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.
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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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Just questioning the numbers, Mr CC advocate Cohen….so far the answers are flakey enough that we have more questions….
The Figaro newspapers exposes the doubling of the number of deaths in India since 1960 caused by lightinings as a consequence of the global warming.
The stupid journalist didn’t even imagined that India’s population expanded threefold during this period…
Just like with the BBC, the truth is the opposite of what you read in the Grauniad.
That’s why I go there – to find out what’s not the truth or occasionally for football and cricket scores.
This bloke’s rantings are actually pretty funny. I read George Monbiot’s salary (on here I think), so he must be on a sh!t salary, nobody reads his crap (except us, so we can take the piss), he has one foot in the grave and he has to look back on his schoolboy choices, i.e. remaining one. The only thing missing is his short pants.
Look on the bright side. This is his self-manufactured punishment all the way to his death bed. He probably can’t even afford to get his bum caned by a lady in a School Ma’am outfit in Soho. I look back fondly to those days when that was free. Well that’s what my uncle told me ……..
Quite so, also considering ~ 80% of UK primary energy consumption comes from fossil fuels (2019) and the ~14% of ‘renewables’ is already causing serious supply problems:
Only 3.47% came from wind and solar. Most of the “renewables” figure is from burning biomass. It is SO renewable to chop down American forests, ship the wood across the Atlantic and burn it in Drax power station.
Also, I think the 3.47% is not real. Not sure quite how to put this. They oblige electricity companies to buy the wind and solar generated power. Because of this, they buy it whether they need it or not, and most of the time they do not. Because most of the time its coming in high peaks which don’t coincide with demand. So they buy and turn down supply from conventional.
The 3.4% is basically an artifact of this legislative situation. If you took off all regulation and left it to the market, it would be way down. No-one would buy it on a contractual basis because of intermittency. And if they did buy it on the spot market, they’d buy very little because they would not need it.
I guess there would be some limited periods when high demand would coincide with high wind and solar production. Not many. In the UK climate you really do not need air conditioning, no homes have it. So the peak demand coinciding with high solar that you might observe in the US or Australia just doesn’t exist.
The real number if you want to assess useful supply is well under 1%.
Michel, your post is a very nice summary of the current insanity that is Britain’s power supply system.
Btw in UK Boris’s windmills producing 1.8% of UK electricity. Again.
Good job we didn’t waste billions on them…
Didn’t griff just tell us that wind and solar was providing 40% of the UK’s energy needs?
Don’t tell griff lied.
That normally only happens on a windy weekend, early in the morning, when demand is barely half that of a normal weekday (ca 35GW). These days we normally get more than 4GW from the EU.
Griff doesn’t just fib on windy weekends…
I do have a weakness for an black African lady. I make no apologies.
Reminds me of a time when some Democrat visited some country in Africa, and started referring to the locals as African-Americans.
We’re all African if we consider mDNA.
All these climate alarmists will shut their mouth when the AMO cycle will turn to negative phase in several years . In the mid-time , the discussion is not possible , The Guardian like others won’t stop to use more and more extremist words … without logic …
We could also call them “ultracrepidarianists”
I’m not so sure. Climate alarmists will simply claim that the cold weather is just another consequence of climate change. I have read some articles in the British media recently which claimed that recent heavy snowfalls in several parts of the world were caused by climate change. I have found it virtually impossible to reason with religious fanatics and climate alarmists make religious fanatics seem reasonable by comparison.
Well until I read the article next to this on German floods I’d have said the Guardian was exaggerating…
but now? yes, I think they nailed it.
Griff, you still don’t know the difference between weather and climate. How many times have you repeated this same old discredited argument?
So weather events that have happened hundreds of times before going back hundreds of years, are proof that this time it was caused by CO2.
I’m tempted to use some schoolyard insults, but griff’s feelings would be hurt.
It’s ok, he can go to the Good Grief Network to get over it.
Simon?
Those who justified the slave trade by the end of the 19th cent. were the likes of Al Gore, Joe Biden, Mrs Pelosi, Mrs K.Harris.
It was always the Southern party of the landowners. The 1960’s civil rights movement was a shock to them as they risked losing most of the seats in their heartland. I think it was LBJ who helped get the Democrats a lot of the Southern Black vote by increasing welfare payments to them, primarily. The history of the Democrat party does appear to be a history of corruption, sleaze and racism.
There is a parallel between climate and the slave trade, and its to do with the mentality of the left.
With climate and emissions, the assumption is always that if the US, UK, Australia, whoever in the West, reduces, that will make a vital difference and save the planet.
The reality is that if CO2 emissions really are creating a crisis, the countries doing it are not the West. They are China, India, etc, and their share of total emissions is rising all the time.
They don’t show any signs of believing in the Guardian’s climate crisis at any level – scientists or politicians.
With slavery, the assumption is always that the Atlantic trade was the entire phenomenon, and was entirely down to Western slave traders.
The reality is, as people here have pointed out, that it was in more than equal measure down to Africans themselves who sold their own people to the slave transporters, for a couple of centuries.
The reality is also that Britain led the world in abolishing the Atlantic trade. They got all the other European nations to agree, they abolished slavery internally before anyone else, and they stationed the West Africa fleet off the coast of West Africa for decades, at huge expense, intercepting slavers and repatriating the slaves.
When we look at this, we should conclude that Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries did appallingly wrong with the slave trade. But they finally realized their wrongdoing and did everything they could to remedy it. And finally succeeded. They did actually abolish the trade.
Just as with the non-Western CO2 emissions, the thing that the left never talks about is the trans Saharan Islamic slave trade. This lasted for well over a thousand years. It was going strong until late in the 19th century, when Europeans, mainly the British, finally managed to put a stop to it. It consisted not only in transporting slaves into the Middle Eastern Islamic countries, but it also did so accompanied by wholesale genital mutilation of the crudest sort, which led to a very high mortality rate.
I have no hard numbers on the phenomenon, but given the scale and duration of it, it must have been tens of millions. It dwarfed the Atlantic slave trade in scale and in brutality and duration.
This is not to excuse the Atlantic slave trade. It was terrible, deeply wrong, inexcusable. It is however to point out that if you want to look at slavery the phenomenon, you have to look at it in the round, all of it. We cannot understand war by ignoring WW1 and WW2. We cannot understand slavery while refusing to look at the largest slaving operations in history.
Finally, I would recall for everyone the wisdom of the New Testament. There is more joy in heaven over a sinner that repenteth….
Have you heard any repenting from Saudi Arabia lately?
Slavery has been in existence since man conquered man. It was actively practiced in every alleged civilization right up to the late 1700s and early 1800s.
Even today, while it isn’t openly acknowledged, slavery still exists in uncivilized regions including the Mideast.
No, not at all.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the Northern states in the American Colonies opted to abolish slavery following ratification of the Constitution in the late 1770s into the first decade of the 1800s.
Following the end of an agreement to get the Constitution passed, President Thomas Jefferson got Congress in 1808 to abolish the importation of slaves into any United States port.
After 1808 importing slaves into the United States meant smuggling slaves past Federal forts at most ports. It also made it difficult to sell new slaves smuggled into any city/town.
This law did not stop importing slaves into English, French, Portuguese and Spanish territories. Cuba for example needed slaves to harvest sugar cane. Other countries need them to tend and harvest coffee, chocolate and especially latex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
“Between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans.[1] It is considered the most costly international moral action in modern history.[5]”
[5] Kaufmann, Chaim D.; Pape, Robert A. (Autumn 1999). “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade”. International Organization. MIT Press. 53 (4): 631–668. JSTOR 2601305.
???
A) wiki is very untrustworthy.
B) Slaves meant for Cuba, Caribbean, Jamaica, Bermuda, Central America and South America.
Nothing to do with Slaves for the southern states in America. America had already taken steps to stem the flow of the slave trade from Africa.
Still wrong, no matter how prettily it is phrased.
Keeping in mind that during the period England was shutting down the Atlantic slave trade, England was actively boarding ships, including American ships and impressing anyone they decided was from England into slavery.
1,600 ships is an awful lot of ships… Just how many of these were actual named ships built by seafaring nations?
Then after the ship is seized, what became of the ship? Returned to England? Sold? Sunk?
150,000 slaves freed amounts to 94 slaves per alleged ship. Since slavers stuff their boats to the limit.
Which indicates that the majority of the alleged slave ships interdicted by the British were small ships. Likely, many were ferrying captured slaves to a larger port where they would be sold to larger slave ships.
England, after several centuries of supplying and using slaves suddenly is credited, by English teachers, with shutting down the slave trade in the Atlantic.
All while England impressed sailors into slavery in the Royal Navy.
Nor should one forget that at no time did England declare war on Netherlands, Portugal, Spain or France. Yet England seized ships operated under these countries flags?
Britain was at war with the Netherlands, America, France and Spain during this time; Portugal was an ally and no ships were taken at a time when Britain was not at war with a country – this was most carefully observed, almost to a fault. On the other hand, whenever Spain happened to put together a small fleet of treasure ships to convoy from South America to Spain, Britain just happened to be at war with Spain at that time, for whatever flimsy reason (look up the war of Jenkins ear if you don’t believe me). The Royal Navy and Britain made quite a good living out of that particular scam – managed it about 5 times overall! The only time there was a problem was when a Spanish ship was taken by mistake just 14 days before a declaration of war – the ship and all contents were returned to the Spanish, along with an apology and restitution for damage caused.
Castlereagh was instrumental in getting the slave trade ban into the Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic wars.
Castlereagh tried, not did.
No one seems as defeated as the lunatic “lefties” who dominated the Grauniad thinking a decade ago. Like late 18th-century opponents of abolishing the slave trade, cranks who filled the comment pages of the Totalitarian press are remembered today as dangerous fools – assuming they are remembered at all.
There, Nick – save that for a future article.
Guardian: “Climate change deniers are as slippery as those who justified the slave trade”
Like…. The Guardian once did
How, in Cohen’s words, can earth’s oceans be “more acidic” when they have a pH higher than 7? Is it because “less alkaline” sounds less frightening?
Yes.
Cohen is utterly clueless about Chemistry, amongst other things.
Phrase was coined in 2003 by Ken Caldeira tp ramp up the fear.
I prefer the description ‘less caustic’
My advice to all is just ignore the Guardian, every thinking person does. That advice also goes for the BBC.
The climate alarm dept. are working overtime to get Climate back onto the front page after brother Biden knocked them off balance, due to his Afghan debacle.
They will never forgive him, the COP 26 lot had to give themselves an extra year to prepare for the mass event of nonsense, because no one was interested and now they are put onto the inside pages because of the ineptitude of one of their own key supporters, Biden..
Justice does exist, you just have to be patient..
My response to the Guardian complaints (guardian.readers@theguardian.com):
Dear Sir / Madam,
I am writing in relation to the following:
The article you’re complaining about : Climate change deniers are as slippery as those who justified the slave trade, Nick Cohen
The date on which it appeared : September 4th, 2021
Whether the article appeared in print or online (and whether through a browser or via one of our mobile apps) : Seen online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/04/climate-change-deniers-are-as-slippery-as-those-who-justified-the-slave-trade
The nature of your complaint in no more than 500 words : Appended below.
Which part of the Editorial Code it breaches : Of the 16 stated areas of code, this article is in breach of Accuracy, Opportunity to Reply and Harassment.
Complaint:
The headline itself is hyperbolic garbage which immediately falls foul of accuracy and harassment, as it specifically associates individuals with the slave trade in quite the most childish logic and attempt to have equally scientifically illiterate individuals seek to make public disparaging and harassing comments about individuals who have then been provided no opportunity to reply to this utter nonsense.
If this Cohen ignoramus, and anyone else at the Guardian, is going to make these wholly inaccurate statements, then the first point of accuracy will be to provide the following:
1. Evidence of the scientific method proving AGW, not theories or hypothesis, the actual burden of proof, and please don’t regurgitate the IPCC as they do not have this information as they are a political body, not a scientific one, which I have in writing.
2. When you fail to answer the first question, you are then dependent on the precautionary principle, in which all lunatic dogma from the likes of Nick Cohen is dependent entirely on models, so in order to obtain accuracy you must provide the names and evidence of having solved the two critical equations prior to then providing evidence of having solved the closure problem, including all confounders, without which all models are GIGO.
When Nick, and everyone else at the Guardian, fails to provide these answers, you will then be subject to making public admission that you are all science deniers, rather than anyone conducting actual science through question and logical debate, rather than idiotic and ignorant comparisons, which would conversely be more accurately laid at the feet of actual science deniers like Nick Cohen.
I have little faith that this constant dogma preached by scientifically illiterate people that conveniently live comfortably off that which they attempt to demonise, nor do I expect anyone at the Guardian to make a swift 180 degree from the crazed ramblings of what has become literally akin to a cult, but as you have set the editorial standards, let’s see if you can do the one thing that ideologues never do, and that is have the courage of your conviction. Whilst you are at it, have Nick Cohen explain exactly how he thinks destruction of the economy for yet another socialist/communist fantasy will solve the economic problem through central planning (I dare say he is equally ignorant on that as well)?
Rants are not useful as Letters to the Editor.
In anticipation of the IPCC Glascow Conference officials are bordering on ordering the Australian Government to stop coal mining and related coal fired power station operation and export by 2030.
When reminded that coal is a major export income source and over 70 per cent of the world’s largest interconnected electricity grid (Queensland-New South Wales-Victoria-Tasmania-South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory) electricity generating capacity is from coal fired power stations and that coal related employment is a significant segment of the economy the IPCC apparently replied that because Australia is a wealthy nation it can afford to stop the coal and related industry by 2030.
Apparently the fact that what the UN calls “developing nations”, best example China with an economy now close to rivalling the USA, are increasing coal mining, importing and burning every year is acceptable, despite China alone producing new emissions every year that exceed Australia’s total emissions. In other words whatever Australia did would be an exercise in futility based on economic vandalism.
Please consider that in 1975 many developed nations including Australia signed the UN Lima Protocol or Agreement to assist developing nations to become manufacturing nations exporting to the manufacturing nations that agreed to greatly reduce their own manufacturing capacities. Accordingly China has become a manufacturing giant and economic powerhouse. But the IPCC will not try to stop them from using coal until 2060 or beyond. So much for net zero emissions 2050 target for developed nations, if that was possible without badly damaging the prosperity of the people in nations that blindly followed UN orders.
Climate hoaxers call sceptics deniers, be careful or they will add racist if we do not ignore developing nations exemption.
Of course the climate changes, Earth Cycles since time began, climate zones and weather, naturally.
Enough of this manipulative mob of unelected diplomatic passport holders enjoying life in New York and their fellow traveller globalists on communistic tickets such as Socialism, Marxism, Lennists, Trotskyites and other leftists.
Please also note that Australia signed the IPCC Kyoto Agreement in Japan and the Paris Agreement in France and achieved all of the emissions reduction targets for Kyoto and is well on the way to achieving Paris emissions targets.
Australia is one of the few signatory nations that achieved Kyoto and will achieve Paris.
Included in the nations that did not is China, and many other nations with lower emissions than China.
My condolences.
” The world only had to look at the weather outside to know who was trying to fool it.
Yes, idiotic people like Nick Coen and his cohorts who should never have been given the title of journalist.
Sorry ‘Cohen’
We will see a lot more silly stuff like this in the run up to COP26, now less than 60 days away. Happily Nick is factually wrong, just as alarmism is, for skepticism is thriving.
now that ” extreme weather ” has become the shiboleth for climate change , we should look backwards at what has happened rather than blaming the climate “emergency ” for bringing new and ” unprecedented ” weather disasters in the future . for instance New York was hit by a hurricane with a 13 foot storm surge which put a large area of Manhattan under water in 1821 . if the hurricane of 1938 had made landfall 60 miles further west New York would have had water up to second floor windows instead of providence . we have had hugely catastrophic weather disasters on the east coast and all over North America in the past and we will have them again . they are nothing new . what is new is the damage they can do to complex infrastructure and increased populations , the tsunami of media coverage and their interaction with contemporary attitudes . what used to be thought of as ” acts of god ” are now blamed on humans . the challenge of protecting ourselves from natural disasters should be faced without the destructive battle over climate change . we’ve had natural disasters in the past , we will have them again whether climate changes or not . regardless of attribution the question remains how much money and restructuring are we willing to commit ?
As already pointed out the founder of the Guardian was a slaver, his descendants were supporters of communism and now are pushing global socialism. Enemies of the human race, one and all.
As a stalwart member of the Climate Taliban, Nick Cohen’s “attack” on the defenders of truth about climate and about energy is nothing but feeble-minded blather. Like so many of his ilk, his salvos misfire badly, and he winds up being hoist by his own petard. He and his brethren would have humanity bow down to, and be slaves to the Green Blob, pretending to “save the planet”. They want to enchain humanity in an anti-human, anti-science, anti-truth, and anti-democratic ideology. So far, they appear to be getting away with it.
These morons, the ‘inetersectionalists’ who seek links and associations between ‘issues’ are laughable. Being black and a woman gives you extra points. If you are a lesbian you get more points, and a trans lesbian black woman gives you so many points in todays world they cant be counted.
This is why climate always affects poor black women most, according to these morons.
Of course,
And now we intersect its perpetrators with slavery, colonialism, whiteness of course, and especially, capitalism. (As if commie China isnt producing CO2!)
These people mistake cutesy feeling with logic, with reason.
Imagine if these people ever had to do anything useful in their lives, create something that might be tested by the laws of physics, like a bridge, or a space ship. Imagine just how utterly redundant their form of thought would be.
And yet, here they are, in all their ignorant splendour, displaying their ignorance with such ill conceived self congratulation. And worse than that, gaining power! Driving policy!
How the hell did we ever let people like this breed, let alone get in a position where their feeble minded utterances held sway.
“How the hell did we ever let people like this breed, let alone get in a position where their feeble minded utterances held sway”
Because normal, competent people don’t want the job any more. They can have lives where they’re normal and competent. So human parasites get the votes, because only parasites are on the ballot.
They love to rant about “clime den!ers” because it moves the attention away from their own hypocrisy.
He may be partially right. There were 25 major slave owners in the US, one of which was Black. Most people did not own slaves in the South and many whites were little better off than slaves driving many whites to the North. The importing of slaves was stopped in 1808 moving to ending slavery that never should have happened.
He is wrong in who he compares slavery to. Slavery was hardship to the slave and poor whites. If the global warming crowd get there way there will be induced hardship and suffering. The deniers however stand for progress, freedom and happiness without some effective writing graduate strolling in cofort dictating how we should live.
Sorry, comfort.
I think the British public, those that have lost family members to depression and suicide over the false climate emergency, “10 years to extinction” BS, should go find this guy and all like him that are destroying the fabric of society, causing kids to stop trying at school.
Its like they are trying to develop PAX (Firefly reference), and destroy the will to live?
The damage these people are doing to society is going to fill decades of papers.