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.
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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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No doubt Nick also proposes Biogenic products to replace all the fossil fuel products that he uses in everyday life. Not wishing to be a hypocrite I would presume he doesn’t use any fossil-fueled transport or telecommunication products. I wonder how his attitude will change when he has to pay the true environmental cost of his profligacy. No doubt he will adopt the reserved position of greenies – do as I say not as I do.
The billions of dollars spent by the fossil fuel industry on propaganda and its acceptance by know-nothing elements on the right
Funny, I never got a dime.
For every dollar spent by FF companies, $10,000 is spent by NOGs, governments, and bribes from China and the Mid-East. The Sierra Club alone has a yearly budget of a Hundred Million dollars !
The fossil fuel companies spent billions of dollars on propaganda? I don’t believe it. That’s a lie.
Who could possibly be more qualified to comment on climate than a third rate Grauniad hack with a PPE?
Libelling a significant proportion of real scientists is pretty desperate.
Such rot from Cohen. It could definitely be Griff.
Hey, Guardian, most people with an IQ above room temperature (in deg-C or deg-F, makes no difference) know that climate changes . . . always has, always will.
Only idiots think that humans can stop “climate change”.
What does Mr. Worrell think that a person is supposed to do while living in a world dominated by fossil fuels; starve to death to make his point? Working to change the course of industrial society, especially given the odds of success, really requires a tempered approach to even reach out to others who may be misinformed or uninformed.
Speaking of misinformed this site must be at the heart of misinformation, probably only second to the Heartland Institute.
Feel free to provide evidence of this misinformation. Any time you like.
Models aren’t evidence, BTW.
Well, how about you informing us on what we should know?
What misinformation at WUWT would you like to correct?
Please feel free to do so.
You admit that you are living in a world dominated by fossil fuels and are working to change the course of industrial society?
Why? It’s worked well in advancing and enhancing our way of life, increasing our standard of living and life expectancy so why on earth would you want to change a system that’s working? Surely the best thing would be to expand it to areas that still need to be improved, to give those people the same benefits we enjoy, wouldn’t it?
Oh dear, you poor soul: welcome to the lions’ den of scientific realism. You better bring your best game face or you’ll get destroyed, just like the regular destruction of the hapless Griff.
I think that people will start to noteist the AGW BS, because their bills will start to go stupid to pay for all this.
So put those rooftop solar installations up with slave labor components from western China in 2021 so you can feel good about yourself and be like your other slave owning (importing) neighbors.
The Green Taliban have spoken. The door to door searches will begin soon.
…more caption detail: and clothing imported from fossil fuel intensive countries
Alarmist Climate Change scientists torture data as those at the Tobacco Institute.
[QUTOE FROM ARTICLE] “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”. [END QUOTE]
Margaret Thatcher embraced global warming theory primarily for political purposes, in order to cast the coal miners’ union in a bad light, and help her Tories keep the parliamentary majority. Although she was one of the UK’s best Prime Ministers, this was probably her worst mistake, one which the current PM Boris Johnson is repeating.
Sorry Steve Z but you are out of date.
Margaret Thatcher: Hot Air And Global Warming from Statecraft 2003 recanted.
“The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.”
https://www.thegwpf.com/margaret-thatcher-hot-air-global-warming/
There is so much wrong with Cohen’s idiotic article I don’t know where to start, but let’s try a couple of things:
This “propaganda” Cohen refers to isn’t under-the-counter money spent on nefarious dark deeds. It transpires it’s money oil companies spent on advertising their products. Nike spends a lot advertising its products; does that mean there is a “Big Trainer” conspiracy?
Weapons grade bollocks. https://www.statista.com/statistics/418126/electricity-prices-for-households-in-the-uk/
Insulating a few homes isn’t going to stop green energy charges costing the poor an absolute fortune relative to the costs the wealthy virtue signallers who read the Graun will have to pay.
I’ve got a tin-foil hat Cohen can borrow (for a fee, natch)
The lights didn’t go out because of fossil fuel back up. Does the idiot Cohen not realise this?
Cohen’s no spring chicken. However, if he wants to align himself with the young and naive, rather than the worldly wise, that’s his problem.
The Guardian is only read by a very few nutters. It is not more than a college rag mag .. and the staff are the same.