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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The result is in: the Swiss public has voted in favour of a proposition prohibiting the construction of any new minarets in their country. Note: this is not a ban on Islam or even the construction of mosques, just minarets.
Aside from all the obvious reprecussions (which are not hard to predict), it does occur to me that this raises an interesting and very thorny questions for libertarians because this is not a straightforward case of state repression. In fact, it appears that both the Swiss government and parliament were firmly opposed to the proposition which has been put to the public by referendum following a petition which was endorsed by a sufficient number of Swiss citizens. The Swiss state urged the public to reject the proposition but, having lost, is now forced, reluctantly, to change the constitution to enact the minaret ban into Swiss law. This was ground-up not top-down.
When a government says no to freedom of religious worship, it is easy to mount our high horses and ride forth bearing gleaming swords of indignation. But when a clear majority of the demos say no, well, then it gets rather harder. At least, it does for me.
I am almost surprised that we were treated so moderately by our captors – apart, that is, from the tragic, largely unexplained, decision to kill Tom Fox, the American Quaker.
– Norman Kember, writing in the Guardian.
According to the Times….
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It seems that
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
and
… the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue.
Indeed. That fact, that climate change was once seen a less pressing issue and is now seen as a very pressing issue, explains a lot. Firstly, as the article says, it explains why the basis of the famous Settled Science has now presumably settled even more firmly beneath two decades worth of layers of landfill. I sympathise. Nine times out of ten throwing out piles of tatty old paperwork is a good idea. (Though it would have been more honest for the Climatic Research Unit to have admitted that the data had been thrown away when first asked) And it also goes a long way towards explaining why the CRU, and so many of the scientists involved in climate science, have been behaving so badly despite almost certainly not being very bad men. They had the heady experience of being transformed from obscure boffins to Protectors of the World. To have the captain of the ship turn over the wheel to you, the skilled pilot, for expert guidance in dangerous waters is a grave responsibility but also one that makes you stand a little straighter, no? After all that it would be embarrassing to notice, let alone proclaim, that maybe the waters were not as dangerous as first thought.
When I posted yesterday’s Quote of the Day I should have made it clear, as David Foster does in the link, that it has relevance to the story of the scientists who were, and will be for a while yet, part of the Inner Ring.
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.
To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still- just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig- the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”- and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure- something “we always do”.
– C.S. Lewis, from an essay called The Inner Ring. I was reminded of this by David Foster of Chicagoboyz.
You may have forgotten this.
So Baron Pearson of Rannoch has become the new leader of UKIP. I can only hope that he has a better grasp of real economics than Nigel Farage, who although he was very sound on a great many issues, was clueless in that respect in that he basically was offering more of the same deranged Keynesian bollocks being proffered by both the main parties. Well we shall see I suppose.
I once heard a very good pro free-trade diatribe by Pearson some years back which is an encouraging sign and his support of Geert Wilders on the Fitna issue was glorious and suggests he may well be dependable on civil liberties.
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.
There is beer… and then there is Tactical Nuclear Penguin (what an exquisite name for a beer).
I must confess I have a soft spot for any company that can also make a low alcohol beer called Nanny State… and as ‘Goat in the Machine‘ pointed out (what an exquisite name for a blog), any outfit that can outrage an arch-statist lobby like ‘Alcohol Focus Scotland‘ is certainly going to get my business once I am no longer sick as a parrot (being ill for coming on a week has allowed my blood/alcoholic levels to fall to zero… the horror, the horror).
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.”
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