James Delingpole and WUWT are inextricably linked in climate history. I broke the climategate story here at WUWT from my laptop at Dulles airport, Delingpole was the first in the MSM to pick it up. From there the story spread and the rest is history. The irony is that just hours before I had met James in person for the first time at a conference in Belgium, but I couldn’t say anything then because nobody was sure if what we had was real. In this video interview from reason.tv, Delingpole acknowledges WUWT’s role in getting it started. He also talks about his new book Watermelons, which I’d been given a copy of and have read. It is entertaining, sad, and funny all at once. Here’s what they say bout him in the YouTube description, and the video is well worth watching.
James Delingpole is a bestselling British author and blogger who helped expose the Climategate scandal back in 2009. Reason.tv caught up with Delingpole in Los Angeles recently to learn more about his entertaining and provocative new book Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors. At its very roots, argues Delingpole, climate change is an ideological battle, not a scientific one. In other words, it’s green on the outside and red on the inside. At the end of the day, according to Delingpole, the “watermelons” of the modern environmental movement do not want to save the world. They want to rule it.
Approximately 10 minutes.
Produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.
h/t to Dr. Ryan Maue for the link
I’ve just finished reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear.
Unfortunately, even if the Green Brigade were to read it, they would not recognise the hypocrisy in the book aimed at their beliefs vs lifestyles, nor the inaccuracies in the ‘science’ they proclaim is ‘settled’.
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Been known since at least the 70s. Hardly a coincidence that the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 was the centennial of Vladimir Lenin’s birth.
polistra says:
September 28, 2011 at 4:03 am
“…… Some of the lower-level functionaries may be fully Marxist, but all the top folks in all the elite institutions have been Gramscians for at least 20 years now…”
Thanks for the tip… I had never heard of Antonio Gramsci, and am researching it now…. it explains a lot. Like why ex-cons are now considered “Heroes”
At one point I believed that the alarmists were doing some good by promoting alternate energy, which given the situation in the middle east is a good thing.
I have now changed my mind. There are almost unlimited amounts of coal and natural gas in the USA. There is enough to make us independent from the middle east for hundreds of years and by that time workable renewable energy will be available.
As of now the “hang up” is storage. The winds don’t blow when it is 110 F and there is no sunlight at night or in deep winter so you have to have the same generation capability as if sunlight and wind were unavailable.
The effect of the alarmists actions is to weaken the USA not strengthen it.
By pretending that CO2 is harmful they preclude the use of the very resources which can make the USA strong !
Richard S Courtney says:
September 28, 2011 at 2:30 am
Scottish Sceptic: You seem to have made a typographical error in your post at September 28, 2011 at 1:34 am where you write:
“The simple fact is that at some point fossil fuels will run out” Surely, you intended to write;
“The simple fact is that economic reality means fossil fuels will not run out during the existence of the human race.”
Richard, a good point, but if you want to be pedantic, I was defining a property of fossil fuels: they get consumed. I would however agree that under conventional economics one would be encouraged to say that the price of energy rises as availability decreases.
But I not at all convinced that has any meaning in the scenario I was describing. I cannot see how you can use standard economics because they are so ingrained in the economy that they have a very similar function to money. Saying energy is in short supply is akin to saying money is in short supply:so you would be saying something like: “as money is taken out the economy, money becomes more expensive”.
The reality is that “as money (or energy) is taken out the economy, the economy gets smaller”.
Another way to put this, bearing in mind that energy and food are pretty much interchangeable (over the long term), is that as energy runs out the cost of living will rise … until people cannot afford the cost of living. Which is another way of saying they will die. My feeling is that standard economics starts to fall down when people are starving to death and their only option is to steel the “cost of living”.
We then get to a situation where population, economics and energy/food are pretty much intertwined in a way standard economics cannot model, more like an ecology rather than economic model. My inkling is that in the long run we may get far more sensible answers regarding our future by looking to the population boom and bust of other species which tend to modulate as the availability of their resources rise and fall. Only problem is that when resources are plenty, it’s really difficult to imagine a time when they will “run out” or should I have put “the cost of living is too high”?
Superluminal neutrino’s Vs Climate Change
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/superluminal-neutrinos-vs-global.html
To believe that watermelon theory you first have to believe that the United Nations is a political organization.
Sarc/off … click… click… bang. Sorry the very thought of the UN being a scientific organization causes my keyboard sarc button to stick down.
I am able to remember sitting on a beach as a small child, up on Cape Anne north of Boston, and watching the boats head out in the morning and come back seagull-swarmed in the evening, when they were mostly fishing boats. I feel a sort of pang now that there are such traffic jams of pleasure boats. However I don’t take that pang, (which is a sort of nostalgia for bygone times,) as a reason to become militant. What really scares me about some environmentalists is that they honestly seem to want to reduce the population of earth by five or six billion, and have no inkling that what they are talking about is tantamount to a horrific genocide.
I feel life is far more subtle and complex than any sound-bite or talking-point, however if we must work on that level, (without descending to that level,) I think the story about the little boy burned to death while his mother was out, in Uganda, should be trumpeted from the rooftops.
It succinctly puts things in a nutshell: “We are killing you little people for your own good.”
Jit says: September 28, 2011 at 3:42 am
Scottish Sceptic: “The real question like: “what is the right temperature for the world”, is “what is the right level of population for the world”
This is actually rather a simple calculation. You take the area of a region and divide by the target level of consumption (expressed as hectares and hectares per person, say). Result is the number of people the region can support.
But that figure of “level of consumption” is really a statement of energy availability and as I said energy is running out (i.e. getting consumed). So what is the “target level of consumption”?
I was reliably informed by a farming friend who had investigated growing their own bio-fuels that if they ON THE FARM replaced fossil fuel by bio-fuels, then half their output would be consumed before it left the farm gate: on the farm. In other words, the number of hectares per unit output would need to double if farmers tried to grow their own fuel.
But farmers aren’t the only ones using fuel, so if we tried to grow all the other uses of fossil fuels and add to this the energy needed to transport that fuel to the retailer, then add to that the energy needed for the consumer to acquire it. Then lets add in the cost of growing the oil-base needed for all those fertilisers and pesticides and herbicides. Add a handsome dose for general costs of society like running a government, healthcare, military. And how much energy would actually leave the farm gate … or would it be like a communist country … more go into production than comes out?
But let’s for argument say that 1/4 of the energy produced by a farm reaches the consumer. Under this scenario, without fossil fuel, we would need 4x as much land for each person, and as land itself is pretty well a finite resource (arguably a consumed resource as fertility of much land diminishes over extensive periods of farming – only offset by fossil-fuel fertilisers!) the result is that if we had to grow our own fossil fuel, using the 25% guess, we could only sustain 25% of the present population. A quick calculation shows that if that were to occur over 200 years. Then we would need a yearly 0.7% worldwide reduction in population to reduce population by 75% in 200 years. I estimate that in practical terms the number of children would have to drop one less child for every two families.
So, even if we argue that fossil fuels will not run out for hundreds of years, the scale of problem when they run out is so severe that we should consider doing something now. … Or at least, we really should do the calculations and have the debate.
Here is the NYT article on the burning of the eight year old child.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/world/africa/in-scramble-for-land-oxfam-says-ugandans-were-pushed-out.html?_r=3
There is a palpable fear of healthy happy, dark-skinned people in the environmental movement…
I believe fossil fuels will never run out as they will become outdated as an energy source before they are depleted as resources. This is one of the primary reasons Peak Oil is a bunch of hooha.
Agenda 21. Interesting reading. If it were to be implemented, the result would be world de facto governance by the UN. That’s why it is a political issue, not scientific.
“Can someone explain to me why it is considered evil to think that popotation growth should be limited or even reversed.”
You want to send men with guns to threaten anyone who decides to have another baby beyond the state-approved maximum (and what do you do if they do get pregnant? Compulsory abortion?). Think about that for a moment: how can that not be evil?
Other problems with the idea are that it’s often been promoted by a distinctly unsavoury bunch whose real interest is more in eugenics (‘kill the poor’) than ‘saving the environment’, and that most of the people I’ve seen promoting it on the Internet in the past usually seem to have at least half a dozen kids already.
In the West, we’re a long way from needing ‘population reduction’ because our native populations are already dropping; if anything we need incentives to have kids, which the welfare state has largely eliminated. A century ago one of the most important reasons why people had kids because they’d look after us when we got old, today we circumvent that by taking taxes from other people’s kids so we don’t need any of our own.
BTW, the reason why China has a ‘one child’ policy — which seems to have largely become an ‘abort/kill your daughters’ policy leading to a massive imbalance between men and women — is that Mao introduced a ‘have as many kids as you can because we need a huge army to fight the United States’ policy. State interference in the number of kids people have has generally been disastrous regardless of which side it takes.
R. de Haan says:
September 28, 2011 at 6:49 am
😉
Another box ticked(maybe). I came to the climate (lack of) debate because I saw it as the main chance. The main opportunity to show that consensus science will not lie down even when it has been shot full of holes. Repeatedly. In the head. At close range.
To be perfectly frank I didn’t expect to see the limit(s) of the speed of light removed before “Monkeys Burning Fossil Fuels will End the World Tomorrow” or “The Big Bang was Definitely the Start of Time and Space” or “Red Shift Proves the Universe is Expanding”, etc, etc.
/begin sarc
I’ve just bought Watermelons through Delingpole’s site. (Amazon Canada doesn’t have it.)
In an election debate last night, the Premier of Ontario was extolling the virtues of smart meters. Anthony introduced discussion here about their vices months ago. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011//05/12/the-smartmeter-backfiring-privacy-issue/
What I discovered this morning is that in Ontario “consumers are going to have to pay extra for the privilege of being smart metered.” http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/green+leapt+before+looked/546779/story.html
Here’s a scary video: http://goldsilver.com/video/smart-meters/
Scottish Sceptic says:
September 28, 2011 at 7:32 am
Check out hemp (seed) – weight to oil ratio and oil to fuel ratio. Both are extreme and you still have the oily fibres left to work with. Hemp grows pretty much anywhere. Higher, drier, colder and at more northerly latitudes than any other plant. No pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or fungicides needed. None. It rotates, sympathetically and supportively with everything we need (legumes, tubers, fruit, veg, grasses) but doesn’t need to be itself. Its only defence mechanism to fight aridity, wind, cold, heat and over-watering? Make more oil.
It is a very hardy plant. Throw the seeds on the ground and let it grow. Over and over and over. Yep, 3 times a year in some climes. There are no truly bad places (outside of deserts and swamp) to plant hemp but maybe some difficult terrain to get it to market for sure. Oh, and the chemical, fibre and paper industries hate it. With a vengeance. That could be a problem (wouldn’t be the first time).
As a concentrated, portable fuel there is no real “alternative” to what we have (derv, avro, petroleum distillate). Which is why we will manufacture it if it “runs out” – barring a miracle (which I don’t discount just don’t expect) replacement.
The people “problem” will mostly take care of itself given enough time and wealth creation. The math guys reckon 9 billion tops. Within 30 years. Decline afterwards. There is plenty of everything to go around those numbers unless one believes, like psychopaths and such, that only an elite deserve it all.
Scottish Sceptic says: @ur momisugly September 28, 2011 at 6:48 am
“….We then get to a situation where population, economics and energy/food are pretty much intertwined in a way standard economics cannot model, more like an ecology rather than economic model. My inkling is that in the long run we may get far more sensible answers regarding our future by looking to the population boom and bust of other species which tend to modulate as the availability of their resources rise and fall. Only problem is that when resources are plenty, it’s really difficult to imagine a time when they will “run out” or should I have put “the cost of living is too high”?”
Do not worry about it. The problem has been “addressed” by the “elite”. They are in the process of driving the peasants off the land and creating a world wide food monopoly so only the wealthy can afford to eat. (I wish it was sarcasm) The food shortage will then be attributed to “Global Warming” (That excuse is already in play)
I sort of address this starting with this comment
The plan is already working. In 2008, nearly 9 million children died before they reached their fifth birthday. One third of these deaths are due directly or indirectly to hunger and malnutrition.
Meanwhile money is to be made while advancing the “Human Depopulation Agenda”
“….Today three companies, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge control the world’s grain trade. Chemical giant Monsanto controls three-fifths of seed production. Unsurprisingly, in the last quarter of 2007, even as the world food crisis was breaking, Archer Daniels Midland’s profits jumped 20%, Monsanto 45%, and Cargill 60%. Recent speculation with food commodities has created another dangerous “boom.” After buying up grains and grain futures, traders are hoarding, withholding stocks and further inflating prices….” http://www.globalissues.org/article/758/global-food-crisis-2008
How Goldman Sachs Gambled On Starvation explains how Goldman Sachs got the regulations controlling agricultural futures contracts abolished so the contracts could bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture thus creating the market in “food speculation.” that caused the 2008 food riots and deaths from starvation.
Fmr. President Clinton went so far as to Apologized for Trade Policies that Destroyed Haitian [and other third world] Farming – “President Bill Clinton, now the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, publicly apologized last month for forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported, subsidized US rice during his time in office. The policy wiped out Haitian rice farming and seriously damaged Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient.”
“Global Warming” was the scape goat used by the UK Guardian to explain the sustained suicides rate of Farmers in India. One every 32 minutes between 1997
and 2005. However the fact that India farmers ganged up and beat the daylights out of a Monsanto rep tells the true story.
According to a study by Jose Romero and Alicia Puyana carried out for the federal government of Mexico, between 1992 and 2002, the number of agricultural households fell an astounding 75% – from 2.3 million to 575, 000
Even in Britain farmers are taking their own lives at a rate of one a week.
While sitting in on a EU meeting Julian Rose reported…a lady from Portugal, who rather quietly remarked that since Portugal joined the European Union, 60 percent of small farmers had already left the land. “The European Union is simply not interested in small farms,” she said.
Food Wars: the global battle for mouths, minds and markets details the increasing concentration of control of the food supply in to the hands of a few international corporations thanks to the international trade treaties.
The Food Wars are a hidden problem that will effect all of us and a lot sooner than most people realize as Rogers, Rothschild and Soros are snapping up farmland right now.
The way e-book readers are coming on, and the new low=priced versions from Amazon announced today, traditional publishers will soon (in three years) no longer be in a position to effectively gatekeep.
Nuke Nemesis says:
I believe fossil fuels will never run out as they will become outdated as an energy source before they are depleted as resources. This is one of the primary reasons Peak Oil is a bunch of hooha.
This is an interesting argument! I believe … therefore everything will be fine. … as in I believe you can’t burn all that fossil fuel and not cause any harm to mother earth …?
Almost all modern energy forms are very old: wind (boats in Egypt sailing up Nile), hydro (Egypt boats drifted down the Nile) solar (first plants), coal – used to smelt copper in early Bronze age. The only recent ones are gas (more because pipes weren’t easily available that because gas was a problem – indeed wood flames are actually gas), electricity (which isn’t really a primary energy source) and nuclear. (I don’t count PV as it isn’t yet an energy source as I think it uses more energy than it produces)
In other words, apart from nuclear, we haven’t actually discovered a new energy sources in several thousand years. Yes we can harness them better and transport them in different way, but we haven’t magically invented any new energy sources except nuclear.
So, where do we get this energy from from: solar – – solar via wind, plants etc. and solar via stored solar in fossil fuels … and nuclear.
Nuclear
Nuclear fission works, but it relies on a finite resource of heavy isotopes that will spontaneously break apart when exposed to radiation. For reasons why should be obvious, stuff which is likely to disintegrate is pretty rare and rarer still in usable quantities. I don’t know how long nuclear stocks are available but I once saw 30years. Perhaps a century?
Which leaves nuclear fusion as the only real “saviour”. But this hasn’t progressed much at all in decades and given our experience of “climate science” we should really have learnt by now to ask the question whether this is yet another nice gravy boat of never ending research grants with nothing but a lot of PR to show for all the money being spent and no prospect of much useful coming out.
In other words when “believing” really means putting your faith in a science establishment and people Like Paul Nurse: people who so passionately believe in manmade global warming doomsday who also passionately believe in their ability to create new forms of energy … do you not think it might be time to develop a plan B?? I know you must have great faith in people like Paul Nurse, but don’t you think that there is just the remotest possibility that these warmist institutions might just be wrong and that there is no new magic form of energy waiting to save us from going over the energy cliff?(/sarc off)
Scottish Sceptic:
Thankyou for the reply to me that you provide at September 28, 2011 at 6:48 am.
I stand by my point. Humans never run out of anything. We did not run out of flint, antler bone, bronze, iron, or anything else. And we will not run out of fossil fuels.
When a resource is abundant it is cheap so nobody bothers to seek an alternative. But its cost rises as it becomes scarce so people then seek alternatives. And found alternatives often prove to have advantages.
There is sufficient coal to provide human needs for at least 300 years (and probably for several times that). Oil and gas can both be synthesised from coal, and synthetic crude oil can now be produced from coal at competitive price to crude oil (google Liquid Solvent Extraction: LSE). This possibility of synthetic crude oil sets an upper limit to the price of crude.
Nobody can know what energy needs and energy sources will be 300 years in the future, but I doubt that energy supply will then be based on fossil fuels: technology advances change things.
Richard
I look forward to James Delingpole’s new book Watermelons.
I have just read and would highly recommend Christopher Booker’s book “The Real Global Warming Disaster – Is the obsession with ‘Climate Change’ turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history? This CO2 climate fiasco is quite amazing.
Trillions of dollars are in the process of being wasted. The money spent will not significantly reduce atmospheric CO2. As we are all aware the planet’s response to a change in forcing is negative (planet resists the change by an increase in clouds) rather than positive (planet amplifies the change) which means the net warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will be less than 1C. (The supposed safe warming has been determined to be 2C.)
In some cases, such as the biofuel scam there will be direct damage done to the environment and to the third world.
If one calculates the total energy input of biofuels there is almost no net carbon benefit of growing food and converting it to ethanol. Legislating a percentage of ethanol in gasoline increases the cost of fuel as the cost of biofuel produced ethanol is roughly twice the cost of fossil fuel comparing equivalent energy available rather than volume.
The net affect of converting food crops to ethanol has been a significant increase on the price of food crops which adversely affects the third world. Currently third world virgin forests are being cut down to grow food crops to convert to ethanol. This last consequent of this absurd scam has brought Green Peace and other environmental groups objections.
We all have a moral and financial responsibility to stop this colossal waste of planetary resources and tax payer funds.
May be slightly off topic and Charles may hit me with his OT club but just saw this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbon-credits-system-tarnished-wikileaks
Scottish Sceptic says:
September 28, 2011 at 9:57 am
“…Nuclear fission works, but it relies on a finite resource of heavy isotopes that will spontaneously break apart when exposed to radiation. For reasons why should be obvious, stuff which is likely to disintegrate is pretty rare and rarer still in usable quantities. I don’t know how long nuclear stocks are available but I once saw 30years. Perhaps a century?….”
You might want to take a look at Thorium, it is much more abundant in nature than uranium.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/default.aspx?id=448&terms=thorium
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8746sci2.html
Thank you!
Interesting argument as well, as I never said that. You’re changing the subject from running out of fossil fuels to the trade-offs we have to make whenever we choose to do/not do anything.
Regarding Plan B — What’s your point again? I wrote that I believe we will quit using fossil fuels before we ever run out, and I’m not understanding your counterargument. Burn all fossil fuels and then worry about a replacement? Act as if technology will never advance? That market forces won’t take affect as fossil fuels (particularly oil) become more expensive?
~More Soylent Green! (Formerly Nuke Nemesis)
Henry Galt says:
September 28, 2011 at 9:28 am
Check out hemp….
_____________________________________
American farmers really really wish they would allow us to grow hemp (You do not smoke it btw)
It is such a useful plant that the USDA had educational films promoting it.
General info on modern uses of hemp: http://www.rense.com/general49/could.htm
1942 USDA film, Hemp for Victory : http://www.globalhemp.com/1942/01/hemp-for-victory.html