This gets the honor of “Climate Craziness of the Week”. Oh, that’s gonna leave a mark…
Josh writes in an email: her actual quote was:
“If we are to overcome the climate crisis we must move on to the equivalent of a war footing”
And she then likened the leadership this would require to Tony Blair’s in taking us to war in Iraq
But that’s too long for a satirical political cartoon, so Josh took the essence. Unfortunately I can’t seem to locate the online link as the Sunday Times link sends visitors to the paywall. It was in “features” and titled:
A very heated debate
Josh is working from the print edition in the UK, so I’ll take his word for it.
Here’s a letter Lucas penned in 2003 about the war in Iraq:
It is very telling. These quotes are pertinent:
They point not only to the imminent military war, which they recognise could have devastating consequences, but also to the ongoing economic war, which is being prosecuted by the US and Britain in particular, through the imposition of economic sanctions over a decade.
Um, in case you haven’t noticed lady, greens are waging economic war in the UK.
A recent broadsheet headline screamed: “Stop the war? Try telling that to the tyrannised people of Iraq.”
and …
An attack on the roads, bridges, ports or railways of Iraq would severely damage what is now an extremely well functioning food distribution system.
So will Lucas advocate stopping the tyrannizing of the British people by absurd green laws, protest takeovers of power plants by greens in the UK, Plane Stupid’s attacks on Heathrow airport, and threats of occasional electricity in the future?
Doubtful, in this case of greens -vs- the UK infrastructure, Lucas is the war leader.
Some deep self reflection is sorely needed by this confused woman.
Lucas is a 1st class moron and illiterate
I think Caroline Lucas should re-read “Winning the Conservative Vote.” I don’t think she quite got the concept.
Wasn’t the war in Iraq about trying to stop a problem that did not exist?
i.e. Sadam having weapons of mass destruction(WMD).
Didn’t Geroge W. ask the CIA to provide “evidence” that Sadam had WMD and they made some up. Much like the IPCC provided “evidence” for CAGW.
Seems like quite a good analogy to me.
Not to worry. According to “FamilyRadio” true believers we’ve only got till May 21, 2011 anyway. http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/03/06/judgment.day.caravan/index.html?hpt=C1
I’m sure we can hang on till then. 😉 😀
In a recent survey 99.9% of the British population are illiterate, the other 0.01% cannot read.
(sarc off )
[snip – the copyright holder of the Hitler movie has foolishly come down hard on blogs that use this…so I regretfully have to snip this – Anthony]
“Many a true word is said in jest”
Ziiex
In other words, a stupid waste of lives and resources to combat a non-existent threat.
Ms. Lucas got that right, even if she didn’t intend to.
John in NZ, yes, it is an excellent analogy, but not exactly helpful to the Greens.
Josh has put his fine sharp pen right to where it (hopefully) hurts most: many people still don’t understand that Watermelons like Lucas, but politicians of other stripes as well, are actually moving towards implementing a war footing.
The trial ballons are going up – you saw the piece by one of Britain’s energy CEOs which Willis posted below. You can actually start predicting when the first brown-outs will start,not just in the UK but in the USA as well.
Ask yourselves how come that countries like Bangla Desh and Vietnam are starting to build nuclear power stations – never mind China or India – , countries to which we sent international development aid. Meanwhile, we build … windmills!
Something not right here, isn’t it?
Didn’t Maurice Strong say, before the IPCC came into being, that his aim is to destroy the economies of the industrialised, Western nations?
Seems he’s well on his way to achieving that aim – helped and supported not just by watermelons, but by politicians of all colours, and hordes of bureaucrats. And this is happening while we still talk about CO2 and debate with true AGW believers, who will never be turned away from their faith.
Sometimes, I think, this is another of their strategies: keeping us occupied while economic warfare is being prepared …
Now see how long it took me to type out what Josh said in his brilliant cartoon, with a few strokes of his pen!
WMD may have provided the excuse to take a war to Iraq… and similarly, saving us from climate change is an excuse to impose a cap & trade (C&T) profit vehicle.
But the irony is that the democrats opposed the Iraq campaign as implemented by the republican regime (they didn’t opposed the democrat’s brief experimentation under Clinton, oddly enough), but now, in the case of the threat of Gorebul Warming, they’re staunch supporters of C&T.
C&T is the new WMD, and neither is, or was, a real good idea.
John in NZ says:
March 6, 2011 at 9:43 am
Wasn’t the war in Iraq about trying to stop a problem that did not exist?
i.e. Sadam having weapons of mass destruction(WMD).
==========
Except that, at one point S. Hussein used them on his own people (I believe it was the Kurds in N. Iraq.) That strongly implies that he actually had them. What happened to them between that point and the invasion is the subject of much debate.
This also means that there is far more evidence for Hussein’s WMDs than for CAGW, so the war on CAGW isn’t quite like the war in Iraq.
Given what seems to be happening in the UK, I’d say Ms. Lucas’ efforts are more like Husseins’, before he was kicked out, or Ahmadinejad (and the clergy) in Iran. Dictatorship. I’d put Gaddafi’s name in there, but his rule seems to be in serious doubt and the Green’s rule doesn’t.
“Lucas is a 1st class moron and illiterate”
I don’t support the GreenParty but I do say name calling and insults like the above do nothing of credit to this blog. Caroline Lucas is neither a moron or illiterate – that much is patently obvious.
Josh provides a clipping at http://www.cartoonsbyjosh.com/carolinelucasclipping.jpg
Thanks Anthony. My apologies. I did not know that the Hitler parodies attracted copyright rage. Very foolish of the copyright holders.
I was against the war in Iraq— we have acheived nothing really there, and many people on all sides have died.
For Caroline Lucas to link a slight increase in global temperaturates to the war in Iraq is opportunism at its worst. You have to remember Caroline Lucas is the only green MP out of hundreds. Trouble is the BBC give her the red carpet treatment instead of challenging her ( see Peter Sissons memoirs). Most British people are very sensible but we can be manipulated by left wing idiots out of a sense of moral duty
Some really nice enviro cartoons from England
http://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/
If there were no WMD why were there UN sanctions against Saddam for that very reason? Gassing whole villages of Kurds doesn’t count?
-and-
Didn’t they find that the UN was stealing wads of cash from the “food for oil” program? Wonders they were a wee bit upset when was busted up. Makes “everything” suspect in this endeavour. But one nagging question I have, how did Syria drop off the map in this then wham, nailed hard by Israel right out of the blue…things that make you say hm.
People often ask do you remember where you were on 9/11 or when Lennon was gunned down or Kennedy shot etc.
I wonder if the end of AGW will happen on one day or will it crawl away slowly over a period of time?
Unfortunately, Caroline Lucas (PhD in Writing for Women: a study of woman as reader in Elizabethan romance, by the way) is a local MP, or as we call her the only ‘green’ in the village (it’s and English or rather Welsh joke). Oddly enough she could afford to go to an independent girls school as daddy ran a central heating (HVAC) company, how ironic. Something, it would seem, she’d rather the rest of us not enjoy. One of those middle class meddlers who has never had to struggle for anything in her life I’m afraid, she’s passed through various NGO and charity positions etc. Really likes to tell everyone how they should run their lives sort of busy body. My! Isn’t our parliament full of those at the moment! They are as bad as the bankers and lawyers who also seem to be drawn to politics. (rant over….)
I really fear for the UK. I can only see a very bleak future in the coming few years. I am really pleased to live somewhere electricity generation is 85% nuclear. It is utterly futile to think that mankind can affect climate to any worthwhile extent. The numbers are very simple and are backed up by acceptance from a renowned UK government advisor, the US Department of Energy and many other reputable scientific minds.
Why cant we get to the nub of the problem ? with NUMBERS NOT ADJECTIVES and there is a good chance that the numbers below are in the right ballpark.
On average world temperature is ~+15 deg C. This is sustained by the atmospheric Greenhouse Effect ~33 deg C. Without the Greenhouse Effect the planet would be un-inhabitable at ~-18 deg C. Running the rough and ready numbers by translating the agents causing the Greenhouse Effect into degrees centigrade:
• Water Vapour accounts for as much as 95% of the Greenhouse Effect = ~ 31.35 deg C
• Other Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) account for 5% = ~1.65 deg C
• CO2 is 75% of the remaining effect when accounting for the enhanced effects of Methane, Nitrous Oxide and other GHGs = ~1.24 deg C
• Most CO2 in the atmosphere is natural, more than ~89% •
Man-made CO2 is less than 11% of total atmospheric CO2 = ~0.14 deg C for the carbon economies of the whole world
• UK’s contribution to World CO2 emissions is ~1.8% = 2.5 thousandths deg C
Maximum efforts in the UK can only achieve an insignificant and immeasurable part of that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy0_SNSM8kg
And whatever is said, outside Europe the rest of the world is not joining in. The non-joiners already amount to 62% of the world CO2 emissions and 48% of the world population. But the UK is the only Government that has enshrined action on CO2 into legislation. (http://www.energytribune.com//articles.cfm/5961/The-Utter-Futility-of-Re…) The probability is that any current global warming is not man-made and in any case such warming could be not be influenced by any remedial action taken by mankind however drastic.
So if the numbers above are even close to the right ballpark, the prospect should be greeted with Unmitigated Joy:
• all concern over CO2 as a man-made pollutant can be discounted.
• it is not necessary to damage the world’s economy to no purpose.
• if warming were happening, it would lead to a more benign and healthy climate for all mankind.
• any extra CO2 is already increasing the fertility and reducing water needs of all plant life and thus enhancing world food production.
• a warmer climate, within natural variation, as has occurred over the last century, would provide a future of greater prosperity for human development and much more food for the growing world population. This has been well proven in the Roman and Medieval pasts and would now especially benefit the third world.
This is not to say that the world should not be seeking more efficient ways of generating its energy, conserving its energy use and stopping damaging its environments. It remains absolutely clear that our planet is vastly damaged by many human activities such as:
• environmental pollution.
• over fishing.
• forest clearance.
• farming for bio-fuels.
• and all other habitat destruction.
And there is a real need to wean the world off the continued use of fossil fuels simply on the grounds of:
• security of supply
• increasing scarcity
• rising costs
• their use as the feedstock for industry rather than simply burning them.
The French long-term energy strategy with its massive commitment to nuclear power is impressive, (85% of electricity generation). Even if one is concerned about CO2, Nuclear Energy pays off, French electricity prices and CO2 emissions / head are the lowest in the developed world.
However in the light of the state of the current solar cycle, it seems that there is a real prospect of damaging cooling occurring in the near future for several decades as anticipated by Piers Corbyn and many others. And as UK power stations face closure according to Green Euro policies, the lights may well go out in the winter 2015 if not sooner. This is all because CO2 based Catastrophic Man-made Global Warming has become a state sponsored religion.
And now after “Splattergate” thanks to the 10:10 organisation everyone worldwide now knows exactly how they think. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Mw5_EBk0g
Splattergate was classic NOBLE CAUSE CORRUPTION. It is probably the most egregious piece of publicity ever produced in the Man-made Global Warming cause. So any misrepresentation is valid in the Cause and any opposition however cogent or well qualified is routinely denigrated, publically ridiculed and as we now see literally terminated.
And so to carry on: If the capital cost of Nuclear power is ~£1.4 billion / gigawatt (according to Prof David MacKay) and the newly commissioned array off Thanet cost £0.78 billion and is rated at 0.300 gigawatt but even using a generous load factor of 35% is only capable of producing on average 0.105 gigawatt , it appears that in capital cost terms alone offshore wind costs ~£7.5 billion / gigawatt or more than 5 times the cost of the equivalent nuclear production.
This of course ignores all the additional costs of the essential parallel backup generating capacity as well as the costs of continuing feed-in tariffs, estimated at about a further £1.2 billion over the 20 year life of the project. Paying just for starters more than 5 times as much for an unreliable energy source must make utter economic nonsense.
Supporting renewable energy, especially wind farms, is something that the UK cash strapped government should re-examine very carefully. And just to add to the nonsense, Carbon Capture and Storage can only increase electricity costs and deprive the planet of a source of increased plant fertility. It is one of many suggestions, which might reduce CO2 emissions. All are expensive and all are pretty well pointless.
So major government savings and greatly increased national prosperity could be achieved by terminating all CO2 related Government green activities and repealing the Climate Change Bill.
Otherwise the UK is “standing into grave danger”. Future Energy Security (destroyed by both the last Government and sadly continued by the current Coalition) is the foremost responsibility of a government to its citizens, probably more important than even than its Military Security.
John in NZ says:
March 6, 2011 at 9:43 am………Wasn’t the war in Iraq about trying to stop a problem that did not exist?
i.e. Sadam having weapons of mass destruction(WMD).
Just what I thought!
It’s more like the 3rd Balkan War with the Jenkins Ear varition.
@John in NZ
@Josh
The “no WMD’s” mantra of the left is another successful ‘big lie”, just like CAGW.
Prior to Sadaam kicking them out in 1998, the UNSCOM mission found considerable quantities of WMD’s. This from “A Report of the Sanctions and Security Project of the Fourth Freedom Forum and the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
at the University of Notre Dame: January 28 2003”:
They were there in 1998, everybody knows that, and they weren’t found in 2003 when the US went in. I assume, John, that you have proof of their destruction? Otherwise, we should rather be more nervous and less condescending about the issue.
A standard 55 gallon drum is 23″ OD x 37″ high. You can put eight (8) stacked 2 high in a space 4′ x 4′. In round figures, one drum holds 520 lbm of water (~8.4 cu.ft). So now you have two tons of say, Sarin, in a large walk-in closet. Two (2) milligrams of Sarin is a lethal dose for a really large person (200kg). Round numbers; 1,900 kg of Sarin, or 1,900,000 g Sarin, or 1,900,000,000 mg Sarin or 950,000,000 lethal doses. Starting to sweat a little, yet? And oh yeah, VX is deadlier than Sarin.
My view? Sneer less, pray more.
Statements like this and the one from the energy company executive last week smack of desperation and it follows shortly after the head of the United Nations made a fool of himself by asking Hollywood to “educate us”.
On top of this a couple of weeks back Al Gore reckoned all the snow we have experienced has come from AGW evaporation etc. However if this were the case the two warmest years of the nineties namely 95′ and 98′ would have been followed by very cold and snowy winters but I do not recall this being the case.
AGW is in big trouble.
I’ve been doing huge digging in the garden today. Not trenches for Caroline Lucas’ war though. I’m going to be growing as much food as I can this year. I advise others with any garden space to do the same. Food prices are going to soar.
I recall reading an article back in (2003? 2004?) about how an Iraqi military base had been nicely repurposed, and instead of WMD was actually storing “concentrated agricultural pesticides.” Umm…. what do they *think* nerve gas is (I remember this only because it cemented my opinions on the competence of journalists)?
Yes, the AGW research-industrial-financial complex – operating with the same fear-mongering tricks used by the military-industrial complex – does need the kind of leadership that Tony Bliar offered. Which probably explains why Bliar is now a highly paid ‘climate change consultant.’
And as John in NZ says (March 6, 2011 at 9:43 am) it is a very good analogy.
And ldd says (March 6, 2011 at 10:57 am) “If there were no WMD why were there UN sanctions against Saddam for that very reason? Gassing whole villages of Kurds doesn’t count?”
That was easy to prove. The UK and US governments no doubt had the reciepts for the gas they sold Saddam. But that wasn’t the WMD anyone was really worried about. It was the ‘mushroom’ cloud…
Anyhow, Y2K, WMDs, Swine Flu, AGW… and, almost forgot, putting the public deep in the hole to bail out the Bankster class was vital to prevent an economic catastrophe, just like the way handing over zillions of dollars to the AGW gang is vital to protect us from the climate catastrophes. All forms of very organized extortion.
John in NZ says:
March 6, 2011 at 9:43 am
Wasn’t the war in Iraq about trying to stop a problem that did not exist?
i.e. Sadam having weapons of mass destruction(WMD).
Actually they did at one time exist. Saddam used them against Iraqis in the south & north in the 90’s. Previously, he had used them against Iran during their 9 year war in the 1980’s. And they never lost the ability to reconstitute their programs.
Didn’t Geroge W. ask the CIA to provide “evidence” that Sadam had WMD and they made some up. Much like the IPCC provided “evidence” for CAGW.
No, they did not make it up. However, the intelligence agencies were in error* as far as Iraq having stockpiles of WMD. A lot of agencies were in error including the intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Australia, and Russia – all believed that WMD stockpiles existed in Iraq. Also, there was the not too small matter of Saddam himself boasting that he had stockpiles of WMD.
(*Evidence so far is that intelligence agencies were in error. There is the outside chance that the stockpiles were moved to Syria, but no hard evidence and no testimony to that effect.)
Hologram: “Lucas is… a moron and illiterate.”
Anthony: “This confused woman.”
Global Warmism is a strongly held belief system, planted by unscrupulous scientists and flourishing in the rich soil of apocalypticism. This politician, in common with many others, accepts the advice of UK Government Science Advisors (that’s rational); she advocates extreme action to combat the threat which, she is told, will destroy the planet (that is also rational). The real villains are the science advisors: defeat them and their half-baked conjectures and the politicians will change course.
D. J. Hawkins says:
March 6, 2011 at 11:31 am
Yes, I guess, mustard gas is such a nice weapon of destruction, that it doesn’t qualify as a WMD. The fact that Sadaam used it on masses of Kurds is lost upon many.
Note revised web reference as follows:
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/5961/The-Utter-Futility-of-Reducing-Carbon-Emissions
There is no implication. They definately had them, there is no debate. The UN has the reciepts, and the forensic auditors at the UN tracked every last part of that programme as most of it was destroyed in the early 1990s.
What was not accounted for came about because in 1991, Saddam had tried to hide some weapons, which the UN discovered. After this the UN decided it could not trust Saddam and so using what had been established as the manufacturing capability, a UN team of experts, estimated the theoretical maximum manufacturing capacity of Iraq’s various weapons programmes.
There was a sizable difference between what the Iraqis actually made, and the theoretical maximum possible output. This difference became known as the “unnacounted for stocks” of WMD.
Using this estimate they set about destroying everything that was known, (from extensive forensic accounting and auditing on a global scale), and succeeded in destroying everything. Even in 1998 the UN inspectors believed that they had destroyed everything, BUT they had this estimate of the total theoretical capability, which somehow ‘morphed’ over the following years from a theoretical capacity, to an actual amount to be found, and so could never sign off that the total stocks had been destroyed.
The fact that many of these weapons were only theoretical and had never ever actually existed, was conveniently “forgot”.
However, what the media completely ignored (as in Climate science) was the scientific fact that the weapons that they were looking for (the biological agents and chemicals) had a limited shelf life. Even in perfect conditions these chemicals and agents would have broken down and become inert due to the laws of physics and chemistry and biology.
Even IF the WMD had existed in 2003 (they didn’t) then they would have been inert and useless as WMD and therefore there was NO threat whatsoever from Iraqs WMD in 2003.
This was known, and the politicians and the mainstream media blatantly and repeatedly lied about Saddam and WMD in order to justify a crime against Peace.
The media were totally complicit. As they are in the lies they tell about “climate science”.
There is NO debate. Saddam posed no threat whatsoever to us in 2003. Science proved it!
As Dorothy Sayers would say, “Distinguo.”
One the one hand there is absolute illiteracy–not being able to read. On the other, there is functional illiteracy–the inability to read critically.
Looks like the EU isn’t marching forward to ‘war’ after all:
4 March 2011
EU backs away from 30% emissions target, leak shows
By Richard Black – Environment correspondent, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12647657
Doesn’t show up on the final copy but I’m guessing there must have been tears and probably snot on the original version of this when Black the AGW Hack had to write it.
Love the radical-action-based-on-shoddy-evidence being played out in this thread on the WMD and CAGW themes. Josh accurately identifies the similarities.
Peter H says:
March 6, 2011 at 10:37 am
“Lucas is a 1st class moron and illiterate”
I don’t support the GreenParty but I do say name calling and insults like the above do nothing of credit to this blog. Caroline Lucas is neither a moron or illiterate – that much is patently obvious.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
The war on climate change will consign millions to a life of poverty without the basics that we take for granted eg., electricity and indeed will lead to thousands if not millions of deaths through starvation (grain for oil programme etc,) and fuel poverty (the Uk already has the worst record in Europe for deaths amongst elderly due to fuel poverty and this will get worse as energy proces soar).
Peter if you are right that she is not a 1st class moron and/or illerate (and you are probably right on that) then she is knowingly and deliberately inflicting this missery on millions of people in the developing world and knowingly and deliberately consigning many to an early and avoidable death. This begs the question of whether she has a conscience and how she will be able to sleep at night.
“Didn’t Geroge W. ask the CIA to provide “evidence” that Sadam had WMD and they made some up. Much like the IPCC provided “evidence” for CAGW.”
No. George Tenet reported that Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister stated that Saddam no longer had WMD. Neither Bush nor the NSA believed the information because of the source and a great deal of conflicting information. Such as reports from the UN that Saddam would not allow inspections of WMD storage areas and that the so called decommissioning facility turned out to be a dairy products processing plant. Of course this was one of multiple reasons given for the war. Since Saddam never said he destroyed these weapons, and boasted to the end he had them, the whereabouts of the same are in question. No evidence has been found of either a decommissioning facility nor is there testimony of the same. And wikileaks provides detailed memos regarding a huge WMD program and details the unavailability of any evidence of their destruction.
Perhaps the war on Iraq and combating climate change are both alike in that they were/are based on incorrect information?
BTW: I don’t know about Britain, but there is no evidence the Bush administration lied or deliberately misled the citizens about WMD in Iraq. Can the same be said regarding climate change?
http://www.tallbloke.net/pics/comical-gore.JPG
[I’m afraid I will have to confiscate that for future use.☺ ~dbs]
Just like going to war? Well then,—— “Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is very apoplexy, lethargy: mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.” Coriolanus, 4. 5
@ D. J. Hawkins, You have bought a lot of misinfirmation.
Saddam NEVER kicked out the inspectors in 1998. The US ordered the UN to remove them for their own protection just prior to Operation desert fox. Even Blair admitted this in an interview just prior to the invasion in 2003.
In 1998, those “unnacounted for” weapons that you are confident were really there, were NOT. In fact they had never ever existed.
In 1991, Saddam had tried to hide and disguise his WMD capability from the UN. Re-assigning a military base as an agricultural facility and keeping nerve agent as concentrated agricultral pesticides for example. After this deception, the UN had “estimated” the theoretical maximum capacity of the weapons factories and the chemical and biological labs. The actual found and destroyed weapons were subtracted from this theoretical maximum and the remaining theoretical total became the “unnacounted for” weapons which (unsurprisingly) could not be found.
They never existed.
Even if they had, VX has a shelf life which had expired by 1998. All the other agents and chemicals on those lists in 1998 also had shelf-lives. All had expired.
Saddam had NO useable WMD at all in 2003 and this was known to both the politicians and the media.
They all lied. In exactly the same way that they are all lying now about CAGW
Good one tallbloke! Bagdad Al.
Bit of an insult to Bagdad Bob…
“Caroline Lucas is neither a moron or illiterate – that much is patently obvious.”
She is demonstrably, with regards to climate change and the science associated with it, a moron and illiterate. She has been questioned about her climate change policies based on dubious science and she said she relied on science from scientists without questioning the veracity of the claims. So she bases her communist policies on stuff she has no understanding of. She has recently also been a vocal supporter of carbon rationing systems which would force citizens to be completely monitored by government. Her green and scientific credentials are nil, she’s a totalitarian playing a the part of a caring hippy.
“Except that, at one point S. Hussein used them on his own people (I believe it was the Kurds in N. Iraq.) That strongly implies that he actually had them.”
Of course we knew Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons: we sold them to him.
However, the UN spent years verifying that he’d destroyed any such weapons after the Gulf War and were saying quite clearly before Bush invaded Iraq that they didn’t exist; if Bush had actual evidence he could have told the UN inspectors where to go to find them. Instead we got Colin Powell’s comedy routine at the UN which was either a glaring display of incompetence or a collection of blatant lies.
Which, in the end, does make it sound rather like the War On Climate to me.
Precisely!
tallbloke says:
March 6, 2011 at 11:34 am
I’ve been doing huge digging in the garden today. Not trenches for Caroline Lucas’ war though. I’m going to be growing as much food as I can this year. I advise others with any garden space to do the same. Food prices are going to soar.
——————————————–
Overwintering onions and shallots going well, first mangetout peas crawling up the frame, leeks and swede ready to harvest. Ground dug, spuds chitting, cherry tom seeds (all 3 sown), parsnips and beetroot sown, salad leaves in trough in cold frame! Brassicas and carrots next. All done by an anti-science, anti-green CO2 loving pariah, funny ain’t it.
All I need now is SUN and some pigging WARMTH! It is too damn cold in Derbyshire.
Have a good growing season, your logic is very, very sound.
PS, greens make good compost, work that which ever way you want.
More on the shrill Caroline Lucas using the war analogy to promte fear-driven group think. She is obviously literate enough to have read Orwell’s 1984 and understood how that trick works:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100072798/what-green-mp-caroline-lucas-should-know-about-liberal-fascism/
There seems to be a parallel with Libya – Gaddafi doesn’t allow free speech, just like the warmists, and the rest of us are resorting to the Internet and Facebook to plot how to overthrow the regime.
Please relax everybody. According to Gordon Brown it is too late anyway.
The train has left the station, so to speak.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Brown-Fifty-days–to.5747301.jp
Politics … from the best science blog in the world?
REPLY: Satire of recent news, per the masthead of subjects. And before you complain further about politics in the climate debate, please go visit RealClimate and Climate Progress and also lodge complaints there. – Anthony
Research in Australia into why people vote green.
We went to war in Iraq over what amounted to a moehill.
It is in the nature of such nations to bs thier capability, as in the “Mother of all Battles” turning out to be an orphan.
Saddam Hussein (and Baghdad Bob) met up with G.W. Bush, who took them up on thier word.
History will repeat itself as the GOP meets up with the Greens in an economic “Mother of all Ecothesis”.
Something like that.
There is an article in today’s Sunday Times Magazine by Bryan Appleyard titled “First Came The Floods, Then Came The Snow… And The Climate Scientists Were Silent”
Bing gives for string “first came the floods” a Times article which points to http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/environment/article2570981.ece
but I don’t know where this pay for access link leads to.
http://www.tallbloke.net/pics/comical-gore.JPG
[I’m afraid I will have to confiscate that for future use.☺ ~dbs]
You’re welcome Smokey. Feel free to retouch and improve it, it’s a bit rough around the edges.
Green Sand says:
March 6, 2011 at 12:55 pm
All I need now is SUN and some pigging WARMTH! It is too damn cold in Derbyshire.
Have a good growing season, your logic is very, very sound.
I think there will be late frosts this year. The poly tunnel has a paraffin heater in it. The price of paraffin is scary these days, though the co2 help the seedlings grow quick too.
PS, greens make good compost, work that which ever way you want.
Heh, I use nettles to make plant food. Works really well.
@ Peter,
I live in Brighton. I have met Ms Lucas. I read her party’s manifesto before the last election. I can say that whilst I do not think Ms Lucas is a moron or illiterate, (although others do and they are entitlted to that opinion, she is woefully ill informed, exercises and has exercised appallingly poor judgment, is undoubtedly a fascist and one of the most execrable prodnose, big government, “I know what’s good for you better than you do”, politicians in the UK. For reasons unkown she appears to have access to the MSM that far, far exceeds her position or importance. She is a disaster and a danger to all of us.
Ken Hall says:
March 6, 2011 at 12:39 pm
“Even if they had, VX has a shelf life which had expired by 1998. All the other agents and chemicals on those lists in 1998 also had shelf-lives. All had expired.”
http://www.fas.org/irp/gulf/cia/960705/73919_01.htm
“20 FEBRUARY 1991 MEMORANDUM”
“CIA BELIEVES THAT A SUBSTANTIAL SEGMENT OF IRAQ’S NERVE AGENT
STOCKPILE CONSISTS OF BINARY CHEMICAL WEAPONS–WHICH WOULD NOT
BE SUBJECT TO DEGRADATION. CIA ALSO BELIEVES THAT THE SHELF
LIFE PROBLEM WAS ONLY TEMPORARY AND THAT THE IRAQIS EVEN NOW
MAY BE ABLE TO PRODUCE UNITARY AGENTS OF SUFFICIENT QUALITY BY
ADDING A STABILIZER OR IMPROVING THEIR PRODUCTION PROCESS.
“
The Cognitive Dissonance is strong in these ones…
I seee Dellers has the cartoon up as well:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100078707/there-is-nothing-smart-about-rationing-electricity/
The global warming scam and the war in Iraq are not even similar. AGW is used as a classic scare tactic by people looking for both power and money. The scare tactics used for the invasion in 2003 was just finding an excuse to remove a problem that had existed since the first gulf war.
Saddam used WMD’s on both Iraqi’s and Iranians In for many years prior to the 2003 invasion. It would have been irresponsible to assume he had gotten rid of them. He constantly threatened to use them. The Iraqi government was a threat to the stability of the region and had been since the first gulf war. He should have been taken out then but, for political reasons was not. The WMD’s may have been old or may not have been. We had to assume from his willingness to use them in the past that they were there. There have been many reports of them being found. This is only one quickly looked up.
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/Iraq_WMD_Declassified.pdf
“Philip Mulholland says:
March 6, 2011 at 1:44 pm
There is an article in today’s Sunday Times Magazine by Bryan Appleyard titled “First Came The Floods, Then Came The Snow… And The Climate Scientists Were Silent”
Bing gives for string “first came the floods” a Times article which points to http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/environment/article2570981.ece
but I don’t know where this pay for access link leads to.”
It leads to an Apache server error. Below is the address that got me to the article by Appleyard, but I’ve got paywall access. Some Ad homs against Monckton and Piers Corbyn but the article does indicate the warmists are rattled.
Here’s a extract showing both ad hom and praise for Monckton.
“Christopher Monckton, joint deputy leader of Ukip, the anti-immigration party, is perhaps the most high-profile warming sceptic on the planet. Though not a scientist, he is highly scientifically informed. “If it were him versus Al Gore or him versus David Cameron, he’s vastly better scientifically qualified,” says Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/Features/article562243.ece?contentSlug=magazine-the_report.gif-79&slugImage=:::
Also references Graham Stringer MP
“The Labour MP Graham Stringer was on the select committee that questioned Dr Philip Jones about his emails.
“It was quite a shock,” Stringer says. “It was not just the emails, which were probably over the top, but when you look below at what they were actually doing, they weren’t doing science.”
Stringer, a scientist by training, is one of the few politicians to come out as a warming sceptic. But there are plenty of closet sceptics. ”
So for mainstream media not a bad read for sceptics compared to the usual tosh even if it is hidden away in the colour supplement which I usually put straight into the recycling bin.
@James Sexton says: March 6, 2011 at 12:06 pm; et al
There were no WMD’s in Iraq period, there is no data to support this concocted canard. The war started by Bush/Cheney and friends at Halliburton and the military industrial complex to profiteer (the Kurds thing is a red herring, just admit you’ve been duped just like CAGW)
Mark G.
“Of course we knew Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons: we sold them to him.”
I don’t know who your ‘we’, is, but it was not the USA. The USA involved itself in very little trade with Saddam. About 1%. Absolutely no chemical weapons were sold. There were some dual use chemicals approved for sale, primarily chlorine, which has multiple uses, the vast majority benign. Saddam was also sold noncritical communication equipment, ambulances and agriculture use helicopters. Non of these items were sold by the government. They were available on the open market. As for the Sarin gas used on Kurds, it was learned that the precursor chemicals and a complete factory to manufacture the same were sold to Saddam by West Germany. So I presume you are a West German?
Or do you attribute Saddam’s attack on Iran and the Kurds to be some foul plot by Bush, devised while he was managing the Texas Rangers?
Combating climate change is like waging war in Irag ……. only if 1010.org is conducting the campaign.
From the Green Party website:-
Britain needs a “war footing” to tackle climate change and energy crisis
From the same article by Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times Magazine.
Mention of:-
Climate Change Week 21-27 March 2011
and also:-
Repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act
@ Josh,
How about a whack-a-mole cartoon.
Warmist vs. skeptic.
Precisely put. There’s the War on the Economy, the War on the Elements; and of course – the third WOE is upon you – the War on Energy. So she has spoken plainly and all Brits need to do is listen.
An interesting thought is, what response would an equivalent comment in the US get?
Where oh where is Vice President Joe Biden when you need him?!
Not sure how the two are supposed to compare. Will the battle against global warming end in self-determination and a fledgling young democracy for a people accustomed to a lifetime of brutal oppression? And will that outcome be sneered at by people who were secretly hoping for a “last chopper on the rooftop” scene like they fondly remember from Vietnam?
I think we’ve already seen that one in those who have openly wished for some horrible climate disaster to “prove” that their warming fantasies are correct.
Anyway, fun discussion but I don’t really see much of connection, unless one thinks that the introduction of a liberal democracy in the heart of the middle-east was a waste of time. Who in that region seems to want such a thing? Oh.
Or, if we hadn’t done anything, we could be enjoying the entertaining spectacle of a Saddam-Ahmadinejab nuclear, biological, and chemical arms race and be glued to our TVs in anticipation of Iran-Iraq, The Sequel.
Yeah too bad we missed all that.
I was for the war in Iraq,and I think the situation in the middle east shows that Bush was right.Iraqi citizens are not marching on their government,wonder why?perhaps it’s because they can vote.I am glad Gadaffi has no WMDs,or nuclear weapons.There was no doubt that Hussein was aiming for nuclear.
I laughed at the food distribution comment about Iraq,did the author not know that the left was blaming sanctions for the deaths of Iraqi children,while Hussein was living in gilded places with all the money in the world at his disposal?
http://faisalkutty.com/publications/toronto-star/sanctions-are-killing-the-children-of-iraq/
I can see that Miss Lucas has a point.She believes climate sanctions are good for future generations,just as Bush believed the liberation of Iraq was good for future generations,and for democracy in the Middle East.
Thousands of soldiers,and hundreds of thousands civilians died in Iraq,losing power and having to restrict your quality of life does not compare with their sacrifice.Time will tell if those sacrifices were in vain.
[snip – the copyright holder of the Hitler movie has foolishly come down hard on blogs that use this…so I regretfully have to snip this – Anthony
That video really was funny. I LOL-ed a few times watching it.
Dan Lee says:
March 6, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Not sure how the two are supposed to compare. Will the battle against global warming end in self-determination and a fledgling young democracy for a people accustomed to a lifetime of brutal oppression? And will that outcome be sneered at by people who were secretly hoping for a “last chopper on the rooftop” scene like they fondly remember from Vietnam?
====
Well said! Two thumbs up, Dan. Way up.
For a year prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the goose-stepping western media assaulted us with the opinions of “experts” about the the threat posed by the Iraqi arsenal. This process of indoctrination was appropriately called “manufacturing consent” in Chomsky speak.
Sadly, a significant number of war-loving “Christians” on the right of politics bought the WMD lies and still defend them today, since the lies were designed appeal to their personal prejudices.
Confirmation bias works in the art of propaganda.
The goose-stepping media, with instructions from above, is now on the warpath against CO2.
Sadly, a lot of industry-haters on the left of politics have bought these lies, and the reason is the same: they were designed to appeal to their personal prejudice, their sense of identity.
The common theme is “experts” enforcing myths through the media–lying to the general public in order to manufacture consent for insane, violent policies that most rational people would reject.
On the bandwagon (argumentum ad populum) of experts (argumentum ad verecundiam) …. by Galileo’s dad:
Also, when April Glaspie greenlighted the invasion of Kuwait, she told Saddam Hussein that a lot of American business people wanted to see higher prices for oil, not lower.
In a world flushed with hydrocarbons, artificial reduction of supply, even if it means bombing an advanced nation “back to the stone age”– is good for some people.
WMD is an excellent analogy for AGW: I use it all the time. Sometimes it is the only way to get people on the left to think instead of regurgitating talking points from the “experts.”
D. J. Hawkins says:
March 6, 2011 at 11:31 am
……we should rather be more nervous and less condescending about the issue…….. My view? Sneer less, pray more.
MDenis39 says:
March 6, 2011 at 11:57 am
There is the outside chance that the stockpiles were moved to Syria, but no hard evidence and no testimony to that effect.
The question is not whether Saddam ever had them. The question is did he have them during the second Iraq war. And it looks like the answer is yes. But that’s all beside the real point since if 9/11 didn’t happen W Bush would not, likely, have went into Iraq. It’s pretty clear that not WMD but rather 9/11 was the reason for Iraq war 2.
Iraq WMD moved to Syria as told by Saddam’s #2 ranked general, Georges Sada:
5:30 video
Khwarizmi says:
March 6, 2011 at 6:36 pm
“Also, when April Glaspie greenlighted the invasion of Kuwait, she told Saddam Hussein…”
Glad you mentioned this. The whole thing was a set up. Saddam was past huis due date after his usefulness carrying on ‘his’ war against Iran was finished. Due to our conveniently short memories and attention spans, too many people forget how the Iraq project really got started.
In the world of propaganda, my favorite trick in that first war was when they faked the whole story about the evil Iraqis taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. Their fake witness delivered an Academy award worthy performance.
Brent Hargreaves says: March 6, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Hologram: “Lucas is… a moron and illiterate.”
Anthony: “This confused woman.”
[Global Warmism is a strongly held belief system, planted by unscrupulous scientists and flourishing in the rich soil of apocalypticism.—-The real villains are the science advisors: defeat them and their half-baked conjectures and the politicians will change course.]
———————————————————————————-
You seem to have this back to front. The scientists are simply paid stooges of some politicians IMHO.
Douglas
Saddam averaged 40 deaths per day during his tenure.
Mariwarcwm says: March 6, 2011 at 1:00 pm
There seems to be a parallel with Libya – Gaddafi doesn’t allow free speech, . . .
France prosecuted and fined Brigitte Bardot for anti-muslim comments. It intends to prosecute and jail John Galliano for anti-Semitic comments. The last Lord Mayor of London was investigated for remarks. Dutch politician Geert Wilders was prosecuted for anti-muslim remarks (and a movie), Mark Steyn was prosecuted in Canada for allegedly anti-muslim writings.
And you can get years added on to your sentence if you happened to have said the wrong thing while committing a crime in America.
Halabja is not a funny or pleasurable watching experience but it does speak to the subject of WMD.
pat says:
March 6, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Mark G.
“Of course we knew Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons: we sold them to him.”
I don’t know who your ‘we’, is, but it was not the USA. The USA involved itself in very little trade with Saddam. About 1%. Absolutely no chemical weapons were sold.
Long ago, when the google search engine was more useful than it is now, I found evidence that both the U.S. and Britain sold Anthrax to Iraq. I have the proof on an old scsi 50 pin drive, but it’s proving to be difficult to recover the data.
Anthony, I should apologize. I prefer the science oriented posts but there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun. The don’t post my comments on Real Climate or Climate Progress anymore. You’re doing a grand job here. I’m addicted to your site, I’ve donated two or three times, and I voted for the site in the blog awards. Keep up the good work!
Let Caroline Lucas enjoy her moment of glorious stupidity as Brighton’s MP. She won’t be returned to office at the next general election. Spiralling costs and a wrecked economy because of fraudulent green policies will see to that
Mike McMillan says:
March 6, 2011 at 9:11 pm (Edit)
Saddam averaged 40 deaths per day during his tenure.
What’s the average since the invasion by the U.S.?
According to verified reports, around 104,000 deaths as a direct result over 7 years.
=40.676 deaths per day.
Plus ca change.
Iagree wit mouch of what has beensaid here.[dude?] Up to & including:-
Peter H says:
March 6, 2011 at 10:37 am
“Lucas is a 1st class moron and illiterate”
No she probably isn’t. She is however arrogant, ignorant, privileged, supercilious, & lives in a world of all her dear little own. She refuses to listen to logic or reason, or common sense of all things, because it doeasn’t fit her prejudiced blinkered views, merely because she has a cause to battle for without thinking anything through, she wants to keep the little people little, & the big people big, but with an environmental smile of her face. After all, she is independently wealthy, is paid an emormous taxpayer funded salary, expenses, & taxpayer funded pension on top, & like the rest of those with their fat noses in the taxpayer funded trough, what do they actually for it return? Sweet Fanny Adams, IMHO!
Josh’s excellent cartoon seems to have triggered a wave of irrationality. Caroline Lucas (Phd) MP, is not illiterate but does seem to have a strange yearning for the rigours of a war that she is too young to have experienced; perhaps her priveledged upbringing and private education provided by her wealthy industrialist family has induced a guilt complex about her never having been cold or hungry or under physical threat, or perhaps she has watched too many re-runs of that wonderfully dated sitcom, ‘Dad’s Army’.. I remember post-war rationing and it was not fun at all; if Ms Lucas has a desire to experience a return to to this meagre and stringent lifestyle I suggest she tries wild camping under canvas during winter – a couple of days of this should change her somewhat odd state of mind.
Caroline Lucas MP is the first ‘Green’ politician to get a seat at Westminster. She represents Brighton and Hove in Sussex, rather like California in its thinking so will soon go bankrupt. The last by-election was won by Labour (no surprise considering the area Barnsley a staunch Labour area) but the real surprise was who came second- UKIP who consider CAGW to be ‘not proven’ and policies based on it to be wrong. the Green party came nowhere.
Caroline Lucas MP is the first ‘Green’ politician to be voted into Westminster. She represents Brighton and Hove in Sussex. This area is rather like California, without the nice climate, so will soon be bankrupt. The last by-election was won by Labour which was no surprise considering that the area is staunch Labour. The Surprise was who came second- UKIP. They consider CAGW to be unproven and policies based on it to be bad for the country. The Greens came nowhere.
Your reiteration of such false propaganda and inability to recognize obligations, recognize responsibilities, or recognize the differences in moral imperatives is repugnant and unsurprising.
Um, this is Carloine Lucas saying this, the same Caroline Lucas that is Vice President of the “Stop the War” coalition?
I don’t get it – she’s saying we should have a “War on Iraq” style enounter on AGW but is actually fundamentally opposed to the actual War on Iraq??? Bizarre.
Anyway, you should take a look at her bio on Wikipedia. She’s linked with every radical left wing cause going. Then she has links with a number of organisations not normally considered radical left-wing but which have shown radically left-wing tenedencies since she got involved – like Oxfam and the RSPCA. She is the very worst kind of Gramscian socialist and she should be monitored at all times. Wherever she goes she spreads Marxist poison.
That is a flat out slander and lie by deception. Biomedical reference samples were sold to Iraq by a number of Western nations because they were obligated by the United Nations WHO (World Health Organization) treaties to comply with Iraq’s requests for these medical samples. Refusal to comply with the Iraqi requests for the samples could have been used by the Iraqi Government and their anti-American supporters to accuse the Untied States of harming the health and welfare of innocent Iraqi civilians at risk from natural Anthrax threats endemic in Iraq and dependent upon Western research samples to combat the disease. Weaponizable Anthrax was more available from natural sources within Iraq or already weaponized samples from North Korea, Russia, and like supporters of such biowarfare research. Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime abused their UN privileges to receivee the samples from the Western UN repositories by uing them to develop dfensees against Anthrax weapons they weere developing from altogether non-Western sources.
The attempt to mislead the public into believing the Western nations were knowingly and deliberately tying to supply Anthrax to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime for use in biological weapons is truly outrageous and false.
Caroline Lucas is a British Member of Parliament.
Quite astonishing really considering her party’s share of the national vote was less that that of the neo-fascist
British National Party (BNP).
Quite correctly the BNP are considered a bunch of loonies, I cannot for the life of me work out why Lucas’s party
is not considered in the same light.
richard verney:
How can Caroline Lucas be “knowingly and deliberately inflicting this missery on millions of people in the developing world and knowingly and deliberately consigning many to an early and avoidable death.” when she is just an opposition backbench MP? I just don’t get the hysteria we see here when one MP (ONE) out of 650 is a Green Party MP. Me thinks you protest to much.
r brearley. Ms Lucas is as entitled to here view on the best kind of society to live in as you are – I’d defend the right of all people to have views. But, I’m not aware she’s dished out the kind of insults she’s got here – maybe she has and you could post a few examples? It’s a poor look out if the best response to green political views people here have is insult.
Alan the Brit. “She is however arrogant, ignorant, privileged, supercilious, & lives in a world of all her dear little own.” insulting and patronising. Is that the argument against her kind of politics you have? So angry and so little of substance…
@ Dirk H:
Notice the date on that memo?
Back in 1991, this was the time that the UN discovered it could not trust Saddam. At this time it was indeed thought that the Iraqis could create agents and chemicals which may have a long shelf life.
By 1998 it was well known to the UN inspectors that these defunct weapons had never been created to a high standard, the quality control had been non-existant, labs were less than sanitary and the weapons would have indeed been inert as the Former UN inspectors had been reporting to anyone that would listen back in 2003.
I was amazed to listen to several former UN inspectors early one morning (3:00 am February 2003) on the BBC of all places, telling of their experiences and of the blatant lies that the media was telling about inspections, the nature of the weapons, the extent of successful disarmament etc…
Shame that the mainstream media only covered this once at 3:00 am, instead of prime time, but it gave me a lead of where to look for more corroborative information. I could not believe it at the time and did a lot of digging.
The UN inspectors on the ground, and their spook assistants where constantly telling of repeatedly inspecting the same wrecked labs, rubble of destroyed factories, and piles of sand, for what Washington and London and elsewhere were telling them was DEFINITELY accurate intelligence of on-going WMD programmes.
All of these leads came from the same offices (Rockingham) (ISG) and others in the States, where these offices were cherry picking intelligence, inventing ‘intelligence’ and taking single-source, uncorroborated nonsense from defectors who had not set foot inside Iraq in over a decade. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were bypassing the CIA to get their own intelligence into the public domain. All of which was lies. The actual spooks were continuously reporting in 2003 that there was NO evidence of a continued WMD programme. Rockingham (UK) ISG and other offices were reporting (false) intelligence as if it were real intelligence that actually, Saddam does have WMD.
These leads were 100% entirely wrong. The west even faked information about Uranium Yellowcake from Niger. Every lead was false and every utterence from the west was disproven and debunked within days. the September and February dossiers from the UK were both full of known lies (exaggerations), with all qualifying caveats removed. The February dossier was a couple of thesis about the Iraq of 1988, which were downloaded from the internet, tampered and exaggerated to make Saddam sound even worse than he actually was, and then fraudulently published by HMG as “the latest intelligence”. That was a blatant and total flat out LIE!
IF they had any shred of real intelligence that Saddam had WMD, why did they have to lie like that?
Additionally, the UN inspectors were telling any media that would listen that they were getting 100% unprecedented and total co-operation from Saddam and his regime in the last couple of months running up to the 2003 invasion and that they only needed about 4 more months and a few hundred million dollars to satisfy themselves that Saddam HAD disarmed. Better that, than the trillion dollars and million lives which have been spent to tell us the same thing.
If anything should convince you as to the ridiculously amateurish level of the administration’s cooked “intelligence”, (rather than the real intelligence), it would have to be the utterly laughable assertion of GW Bush that they found the mobile weapons labs. The British still had the reciepts for these battlefield helium generators for battlefield weather balloons (used for targeting purposes in the Iraq Iran war (when Iraq were on our side remember) ).
No matter that they knew for a fact that these were NOT mobile weapons labs, how the hell do you create what GW described as “the deadliest biological weapons on the planet” in a curtain sided truck??? It is so utterly ridiculous, I cannot believe that the attended world press did not laugh GW out of the room. These kinds of agents require at least four stages of extensive filtration requiring a massive facility. You CANNOT create them on curtain sided trucks.
As for Saddam being in Breach of UN 1441? Well if anyone was in Breach of UN resolution 1441, it was the USA, who took delivery of the total audit of Saddam’s weaponry, (as required for full disclosure), then removed most of it, before passing on what was left to the Security Council as an incomplete record of his arms. they did this in FULL public view of the whole world and nobody in the media said a thing!
The Western powers and their puppet media lied to justify war. Just as they are lying now to justify higher taxes and more controls over all of us in the name of “climate disruption”
This is NOT a left vs right thing. This is an elitist vs the people thing. Western governments, left or right wing are pursuing EXACTLY the same agenda and NOTHING will change at all, AT ALL until the people wake up and realise that the divide and conquer of ‘liberal vs Conservative’ is playing directly into the hands of the globalist elitists who are pushing CAGW for all they are worth!
How many times to the elite and their puppet media have to lie to you all, before you realise what the agenda is?
Sun Spot says:
March 6, 2011 at 3:34 pm
@James Sexton says: March 6, 2011 at 12:06 pm; et al
There were no WMD’s in Iraq period,…………….
—————————————————————————–
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/06/the-sunday-silly-josh-on-why-the-climate-change-war-is-like-the-war-in-iraq/#comment-614914
Anything else?
#
#
tallbloke says:
March 7, 2011 at 12:00 am
pat says:
March 6, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Mark G.
“Of course we knew Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons: we sold them to him.”
I don’t know who your ‘we’, is, but it was not the USA. The USA involved itself in very little trade with Saddam. About 1%. Absolutely no chemical weapons were sold.
Long ago, when the google search engine was more useful than it is now, I found evidence that both the U.S. and Britain sold Anthrax to Iraq. I have the proof on an old scsi 50 pin drive, but it’s proving to be difficult to recover the data.
=======
I have read the same docs! they are reprinted in the back of a book I read recently and have gone blank on the name of:-( they are around on the net though.
Dr David Kelly said there were NO WMD and he was murdered for telling the truth..
10:10 anyone?
The comparison between Iraq WMD and AGW Science lies in the dangers of expert consensus. Unlike AGW, the professional consensus on WMD was nearly total.
I was in the intelligence community at the time and, although Iraq was not in my area of responsibility, I didn’t know a single analyst in the run-up to 2003 who doubted their existence.
The comparison is striking I think. In Iraq, there was a handful of Mideast and WMD analysts who sincerely believed that Iraq had WMD stockpiles, an ongoing program, and intent to use the weapons. This analysis was taken as gospel and used and amplified in self-validating circular reporting by others. As for me, I truly believe that capability implies intent and when I deployed to Kuwait and Iraq in March and April 2003, I was more than a little apprehensive about finding myself in a chemical/biological warfare environment—MOPP gear was training I took very seriously.
Likewise, look at the volume of work on the effects of AGW that is based on the assumption that a much smaller body of work by a handful of scientists, say, Hansen, Jones, Mann, is correct. I don’t know what the percentage is, but I would make a swag that three-quarters or more of the AGW narrative is simply based on the assumption that those fellows have it right.
In both cases, it is a false consensus based on the premise that the real “experts” know what they are talking about….
No, it was not a false consensus at all. The experts mostly did know what they were talking about. What they could not control was the evacuation of the remaining WMD through Syria in June 2002 to March 2003 in accordance with the old Soviet deception plans. The WMD assets were generally moved by airliner and truck into Syria, from which some of the assets were subsequently transshipped to Belarus, while others were transshipped through the Sudan, Somalia, and North Korea.
During the niights immediately preceding the Coalition invasion, CNN news reports broadcast night vision videos of the long line of tanker trucks stretching from Baghdad to the Syrian border. Later eyewitness reports from the truck drivers themselves indicated how some of them were killed by their leaking cargoes and were replaced by another driver by the Iraqi security services to complete the tanker truck’s journey to Syria.
There’s obviously a lot to be said about Saddam and WMD, including the oft-forgotten Halabja, but the impression given is that the mere ownership of chemical weapons was the basis for the invasion of Iraq, and the implication is that, had the WMD claims been more accurate, there would have been justification for military action.
As we see with Libya, the type of weaponry a force uses is secondary to its intent and ruthlessness, and all bystanders anguish, as always, over whether to intervene or not.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Oliver Ramsay,
Here’s a picture of the Iraqi WMDs being evacuated to Syria just before the invasion.
You know the big lie has made the rounds when otherwise thoughtful people regurgitate Hussein talking points (that’s Saddam, not Barry). The War was about REMOVING the regime from power in accordance with UN Resolutions (17 of them) and the Clinton era official policy, it was never a WMD easter egg hunt. Powell had a last ditch effort speech before the UN (quick Google hit here) to stave off the war, which was clearly his personal point of view. They even offered Hussein a form of amnesty / exile. Truth is they went so far to accommodate the State department and leftist anti-war group-think that the regime (Saddam, not Barry) had too much time to prepare, just like the previous Gulf War. From December 2001 (when Iraq was placed on the table) to March 2003 was over 14 months of discussion and planning. The attack window was discussed every day in the media and I believe they got it to within four days of the actual invasion (the only surprise was probably the decapitation strike). This is what happens when you bend over backwards to accommodate the shallow thinkers acting as Saddam’s pro-bono defense team. And this is what Bush gets! Attacked anyway for painstakingly following the letter of the law, giving up all real hope of surprise and therefore placing US lives at higher risk!
Iraqi WMD was never THE point, only obsessive/compulsive lazy people latched onto that, the question of WMD and the infamous inspection run-around was the FINAL point. Considering just their recent history, assassination plan thwarted against former president Bush 41 (during Clinton), and thousands, I repeat THOUSANDS of attacks on our Military defending the no-fly zones (you do know this is an act of war right?), this regime change was long overdue. (Hint: What if North Korea began firing into the DMZ thousands of times) Then there was the long simmering Oil-For-Food fiasco, at the time the largest organized crime operation in history (likely succeeded by AGW) was the underpinning of all the foot dragging. Never forget that none of this took place in a vacuum, it occurred in light of the September 11 attacks, the administration placed high priority on removing future threats (and Iraq was always within the top 5 of all threats, and we were already there in theater), so we finally get to ultimatum time for Saddam, leave Iraq or face the consequences. He chose poorly.
This whole event was a compromise, they strictly followed the UN, its 17 resolutions and questionable inspections to finally get to an action that was meant to put teeth into their procedure. And this is the thanks we get from the bedwetters. My opinion now after years of thankless criticism is F’all’ya’ll. I say we pull out of the UN, let these parasitic enemy governments fall and destroy each other, and perform unilateral action whenever necessary, including nukes. To hell with diplomacy. We’ve tried it their way, the UN way, the bedwetter way, the democrat way, enough! We’ve walked softly, time to wield the big sticks. I hope the leftists are proud of themselves, unintended consequences are a {snip}.
AGW does compare here but not in the way you stated it. The AGW lunatics are making it up as they go along which is exactly what this Bush/Cheney/Halliburton horse{snip} is. That goes ridiculously far beyond plain stupidity almost to defamatory. To think he would send US soldiers to their death to benefit some company’s bottom line is certifiably insane! The Iraq vets I know would defend Cheney to the death and wouldn’t take a {snip} on someone who said this even if they were on fire! Anyway, here on Planet Earth you will actually find that most who believe this nonsense also believe in AGW. You can find them by day wearing sandwich boards along Times Square stating The End is Near, by night they’re busy phoning in to Coast to Coast.
Exactly who is We? And what weapons exactly? How would we sell them anyway? The Army collects the money? Get real. This lie has been circulating since the mid 1980’s from the socialist democrats and is now morphing into really creepy stuff. They used to say Rumsfeld and Reagan sided with Iraq (Reagan pursued a stalemate deferring to the State department over Hawks that wanted Iran taken down); and later they changed it to we armed Iraq (myth exploded in the Gulf War when we faced and/or destroyed countless Soviet T-xx tanks, landmines, AAA and SCUDs and AK-47 rifles while their Soviet/French made Air Force fled to other countries).
Of course you are probably alluding to the fact that some USA based company (as well as other countries) sold some chemical precursors to them and that is the same thing in your mind, right? Following your illogic, nothing could ever be sold to anybody, especially fertilizer, peroxide, petroleum or any food. If we wanted to arm Iraq we could have, there was plenty of money to be made. But sorry to disappoint, the evil USA stayed out of it. Don’t worry though, you’ll get your chance to bash the USA when Saudi or Israel engage against Iran using really good weapons that we really did supply.
Exactly who Lied? And what did they Lie about? Can you tell me something that does not have a shelf life? Your argument is specious, even nukes have shelf lives but I can assure you we still have them even after perishable ingredients expire. Following such thin evidence as UN inspector lists of chemicals that were actually seen (and ignoring those that went unseen) strikes me as vapid. If the health inspector gives a politically motivated cursory inspection at your child’s school because of a gas leak or acid spill and says its ok, the school is just fine wouldn’t you even question it? I love people who hold murdering dictators like Saddam to a lower standard than they would their babysitter, school bus driver or health inspector.
AGW and Iraq? ROTFL. How about this: there is as much evidence that we lied to go to war as there is evidence that manmade AGW from CO2 will destroy the planet. I suggest you (and some others) re-examine your AGW comparison, because you will find that this USA bashing: ‘they lied‘ crap comes out of the AGW cultist mouth more than any other. All AGW cultism requires is blind loyalty to a faith, a point of view. By comparison, the ‘faith’ in this area is belief that the USA are greedy capitalist warmongers, and, that Saddam should have been left in power (because ‘he was contained’). Naturally, I believe neither, but you may continue believing whatever you want, without any evidence just like AGW! That entire paragraph could have been written by Alan Colmes (who parrots democratic talking points for a living). Rule of thumb, take the opposite of whatever position Alan Colmes takes, you will be correct 99.999% of the time.
Well since I know that you are a good guy I’ll just say this: I am unaware of anybody selling weaponized Anthrax to anyone. Even if we had some in useful weapon form, we would not have enough to sell, and I highly doubt it is worth the trouble to maintain as a weapon because there are far better ways to eliminate an enemy! No president would ever say ‘give them some Anthrax’ when we could actually supply weapons that could make a difference. Now about non-weaponized pathogens, which is where all these BLAME AMERICA stories originate, there is no preventing their manufacturer or distribution. The world has no interest in stopping the big stuff like U235 enrichment in Iran and the easy to make Little Boy that will result, so what are the chances of chasing down microscopic samples of anything? Besides as Iraq told the UN: it made enough botulinum toxin in 1989, 1990 and 1991 in theory to wipe out the Earth’s population several times over. And, they also produced Anthrax. That article also speaks of precursor Strains of pathogens purchased from many places. But no-one ‘armed’ them or intended to. Besides, when you have BILLIONS of dollars at your disposal strawmen purchases trump any plan at thwarting proliferation. If something can be done, it will be done. It makes no sense to blame the USA or UK for something this technologically trivial. Blaming the west for the sins of tinpot dictators is a blood libel, propaganda from the international socialist cabal who usually support these dictators in the first place.
And then there’s this, Anthrax infection is an old, common, natural disease (here in the states at least). Samples of this and many other viral and bacteriological pathogens are routinely shipped between infectious disease agencies. We could also be accused of supplying country xxx with Small Pox and Spanish Flu. Now we can debate whether this is a good idea or not, and it may not be, but we weren’t invited to the party. It has been long ongoing in the so-called spirit of humanity and international co-operation. These projects occur at the State department and UN level or below, and transcend politics. Personally I believe that agreements like this never help the USA, almost everyone we deal with has something to gain where we don’t. I believe that this is just another raping of the taxpayer, where we get to fund disease research in other countries. We in the USA could shut the doors tight and say screw you and still survive just fine. However, my opinion hasn’t been implemented (yet), so in the meantime the globalist: ‘it takes a village‘ crowd comes up with all these information sharing arrangements (if you don’t like it complain to them). This is yet another vector for proliferation.
Ah yes, the big lies live on, no matter how many times you think they have been laid to rest.
Big lie that won’t die #1 – Bush lied, people died. Was there any intelligence agency in the world which did not believe Saddam had a WMD program? No? I wonder Bush/Cheney/Haliburton were able to pull that off. All through the 1990’s, the Democrats in Congress and in the Clinton White House made speech after speech after speech regarding the threat of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Again, how did Bush/Cheney/Haliburton pull that off? What about that yellowcake ore? Do you know how many tons were shipped to Canada to be processed into nuclear fuel? Over 150 tons!
To those of you who “knew” Saddam had no WMD program — how did you know? What was the evidence to support your conclusion?
Big lie that won’t die #2 – The USA greenlighted the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Did the Iraqi ambassador say they were going to invade Kuwait? No. Did the Iraqis indicate an invasion was imminent? Again, no. So how could the US ambassador give a greenlight to an invasion?
Big lie that won’t die #3 – The USA sold WMD to Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war. This lie started with the USA selling weapons to Iraq during that conflict and then just morphed into a bigger lie after 2003. Did the USA really sell AK-47s, Soviet-built MIGs and Soviet built T-55 tanks to Iraq? How about Soviet-made SCUD missiles? No, the USA doesn’t have factories to make Soviet-era weapons, does it?
I would like to make a mention of the mass graves which were uncovered in Iraq, as a memorial to the victims. I would also like to congratulate the Iraqis who turned out to vote in elections at risk to their own lives, as terrorist threats were repeatedly made to keep them from venturing out of their homes. What a passion for voting. I would like to wish Iraqis healing from a brutal traumatic past under both S. Hussein and his two sons, which will not be easy as so many men, women, and children just simply vanished, and the torture chambers and methods of the regime are well documented. I continue to hope for their freedom to provide for their families and worship freely, without the government or some mullah or a common criminal preventing them from doing so.
Our military cannot build nations; freedom is a gift which ultimately people have to attain and keep for themselves. Freedom from radical Islam, which is a political philosophy first and a religion as a far second, in that region is difficult, and some have said it is impossible. But my hope is that with a protected start, Iraq will become and remain a pro-west, representative republic.
>Ah yes, the big lies live on, no matter how many times you think they have been laid to rest.
As I recall, the so-called “lie” that got the most heat and had the most traction was that Bush lied about yellowcake in the 2003 state of the union speech.
Here is what he said:
“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Given that the British continue to stand by this statement, and subsequent documents have show it to be accurate, where exactly is the Bush lie?
The myths get passed around so much they become “common knowledge”, and we end up having discussions like this one, with good and intelligent people who have never paused to take a second look at those old assumptions, and perhaps re-evaluate.
John in NZ, I know this is not the place for political discussions, but since you started it.
No, the CIA did not make up anything. What evidence that did exist was sufficient to convince the intelligence agencies of most of the western powers that Saddam was still actively pursuing WMDs.
As we found out after the fact, his activities were not as far advanced as he had tried to make us believe. (And yes, much of the misinformation was put out by Saddam himself, he thought that if he could convince the western powers that he was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, we would be too afraid of him to attack. Bad miscalculation on his part.) After the war we found that Saddam’s nuclear program had not been dismantled, but rather mothballed in hopes of restarting it after the sanctions and other pressures had been lifted. That he once had an active chemical program is proven by the fact that he used chemical agents against his own people. Whether or not his chemical program had been completely mothballed or was still ongoing is still subject to debate, as many of the components used in such a program are also usefull in other endeavors.
Additionally, stockpiles of chemical weapons were found. They were older weapons, but they were still dangerous, and they weren’t on the declared lists.
Finally, nobody knows what was in those convoys seen heading to Syria in the days before the war started. They could have been nothing more than Saddam’s art collection, or they could have been something more sinister. Nobody knows and nobody is talking.
Note to moderator: If you don’t want long discussions on political topics, you shouldn’t allow ignorant and ill informed initial comments to slip through in the first place.
[Reply: We are not the arbiters of what is ignorant or ill informed. Moderation is done with a light touch here. ~dbs, mod.]
The only evidence that Saddam had destroyed both his stockpiles and the equipment to make more came from the same agency that was making millions off of kickbacks from the oil for food program.
I find it interesting that some of the same people who don’t believe anything the UN says when it comes to global warming, think the UN is the ultimate source of truth regarding Iraq pre-gulf war.
Man, it’s amazing what the shelf life of liberal myths is.
Prior to his invasion of Kuwait, there was a disagreement between Iraq and Kuwait over who owned a small patch of desert that had a lot of oil under it. When Saddam approached the American ambassador to ask for our support of Iraq in this disagreement, he was told that the US had no interest in this matter, it was between Iraq and Kuwait.
Now many on the left insist on declaring that this simple statement was actually a signal to Iraq that it was alright for him to invade all of Kuwait. Like most things liberals believe, this one also has no basis in reality.
tallbloke, you need to check more often. Your so called official report has been well and thoroughly discredited.
Even before the invasion, the Coalition had remarkably exact information about the WMD and conventional weaponry being transferred out of Iraq and into Syria and Lebanon.
Indeed, local journalists risked their lives and the lives of their families to report the Syrian activities and WMD facilities being constructed the Syrian enginner corps in late 2002. They provided maps and reports to the public on the Web, which were contemptuously dismissed by the Leftists opposed to the Bush Administration and its proposeed upcoming actions. Essentially, all of this information was dismissed to the memory hole who were dead set to create and perpetuate the Big Lie that there were no WMD or other compelling amd moral reasons for enforcement of international law.
Mustard gas on the citizens is not an example of WMD
CO2 from suv’s is an example of WMD they say.
Smokey says:
March 7, 2011 at 7:40 am
Oliver Ramsay,
Here’s a picture of the Iraqi WMDs being evacuated to Syria just before the invasion.
—————————————-
I didn’t find any of the pictures very convincing. There was plenty of other stuff that was, however.
The point I wanted to make was that, behind the refrain of “they lied to us” is the implication that, had they not lied, the attack would have been justified simply on the grounds of WMD being in their possession.
There needed to be greater cause than that and, in my opinion, there was.
Here is the full text of the Sunday Times article by Brian Appleyard:
(quite pleased as I get to be quoted in the article.) Hope it’s not too long for a comment.
Sunday Times Magazine 6th March 2011.
A Very Heated Debate
As the world is gripped by extreme weather, the global warming sceptics are gaining ground. Who is winning the battle for our hearts and minds?
Bryan Appleyard Published: 6 March 2011
Global-warming sceptics are gaining ground, but are they full of hot air” (Jasper James)
In a basement in London, in probably the smallest office in the world, an American television crew is demanding to know what the weather will be like on April 29, the day Prince William marries Kate Middleton. Any mainstream meteorologist would tell them their question is unanswerable so far in advance. But Piers Corbyn is not mainstream.
“It looks like being a cool day with blustery showers, although we do have to see if there will be a blocking high pressure to keep things away. But to do it properly we need a little more time.”
Corbyn, who is the brother of the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, has the air of a Dickensian clerk – crazy hair, disordered clothes, and he sniffs persistently through a giant nose. “He comes across,” muses one climate scientist, “as mad as a hatter, but he’s not daft.”
Not being daft makes him, to the vast majority of climate scientists, a very dangerous man indeed and one in serious need of a good slap.
“He is an utter prat.”
That was Professor Philip Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. His view of Corbyn appeared in one of the leaked emails in the “Climategate” scandal, which proved to global warming sceptics that scientists like Jones were prepared to rig the evidence to advance their case. Corbyn, you see, thinks that global warming is a scam, a fraud, bad science, you name it. “There is no evidence whatsoever,” he says, “for any long cycle connected with carbon dioxide, absolutely none.”
Later, over breakfast at his club, Brooks’s, the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley – pinstripe suit, clashing shirt and tie – tells me that he also thinks warming is a scam, a fraud, etc. “Self-sustaining nonsense,” he calls it, “where anybody who wishes to be part of the establishment dare not stand up and say it”s nonsense.”
Christopher Monckton, joint deputy leader of Ukip, the anti-immigration party, is perhaps the most high-profile warming sceptic on the planet. Though not a scientist, he is highly scientifically informed. “If it were him versus Al Gore or him versus David Cameron, he’s vastly better scientifically qualified,” says Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Monckton is lapped up by sceptical Americans for two reasons. First, he has a plummy English accent and he peppers his talk with classical references. Secondly, he has a habit of suggesting that warming is a quasi-communist plot. The believers, he says, are those who once would have been communists. They are intent, he claims, on a form of world government capable of overruling democratically elected leaders. He is very self-conscious and aware that he might be taken as bonkers. At one point, in the middle of a long story about a cold war Soviet plot, he stops and looks at me. “I watched your face and you looked as if you were thinking, ‘Oh, my God, what kind of a nutter am I talking to?'”
There are good reasons to treat Corbyn and Monckton with caution. Corbyn bases his weather forecasts and his carbon denial on a system he will not divulge; he maintains that climate change is the result of solar activity rather than man-made. “The thing about Piers,” says Professor Chris Rapley of University College London, one of our most distinguished climate scientists, “is that he will not reveal his methodology and therefore cannot be taken seriously as a scientist.”
Monckton, meanwhile, has a nasty habit of rewriting his own story. To me, for example, he denies he advocated quarantining those infected with HIV in an article in the American Spectator in 1987. He says he simply said they should be warned about the dangers. In fact, he was very specific about quarantine. The infected, he wrote, should be “isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently” Carriers need not be isolated from each other “and carefully supervised visits from uninfected people would be possible.”
Both of them tend to alienate other sceptics. One anti-warmist had doubts about Monckton when he argued that coal was as clean as wind and solar. And Corbyn’s assertion that there is no carbon effect is dismissed by even hard sceptic scientists. Neither man, in short, is strictly credible. But they are on a roll, both making regular appearances on American TV. The question is: what should the reasonable person now think?
Since I wrote about being converted to warmism in this magazine just over a year ago, the greens – and I – have been on the run. They are so much on the run that, on key issues, they have fallen silent. The last few months have seen a series of spectacular weather events – floods in Pakistan, Brazil and Australia, cyclones hitting Australia, huge snowfalls on the eastern coast of America, and two very cold winters in Britain. Such extreme events were, in fact, predicted by global warming models. But nobody has dared to claim them for the climate change case.
“Not a single climatologist,” says Rapley, “has even dared to discuss the possibility that these events are linked to climate change. The truth is you cannot attribute any one of these things to human-induced climate change, but they represent a series of coincidences that seem very unlikely.”
The climate scientists have been demoralised by a series of heavy blows to their credibility – among them the Climategate affair.
The Labour MP Graham Stringer was on the select committee that questioned Dr Philip Jones about his emails.
“It was quite a shock,” Stringer says. “It was not just the emails, which were probably over the top, but when you look below at what they were actually doing, they weren”t doing science.”
Stringer, a scientist by training, is one of the few politicians to come out as a warming sceptic. But there are plenty of closet sceptics.
“With Labour MPs, it’s become more of an issue like racism: ‘Of course you’re against it, and if you’re not, you’re not going to be invited to my dinner party.'”
There was also the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, at which world leaders got together to do almost nothing, and then last year’s Cancun summit, at which the poor accused the rich of failing to deliver the $30billion promised to help mitigate the effects of warming. And, finally, the science itself turned weird. After decades of temperatures increasing steadily, the trend levelled off in the noughties. It did not, as some sceptics claimed, go flat. It was still the warmest decade on record, but the rise had dropped to one-tenth of what climate models had predicted.
In America the Republicans’ success in the midterm elections has given the sceptics’ cause what it does not have here: important mainstream representation. But that could be about to change. Down in the leafy lanes, something is stirring.
“We prefer not to use the word ‘sceptic’,” says Fay Kelly-Tuncay. “We prefer ‘realist’.” She is the Surrey housewife organising a campaign to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act, which commits the UK to cutting carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.
“We’ve become very aware that data has been manipulated, and the most annoying thing is the closing down of debate. There have been complaints about the BBC having meetings to decide that all scientists agree, so let’s stop talking to sceptics. I think that’s undemocratic.”
“We’ve had a scare story running since the 1970s. It started off as global cooling. Then they said the Earth was warming and it would be catastrophic, there would be tipping points – and those things just haven’t happened.”
Zeroing in on the 2008 Act potentially gives the campaigners real political traction. “We think MPs rushed to judgment on global warming and made a catastrophic policy blunder,” she continues. “We feel energy subsidies will be too high. Wind farms and solar, they’re uneconomic. Also, the government is ignoring gas from shale and shale oil, which is very cheap and in plentiful supply – We don’t really understand why.”
Graham Stringer adds the jobs issue into the anti-act mix. “Gradually, those MPs who take the global warming arguments at face value are beginning to realise they’ll have to explain to their constituents why industries are closing down and why their domestic fuels bills are going up. Making renewable energy three times as profitable as traditional energy, and making my constituents pay for it – that’s a very bad idea.”
Finally, there is the moral issue. The Rev Philip Foster is now retired from his job as vicar of St Matthew’s, Cambridge. About 10 years ago he was talking to a scientist who asked him how much he thought temperature had risen in the last 120 years. “I said about two or three degrees. He said about half a degree.” Foster was shocked that so much was being made of so little, and in retirement he has immersed himself in warming science. He is now a card-carrying realist. He does not believe rising carbon dioxide levels cause warming, rather that warming causes rising CO2.
I ask him why he thinks the warmists believe otherwise. “Scientists of a certain kind say, ‘There’s a problem. Will you give us money to research it?’ It then becomes an almost self-fulfilling prophecy.”
But the real issue for Foster is moral. “If Africa is told it mustn’t touch its coal, mustn’t touch its oil, when it desperately needs electricity to run basic services, that’s morally shocking. This western obsession is actually killing people. It is Christian charities pushing this, and it distresses me.”
Repeal the Act, the campaign to overturn the 2008 Climate Change Act, will be launched formally at a meeting in St Ives, Cambridgeshire on March 19. This immediately precedes Climate Week, which runs from March 21 to 27.
Climate Week, and green politics in general, show that, if sceptics rely on dubious science, warmists rely on bad politics.
The week is, as the website says, “a supercharged national occasion that offers an annual renewal of our ambition and confidence to combat climate change”. Nothing damages a cause in secular Britain like quasi-religious language; it spreads suspicion.
Well, there is one thing even more damaging, and that is the pursuit of clearly unattainable goals. Caroline Lucas is the Green party leader and our first Green MP. She recently came up with the idea of the New Home Front initiative. Based on our performance during the second world war “when we cut coal use by 25%, we saved waste to feed pigs, car use plummeted and so on” it calls for Britain to get onto a war footing again to combat climate change. The glaringly obvious objection to this is that slowly rising temperatures do not have quite the same persuasive power as the Luftwaffe and massed panzer divisions on the French coast. So I asked Lucas how on earth she expected people to be talked into joining the new Home Front. The answer is leadership.
“If you think of the political capital that Tony Blair expended on persuading people there was a genuine threat from Iraq, if he had used that same political capital he had back in 1997, that charisma, that leadership, around the issue of climate change – you could communicate in a clear way what the threat is, what the benefits are of acting, and you could galvanise people.”
This is the Greens shooting themselves in both feet prior to standing on a rake. If evoking the war as a model for our response to climate change is a mistake, then evoking Iraq is an egregious blunder. Blair did not get us into that war on the basis of his popular leadership skills; he got us in against massive popular resistance and on the basis of wrong intelligence and extremely dodgy dossiers.
So, torn between bad politics, grass-roots unease, eccentric deniers, terrible weather and unbelievably complicated science, what should you, the reasonable person, think?
First, the heart of the matter is science, not politics. The kneejerk right-winger who embraces hard-ass scepticism as a necessary political accessory is as stupid as the kneejerk left-winger who embraces radical, back-to-austerity warmism for the same reason. These people are pre-programmed ideologues.
Nevertheless, the science says that global warming is happening and that human activity is almost certainly the cause. There are important arguments to be had about the rate of warming, about its impact, and about “climate sensitivity”, the degree to which the climate responds to small changes. But the simple truth is, unless some staggering new development reveals factors at work that have concealed themselves for 40 years from the best scientists in the world, denying the basics of the case is irrational, mere prejudice. Piers Corbyn claims to have such a revelation but, since he refuses to share his methods, he need not trouble the reasonable person.
Secondly, that rational formulation of the issue does not in itself solve any of the political problems. Our uncertainties about rate and impact entail profound uncertainties about action. How much should we spend, how much should we change our lives” The short answer is neither question is politically meaningful, since politics is seldom about “should”. In Britain the current green consensus in parliament is likely to weaken and, internationally, there is no prospect of any enforceable deal on emissions. So we will spend money on green technologies, do a bit of recycling but, unless there is some clear warming-causing catastrophe, our resolve will falter.
So what does the reasonable person think? The philosopher Roger Scruton has an answer. Scruton is a very unprogrammed right-winger.
He thinks human-caused global warming “very likely”, and he is quite green. He has a book called Green Philosophy coming out next year. But his view is that the greens have let mass panic overcome rational argument. “We must come up with incentives for people not to consume energy. Yet all the campaigning is not about finding incentives but about passing treaties that impose obligations nobody has a motive to obey.”
Neither side is winning this fight, though the greens are on the ropes. As they slug it out, the language grows ever more vicious and the claims of both sides ever more extreme. To the sceptics the greens are lying, cheating, catastrophe-crazed group thinkers; to the warmists, the sceptics are mad, bad, neo-fascist defenders of Big Oil.
At the margins it is, admittedly, all too easy to find evidence for all these charges. But in the middle, the ground occupied by the reasonable person, there is only confusion and uncertainty. Meanwhile, the planet cycles on regardless. In time, it will make its own decisions about the viability of our troublesome species.
Taken out of conext, you would have no way of knowing what the photographs represented. When presened along with the information about what they carried from the very people who drove them and others, it was a photograph of the WMD and conventional weaponry being shipped to Syria.
Yes, even without any WMD whatsoever, Saddam Hussein’s regime was engaged in an ongoing belligerency, meaning an ongoing war of aggression, in which every norm of international law was being flagrantly violated by Iraq’s government. The remedy for such a belligerency was collective military force to restore peace, with or without Iraq’s possession of WMD being an issue.
Phillip Foster, the article you have referenced missed the point that Piers Corbyn does not reveal his methodology as it is the basis of his weather forecasting business. He has a different set of realities as a self-employed person; it’s very easy for scientists on quite generous government or institutional salaries to dismiss Corbyn because of non-disclosure, but no-one criticises Coca-Cola for using a ‘secret recipe’ for their confection which is a spectacular international seller.
I am pleased you were quoted in the article as your points were very sound.
D. Patterson says:
March 7, 2011 at 2:06 am
tallbloke says:
March 7, 2011 at 1:16 am
What’s the average since the invasion by the U.S.?
According to verified reports, around 104,000 deaths as a direct result over 7 years.
=40.676 deaths per day.
Plus ca change.
Your reiteration of such false propaganda and inability to recognize obligations, recognize responsibilities, or recognize the differences in moral imperatives is repugnant and unsurprising.
Your accusations are innaccurate, repugnant, unsurprising, and unsupported.
Plus ca change.
MarkW says:
March 7, 2011 at 11:42 am
tallbloke, you need to check more often. Your so called official report has been well and thoroughly discredited.
http://johnrentoul.independentminds.livejournal.com/19018.html
The Iraq Body Count cumulative total since the invasion is now just under 100,000. That is likely to be an under-estimate, but the highest figure from a credible and independently verifiable source is the World Health Organisation survey, also in 2006, that estimated (with a 95 per cent probability) between 104,000 and 223,000,
I was using the lowest credible estimate, 104,000.
If you have better figures from a credible source, bring them on and lets have a look.
MarkW says:
March 7, 2011 at 11:19 am
In one particular example the U.N. task force intervened in the 2004 elections just before the elections by publicly, loudly, and hysterically accusing the U.S. of failing to protect specialized explosives (MDX and RDX) which they had sealed up in warehouses as part of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program which had not been destroyed. The task force claimed the U.S. had been advised of them, and it was shown that they had done so, unfortunately only detailed as being somewhere on a multiple hundred square mile base.