten up
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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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