The Sunday Silly – Josh on why the climate change "war" is like the war in Iraq

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.]

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.

tallbloke, you need to check more often. Your so called official report has been well and thoroughly discredited.

Mustard gas on the citizens is not an example of WMD
CO2 from suv’s is an example of WMD they say.

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.

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.

MarkW says:
March 7, 2011 at 11:19 am

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.

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.