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
More Soylent Green! (Formerly Nuke Nemesis) says: September 28, 2011 at 11:58 am
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?
I think we need to plan the future on the basis that there is no new energy supply and that available energy sources “come down the cost curve” in terms of fairly predictable but painfully slow improvements in efficiency. Not overly pessimistic, but certainly not “someone will invent something”.
We then need to fill in a few big holes: “How much fossil fuel is there?” I would suggest a few billion spent working out how much fossil fuels actually exist … even if it involves bribing middle eastern countries it would be money well spent and we could be pleasantly surprised … or really start panicking depending on the answer.
Next we need to understand the relationship between energy, food supply and other things like e.g. land exhaustion, so that we can work out how much food we can really grow without fossil fuel. My understanding is that a very plausible reason for the fall of the Roman Empire was that agricultural land because exhausted. We don’t see that at present because we bombard our land with nitrogen and other fossil fuel based chemicals which vastly increase output. We’ve all seen what a disaster organic has been … what if we were forced to be organic? It would result in worldwide famine!
Finally, we need to realise that the critical point is not “running out”, but the turning point from increasing availability to reducing availability. In other words from a period where increasing GDP was the norm, to one where decreasing GDP is the norm. Can I restate that: we need to plan for a couple of centuries of recession.
So really plan B is: work out when we are likely to start entering a phase of reducing energy supply (based on realistic estimates and sample testing of reserves). Try to estimate the social and economic effects of changing from year-on-year increase to year-on-year decrease … I could reasonably argue the effect is anything from “seen it all nothing to see move on” to “WWIII,IV,V”, that’s a rather large range of estimates, with a worrying worst case scenario. I think we could probably do better, but it needs a new way of thinking (economic-energy-techno-history-forcasting)… trying to learn lessons from what is really ancient history and apply them a modern world. Finally, where it does seem prudent to act … let’s start the ball rolling. Reducing population looks like a sensible thing to do, so stopping increases in population and unnecessary immigration seems a good idea.
And finally, we could re-establish the credibility and usefulness of some of these “sciences”. At the moment I feel like I’m on the Titanic, and the captain and lookout (“scientists”) are dressed in voodoo costumes with a bottle of whisky or worse in their hands. Somehow that just doesn’t seem sensible, particularly if we are about to enter troubled waters.
Very good work by Delingpole, illustrates everthing I’ve written about for years.
Scottish Sceptic says:
September 28, 2011 at 12:44 pm
“…..I think we need to plan the future on the basis that there is no new energy supply and that available energy sources “come down the cost curve” in terms of fairly predictable but painfully slow improvements in efficiency. Not overly pessimistic, but certainly not “someone will invent something”…..”
IF the idiots trying to sink our civilization can be muzzled – BIG IF – then I do not think you really have very much to worry about. My aunt who just died this spring (at over 100 yrs of age) went from the horse and buggy era to space flight.
To run around in fear because we might run out of energy is like worrying about NYC, or London being buried in horse Manure.
Romes problem by the way was the same as ours, to many parasitic people consuming wealth without contributing aka welfare here in the USA.
“…The reason why Egypt retained its special economic system and was not allowed to share in the general economic freedom of the Roman Empire is that it was the main source of Rome’s grain supply. Maintenance of this supply was critical to Rome’s survival, especially due to the policy of distributing free grain (later bread) to all Rome’s citizens which began in 58 B.C. By the time of Augustus, this dole was providing free food for some 200,000 Romans. The emperor paid the cost of this dole out of his own pocket, as well as the cost of games for entertainment, principally from his personal holdings in Egypt. The preservation of uninterrupted grain flows from Egypt to Rome was, therefore, a major task for all Roman emperors and an important base of their power (Rostovtzeff 1957: 145). “ http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html
Sounds familiar doesn’t it….. Just substitute food stamps for bread and TV sets for games. At least the Romans made the ruler pay out of his own pocket.
People already do this. The amount of known oil reserves has increased dramatically in the last decade, even with the world-wide increase in consumption. As technology is not static, more and more of these known reserves are now recoverable.
Things aren’t static. The tars sands oil is recoverable because of the price of oil. If oil were less expensive, it’s not economically practical to harvest that oil. Same goes with the oil shale in the Western USA.
Most of the world would starve without modern agriculture — that includes farm equipment, pesticides, fertilizers and fossil fuels to power everything and transport the goods. Organic techniques cannot feed the world, but there is no need for them to do so, either.
Fortunately, we’re not running out of agricultural land. We have so that we grow crops for fuel instead of fuel.
Finally, we need to realise that the critical point is not “running out”, but the turning point from increasing availability to reducing availability. In other words from a period where increasing GDP was the norm, to one where decreasing GDP is the norm. Can I restate that: we need to plan for a couple of centuries of recession.
Energy companies are already spending tons of money to estimate the supply of fossil fuels. There are companies that specialize in corporate intelligence. Government intelligence agencies also are already keeping an eye on natural resources worldwide.
It’s amazing that Malthus still occupies so much of our thoughts even to this day. (Is it a broken clock is right twice a day logic at work?) Somehow we all survived the ’70’s, when we were going to run out of oil. Or was it food? Or was it the ’80’s? Futurists have a zero percent batting average, but still people like Ehrlich and whomever came after him have managed to keep pushing their doomsday scenarios upon us no matter how many times they are proven wrong.
I don’t know who has failed more, the futurists or the central planners. I can just imagine what an IPCC-like body for doing what you’re suggesting would come up with, and it wouldn’t be much different from what the catastrophic climate change factions are already proposing.
The world’s resources are limited, but they are also vast. We have centuries worth of fossil fuels available. I can’t imagine how time will continue to move forward while the market, technology and society does not, but if that does happen, we have a long time before we’re really screwed.
JamesD says:
September 27, 2011 at 9:06 pm
That guy is cool. Tempted to buy the book.
Yeah. Strikes me as the James Dean of journalism.
Barry Woods says:
September 28, 2011 at 2:08 am
“Whilst I completely understand where James is coming from. I detest ‘watermelons’ as yet another label, It will offend far more people than ‘warmists’ does, and worse using this world will alienate many grassroots environmentalists.”
Does a perfect succinct label for describing the concept even exist? Putting things into perspective, “Watermelon” is a heck of a lot more polite than D-word that Warmistas are so fond of flinging about. The dated expression, “closet Marxists,” is just as accurate, and may be slightly less emotionally charged.
My beef is that it’s not entirely truthful to describe all Warmistas as coming in only one flavor. There are several, not-necessarily-mutually-exclusive categories of people, who have coalesced into the CAGW movement.
Category 1: The vast majority of Warmistas are useful idiots–to use Lenin’s expression–and salivate on command, for the agendas of others. These True Believers, in the Eric Hoffer sense, would be just as happy following a New Age religion, based upon the Tooth Fairy.
Category 2 Warmistas are simply greedy and power-hungry. Al Gore is the perfect example.
Category 3 Warmistas are former scientists, who are currently hired guns, with delusions of grandeur.
Category 4 Warmistas are misanthropic Depopulationists, like Prince Philip, Paul Ehrlich, and Obama’s pet ‘science advisor’, John Holdren.
Category 5. And yes, there are also the Watermelons. They have an intensive dislike for freedom of all kinds. And some of them are attempting to use CAGW as a pretext, and carbon credits and ‘climate reparations’ as mechanisms, for transferring trillions of dollars to corrupt governments of developing countries.
Did I leave anything out?
I think you have left most people out, you’ve perhaps only described those that haunt the blogs and the media..
Do you know anybody, that you have assigned these labels to.. Would you describe those categories to them face to face.
Imagine you have a nephew, that’s just started a PHd in atmospheric physics.. or some other climate scientist discipline. Or a colleague that supports wwf , because they are concerned about saving the tiger..
To these people and the wider general public, they would not recognise themselves or others they know as fitting any of these categories.. and just reject sceptics as a bunch of ‘conspiracy theorists’
This is the same type of thinking, within a group of similar thinking individuals, that led to the pr disaster 1010 video..
A lack of awareness of the wider public, who are oblivious to all of this, and have no clue about any of the sceptical and AGW proponents blogs.
A couple of years ago, I certainly had never heard of WUWT, Realclimate, Bishop Hill, Think Progress, etc and if you asked me who Michael Mann was, I’d have said Isn’t he the guy that made Miami Vice, in the 1980’s
An outside of the blogs, I can safely say every one I know would be equally as clueless.
Gail Combs says:
September 28, 2011 at 12:10 pm
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
====================
For the background to the demonisation of hemp in the US by corporate business interests manipulating science and governments worldwide:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/23/let-the-inhaler-hoarding-begin/#comment-752790
More Soylent Green! (Formerly Nuke Nemesis) says:
September 28, 2011 at 2:58 pm
Things aren’t static. The tars sands oil is recoverable because of the price of oil.
That is where I have serious reservations. The impression I was getting early on was that more energy was going into the process than energy coming out of the oil sands, and that it wasn’t so much a way of mining energy, but a process for converting gas in remote and difficult to exploit areas into oil which was easier to transport. … but less energy was delivered than if the gas itself were transported!
That is why I like to talk about the “enerconics”, rather than the economics, by which I mean not whether more money comes out than goes in, but whether it provides more energy out than goes in. Admittedly the noises now suggest that more shale oil/gas is enerconic, but I still have concerns over how much of the total suggested reserve is enerconic and how much is not. Also traditional oil supplies are becoming less and less enerconic as we are being driven into more and more hostile environments. So, whilst there may be substantial reserves, the energy availability of those reserves goes down as they become less and less enerconic.
And here is why I prefer enerconics …. because there is no point at which energy prices will ever rise enough to make an unenerconic source viable. In other words, if the enerconic costs of producing the steel for all the infrastructure and the transportation and efficiency means that more energy is invested in getting the energy source out than is delivered from that source, then there is no price of energy that will ever make it economic.
Futurists have a zero percent batting average
I correctly predicted the banking crisis … to the extent I persuaded my wife get away from a banking related job. But I’d say that was obvious to anyone who looked at the trillion being added to personal debt. I correctly predicted the Euro crisis … but again, it’s pretty obvious if you understand how currencies work. I got it wrong on global warming.But I correctly predicted the lack of UK wind jobs. I correctly predicted the update of PCs into households, but I spectacularly failed to recognise the importance of CDs.
So, personally, around 4/6 of my predictions seem to be right. Obviously I’m probably biased.
Gail Combs says: September 28, 2011 at 2:55 pm
IF the idiots trying to sink our civilization can be muzzled – BIG IF – then I do not think you really have very much to worry about. My aunt who just died this spring (at over 100 yrs of age) went from the horse and buggy era to space flight.
Gail, the absolute level of wealth seems less important than the relative change in wealth. E.g. if our society were suddenly to go back to 1940s GDP, the social chaos would likely become near revolution, riots etc. Whereas if society in the buggy era were propelled forward to 1940s GDP, the last thing they would do is riot (riotous party perhaps!). The same GDP, but the effects would be completely different depending on the expectations of the society.
The biggest problem we face is that we simply don’t have the experience to understand the nature of the social, economic and political problems that could be caused by a sustained period of economic decline in real terms which seems to be the likely result of the end of fossil fuels, which itself isn’t a foregone conclusion … but a reasonable expectation.
(Indeed, to be honest, I seem to be the only person mad enough to have considered the issue, which is why I’m so pleased to be able to discuss it.)
If you plot energy against GDP, the graphs are orders of magnitude closer fit than CO2 and temperature over several hundred years. This is a strong indicator that GDP and energy are extremely closely linked. Moreover apart from a few wiggles, they both keep going up.
So, if or when we “run out” of fossil fuel, a pragmatic look at energy and GDP would suggest that as GDP appears to be intrinsically linked to energy, we will also enter an era of continuing shrinking GDP. If we are discussing “coal lasting for hundreds of years … until there is none”, we are discussing a period of several hundred years of reducing GDP – almost the mirror of the several hundred years of rising GDP.
I repeat, we simply don’t have any experience of a prolonged period of reducing GDP on which to base our predictions of the effects of such a period if/when it comes. All we can say is that those short periods we have had, have all been extremely negative. The closest we have is the “great depression” and where did that end? Nazi Germany and WWII! Does that mean all sustained periods of reducing GDP end up in World war? Simple logic seems to suggest that people will get on better when the future looks bright, and they will struggle and fight competing over diminishing resources. But then again simple logic brought us the global warming nonsense, so somehow we need to be more professional in our approach … somewhere not so much between “head in the sand … it’s not going to happen go away I don’t want to listen” and “screaming about madly shouting ‘the end is nigh'” … but a calm rational and as far as possible, impartial analysis.
I am extremely concerned about putting people into groups. We seriously risk “Divide And Rule”, worsening the language issues.
Sure, “watermelons” has a grain of truth. And sure, climate skeptics hold both the scientific and the moral high ground, on balance. We have momentary lapses, as is only human – but to hold the moral high ground, we need to be all the more careful with such lapses.
I think “watermelon” is far too equivalent to “denier” in its connotations to be useable. The Communist regimes enacted just as ferocious a program of ethnic cleansing etc, as did the Nazis. Just less reported and spread over a longer timeline. “Greenies” are people, individuals, with a huge range of attitudes – and even if there is something deeply wrong in a common “greenie” attitude, it’s still precious human beings I have to relate to. I’m still an environmentalist and so is Peter Taylor, author of “Chill”. Anyone doubting my climate sceptic credentials, click my name.
Here´re are the links to the speeches by Dr. Steven J. Milloy, and James Delingpole at The Heritage Foundation, as well as, the link to 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, The Global Warming Fraud:
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Heritage-Foundation/13474/
http://www.heritage.org/Events/2011/06/Watermelons
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Global_Warming.html
SAY NO TO GLOBAL WARMING HOAX
SAY NO TO JUNK SCIENCE
@Scottish Skeptic
China has been trying to curb their population growth for quite some time with their “One Child is Best” policy. While not officially proscribed, the government there *really strongly* wants families to have only one child.
So of course almost everyone wants a son to carry on the family name and inherit whatever the Communists will allow to be inherited. When portable ultrasound obstetric equipment became available, abortions of female babies skyrocketed in China.
In recent years there are places in China where young men have been having problems finding women of their generation to marry. I’ve seen reports of many marriages to second or first cousins. Some have resorted to finding their brides in other Asian countries, but the anti-foreigner sentiment runs pretty strong and finding women willing to move to back-country China isn’t easy. The future of China WRT their population and genetic disorders in future generations over the next 30~50 years doesn’t look too healthy.
As for population density, humans are only really thick on the ground in some large cities. Monaco, one of the smallest countries, has the highest population density on Earth at around 43,000 per square mile. (Actual area is about 3/4 square mile, population around 32,000.) Even there they’re not packed in cheek by jowl.
Here’s an easily provable factoid. The entire human population of Earth could quite comfortably fit within the borders of Texas. The last time I did the division the answer was nearly 2,000 square feet of Texas per individual human. That’s larger than most American homes for a family of four, for every single human. A density of 13,940 per square mile. (Rounded up because I’ve never encountered a .2 human.) Texas could be covered with a single story building, complete with space taken up for utilities and hallways and we’d all fit in it very loosely.
Earth is a huge place. Humans don’t yet use much of it, but some of them like to gather together in collections of a few hundred thousand to a few million, then imagine the whole world must be just like where they live.