Hmmm, sounds like a bad “B” movie plot. From Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone:
(…) Any fan of Hollywood films following the climate debate knows the objectives of mad scientists: They try to rule the world. With his performance in the FAZ in the run-up to the recent UN-Summit on Sustainability in Rio, Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber can be ranked along with the likes of Dr. Strangelove and Dr. No:
“The role of climate science remains to put the problem-facts on the table and to identify options for appropriate solutions. The role of politics is then to mobilize the will of the citizens with the aim of implementing decisions that are based on science.”
This demonstrates an odd understanding of democracy. Up to now the “will of the citizens” has always arose from the interests of people and were implemented by electing a goverment that abided to that will. But Schellnhuber wants to turn this on its head. According to Schellnhuber, politics should now tell the citizens what interests they are to have so that measures that follow those prescribed by science will end up getting implemented.
Read more at No Tricks Zone
h/t to reader Rudolf Kipp
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My Father used to say to me “Beware if Germany is reunited, It won’t be long before they try to take over the world!”.
Noblesse Oblige says:
July 15, 2012 at 6:43 pm
““A sacrifice required for the future of the human race,” says Dr. Strangelove at about 3:50 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iesXUFOlWC0 “All we need is Der WILL.”
Why do these creatures come out of the woodwork at such times?”
Schellnhuber has been scaring the kids on German public TV (which most Germans hold in unfounded high esteem) climate pr0n evenings with his “spooky apocalyptic uncle” schtick for at least a decade now.
Don’t know if they still make these “theme evenings” though. Everybody seems to be watching cooking shows in Germany at the moment. Interrupted by soccer from time to time.
So, Schellnhuber doesn’t come out of the woodwork. He’s also the scientific advisor of Merkel.
Meaning… nothing good at all.
Ian says:
July 15, 2012 at 6:51 pm
“Noam Chomsky wrote a book called ” Manufacturing Consent”. Any one who has read it, knows full well that this is happening already in America”
Has Chomsky suddenly discovered Hegel?
A president should have private enterprise experience, like George W… oops, bad example.
But you know those politicians, the ones who are there because a majority of people vote for them? I kind of expect them to do the hard thinking and make the tough decisions. I don’t always agree with them. I marched against Australia joining the Iraqi invasion, but things don’t always go your way…
Dig the shirt.
I’m sure that he believes if the scientists give the people the will to fight global warming it will be an absolute triumph.
Which reminds me of Leni Riefenstahl’s little film ………..
Zat globe…
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=the+great+dictator+playing+with+the+globe&view=detail&mid=4195848822186A5FFD884195848822186A5FFD88&first=0
Smokey says:…”I can think of no better nor more pleasurable account than Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War.”
That book is one of the best ever and the television series with Robert Mitchum as Pug was well done. I would further recommend a book about Robert Stephenson by Roberts Stevenson titled “A Man Called Interpid”.
@RogerKnights says:
“They’ve abstracted the problem to “basic physics,” which it isn’t. “Basic physics” fits their reductionist, “straight,” clock-model (Popper), strict causality mindset, but not the chaotic, cloud-model, multi-feedback, un-model-able climate.”
+++++
My son describes it as using fuzzy logic trying to programme a chaotic model of a partially understood reality. Predicting the outputs of a fuzzychaos model is basically impossible, of course, but that has not stopped people trying their luck. So far they seem to be guessing wrong.
Re the global government thing – I am not afraid of an international federation the way some people seem to be, but unelected? Well, that is pretty much what the UN is now. it needs serious reform, not elimination. The veto has to go, that’s for sure. No ‘elite countries’ thanks very much. We always have to have the power to throw the bums out, whether a political or scientific self-appointed elite. The USA’s two-party ‘choose the lesser crook’ system is not a very good example of how to run a railroad either. Innovation required.
Schellnhuber is the Brain (from Pinky and the Brain). “Tonight, take over the world”
http://thyselfolord.blogspot.com.br/2012/07/cientistas-ambientalistas-que-querem.html
Organismic! Trust in the power active in you.
——————————————–
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “father of the two-degree target”, climate advisor to Angela Merkel, is the worst kind of alarmist.
“Observations of an incipient climate transition include the rapid retreat of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, melting of almost all mountain glaciers around the world, and an increased rate of sea-level rise in the
last 10-15 years,”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/23/idUS147048+23-Sep-2009+PRN20090923
“But we know if we get into the 3-5 degrees realm, we will be faced by major crises like a complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheets, a collapse of the Amazon rain forests, a sea-level rise of 10 or 20 meters in the long run.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1217/p10s01-woeu.html
“We might have something like a global civil war with many pockets of conflicts”.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/12/10/us-bali-conflict-idUSL1056548020071210
“After the cold war, mutually insured disarmament was the logic of good global governance. Facing the global climate challenge, mutually insured emissions reductions should become the logic”
http://www.idw-online.de/de/news317708
“In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than it has been assumed up until now, … We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize. … The current coastline will no longer exist, and that includes in Germany,”
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/264218
“In most cases, it’s social mismanagement that creates the conditions for social catastrophes. … But extreme weather relentlessly exposes human mistakes and our crimes against nature. … Naturally, we have to be careful not to dramatize things. After all, scientific credibility is our unique selling point. But I do confess that when you have the feeling that people just aren’t listening, it becomes very tempting to turn up the volume. Naturally, we have to resist this temptation. … I’m convinced that in the long term we should take the atmosphere back to the cooler state that prevailed in the Neolithic Age, when humans became sedentary. … what’s hubristic here is the way we are unscrupulously interfering with creation by burning all the fossil fuels.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-climatologist-on-criticism-of-ipcc-we-received-a-kick-in-the-pants-a-712113-2.html
However, he’s no not Dr. Strangelove. Strangelove was not this strange. His political philosophy might be impossible to classify but I’ll try my best: Cybernetic-Transhuman-Neo-Luddite-Ecogenecist or something like that. Here is an extract from the Potsdam Manifesto, of which he is a signatory:
“The individual person, like everything else, is in principle never isolated. In our only seeming smallness, we are simultaneously involved in and significant in the omni-connected commonality in an infinite variety of ways. The variety of influences and impulses of other people and of our geo-biosphere has a part in all our actions, and not only over the bridge of material-energetic interactions mediated by our senses, but also directly through the immaterial, potential connectedness common to us all. Our action influences in equal measure the entire composition of our society and changes the constantly dynamically shifting potentiality of the living Wirklichkeit. Thus, the uniqueness of the individual is a carrying component of the process of our common cultural evolution.
We humans and human communities, with our cultural worlds of ideas, our mental processes, and our moving exchange, represent a special, deeply connected sphere of the living world. Pre-livingness is a characteristic of everything, including the world of things, which is usually regarded as “dead”. We need to reach a fundamentally new way of thinking and a more comprehensive under standing of our Wirklichkeit, in which we, too, see ourselves as a thread in the fabric of life, without sacrificing anything of our special human qualities. This makes it possible to recognize humanity in fundamental commonality with the rest of nature, without thereby falling into a conventional naturalism or simply invoking cosmologies that may have corresponded with the world views and ways of life of cultures that remain close to nature.
The materialistic-mechanistic worldview of classical physics, with its rigid ideas and reductive way of thinking, became the supposedly scientifically legitimated ideology for vast areas of scientific and political-strategic thinking. The progressing uniformity of all ideas of value and affluence, habits of consumption and economic strategies on the pattern of a Western/North American/European knowledge society is still legitimated by a way of thinking that argues for a rational objectifiability of the Wirklichkeit on the basis of secured scientific foundations. Where conflicts arise, a lack of instrumental knowledge is diagnosed and compensatory delivery is prescribed. The foundations of this orientation are seldom questioned, though there is reason enough to do so.
Modern societies are in a cold war against diversity and change, difference and integration, open development and movements to balance through risks and opportunities: a cold war against everything that is the source of living evolution in nature, and with it in us – down to the “pre-living” ground that sustains us and all of life.
[…]
If we continue to “tilt” our common playing field of life by unrestrainedly striving for power, so that the majority of humankind and a great part of all living creatures are slipping off, our problems will grow into a catastrophe.
But the ground on which a new, sustainable organismic cultural variety grows is well prepared. A new and yet familiar image of humankind is emerging, originating from empathic people. The confrontations and distortions we daily experience in our civilization should not allow ourselves to be led astray. Our existence as human beings today shows us that we, too, are the successful result of a similar development that has already gone on for billions of years. Our confidence is not unfounded. We must create new knowledge and act in such a way that liveliness increases and flourishes diversely. We can trust that this power is active in us. For omni-connectedness, which we can also call love and from which life springs, is fundamentally inherent in us and in everything else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Denkschrift
http://www.gcn.de/download/manifesto_en.pdf
I’m sure it loses a lot in translation.
“People go into science because they’re interested in finding the truth. It’s total nonsense (to accuse scientists of scare-mongering). Those people will never believe us.”
http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/12/03/idINIndia-44431020091203
And on that last point, Prof. Schellnhuber, I am in full agreement.
P.S. Visual dictionary editors would do well to add this link to their entries for “supercilious”
http://tinyurl.com/d2sajn2
Crispin in Waterloo says:
“the UN… needs serious reform, not elimination. The veto has to go, that’s for sure.”
I agree with Crispin almost all the time. But in this instance, I see it differently.
The UN needs to be ejected from U.S. shores. It is a thoroughly corrupt, anti-U.S. organization, which takes as much American taxpayer money as it can get its hands on; it never provides an accounting of how our money is spent, and most member states publicly detest the U.S. It has never prevented a war — the primary reason for its existence. It’s blue helmets rape and pillage local populations, and are never called to account.
Barring doing the right thing [promptly evicting the UN], the Veto must always remain in force. Why? Because without it, it will be a situation where two wolves and one lamb are voting on what to have for lunch. With close to 200 members states, the UN would promptly vote U.S. assets into the hands of its kleptocratic member states. Is there any doubt? Any doubt at all?
Things are bad enough already. We have an anti-American President who cavalierly and illegally shovels hundreds of million of dollars into foreign QUANGOs, like the Palestinian Authority, and various eco-NGOs — with no enabling legislation! American tax money is simply handed over as if Obama is some ancient Roman imperator with free access to the Treasury. And if Obama is unfortunately re-elected, there is no doubt that he will place the U.S. under the jurisdiction of the thoroughly corrupt, politically motivated foreign International Criminal Court. He has already said as much.
If we eject the UN from the U.S., other countries would immediately begin treating us with respect, instead of badmouthing über-generous America. As it stands, American money flows into the UN at the rate of many $BILLIONS of dollars every year! And for what? There is zero accountability; the UN has steadfastly refused to allow any outside audit of its finances. Every Secretary-General retires filthy rich, like an ancient Governor of a Roman province.
If we dispensed with the corrupt UN middleman, countries would understand that by being hostile to the U.S. they would jeopardize our generous largesse. So instead of demonizing the U.S., countries would begin to curry favour. Which is only to be expected, when someone is handing you their money.
There are no redeeming qualities whatever in having a UN. They hand out our money — most all of which goes into the pockets of dictators rather than to benefit the people it is intended to help — and take full credit. When has the UN ever publicly expressed appreciation and gratitude for America’s generosity? Instead, they take our money with a surly, grasping attitude, and demand ever more. They bite the hand that feeds them, and hate us more with every dollar we give them.
The sooner the UN is booted out, and its U.S.-provided income cut off, the better. Hatred should not be rewarded with cash extorted from working Americans. Those $billions would do a lot of good right here, instead of being wasted on third-world America-hating dictators, and corrupt UN kleptocrats.
“One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
~ Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-Chair, UN/IPCC WG-3
Ray Bradley:
“I just read that Schellnhuber got an OBE!!!! I didn’t know you got those for spouting
bullshit, but I guess that’s how far standards have fallen. Pretty amazing…
ray”
http://climategate2011.blogspot.com/2011/11/3803txt.html
Since Sir Charles Chaplin’s great movie “The Dictator”, I have dire problems with taking people who are juggling Globuli serious…
Die climate Science ist gesettled. Ve haff vays von mobilizing der Vill. Rezistenz ist futile!
“Every Secretary-General retires filthy rich, like an ancient Governor of a Roman province.”
OBJECTION!
Unlike Sec.Gens, those governors were occasionally held accountable for their actions.
(However, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a UN Sec Gen someday facing “corruption” charges for attempting to clean up corruption, or to find one refusing to give up his office because it would mean giving up his immunity.)
more information about goals and supporters of Schellnhuber’s ideas:
http://www.greattransformation.eu/
In former days he named it “cultural revolution” a term invented by Mao Zedong.
IMHO these people are dangerous.
for german readers:
http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx/index.php/dadgd/article/herr_schellnhuber_und_die_kulturrevolution/
Searching for “Schellnhuber”, “Kulturrevolution” or “Transformation” on http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx delievers a bunch of links
Madness:
http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=82922
and
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/07/16/us-germany-environment-idUKBRE86F0R220120716
“However, he’s no not Dr. Strangelove. Strangelove was not this strange. His political philosophy might be impossible to classify but I’ll try my best: Cybernetic-Transhuman-Neo-Luddite-Ecogenecist or something like that.”
I used to have a friend (not late) who staetd the position more succintly: scientific socialism – that is the solution!
The idea is that an elit of unaccountable scientists should determine what is needed (always involving the need for PR-worthy deaths and the uncovering of imaginary plots against the Great Leader). Can you name the place??
@Smokey
I don’t know anything about the legality of funding from the USA to organisations – not an American and little background in it. I have studied the UN as ‘an intent’, and I like it. It is assuredly corrupt and as I will not participate in corruption I don’t sell anything to the UN, but it is not wise to toss out all international cooperation because a bunch of crooks and opportunists inveigled themselves into what is a good idea. The USA could unilaterally demand all moneys be accounted for by audit or no more money – that would probably find sympathy from other member states.
The Law of the Sea was I think the first international law that was supra-national in powers. Nations voluntarily gave over part of their absolute independence to have the benefits of an agreement on how to handle things at sea. The allocation of radio waves is another. There are lots of them. By ‘them’ I mean legal things which are agreed by a supra-national committee that overrides national opinion – the result of the international vote is binding on the national parties who have agreed as a membership requirement to do so.
The UN is just a larger version of this – a pretty defective attempt not to create a ‘world government’ the way the communist party envisages it, but more like a federation much like the relationship between the US States and the government in Washington. I don’t want to drag misuse of the US system at present, please consider the relationships. International level administration of the air, radio, satellites, phone numbers, trade rules, lots and lots of things, are necessary to a functioning modern world. Just look at the prevention of disease. Monitoring for polio cannot be done sensibly with ‘each nation doing their own thing’. Why not each province doing their own thing? or each town? or each family? Doesn’t work. The world is now in a condition, we have come so far, that we need formal international cooperation. At present, member states are not suspended if they violate treaties they sign. That must end or there is no point in having the treaty.
We have no need for corrupt and un-audited international organisations above the law, obviously. They could be above national law, but certainly there needs to be ‘law’ for all, not just for some. Its membership should be by election, and the ‘seats’ should be representative of the global population. No un-elected uber-bosses ‘overseeing the elected’, thanks. In fact the US federal model is a good way to manage international affairs, provided the area of influence is limited to exactly those international affairs. It seems the concept of limited role at different levels is not well understood – everyone advocates systems where all power belongs to some Top Guy so they can force their views on everyone. The Founding Fathers seem to have had a better and more balanced view, looking around now. Odd.
I doubt whether this bird would be too happy with the “rating” and solutions prescribed for him by sufficiently scientific psychiatrists …
Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisory Board
Lord Browne, Managing Director and Managing Partner (Europe) of Riverstone Holdings LLC and former CEO of BP
John Coomber, Member of the Board of Directors Swiss Re and Chairman of The Climate Group, UK
Fabio Feldmann, CEO, Fabio Feldmann Consultores and former Executive Secretary, Brazilian Forum on Climate Change
Amory B. Lovins, Chairman and CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute
Lord Oxburgh, Member of the Advisory Board Climate Change Capital and Former Chairman Shell, UK
Dr. R K Pachauri, Chairman of IPCC
Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber CBE, Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Robert Socolow, Co-Director The Carbon Mitigation Initiative and Professor Princeton University
Klaus Töpfer, Former Minister for Environment
Zhang Hongren, Former President International Union of Geological Science and former Vice Minister of Geology and Mineral Resources
Let’s remember that Germany has half a million families without electricity..
http://www.thegwpf.org/international-news/5035-green-germany-half-a-million-families-sitting-in-the-dark.html
They’re not only in literal darkness, but “informational darkness”, and are “silenced”.
[SNIP: You are right, it is poor taste. Can we stick with substantitve comment, please? -REP]