Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian is outdoing itself reaching for ridiculous hyperbole, to try to make us care.
Climate change deniers are as slippery as those who justified the slave trade
Nick Cohen
Sun 5 Sep 2021 04.00 AESTGlobal warming sceptics should be hiding in corners. But still some defend the indefensible
No one seems as defeated as the global warming “deniers” who dominated rightwing thinking a decade ago. Like late 18th-century opponents of abolishing the slave trade, Lord Lawson and the claque of Conservative cranks who filled the comment pages of the Tory press are remembered today as dangerous fools – assuming they are remembered at all.
The billions of dollars spent by the fossil fuel industry on propaganda and its acceptance by know-nothing elements on the right caused incalculable damage. They might have followed Margaret Thatcher, who warned in 1989 of C02 emissions leading to climate change “more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known”. The desire of business to protect profits and the vanity of politicians and pundits, who saw themselves as dissidents fighting the consensus rather than fanatics enabling destruction, helped to waste two decades of valuable time.
Every argument they advanced has been disproved, as much by the experience of everyday life as science. Journalists are advised: “If someone says it is raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find out which is true.” The world only had to look at the weather outside to know who was trying to fool it.
…
The comparison isn’t harsh. One day, the attack on climate science will be seen as shocking as the defence of human bondage. Indeed, that day should have long passed. They are overwhelmingly old men or, in the case of Lawson, a very old man. They grew up in a 20th century where the carbon economy was natural: the way the world was and would always be. Slavery was equally natural to the plantation owners and slave traders of Georgian Britain. It had always existed, everywhere on Earth.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/04/climate-change-deniers-are-as-slippery-as-those-who-justified-the-slave-trade
What I find entertaining about blowhards like Nick Cohen is, from the Guardian picture above, he is obviously utterly surrounded by and dependent upon the products of a fossil fuel civilisation.
Nick walks on roads and pavements made of asphalt or tarmac, a form of long chain polymer plastic derived from crude oil (see picture above), likely heats his home in winter, using you guessed it, and eats food transported by fossil fuel powered vehicles to refrigerated supermarket shelves of plastic, glass and metal, whose temperature and humidity controlled indoor environment is only possible thanks to fossil fuel goodness.
That walking cane you’re using Nick, does not look like a stick you picked up by the roadside. Plastic? Aluminium? Lacquered kiln dried wood, turned to a smooth shape in a fossil fuel driven lathe? I bet there is a rubber or metal footing on the bottom of your stick, rubber vulcanised in a fossil fuel heated mill, with sulphur derived from refining crude oil, or perhaps a steel tip prepared in a blast furnace from ore mixed with coal or natural gas, rolled into a large sheet, then pressed into shape using heavy machinery.
The very clothes Nick is wearing do not look like home spun wool. I’m guessing machine woven cotton, wool and possibly synthetics, which make those high quality business shirts so shiny and wrinkle free, with their beautiful plastic sheen. Have a close look at the buttons on your shirt Nick, ask yourself what they’re made of.
And I’m pretty sure you didn’t write your Guardian article on Roman papyrus, using a bird feather quill pen dipped in oak gall ink. Even if against the odds you did, the people who digitally published your article and who maintain the Guardian website certainly used a lot of high tech fossil fuel derived plastic, silicon and refined metal, not to mention fossil fuel electricity to keep their web servers running 24×7.
All I see is absurdity, when Nick declares the age of fossil fuel is over.
It would all just be funny, if it was only Guardian author Nick Cohen who suffered this delusion.
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I get sick and tired of those like the Guardian who distort the view of those of us who question alarmism and then discredit this strawman. This is blatant slander and deceit. They are not able to argue point for point against our position because their arguments are flawed so they twist our words and lie about us.
Ironically, industrialization powered by fossil fuels did more to end slavery than any increase in morality.
Only if you’re counting whale oil.
Coal worked in later steam engines, but before coal it was cut trees that served as fuel in the steam engines.
True, Industrialization was based on water, wood, then coal. Oil and gas came much later.
Oil refining might be older than you tink.
There was a time (albeit a very short time) when Scotland was the largest producer of refined oil in the entire world! Unbelievably it even boasted the world’s very first commercial oil refinery. This was all because of one man – James Young.
His major discovery occurred in 1848, while working in the mining industry. Young noticed that oil was leaking from the ceiling of a coal mine. He deduced from this that there must be a way of intentionally extracting oil from coal if you heated it, and it turns out, he was right. Young patented this particular method in 1850 with his partners, Edward Binney and Edward Meldrum. This led to them founding a business in Bathgate that became the first commercial producing oil refinery in the world.
This enterprise used Young’s technique of distilling oil from the locally mined shale or Torbanite (which is known colloquially as bog head coal, bog coal or cannel coal). From these he managed to extract oil and distill it into paraffin, amongst other useful chemicals, which is where he got his nickname.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/James-Paraffin-Young/
1859, first American oil well drilled in Pennsylvania.
https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/american-oil-history/
The founder of the Manchester Guardian (as it was then) made his fortune from slavery in the West Indies.
You beat me to it, leftists are all descendants of slave owners and traders, that is the root of their hypocrisy.
One person’s guardian is another’s master, the former being more politically correct in its keeping slaves imprisoned.
Was the Guardian around at that time.
I would tend to think they would have shown up, late,
And a dollar short
The Grauniad was founded in 1821 by John Edward Taylor who was born in 1791. He made his money in the cotton trade. At that time, much of the cotton came from the southern states of the US, made possible by slave labor. It was in fact British (and Northern US) cotton mills’ demand for cotton that resulted in slave populations in the south rising from 700k to 4m between 1790 and 1860.
The Grauniad seems equally concerned about Uighur slave labor making solar panels as their founder was troubled by the source of his cotton bales.
And, attempt to tar and feather us through association with racism. It is hard to get any lower than that!
The Guardian was formed in 1821 by a cotton mill owner. It campaigned to keep child labour, against universal suffrage and in defence of the southern slave owning states during the American civil war.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8443501/GUY-WALTERS-woke-Guardian-newspaper-founded-fortune-linked-cotton.html
Sounds like they should “cancel” themselves.
It is what the racist left always does.
I don’t think they need to distort it, do they?
The constant ascribing of the science to ‘leftist’ political attempts to undermine the West?
The weird science in which the greenhouse effect and basic physics are replaced by science akin to that of Victorian notions of perpetual motion?
The quaint idea that one temperature or weather event in 1934 ‘proves’ that a series of temp records and weather events in the last 20 years ‘are just weather’
The constant rubbishing of contrary views with schoolyard insult (I’m looking at you, MarkW’.
The presentation of contradictory theory about warming with no apparent shame – it isn’t warming, an ice age is coming, it is water vapour, it is the sun, it is warming but it will be good for the planet… you can’t believe all of these.
If you want to argue with the science, use science, not 1950s politics, insult, whataboutery and misdirection…
griff
you live in a country with very rich weather records which stretch far beyond one weather event in 1934.
we can trace the various climate changes on our uplands with dartmoor for instance illustrating that habitation was higher than today, trees were at a greater altitude, cultivation was higher.
our uplands demonstrate that most of the holocene was warmer than today. do go and read up some of Britain’s climatic history.
I have written numerous articles on the subject but you will find many documents in the Met Office library and archives.
Griff cannot learn from error, psychopaths can’t, either…
Now now. Griff is just set in his ways.
Indeed……
Did you read Judith Curry’s piece yesterday …..?
You mean the constant dribble with no facts (I am looking at you Griff).
Griff
Thank you for perfectly illustrating my point by your strawmen arguments. If you have carefully read my comments on this site you will know that I believe it is a fool’s errand to think we can engineer the perfect climate for each different climate zone. Where is there any scientific backing for this?
We may want to play God but four thousand years of recorded history provide ample proof that we cannot. However, there is much proof that our ancestors have time and again adapted to living with and thriving despite adverse weather conditions. History and empirical observations are a far safer guide than a spate of computer models produced in a lab. That is why I find TonyB credible because I can check and confirm his observations while I cannot reproduce any single “climate model” which are characterized by their considerable variations rather than agreement – all supposedly working with the same data.
Strawmen, red herrings and the clear politicizing of climate discussion do not contribute to cogent and cohesive arguments.
I think griff is just Nick Cohen’s alter ego.
If you want to argue with the science
The science, griff? That looks like a Freudian slip to me, inappropriate use of the ‘definite’ article.
There is science, but it isn’t definite or settled; especially where your busted AGW hypothesis is concerned.
Strange, isn’t it? Leftists always talk about “The Science”, whereas those who actually understand logic, falsification, and the scientific method refer to “Science”.
All politicians are followig “The Science”, well in the UK they are anyway
The Science ™
The Science is like a god to our Marxist friends, a god they hope will strike us unbelievers down.
Wow, the same lies spewed by the same lie spewing liar. How,,,typical.
Oh Griffy – every time we try to discuss reality and genuine scientific research you retort with claims of ‘the science’ – claims which are unsound and deeply rooted in delusional wishful thinking and pure fantasy. You are the fantasies, placing this concept of ‘the science’ on a pedestal like some religious icon or totem. You and people like you have become the problem, don’t you see? Your blind, religious faith in this totem is utterly delusional, irrational and extremely dangerous.
It’s not just one prior weather event, it’s hundreds of the going back hundreds of years.
The fact that the vast majority of those pushing this scam are politically left to far left is only in dispute by those who’s intent is to disguise the motives of those pushing this scam.
If you think that calling your scam a scam qualifies as a school yard insult, then you have never been in a school yard.
I also notice how griff completely ignores the fact that he and his fellow trolls constantly resort in insults when they run short on facts.
Griff’s mind has already dealt with this contradiction. The past extreme weather events were due to nature whereas the present ones are due to human CO2 emissions, specifically humans from western countries. That’s what his science says
Okay, Griffypoo, before you go any more dysphoric, please state your objection to having a warm planet to live on.
Having been through several decades in which there was at least one, and frequently three, blizzard events, I can truly say that a cold climate is not my idea of a good time. And by COLD, I mean well below 32F/0C on a prolonged basis.
Also, please provide your size in relation to the rest of the planet’s size. Attempting to find someone from a long distance, such as the Moon, is difficulty if not impossible. It’s the likely reason that we have yet to find any other civilizations on planets far, far away.
While I realize that it’s difficult to sort out the wankers like Nick Cohen (all talk, no compliance) from the real science people, you’re ignoring the political scam that is underway. Now do you really, really want to be told how to run your life by someone like that jerk? Or any one of a number of power-hungry political animals?
Do you? Think about it for a minute.
I’ll give you a valid reason for NOT relying on any kind of wind or solar-driven power sources, so please pay attention. My own experience, having lived in my little house on the hilltop since 2005, is that in BAD weather, e.g., blizzards, the power grid has failed repeatedly because the source (solar and wind) shut off in bad weather. The solar panels get covered with thick snow, which becomes ice, and the wind turbines stop turning. PERIOD. Two winters ago, we had an outage that affected the entire northeastern section of my state for THREE EFFING DAYS in the middle of a very cold winter. Not my idea of a good time, since my furnace won’t run if the power fails. And no, I do not have a fireplace.
The only thing that kept me going was my gas stove, which is so old it has strikers in the burners, and I can light the burners with MATCHES if the power goes out, because the gas valves will open, regardless. More modern gas stoves won’t do that. My unfortunate neighbors didn’t even have that benefit.
You try going three days with no heat or light in the middle of winter and tell me just how much fun it is, since you will NOT be allowed to burn anything in your fireplace to cook or keep warm.
I’m really concerned that you’re spending far too much energy on sulking and not enough enjoying the Great Outdoors. Please take your vitamins and wear a belt with your trousers. If you enjoy being cold as all get-out in the winter, that should be included.
Geez, I’m worried about you…..
Poor griffie, he actually believes that there is some controlling authority that informs all of us skeptics what we are supposed to believe.
To him, the fact that different skeptics have different opinions on the subject actually proves that skeptics must be wrong. All true socialists know that the government decides what is best and the myrmidons do what they are told. Because that’s how he lives his life.
Worse, most of the things in his list aren’t even contradictory.
You can believe that it isn’t warming now and that an ice age is coming, because both can easily be true.
You can believe that both water vapor and the sun play a bigger role than does CO2, without being a hypocrite.
You can believe that an ice age is coming and that warming is good for the planet without contradicting yourself.
You can scream “Summer Is Coming” at 4AM on any day and it is still accurate, perhaps annoying, but accurate
I have six lists of record highs and lows for my little spot on the globe. Five of them were copied at the time they were listed starting in 2007. (I used TheWayBackMachine to get the list from 2002.)
Interesting to see how often more recent “record” highs for a given day are lower than previous record highs for the same day. Lots of “adjusting” going on.
And that’s just for one little spot on the globe.
What has Hansen and Gavin Schmidt done to past records for the globe (GISS)?
Griff,
You could not be more wrong when you say,
Science says it has to be assumed recent weather has the same cause as similar previous weather in the Holocene. This is because the scientific Null Hypothesis decrees that a system has not changed in the absence of evidence for the change.
The scientific Null Hypothesis is a tenet of the scientific method and derives from the principle of parsempirical imony (sometimes called ‘Occams’ Razor’), and it decrees that an effect should not be assumed to exist in the absence of physical evidence for its existence.
The scientific Null Hypothesis should not be confused with the null hypotheses used by statisticians and its importance cannot be overstated. It is the basis of all experimental procedure. Indeed, modern physics exists because it had to be assumed the ether did not exist when an effect of the ether was not discerned by the ‘Michelson & Morley Experiment’.
So, the fact that no recent weather event is unprecedented in the Holocene is sufficient for the scientific method to reject an assumption that discernible global climate change exists as a result human activity. But that is science and advocates of anthropogenic (i.e. human induced) global warming (AGW) are certain of their superstition which they pretend is not rejected by science,
Richard
oops Should be ‘principle of parsimony’. Sorry
Are you using science griff when you prattle about weather events as being the result of CO2 increase? You have never substantiated any of your claims, and here you are again reducing the quest to understanding climate to “simple physics”.
The idea that there was a single event in 1934 that was responsible for considering the ’30s as a period of hot weather is right up there with the idea held by Biden that tornadoes are no longer called that. However, in your case, I think that you are lying.
The attached annual Heat Wave Index graphic is from the US EPA website:
My issue is that people like Nick Cohen use a complex question form of argument.
Sure, it is warmer than 1850, which was the end of the Little Ice Age. Is that a bad thing?
Human produced CO2 may be involved in that warming, but the models have not improved on the Charney Report estimate of effect in 1978, which has a three hundred percent range in the estimated effect. Not quite the sort of precision one wants to do engineering, particularly as Charney probably overestimated the effect.
So Cohen stretches some level of agreement on warming into buying into a jihad against fossil fuels, as any measurable warming is intolerable and will cause all sorts of bad things which have yet to actually occur.
Perhaps psychological counseling, or various other treatments for delusional behavior might help him.
Pre frontal lobotomy was developed for his condition wasn’t it? Debunking his science would have been a better option if he had espoused any, so an ad hominem response to his ad hominem is the only option left.
I think the problem starts with poor maths education. Many people (like Cohen) are simply not able to spot obvious errors and deceits because they don’t have the tools to answer basic back-of-a-postcard questions, and therefore don’t even ask themselves the questions.
lenses might be hi def plastic, too.
“Hi def”?
Plastic eyeglass lenses are made from polycarbonate or a similar CR-39 plastic.
High density plastics tend to be polyethylene or Teflon.
Your observation is correct as those glasses in the picture are most likely plastic.
If not, then they’re glass which requires large amounts of fossil fuels to melt, form, grind and polish lenses.
They could be actual tortoise shell from an endangered sea turtle … with glass lenses requiring high, sustained temperatures and a whole mining industry to supply the necessary fusible minerals.
As you accurately portray Rory Forbes.
Tortoise shell was used for eyeglass frames. Glass was/is used for lenses.
Tortoise shell provides beautiful items where we now depend on plastic, eyeglass frames, knife handles, razor handles, jewelry boxes, boxes, handles, etc.
Like today’s plastics, heat and sometimes a little moisture allowed artisans to mold the shell into desired shapes.
Eyeglass lenses were glass for hundreds of years though not often a high clarity type of glass.
A few countries had glass industries capable of consistently producing quality glass with high clarity and preferable index of refraction. Usable for eyeglasses or telescopes. These industries ability to produce high quality glass were treated as state/industrial secrets, both then and now.
Even so, if his eyeglass frames are tortoise shell, it required fossil fuels to power equipment to thin/polish the shell to desired thickness, provide heat to shape the shell, and to smelt, refine and turn any metal fittings needed for hinges and pince nez nose pinch springs.
Practically every part, item, aid that Cohen is, has or uses is derived from fossil fuels or fossil fuel run equipment. He is a hypocrite of the first order.
And he is either unaware of the extent of how hypocritical he is, or doesn’t care, which makes him a cynical hypocrite (a politician).
You only have to look at his Twitter a/c to see that not many bother about his irrational (and unscientific outbursts. I wonder if he has read this statement:
William Nordhaus received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018 for his work on the economics of climate change (The Nobel Prize, 2018). In his Nobel Lecture he questions the idea that humans should try to reduce GHG emissions enough to keep temperatures below two degrees above the Little Ice Age or the preindustrial period. Doing so, he calculates, will cost $30 trillion more than is saved. To limit warming to 1.5 degrees would cost $50 trillion. The total world GDP in 2020 was only $85 trillion. His optimum economic path is to allow four degrees of global warming (Nordhaus, 2018).
‘Allow four degrees? What control knob does he inte to use?
JF
4 degrees is never going to happen and everyone knows so no control nob required
Even burning all the fossil fuels available to us will put CO2 up to less than the ideal (for food growth) 1000ppm, so less than 2 degrees C warming Max. Maybe much less.
It assumes we can control the climate. We can’t, it’s a delusion.
“Climate change deniers are as slippery as those who justified the slave trade”
They are Democrats ?
Demonrats.
Judging by the photo I’m afraid that Nick looks just like an old man, maybe even one of his very old men!
OMG! I thought that was a picture of one of those slippery climate deniers being held up for public ridicule. It was an honest mistake. Here he is hobbling along in the opposite direction as everyone else, not watching where he’s going, sure to be mowed down by some dowager with a shopping cart full of her worldly possessions. Oh the huge manatee.
Guardian author Nick Cohen hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about, especially the slave trade.
He should visit the west coast of Africa and learn about the slave traders who were well established before the Roman Empire colonised, Africans who enslaved Africans and who in later times supplied slaves to buyers in America, and many other countries.
I watched a documentary covering a family of Americans of African ancestry who travelled to the homeland of their ancestors and were visibly shocked when they learnt that Africans were the slave kidnapping traders.
There was a long line of slavers, from the forests of Africa to their final destination in the Americas. By the time they arrived in the North American colonies, a slave might have passed through several owners at least four countries and up to three or more generations. It was rare for the US to receive slaves directly from Africa.
True.
Razzia —is an elaborate ceremony in Africa long before the Romans period.
True.
I have strong ties to Africa and what you say is true.
HMS Black Joke.
After Xiden’s recent disasters, as well as the economic ones waiting in the wings, the Leftists are trying to ramp up the rhetoric in an attempt to distract folks from the Leftists failures. I think people are getting wise too, and tired of the BS.
If you truncate his statement it ends up telling a truth: “Climate science will be seen as shocking as the defense of human bondage.” After all it is the climate hysterics who want to control and impoverish us all.
It is past time…Dewindmillize…..and Desolarpanelize NOW! Stop the subsidies for this expensive wasteful unreliable green rubbish. They are “pretenders” who rush into tearing down what is working based on a lie that man made CO2 is warming the planet.
“Dewindmillize” Is that a German word? 🙂
No 😀
Tax the wind farms retrospectively. It was good enough for oil companies.
JF
It’s surprising how many of the political incompetents who rise to influential positions in the UK share the same education, Oxford PPE. While a degree entitled Philosophy, Politics and Economics might be expected to be useful in government this turns out to be rarely the case. Instead it gives a sense of entitlement and the ability to sound plausible. The only exception I’ve seen to this rule is, IIRC Andrew Neil, the media commentator.
People like Mr Cohen deserve a label of their own. They know nothing of the science that they decry but talk of climate deniers. Gullibles?
JF
Just a couple of days ago I was invited to debate at the Oxford Union the proposition: “This House had enough of PPE.” (I took PPE at Oxford in 1984-87.) It seems lots of people see British politicians with this degree and so it’s tainted by association! Although I was good at it, I dropped the “E” quickly because it was approached as a mathematical modeling exercise with no contact with reality. (Not unlike most climate modeling).
Yes, such a degree should be useful in government, but nothing works well when put into a government. Don’t judge the rest of us PPE graduates who fight for free markets and against climate catastrophism.
Why doesn’t it work in government? My MP was Minister for Energy and Climate Change and managed so badly we got within two weeks of power cuts. And he then supervised the NHS PPE shortages.
Maybe there’s a mismatch between the skill sets.
JF
Piss Poor Education.
It just goes to show that a degree doesn’t stop you being incompetent. And in the PM’s case, a lying incompetent.
Slavery, diversity, and the wicked solution. Speaking truth through projection.
Then there is the hallmark of a Democrat … ‘confession through projection’. You know exactly what they’re going to do or have done by what they accuse others of doing. Example: blaming Trump for nefarious ties to Russia and the Ukraine. It isn’t a matter of discovering their lies. The hard part with Democrats is detecting their rare truths.
Well, they should know…
It’s not so much that they are trying to make us care. It’s more that socialists view all those who disagree with them as evil. Once they define one as evil, it really doesn’t matter which type of evil you believe them.
Hence denying catastrophic climate change is no different from justifying slavery.
Of course once they have defined all those who disagree with them as evil, it’s a small step to justify killing them.
“The desire of business to protect profits and the vanity of politicians and pundits, who saw themselves as dissidents fighting the consensus rather than fanatics enabling destruction, helped to waste two decades of valuable time.”
***************
Nick, it must be terribly frustrating going through life being so bitter at so many people in the world around you. Surely you must foresee a doomed world due to its unwillingness to bend to your will.
The difference between you and Adolf Hitler is that, unlike you, Hitler was able to rise to power and take action against everyone in the world against whom he had a grudge. The end result was pretty devastating, wasn’t it Nick?. If you never see the opportunity to act on your grudges against others before being laid to rest, I will be forever grateful. Please do the world a huge favor and confine your bitterness and frustration to the pages of The Guardian. Thank you.
And Nick, the climate scare narrative is about 33 years old now, not just two decades.
You mean the British and later, the Democrats?
He’s wearing shoes walking on that tarmac. Even if he’s wearing all leather shoes (unlikely) they’re made using leather cures, cured oiled dyed and waxed using fossil fuels.
No fossil fuels? No shoes for the pathetic opinion writer. Let alone a writer for a newspaper utterly dependent upon fossil fuels to run the newspaper and web publishing business.
You mean the British and later, the Democrats?
The thing about people of the left and ethics is that many of them lack the self awareness to believe they are part of the problem. Here in Oz we had the leader of The Greens get called out a few years ago for under paying his live in nanny and her boyfriend (who I believe worked as a casual labourer). The justification was that they were considered ‘part of the family’ and hence not, one assumes, locked in a hut at night and beaten with sticks.
They were ‘Nice’ to them and treated them ‘Kindly’ therefore there was no wrong… except for the fact you were blatantly under paying them.
There is/was a similar argument that keeping a slave was actually doing them a favour as it gave them a better life and it was not as if the slaves were being beaten and made to work in the field and if we didn’t own the slave a meaner person may have ended up owning them instead. So it was all good, cause they were NICE slave owners.
The other point is the British developed ethical concerns on the topic of human owners a LOT earlier than many other parts of the world. I believe (open to correction) that for purely ethical reasons they ended slavery in the 1830s and then spent most of the next 80 years spending large amounts of their own money deploying the Royal Navy to help enforce their views on human trafficking.
Given the fact that the size and power of the Royal Navy in the Victorian Era had a lot to do with the size and power of British (coal powered) industry, it could be argued that Coal not only ended the need of human (read – slave) labour, but also allowed the physical trafficking to be crushed.
All Hail Coal. Destroyer of Slavery.
Craig, correct, in part.
Spanish Conquistadors enslaved indigent populations. Then when the enslaved indigents were not sufficient for the task, the Spanish imported slaves.
The French, Dutch and English anxious to counter Spanish new world holdings and plunder.
Dutch and French quickly lost ground in new world holdings with the Dutch focusing on the far east.
The English, perhaps by greater influx of new world colonists controlled more and more of the North America new world.
Because England was a manufacturing center they required greater amounts of raw products. To that end, it was normally unlawful for colonists to “produce” finished items. Only in deep backwoods areas were colonists able to establish cottage industries
To fuel this manufacturing economic engine England sought to increase raw goods production, e.g. cotton.
At that time picking and cleaning cotton was extremely laborious.
So, England began wholesale importation of slaves in precolonial America.
This substantial flow of slaves into America continued until England’s non-monarchy leaders decided slavery was wrong and passed laws against slavery.
Nor were the English picky about who or where they obtained slaves. Of course, where slaves are cheapest and plentiful is the first option.
The second option centered on conquered and convicted peoples.
To that end, I learned about conquered soldiers being enslaved when I tracked one of my family lines back to a Scottish Prisoner of War, from Culloden I believe.
Britain had decided that captured soldiers could provide benefit for their imprisonment. A number served out their slavery in England. Some were sent. after a few years toiling in England, to the American Colonies.
The rest were sent to Australia where I assume they got similar treatment.
My ancestor was granted freedom after seven years of slavery. He stayed in America and is one of the Scotsmen in my ancestry.
Then there is the issue of the Royal Navy, always short of experienced sailors, would stop and board vessels. Anyone that the British decided had an English accent, English name, or whatever the Royal Navy decided was cause to believe they came from the United Kingdom was cause to impress the sailor on forced servitude on a Royal Navy ship.
That was one of the causes for our war of 1812.
This was a practice carried out by the Royal Navy well after 1812. Technically, England agreed not to impress American sailors, but they still did board and impress sailors occasionally, just not rampantly.
Australia was a favorite place for England to send prisoners of war and persons convicted of one crime or another, including debt. Murderers were usually given terminal treatment, it was for lesser crimes that so many were sent to Australia.
England’s alleged humanity took a dang long time to appear which does not forgive England their earlier inhumanity.
Nor is it a surprise that so many pirate ships were manned by slaves. Pirates took particular pleasure preying on Spanish, French and English vessels where captured slaves often joined the pirates keeping the pirate ships well manned.
Wow. That’s mixing a lot up into a small area. My family were also victims of transportation, but eventually made it back to the UK – it was a popular form of slavery before Africa was used as a source of slaves. It helps prove the point that slavery has never been about the colour of the skin but is a crime perpetrated by the rich and powerful against the poor and powerless. In actual fact, if you go back far enough, every group of people have practiced slavery at some point.
True! All true!
Most of England’s actual advancement against slavery was recognizing the institutions within England that were actually forms of slavery.
Mining, prisoners of war, child labor, etc. were all dealt with by British legislation one by one from the late 1700s through the 1800s. Each act advanced individual freedoms and freed a subpopulation from tyranny.
ATheoK,
It was actually the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 by Connecticut resident Eli Whitney that fueled a rapid increase in the slave population of the southern US states. Until that time, cotton was an unprofitable commodity due to the extreme difficulty of removing seeds from the cotton bolls. Slave populations rose from about 700k in 1790 to 4m in 1860, largely due to the boom in King Cotton made possible by the cotton gin.
Importation of slaves was made illegal in 1808.
Leaving only 15 years for massive slave purchases and importations.
Nothing is profitable if slavery is required to earn any profit.
If you check the map, there are immense tracts of land along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
The problem arose when growing cotton inland.
I can vouch for those cotton seeds to be tightly attached to many cotton fibers and require brute force to remove.
However, every fiber goes through a carding process. Carding is meant to align the fibers in preparation for spinning. As such, cards have fine teeth which are not meant to remove cotton seeds from cotton bolls.
Eli’s machine utilized teeth strong enough to remove cotton seeds.
Note Eli’s reference to existing machines. Manually operated cards with teeth strong enough to remove cotton seeds.
Eli’s machine was not invented where no other machine existed to do the job.
The rest of the increase in slaves was from population growth, not importation of slaves from Africa.
About England and coal.
As far as I know, coal usage in the UK was primarily for heating until the 1800s when more machinery and furnaces were stoked with coal. In London, coal was used to generate coal gas for lighting.
Coal stoked furnaces produced better iron and steel. This served as the real engine behind the industrial revolution; better steels, better iron castings made for better more reliable more powerful engines.
Still, whale oil served for light in wealthier homes and Clipper Ships moved tonnage on the seas into the 1890s.
In London and I presume a few other English cities, coal was used to generate coal gas which was then used for lighting. Many of London’s gas lamps are still in use.
Unless there were massive pipe emplacements, all rural homes needed other types of fuel for lamps.
Newspeak in Russia today has evolved into
“gulag was a ticket to a better life”.
I kid you not!
So your:- quote is charitable by comparison!
“They were ‘Nice’ to them and treated them ‘Kindly’ therefore there was no wrong… except for the fact you were blatantly under paying them……..
There is/was a similar argument that keeping a slave was actually doing them a favour as it gave them a better life and it was not as if the slaves were being beaten and made to work in the field”
Yes, the British justified slavery just like almost all other cultures. But be fair, the British were also the first major power to abolish it. Even before the USA. That early social advance is not an accident — the US constitution evolved from British political philosophy.
Yes and no.
To get the United States Constitution passed, the northern states had to accede to the southern states on slavery. It was quite contentious.
Slavery was outlawed in the northern states by their state Constitutions from the period immediately after 1779.
Which is why there was an underground railroad conveying slaves to the north. Once across the state border, they were no longer slaves.
This preceded Britain recognizing that slavery was inhuman by decades.
This matter became so important that during the American Civil War, President Lincoln abolished slavery. As defeated Confederate states rejoined the Union, they gave up any rights to hold humans as slaves.
Again, this was a forceful elimination of slavery, not just recognition of slavery’s inhumanity.
America’s Constitution has many lessons from the United Kingdom’s misuse of power. It also has lessons from the French and other democracies and monarchies.
It took England hundreds of years to finally force a monarch to sign the Magna Carta. That document along with a number of subsequent documents formed the seed for individual freedoms. Most of which were not granted to the ordinary English citizen, but only to the higher classes.
All lessons for the founders of the United States of America declaration on Independence and Constitution.
It’s a shame that rights granted under the Magna Carta are no longer considered rights for United Kingdom citizens. Centuries of individual freedoms and rights have been eliminated in the United Kingdom.
The RN was largely responsible for ending the West Coast slave trade. The Democratic Party not so much.
JF
West Africa squadron. The Barbary pirates took American slaves in C19.
The Barbary pirates took American ships passing through the Mediterranean – they never made it all the way to America. They raided the European coasts as far as Southern Britain and through into the Black sea coast. They are estimated to have taken 1-1.5 million European’s as slaves and around 700 Americans.
All the British Navy accomplished was to interdict slave smuggling. Importation into the United States was already illegal by 1808.
Again, N.B., the Royal Navy frequently intercepted American ships and impressed any/all sailors they thought were from England.
Impressing sailors is not any different from enslavement of sailors!
Scottish coal- and salt-miners were effectively slaves for much of the 17th and 18th centuries. A change to the law in the 1770s that stopped miners being the property of mine owners was initially not retrospective – it took until the 1790s for all miners to be legally free men.
Yes!
Accurately summarized.
Except the miners/salters employment conditions and dangers did not substantially improve for years.
However, as each virtually enslaved work situation improved whether by act of legislation, union negotiation or employer enlightenment, conditions improved for all.
America benefited as many disgruntled workers, e.g. skilled miners, tanners, foundry workers, etc. migrated to the USA.
When you can’t convince with facts you resort to slander, slime, and lies.
I often see this type of logic. Attack your target a la Saul Alinsky style forgetting that your insult applies to yourself as well.
Nick Cohen is 60 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Cohen
60?
He hasn’t aged well. I would have guessed older.
I would have guessed early to mid 70’s. I guess climate change was not very kind to him.
The evil shows through.
He should know better
““If someone says it is raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find out which is true.””
That depends entirely on the location, time etc.
Lee
This is precisely why we need context. We need complete primary sources. An unnamed source is worthless. Even quoting someone or a document without the reader/hearer being able to go and check the journalist is worthless. It often happens that you can listen to an address and then read a report on it and the two are at complete odds.
Over fifty years ago I was involved in my first and last public protest. The three main city newspapers reported on the event. The “conservative” newspaper got some of the details correct but the “liberal” papers were not even able to accurately name who was behind this student protest. I have been a media sceptic ever since.
And as slippery as those who denied the ozone hole crisis?
https://wp.me/pTN8Y-5Uq
I dislike climate change deniers, too. Of course I mean people who deny that the climate changes regardless of what humans do (and before there were humans).
Call me when there are hippos in the Thames, like when the Neanderthals were around. With their jet planes and V8s, the damn fools…
No hippos but they recently found that about 2,500 seals have made their home in the Thames.
Probably forced to migrate there due to the exploding polar bear population in the Arctic.
Different type of seals – I doubt we’ll see Polar Bears following them and setting up home there – it would certainly liven up London life though!
“If someone says it is raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find out which is true.” The world only had to look at the weather outside to know who was trying to fool it.
Actually, you are claim to be reporting the news it IS your job to quote both. You are providing you readers/viewers/consumers with summaries of the current factions and their opinions and allowing your readers et al to be informed about the topic.
But determining what is true – whatever ‘true’ actually is within context – you are filtering the raw infomation. You are not providing the argument, you are providing the solution. Providing the solution may not be a bad thing, but by removing the supporting argument you are further isolating the readers from the overall picture.
“We are Trusted News. Don’t Question Us.”
(the side observation into this is that the ‘media’ class honestly believe this is the correct start of society. They are horrified at information and debate that is allowed to travel sideways because only qualified people (aka – THEM) have the skills to ensure the debate is controlled correctly and that the great smelly unwashed are ONLY given the information they themselves have first filtered. Information should travel via the vertical model where the skilled analysis (again – aka THEM) feed it vertically down, without discussion, to the masses below. They literally and proudly think this.)
The second observation is the complete lack of self awareness. If we were to re-write slightly that paragraph with the words ‘CO2 driven warming’ and ‘no observed warming’ then the job of the media would be to go and check the observations.
Do they?
Of course not. It is all about the models and if the models don’t work it is clearly the fault of… ummm… Republicans… or something.
So, trusting the observations is Good(tm) when dealing with hypothetical examples, but trusting the observations when debating CO2 effect on society is supporting slavery.
Yup. Well done. Greta would be proud, or at least would be if she wasn’t constantly angry.
Actually, your job is to prevent the advertisements from all running together.
Cynical but true.
The problem is that the activists are so often ignorant about what happened yesterday, last week, last year or last century. They are dismissive of any contrary viewpoint, but can not be bothered to research past weather conditions and events.
As a result they over-react to any change in the weather rather than taking a more considered view, and using the money to provide resilience to weather related events.
Instead they insist on wasting billions on limited life boondoggles that have questionable benefits on the CO2 they are supposed to be saving, in order, as they see it, to ” save the planet “.
Incidentally, IIRC, didn’t Margaret Thatcher change her mind in later life as to the connection of CO2 with CAGW?
Her initial attitude was considerably affected by her tussle with the coal miners’ unions.
Speaking of slippery they have more games up their sleeve if CO2 doesn’t strike fear into your wallet-
‘Game changing’ study of turtles and plastics on Great Barrier Reef (msn.com)
Grants need to be versatile where the products of fossil fuels are concerned.
Scientifically illiterate bitter old lefty – who cares what he thinks.
Have you ever met a lefty who wasn’t scientifically illiterate?
No, or very ignorant.
Or bitter?
Nick Cohen is as slippery as those who opposed BREXIT, preferring instead, continued enslavement to the EU bureaucrats.