INTERVIEW WITH MATT RIDLEY
ANDREW BOLT, PRESENTER: Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines last week and killed perhaps 4,000 people. The Greens couldn’t wait to exploit it like they exploited last month’s fires, and even accused Tony Abbott.
ADAM BANDT: He can be expected to be referred to as ‘Typhoon Tony’. // Many people are saying this is the worst typhoon that they’ve ever seen. // This is what we’re in store for, unless we get global warming under control.
ANDREW BOLT: Matt Ridley is a member of Britain’s House of Lords and a science writer, whose latest bestseller is ‘The Rational Optimist’. He’s here on a speaking tour for the IPA. Matt Ridley, thank you for joining me.
MATT RIDLEY: Thank you for having me on the show.
ANDREW BOLT: The typhoon in the Philippines – what do you make of the attempts to make that evidence of the great global warming catastrophe awaiting us?
MATT RIDLEY: Well, this is ridiculous. I mean, storms and weather events happen. They’ve always happened. There’ve been much stronger typhoons in the past. This isn’t the strongest one that’s ever recorded or anything like that. They’re gonna happen, whatever. And to blame this on climate change is a bit like shamanism. It’s witchdoctory. It’s going back 10,000 years to try and blame every weather event on mankind. And we don’t have to just know this from basic data. If you look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They say there’s been no trend in increasing frequency of typhoons or cyclones or hurricanes. In fact, this year’s been an unusually quiet one globally. And even in that part of the Pacific it’s been quiet. So the idea that you can stop typhoons happening by cutting carbon dioxide emissions is just absurd. We’ve got to tackle typhoons as an issue, whatever happens to the climate.
ANDREW BOLT: What do we have to worry about, if global warming continues? I know there’s been a pause in atmospheric temperature rises for 15 years. But should it continue, what have we got to fear?
MATT RIDLEY: Well, I personally think that we are seeing benefits from climate change. Sorry – that’s not my personal view, that’s what the data says. We’re seeing benefits from climate change at the moment – slightly greener vegetation in the world, slightly fewer winter deaths, things like that – longer growing seasons. And that’s likely to continue for another six or seven decades. After that, if the projections of climate change are right – and on the whole, they have been too warm for the last 30 years, so they may not be right – but if they’re right, we will then start to see net harm. And the one harm that will would hurt civilisation would be rapidly rising sea levels. Fortunately, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that sea levels are not rising – are not gonna rise that fast in this century – not much faster than
they did in the last century. Greenland’s losing ice at the rate of 2 billion tonnes a year, which sounds a lot, but it’s actually 0.5% per century. So the collapse of ice sheets, that sort of thing, has now largely been ruled out by the IPCC as a risk. But we are – you know, we do have to get our act together to be ready to deal with some disasters, if they happen towards the end of this century, the beginning of the next.
ANDREW BOLT: Well, when you say “get our act together to be ready”, where – obviously the world is spending trillions of dollars on various ways to so-called stop global warming. Is that a sensible use of our resources?
MATT RIDLEY: No. I think rolling out immature and 14th-century technologies like wind power all around the world – which are extremely expensive, don’t cut carbon emissions very much, and on the whole keep people unable to afford the measures to adapt to climate, by being so expensive – is not the answer. Japan, interestingly, has just said that it’s not going to try to keep emissions as low as it was hoping by 2020. Instead, it’s going to put a lot of money into research into new energy technologies. And that’s the answer. If we can get cheap fusion energy, or cheap thorium nuclear power, or even cheap ordinary nuclear power, and some of the solar power developed, then by the end of the century we probably won’t need fossil fuels, and we can give them up, long before they run out. That’s a much better approach than trying to roll out immature energy technologies now. Because we’ve tried that, and it’s just not working. We’re trying it all over the world, it’s disastrously bad for people’s living standards.
ANDREW BOLT: So when Tony Abbott gets elected on a platform of scrapping the carbon tax, is that seen, as the Greens would suggest, as a worldwide embarrassment? Or is it seen as something perhaps – well, the return of reason?
MATT RIDLEY: Well I think until now, it’s been assumed that you had to pay lip-service to dangerous climate change. I mean, most of us – I believe that human beings do affect the climate, and probably have caused some of the warming in the past. That’s not at issue. What’s at issue is a forecast of dangerous warning, which is only going to come true if certain positive feedback amplifiers happen. And if that’s likely to be the case, it’s always been assumed that you had to show real alarm about this in order to get elected in a western democracy. I think Tony Abbott has shown that’s not the case, and a lot of elected politicians around the world will have noticed that, and will have noticed that not only was the carbon tax something that he was determined to repeal, but that it was front and centre in the election campaign, so you can’t say it was just a peripheral issue. So for example, the Canadians have commented on that. And I think western European politicians will notice that, and will say, actually, you can take a relatively rational, relatively sober approach to climate change and be elected, despite what the extreme Greens will throw at you.
ANDREW BOLT: And is there any other government, then, that will be the next to follow us, do you think?
MATT RIDLEY: I’m not the one to predict political trends. I don’t think it’s going to happen in a hurry in Europe – sorry, in Britain. But there is huge disquiet in the UK about energy prices, and they’re about to go up even more, because of green levies, and that I think is beginning to make politicians rethink this agenda.
ANDREW BOLT: Thank you very much, Matt Ridley, for joining us.
Video here:http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_bolt_report_today37/
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Well done except for the part about renewable energy. There are competitive leaders within solar PV that need to be allowed for in arm wave dismissing alternative energy. It’s quite true that solar PV has been tainted by high cost variants, high-cost players, crude industry averages, and wrong way government bets on it, but it is also possible to get educated on the subject of the cost leaders and what they have to offer NOW and in the short term. The quarterly financial reports and analyst briefings from these sector leaders demonstrate quite well the benefits and near-term potential for rapid cost declines and rates of technical change. It is a mistake for policy advisers and planners to be ignorant of these tech plays and business plan leaders. Such ignorance also keeps public policy well behind the smart money placements for new investment and reduces efficiency of information flow to roundabout signals from these third parties back around to policy leaders. It would be a more efficient information and policy planning system if planners and advisers were closer to the pulse of what the smart money is watching in tech plays and investment ramp up by these sector leaders.
Members of the ‘ruling class’ (i.e. ruling elite) have no problem with the state of society as a whole … those at the top rarely suffer as long as the ‘force’ of government can be harnessed in the form of MWG (men w/guns) to confiscate that which is called ‘taxes’.
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It would seem these ‘gasses’ did not get your memo or heed the desired direction-of-traffic signs.
Maybe you can expound on this purported uni-directionality (“uni” as in single or “one”) of radiation thing? Cites, quoted text, or at least an author?
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Peter Taylor says:
November 19, 2013 at 5:08 am
Read some critical development studies and look at just how little of western wealth gets spent on what the ‘poor’ really need….clean water, ecologically sound agriculture and stable soil, intact community, forests and biodiversity….whereon less than 5% of international development aid gets spent………
Get real, Pete!
Rational realism has determined that much less than 50% of the money spent on international development gets spent on ANYTHING but increased government spending on graft, cronyism, boondoggles, and military hardware to fight their unending conflicts.
jb frodsham “I know this as I am in Viet Nam, and yes I have more freedom here than in my native Australia. ”
Exactly what freedoms are you enjoying in Vietnam that you can’t enjoy in Australia? Here is a test for you. I will go and stand in front of Government house with a sign saying Tony Abbott is a criminal. You go and stand before the Central Committee building in Hanoi with a sign saying The “Polituro are criminals”. Let’s see who enjoys the most freedom. Another example is that although there is “freedom of religion” in Vietnam all clerical appointments are ultimately made by the Central Committee.
Please, let’s not make silly comparisons between free countries and communist states.
“Witches are so called on account of the blackness of their guilt, that is to say, their deeds are more evil than those of any other malefactors. They stir up and confound the elements by the aid of the devil, and arouse terrible hailstorms and tempests.”
Malleus Maleficarum, 1486
http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/mm/
Carbon “pollution” is so-called on account of the blackness of its guilt; that is to say, its deeds are more evil than those of any other malefactors. It stirs up and confounds the elements by the aid of its “forcing” field, arousing terrible blizzards, cyclones, droughts, floods, hailstorms, heat-waves, hurricanes, and typhoons.
“Fossil fuels” are so-called on account of their abundance on inhabitable rocks like Titan and Comet Haley. Although microbes on Earth have for billions of years been consuming more “fossil fuels” than humans currently do, only human consumption of the stuff really matters because…”you can’t tax a marine organism.“. That’s what a member of Adam Bandt’s staff told me last year.
There is that pesky and persistent “the sun don’t [sic -_Jim] shine at night” thing … or has that been solved? Or is it on a fast-track in the development cycle?
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As if – we haven’t heard the pessimists predict gloom time and time again, and we have YET to see any of their multitudinous predictions come to bear fruit.
Peter Taylor, you could help your case to bear some ‘weight’ by citing a case in history where the doomsayers were, um, actually ‘right’ in their gloomy predictions resulting from the practice of their pessimism …
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Peter Taylor says: “Your ‘solutions’ apply only to the hegemony of the North – from the USA across Europe, to China and Japan. Eventually, they will require Chinese style political and economic structures to maintain them. The writing is on the wall in my home county of Somerset – the first UK nuclear station in 20years is to be built with Chinese money and French state-controlled expertise.”
That nuclear plant being built by the Chinese in the UK has been commissioned at a guaranteed “strike price” of double the price of current power rates. Nigel Farage remarks on the “bizarre assumption that energy prices will rise in the next few years,” and counters that shale gas has the potential to reduce energy prices by 50% in the UK.
Discussion of energy policy in first 5 minutes. Comment on Chinese nuclear plant at 5 min. Second commercial break ends at 16 min.
@sisi –
You are dead wrong when you say that wind power replaces the power generated by fossil fuels and lowers fossil fuel burning accordingly. Because of the inefficient types of fossil generation that must be on hand to keep the grid energized when the wind stops blowing, MORE fossil fuel is burned when there is wind power in the mix, that if there were no wind power. Not only do quick-start fossil generators consume two to three times as much fuel as baseload generating units, per megawatt-hour generated, you have to have them running all the time when wind power is part of the mix (as “spinning reserve”), and most of that time they are not generating electricity but are burning fuel.
Nigel Farage on the construction by China of a nuclear power plant at Hinkley:
“I am not concerned about Chinese money coming into this country – I welcome it. But what I think is bonkers is that we’ve gone for this plant at Hinkley, and we’ve guaranteed the Chinese investors a “strike price” as its called, over the course of the next 35 years, which is exactly double what the current cost of electricity is. It’s a dam*ed good deal for China, but I think it’s a rotten deal for the British tax payer. But it’s based on the idea I mentioned earlier on this show – they assume that energy prices will go up, and I think actually, if we get frakking, and start to use a lot more genuine new technology, the price can come down.”