Some weeks we are given gifts from on high. This week was one of them.
Give thanks to George Monbiot for this gem, from his essay:
Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it’s dead
The best outcome anyone now expects from December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings.
…
But nobody cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are simultaneously entrenched and muted. The doctor’s certificate has not been issued; perhaps, to save face, it never will be. But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead.
George still doesn’t get this bit though:
Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see.
It was regular citizens, blogs, and somebody who had the courage to bring CRU’s emails to sunlight to show the world what they were really dealing with. There wasn’t any “industrial lobby”, just a bunch of regular folks who were fed up with being fed mushroom food. Once it was out in the open, exposed by this rag tag bunch of citizens and bloggers, the greens pretty much did the rest themselves by their pathetic public relations on the situation.
And soon, they’ll be on to the next big scare.
Read the whole article here
I was talking with a small group of 20 somethings last week and I tested the waters with a comment about AGW in an attempt to gauge what they knew and how they felt. They were all out here for a short visit from the UK.
Surprise, surprise.
They were surprisingly well informed on the topic and few details escaped them. Each of them figuratively snorted at the whole “ridiculous concept of AGW” and quoted from Climategate, IPCC AR4, Glaciers etc. To them the whole debate was dead in the water now and indicated that most of their friends in the UK were of a similar opinion.
George is just catching the wave it would seem.
Sorry Richard, it wasn’t a polar bear. It turned out to be a cow! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8014541/ITV-embarrassed-by-report-of-polar-bear-washed-up-on-beach.html
GM says:
September 20, 2010 at 8:53 pm
“Because science is decided by popular vote and expertise matters nothing. ”
Well – when one orginally starts the whole CAGW show by conducting “science” through press release, opinion polls, and the efforts of paid lobbyists, what other result is to be expected?
The Climate Change fiasco might be dead but the foul miasma arising from its rotting corpse continues to blight the political atmosphere. In England “Green” taxes are now expected to raise £50 billion annually, with petrol and diesel fuel being hit hard.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/liberaldemocrats/8014722/Motorists-and-holidaymakers-face-green-tax-rise-of-800.html
That’s a cracker. Mind you, it is a very good impersonation of a dead polar bear…
’you can’t polish a turd’
You can. And sell it for a very high price. (Ask any paleontologist. Coprolite alert!)
Just because one AGW fanatic writes one miserable article more-or-less throwing in the towel, the process itself is nowhere near ending. The “global warming” industry worldwide now consumes $500 billion a year, and has become a self-perpetuating economic force in its own right.
The tax-paying public observes a gap between what they are told and what they experience for themselves. We were told the arctic would be “ice free” in five years. That was in 2000. Were told rising sea levels would devastate vast areas of the country years ago, but those areas are obstinately still there, completely unaffected. We were told it was “inevitable” that our weather would get hotter and drier every year until we enjoyed a sub-tropical climate in Scotland. Then we had the coldest, wettest, two winters in a row for nearly 100 years.
How do politicians address the growing gap between what they said would happen and what has actually happened? How do they explain the gap between their climate scientists’ hysterical claims and what they can prove in a measurable, repeatable, scientific method? Simple – they don’t. It’s actually impossible to get any politician to debate any of their policies which they have based on fraudulent climate science. They all just act as if the “science is settled”, ignore all the contrary evidence, and carry on regardless. It’s as if a veterinary surgeon based all his treatment on the “proven” science of witchcraft, and refused to discuss any medical theory other than paganism.
Policies based on corrupt climate science have appalling consequences, That’s the real devastation. From poor Africans now starving because giant companies have taken over their land to grow bio-fuels, to the destruction of the British countryside wrought by the building of thousands of useless bird-shredding wind turbines, to all those now unable to heat their homes because of soaring carbon taxes, this is just some of the real destruction flowing from the evil global warming fraud.
Against all that, what difference does it make if one day some AGW-loving columnist whines a bit in his article?
“producing a full house of science deniers.”
Doesn’t look as if Moonbat has learned or changed very much…
It’s a standard military stratagem to appear to run away, draw on your jubilant foe and then outflank, encircle and annihilate them. The Parthians were very good at it. So I too am with R. de Haan – don’t assume it’s all over bar the shouting. Here in Europe we are facing enormous tax increases along with social and personal consequences based on these discredited theories and it’s certain that the politicians will not let go of the myth easily – it’s worth far too much to them and their corporate backers.
George Monbiot asks:
Mr. Monbiot: if you read here, try to be just a tiny bit of a real science mind and read and understand what the work and papers of Ferenc Miskolczi on planetary atmospheres are telling you. That’s a starter. This is empirical science that I know you are not use to, you have preferred the GCM simulation route. Apparently the temp change came from elsewhere, the sun, albedo change, current changes, some record and station placement errors as UHI, all of the above, your guess is as good as mine, but it seems not GHG’s. I’m probably like you, from where then? That is why we have real empirical science, with all of the messiness of actual measurements, to answer such questions, but not your kind of computer generated / political “science”, it has been flawed for a long, long time. You say you see human weaknesses and most including me see human strengths, thank God. We will adapt, correct, learn, and survive just fine, for that is what we do best.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says: …Tourism gases?? I’ll hold the wisecracks!
Such self control! I never could “hold em”, especially after a street burrito…
USEPA will make their move shortly, now that cap and trade legislation is dead. Watch for it. My clients are quietly preparing for the eventuality of carbon regulation. EPA has all the authority they need, backed up by the US Supreme Court.
November…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/buck-up-or-sit-in-the-truck/
I was undecided about George Monbiot until I watched a video of him ‘debate’ with Ian Plimer some time ago, with the aid of a cycnical and egotistical meeja person whose name eludes me. I was stunned by Monbiot’s extreme rudeness, plus the crass ‘me too’ echo of the meeja person, to Prof Plimer and could never take seriously anything Monbiot says or writes ever again.
As to GM, he keeps turning up with the same tired and egregious nonsense, like a kid knocking on a door, shouting something rude then standing back and waiting for the argument.
I, too, believe that the battle for sanity and truth regarding the earth’s climate is far from won. ‘Green taxes’ are currently a juicy low-hanging fruit and too extraordinarily tempting for politicians to resist. The UK ‘Climate Minister’ has just announced that individuals who actually have the termerity to earn money will pay an extra £800 each in ‘Green’ taxes on flying, petrol and other fuels so that those who don’t earn below a specified level will not pay tax at all.
Finally, the MSM fails to report the huge storm that stretches from South America, across Antarctica to Australia and is wreaking havoc in Tasmania and New Zealand, just as the extreme cold snap that much of the Pacific coast of South America went unreported by the MSM, indicating that a very long battle for truth and scientific honesty still lies ahead.
Paul Deacon, Christchurch, New Zealand says:
“…The Guardian, which has been loss-making for years (by design), is coming under increasing financial strain…
So perhaps George is really crying at the realisation that he might lose his job…”
Correct. the Guardian is a rubbish paper, and it’s going downhill fast. Last year it made a whacking great £74 million loss, and had to sell of all of its other papers, mostly local titles, to prop up the main paper. With such a drain on its resources, it will be either declared bankrupt or, like the London Standard, be taken over soon for £1.
And talking of massive losses…
LOSS-MAKING UK WIND TURBINE MANUFACTURER TO BE DUMPED ON AMERICANS
Clipper Windpower runs out of puff, and is set for takeover
Clipper Windpower, the London-listed wind turbine maker which has received millions of pounds in government grants, looks set to be taken over by US engineering giant UTC. Clipper said that it “expects to face significant liquidity strain within the next year” and was “seeking additional sources of capital”. As part of this UTC, which bailed Clipper out with a £126.5 million equity injection in January to take a 49.9% stake, said it could be interested in a making a full-scale takeover bid.
Clipper shares, which floated on AIM five years ago at 190p today slumped 16¾p to a new low of 28p valuing the company at just £60 million. UTC paid 150p a share for its stake. UTC owns Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines, Sikorsky helicopters, Otis lifts and escalators and Carrier heating and air-conditioning.
Former prime minister Gordon Brown and Labour leadership candidate Ed Miliband (then energy & climate change secretary) attended a ground-breaking ceremony on Tyneside in February for Clipper’s new turbine factory. This was backed by a £4.5 million government grant and was meant to produce a prototype new turbine named Britannia aimed mainly at offshore UK wind-farms.
But the wind industry has suffered a huge downturn since the financial crisis with Clipper particularly hard hit because it was unable to provide warranties on its turbines. In the US, which is Clipper’s main market, tax breaks for wind farms run out at the end of this year and there are doubts whether America’s President Barack Obama will be able to introduce fresh finance initiatives for green energy this autumn.
Clipper is burning cash. At the end of June it had $140 million (£89.8 million) in the bank by the end of August that had fallen to $86 million. It also said first-half revenues are likely to have halved to around $150 million and losses for the six months to end-June will be between $26 million and $30 million. It now expects turbine sales for the full year to be at the lower end of the 140 to 180 range.
Sign of the times?
When they were busy inventing global warming, someone else was busy inventing the internet, web, and blogs.
The internet is helping to reinforce what Howard Bloom calls, one of the pillars of healthy capitalism, namely, the people’s freedom to make righteous protest against harmful and unhealthy things.
People didn’t deny and refuse to see. They protested against what they saw.
This led greens to start wondering about putting democracy on hold, because they weren’t getting the support of the people. Yes Mr. Dictator, the people are protesting the streets, what shall we do?
Protests in the form of citizens blocking coal trains are OK.
Protests in the form of citizens writing blogs questioning why the IPCC doesn’t make sense, are not OK.
Perhaps the greens could try listening to protesters for a change, rather than trying to shush them up.
Cassandra King @12:11. How I agree with you.
GM:
Where were your vaunted climate scientists hiding while the IPCC was out pushing a false doomsday scenario? Out of the so-called “consensus” few had the courage to speak out. What manner of scientists are these?
Poor old Moonbat. He is going to have to find something new to earn his fees.
BUT the juggernaut is fuelled up with our taxes and being driven towards the cliff by politicians, bankers and consulting firms (all fresh from the toxic loans crisis) and won’t stop just because they are wrong. In UK we have a Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, the multimillionaire Chris Huhne (rhymes with Loon) who is orgasmic in his desire to raise ‘green’ taxes and build windfarms everywhere. Our Green Prime Minister’s father in law is getting £300k+ p.a. extra for letting his land be ‘windfarmed’ and so it goes.
We will have to fight for years yet unless someone can come up with a new scare to displace this one. Solar flares anyone?
@ur momisugly R. de Haan says:
September 20, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Anthony, thank you very much for the article but I think we are creating the false impression here that the MSM climate change scare has been overcome.
This is IMO absolutely not the case.
The government of my former country for example is still in the process of building a 100 billion Euro water defense because the politicians believe there will be a drastic rise of ocean levels by 2050 and in the USA governmental budgets for climate spending are beyond belief.
=================================
Absolutely agree. This won’t be over till there is no more money to be made by lawyers and politicians.
“All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here”
The political reality of needing to actually have a conversation with the people to discuss and justify everything instead of just steamrolling over them. Yep. Sucks that it didn’t work. Damned bloggers.
Steve Keohane says:
September 20, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Thanks for all you have done, Anthony. The fantasy that big industry is funding some anti-Climate Change movement is amazing.
————Reply:
I agree, but there is more–indeed, “big industry” has funded CAGW, not fought it; check out who started and continues to fund the CRU and similar institutions; and CAGW certainly has the financial backing of big government. I get no check from big oil, big government, or big anything–I’m just a piddly has-been geologist that has a nose for stench and lies, and Monbiot is the stenchiest I’ve run across in a long time.
And while I agree the battle is far from over, it is generally true that the enemies of truth will turn on each other and fight themselves into oblivion; history is replete with examples. So if I were to answer Monbiot’s question “So what do we do now?”, I’d say continue with the infighting. It will decimate your forces and truth will eventually triumph. Sadly, you’ll just be on the wrong side of it.
“Perhaps we should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.”
Where did you go wrong? Granted, you did have the MSM behind you with a constant barrage of scare stories, and you had Gore’s scareumentary, and assuring people that “the debate is over”. You had (and still do) government-sponsored “scientists” being paid to “find” evidence for CAGW/CC, and once-proud scientific organizations like NAS and AAAS making sweeping pronouncements in support of it (without bothering to ask their membership what they thought), and a whole host of NGOs like Greenpeace and UCS jumping on the bandwagon. In short, you just about had it all, but the one thing you didn’t have, and which was your biggest failure was lack of control over the internet. This was what allowed the truth to leak out in various ways. That mysterious “power ranged against you” was in fact, the truth. Perhaps you might want to reacquaint yourself with it, Georgie.
No, it’s not over. The CAGW/CC/CD juggernaut has been stopped in its tracks, is surrounded on all sides and will continue to flail and inflict whatever damage it can.
The saddest thing about this whole affair is that the AGW Lobby, including the leadership of the National Academy of Sciences, is willing to claim that there is a “scientific consensus” or “consensus of scientists” and that the rest of us should accept it. They press upon this ancient fallacy of appeal to authority and they do so furiosly. I am shocked to discover that Lysenkoism has an American cousin.
Are you really suggesting that climategate (or indeed any of the many other “gates”) are part of some organised campaign? The only “organised campaign” I am aware of is the one to cover climategate with whitewash. Perhaps you should be thankful that most of the public don’t have the time and inclination to actually read the e-mails for themselves, directly from the source.
I really don’t understand what George thinks has been happening. Here in the UK, at least, he and his ilk have politicians, NGO’s, the MSM and big business all singing from more or less the same hymn sheet (witness climategate). How much more support does he want? Perhaps he should be asking himself why, even with all this support, he and his allies are still not getting what they want. Judging from some of the comments I would have to ask if they even know what they want?
How many climate scientists does it take to change a light-bulb?
None, BUT, they DO have full consensus that it WILL change.
“Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted”. Oh, really, George? Fun for whom, exactly?
Monbiot: if you want an intelligent debate, please drop stupid terms like “ecofascism”.
…and while we’re about it, how about these gems?…
“AGW sceptics are equal to Holocaust Deniers”, G. Monbiot
“People who fly are like pedophiles”, G. Monbiot
“The old don’t care because they’re going to die soon”, G. Monbiot
…there’s many more, but life’s too short.
When it comes to the use of stupid terms, you, George, are an expert. And has it ever occurred to you that one issue that may be given you problems with the public is the rank hypocrisy of green movement, the evidence for which you provide a-plenty? For example, exactly how many journalists will the Guardian be sending on a nice little Mexican trip to Cancun, and will you (once again) be clocking up some more long-distance air miles, after you claimed you would “never fly again” following your North American book selling tour – which itself followed your “people who fly are like pedophiles” statement?
You really appear ignorant when you use the word “science”. It’s as if we are all supposed to genuflect, and meditate, and pray whenever the word is mentioned. Science has an historical and social context, and by the way you are paid to know things like that. There’s a difference between a strong scientific hypothesis, and a weak scientific hypothesis. So-called “man-made global warming,” which is mostly based on questionable computer models, is a weak hypothesis. The expectation that it could be used as a basis upon which, as you once said, “redesign humanity” was pretty ridiculous.
Claiming that “Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups,” is even more patently wrong.
The planet-wrecking “greens” have an inordinate unelected power that has shaped a vast amount of policy, and all the current political delusions of the West. However, as you have noticed, these powers are crumbling a little bit. “Green” western philosophy and policies have never being in danger of being near a vote, something that may have impressed China, but delusional if anyone expected that China will ever do anything to change its path of (following our example) developing as fast as it can. The fact that most Western industries – and the larger the industrial monolith the truer this is – are eagerly playing into the hands of all the legislation-subsidising green policies are plain to see, though you don’t seem to see it.
Let’s face it, the greens couldn’t have done a worse job of presenting their case if they’d tried; fronted by jet-setting rich men living lives of luxury, and supported mainly by affluent, western, leftist, high-consuming people who don’t follow their own bossy advice on all sorts of topics, the “climate change” movement has been a fiasco.
Then there’s the sloppy “science” from arrogant people, who demand deference and resent scrutiny and open debate, the hysterical and disrespectful comparisons with Holocaust denial, and adverts for expensive, gas-guzzling cars and cheap flights even in pro-“green” newspapers like the Guardian itself.
George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and predictor of the world’s end, has undergone a metamorphosis of Kafkaesque proportions, or so we are to believe. Never mind poor Gregor Samsa, who awoke one morning to find himself transmogrified into a monstrous insect; Monbiot has made an even more remarkable cross-species leap. Some time during the past five years he went to bed an hysteric, the closest thing Britain had to a nutty Nostradamus, and awoke to find himself labeled a man of reason, a “defender of truth” no less, who is praised on the dust-jacket of his latest book for possessing a “dazzling command of science” (only by Naomi Klein, admittedly, but still – HA!).
How has this happened? How is it that George Monbiot, who still writes the same old apocalyptic nonsense (think Book of Revelations but without the hot pokers or the hot sex), can now pose – no, it’s more than that, – be hailed – as a “scientific visionary”? His metamorphosis from green-tinted hater of all things modern, to the man with a “dazzling command of science,” reveals a great deal about the politics of environmentalism, and how it has added a gloss of “scientific fact” to long-standing middle-class prejudices against modern society.
Here’s the reason why George Monbiot and other editors in the Guardian will keep pushing the “global warming” story:
This is Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in an interview with the left-wing Hindu newspaper:
http://www.hindu.com/2010/09/20/stories/2010092052441100.htm
…”A year ago we decided the environment was the biggest story of our lives. So we have six reporters doing the environment – one in China, one in America and four in the U.K. And then we built a network of environmental sites. We aggregated and became part of a network, with about 20 or 30 sites. A huge amount of editing and resources goes into the environment. That’s like saying, almost regardless of revenue, it’s going to be such an important subject”…
And what about the global warming fraud itself? The whole thing started out 38 years ago as the “Greenhouse Gas Theory”. And in no time at all, it was proved, by real scientists, to be a really flawed theory. Anyway, this is one of my favourite quotes, and it’s a beauty straight from the horse’s mouth, the IPCC itself:
“A number of diagnostic tests have been proposed…but few of them have been applied to a majority of the models currently in use. Moreover, it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining future projections (of warming). Consequently, a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed.”
IPCC AR4 report, section 8.6, page 640.
Note the use of the most important word in that statement – “plausible”. On that single word, the whole theory collapses.
One further challenge is to undo the mindset damage of CAGW perpetrated on innocent children by socialist re-engineering educators who desired to create “Eco Warriors” to re-educate parents and bring home to them the error of their ways!
These so called “teachers” have done untold damage to young minds to the extent that some children just parrot the meme, thinking they are saving a planet from rotten capitalist humans that are raping the earth. How will those kids feel about science and scientists when they inevitably discover they were conned and their trust suborned.
Parents will need to be careful to explain the truth and hopefully the media will finally undo the damage that has been done and help parents with truthful reports to expose the lies and the deceptions that falsely claimed their trust and action.
The day I hear the Royal Societies and the Scientific Associations working with rather than against parents by exposing the errors and propaganda and establishing a proper code of ethics of process and procedure to clean their own house, will be the day we can start to build trust.
Sceptics are not against good science, environmental responsibility and helping others and I do hope that we will all be able to work together for a cleaner, brighter future where children are nurtured in the values of truth and respect for all including their parents.