or, Leftist Climate Scaremongering Twaddle Analyzed
In part one of a two-part Sunday series in The Telegraph, Christopher Monckton reviews the history of Global Climate Change as a political means toward installing “world government”.
The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the ‘facts’ of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth
Biblical droughts, floods, plagues and extinctions?
Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst “market failure” ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the “climate-change” scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac’s chilling phrase, “creating world government”. This week and next, I’ll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.
Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn’t. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that’s as far as the “consensus” goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.
The Royal Society says there’s a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer’s shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.
In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.
This week, I’ll show how the UN undervalued the sun’s effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century’s temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.
Next week, I’ll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern’s report; I’ll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I’ll show how the environmentalists’ “precautionary principle” (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.
Go read the whole thing, and if you’re of a statistical bent, download his PDF of his calculations, which he generously invites all and sundry interested to do. It’s rather better annotated than anything offered by Al Gore.
That’ll get the trolls’ heads spinning like a teenage Linda Blair .
Actus squats and expells the “peer reviewed studies” snark in 3… 2 … 1 …
Monckton is polemic, but Al Gore is not? Come on! This is just the Paper Tiger thing to the Nth degree. It’s one thing when you don’t know what polemic means. It’s another when you accuse the opposition of something you are doing. Heads I win, tails you lose.
On a (distantly) related note, I took my daughter, who turns 3 in January, to see Happy Feet yesterday. I expected a kid’s movie about penguins. What I saw was a propoganda film.
Man is destroying the planet, sharp pokes at religion and the portrayal of the UN as the savior of all.
Then today my wife showed me this WSJ article discussing the movie’s addressing of environmental issues. It includes this,
Indoctrination, anyone?
People like Monckton are facing an uphill battle because their opponents are both powerful and utterly shameless.
What, Mike? You’re not going to buy one of these, touted all over the intarweb prior to the holidays, or your little ones? You cynic!
Hey, who’s going to write, Why Daddy Thinks Mommy’s Full of Shit?
Ivan–
Serious people, like ourselves, understand that the labels polemic and rhetoric are only two ways that morons have of dismissing what they disagree with, particularly when they’ve nothing substantial to base their disagreement on.
Religion finds the cause of global warming.
“Commie environmentalists are under my bed! Save me Capitalist superman! Oops, I just wet myself.”
This is simply ludicrous. Even if you have the shallow mindset that this is some kind of culture war, how do you conclude that the Sierra club and some filmmakers are more powerful than the pro-business lobby? Considering the amount of money they throw at lobbyists, “think-tanks”, PR blitzes, etc… you’d think they would have a fighting chance against, uh, Al Gore. Is capitalism so weak it cannot beat back a bunch of penguins?
heet–
I’m interested in the truth. If the claims of the global enviro-lobby are untrue, and I think that they are, then I want to know why they’re so attached to them. If you’ve got a better theory, please float it.
Dan,
If there was a logical or even plausible reason for the enviro-lobby to purposefully lie, I’d love to know it, too. A previous post on PW suggested the reason is to enact a global super government of some kind. Does that sound plausible to you? It sounds batshit-crazy to me.
Who is more likely to lie?
1. Mulitnational companies that can potentially make $billions if people ignored GW.
2. Scientists and the UN who can potentially make, uh, how exactly can they make money on this one?
I can just imagine the image that comes into his/her head when ‘heet’ thinks of business. Picture a dozen guys in tuxedoes and top hats, just like that little monopoly guy, all puffing away on cigars or cigarettes in those little holders, laughing away as they plot to steal grannies mortgage and dump evil toxic stuff down the well, just because they can.
Holywood is a business. Companies that have invested in solar and wind power are businesses. There are a lot of businesses that do not have a stake one way or another in potential solutions to global warming that are run by liberal people. All those NGOs and PACs that make money from people concerned about the environment are businesses.
Countries like France that have an economic incentive to promote a specific political solution to global warming whether or not it actually is a problem are… not businesses. They’re governments, and their power is significantly greater than any business.
You may like your world political issues settled by which side can get more sympathetic cartoonists to do movies and put comic strips in the local paper. If that’s the way you want to go, let us know, and we’ll settle it your way. Meanwhile I’ll stick to debating the facts.
heet,
Do you have any idea what Kyoto says?
I’m not even saying that a lot of them are lying. The fact is that these people, like all people, love to feel that they are at the center of what really matters at this unique watershed moment for the entire human race. It makes what one does seem very romantic. It makes one’s opinions seem very important. I imagine it’s quite flattering.
So, please tell us how much money the govt of France is making by pushing their version of global warming? Also, tell us how the money made by those NGOs compares with the money made by oil companies and the money spent by business in general b/c of related regulations?
Dan,
Without a doubt they like to feel important and wanted, don’t we all? I’m skeptical that these ephemeral feelings, and their related actions, can trump the very real drive to make that money. A staunch capitalist such as yourself can surely agree with that, yes?
You’re kidding, right? Complying with current energy regulations costs each and every business money. If they could convince everyone that there is no reason to believe in anthropogenic GW, they’d pay less for energy.
Well, let me see. If I recall correctly, Kyoto calls for reductions in CO2 emissions by industrialized countries down to a 1990 level. The US is growing significantly more than France and the rest of Europe, so it would have to impose more draconian restrictions on its economy to reach that goal. This would in effect give France and other European countries an economic advantage over the US.
It’s all a matter of power. Let me put this in a way you might be able to understand. The following is an example that may make sense to a liberal mindset.
The anti-abortion lobby doesn’t have any significant money to gain from opposing abortion and the businesses that promote it. Therefore anything they say should be taken as the truth.
Spot the fallacy? Environmental NGOs have specific policy objectives above and beyond soliciting donations from wealthy and gullible people. They’re not in it for the money; they’re in it to achieve specific changes to government policy.
Besides, there’s more evidence than that. Why have all the environmental organizations that claim global warming is such a big threat remained opposed to nuclear power, to the point where European countries were closing nuclear plants at the behest of the Greens knowing that it would cause them to miss their Kyoto goals?
If that doesn’t persuade you heet, I have one more thing to say. Read carefully:
BUSINESS!! BUSINESS!!! BUSINESS CONTROLS YOUR LIFE!!! FEAR BUSINESS!!!! FEAR!!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Force of habit.
Nowhere did I mention Kyoto but you guys keep talking about it. Last time I looked, we didn’t ratify it. I think you have a legit point there, however. But this is a bad analogy:
Abortionists make tons of money on killing babies? Lemme ask you this – would an OBGyn make more on one abortion procedure or on a pregnancy to term? You get one guess.
Frankly, the greens need to forget their anti-nuke policy. I’m not sure I follow your line of reasoning here.
As for the rest, please replace “BUSINESS” with “LIBERAL”, stir, and enjoy over ice.
Money is not the sole corruptor of people. Power, ideology, sex, etc., all sorts of motivations exist for people to lie or twist facts or evidence. At least two from this list could be attributed to both the enviro-lobby and the UN.
Heet, the answer is simple, and complex.
What you’re looking at is the last, desperate push of the philosophical descendants of Charles Martel for ascendancy. The matter is more in the balance than it should be, because the rest of the world didn’t have the compressed experience Europe had. That gives the elitists more allies than they should have.
When the Roman Empire fell apart, the economy it had built and fostered died as well. In the resulting isolated little hegemonies, strongmen of one type or another seized leadership and began administering their polities according to the old-fashioned notion of “the strong oppress the weak according to their respective strengths.”
The problem with that was that it didn’t create wealth. That system never does—it’s champion at collecting it, and passing it out to family and buddies, but it’s the pits for achieving overall prosperity. So the kingdoms and princedoms festered, growing slowly if at all.
The only bright spot was that the Romans had supported commerce, and the remains of that—the roads, the systems of inns and hostels, the very habit of long-distance trade—remained. In the remnants of that system, traders prospered. People who were willing, at great effort, to take things from where they were to where they were needed accumulated wealth.
The princes needed that wealth to support their self-destructive policies, but not even they could justify simply stealing it, at least at first—they needed a philosophical justification. The Church supplied that, by perverting Christian teaching. Christ taught that rich people were too attentive to the trivialities of the World, and were therefore less likely than the poor to achieve salvation. The modified version of that made being rich a matter of evil—and took a teaching that Christ had specifically rejected, that it’s OK, even virtuous, to be cruel to bad people, and made it a basic rule. Voila! It was not merely OK, it was virtuous, to rob the traders—they were rich, and the princes weren’t (at least not rich enough to satisfy themselves), so the princes were perfectly justified in taking whatever they wanted.
That slimy collusion between the Church and the (real!) robber barons is where your suspicion of “business” comes from. When later thinkers, culminnating in Marx, came along, they just took that notion and extended it. There’s a lot of justification to the notion that Marxism is just another Christian heresy. Marx’s interpretations bid fair to be identical to those of the early Church—and his followers extended that to the whole system. Robin Hood was just as happy to rob a “fat Abbott” as anyone else. The Abbott was technically poor, in that he owned nothing—it all belonged to the Church—but he never missed meals or froze in a ditch. The good, self-righteous bureaucrat nowadays isn’t rich—oh, no! he takes a salary, to support his modest needs. See the analogy?
But the Princes and the Church exhausted themselves in contests between the factions, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, which left the “nobility” discredited (and broke) and the Church hanging on by the skin of its teeth despite its accumulated wealth. The traders, the businessmen, achieved ascendancy, and the result is the system we now inhabit. It ought to be obvious that wealth is made, not “intrinsic”. At the time of the founding of the United States there were probably fewer than half a billion people on the planet, all but a vanishingly small number of them starving. We now have six billion, two billion of whom eat well and the rest better off, on average, than their ancestors were two and a half centuries ago. Population increased by a factor of twelve, and the result eats better, on average. Where did it come from?
The Princes and the Church survived largely because early industrialization had to be done with primitive economic systems—it was hard to accumulate little bits of wealth into large enough piles of swag to build factories with, and the people who already had piles of swag were able to accommodate the demand. That’s where Marx came in, and his description of the system at the time is pretty damned accurate. Too bad he never noticed that the system that was really needed, the ability to assemble capital from smaller and smaller individual sources, was already in place and growing. Nor did he notice that the system of “private property” was changing out of recognition. Despite what the libertarians will tell you, private property is an offshoot of the desire of the Princes to buy off their relatives and share the loot with their enforcers and goons. Marx saw that, and decried it, but never figured out that a modification of the notion could serve as the underlying rationale for overturning the original—and his proposals—almost completely.
And the Princes and the Church didn’t give up, and the fact that they’d been ascendant so long gave them the stake to defend themselves. They want their positions back, and their biggest advantage is the propaganda campaign launched by the early Medieval Church to support the Princes’ desire to rob the traders with impunity. After all, you believe it totally: that it is somehow vile to be rich; that it is virtuous to be cruel to bad people; and that, therefore, robbing the rich is a virtuous act. Which is bullshit. Robbery is robbery. Furthermore, implicit in your assumptions is the concept of wealth as zero sum—if A is rich, he must of necessity have gotten it from B (or some combination of Bs). Again, that’s bullshit. It has to be, or what are six billion people eating?
No, the rich aren’t specially virtuous, either—they’re people, good, bad, and indifferent. But business is a special category. Business makes trade, and trade makes wealth. Break the cycle anywhere, and you get China.
The characteristic of Europe is upheaval. We Europeans are more vicious, more violent, than Asians are on the average, and the result is that for us, the Roman Empire (six centuries, more or less) was extraordinarily long-lived—whereas in China, that would be considered an especially ephemeral dynasty. China developed more by slow evolution than Europe did, so Chinese society could rationally be considered more “natural” than ours. And notice what it looks like, absent the import of Western notions—a rigid class system, a micromanaging mandarinate, and a very few Princes at the top of the heap. Look familiar? None of that nasty old “business”. None of the wealth creation, either.
You and a lot of people support the envirowhackies and the Socialists because it “feels right”, and it feels right because it is right, that is, the natural way for humans to live. But “natural” isn’t always good. If you really do want your descendants to live “naturally”, that is, to regard staring all day at the south end of a northbound mule as a pinnacle of achievement few will reach, just go on as you are. Some of us will be doing our best to frustrate you, though.
Regards,
Ric
It was a really slow time around the Kingdom, wasn’t much going on at all. Suddenly, this little nobody named monkyboy came hauling ass into town screaming “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
Normally nobody would have paid him much attention, but since it was slow a buzz started amongst the rabble, so the King decided to look into it.
“Merlin!” he shouted. “What you got going on right now?” Knowing full well Merlin had nothing happening, and had been out trying to drum up business for weeks. So he sent Merlin out with monkyboy to investigate. The local newspaper man was bored as hell too, so he decided to tag along.
So they all go out to where the sky fell, which happened to be right under an apple tree. Merlin took one look and said, “It wasn’t the sky, monkyboy, it was a fucking apple fell and hit you on the head.”
Monkyboy said, “Oh, yeah? Then where is the apple? Huh? Smart guy?”
Merlin pointed at the fresh deer tracks on the ground “I would imagine a deer ate it”
And they all went back to town. Merlin was back to looking for work. The newspaper headlines that day said: King Determines Sky is Not Falling, so the townspeople walked right past the newstand, laughing at the King and not bothering to buy a paper.
Merlin, being a professional Wizard, realized this was not the optimum outcome for him, and decided to take a mulligan.
So they all go out to where the sky fell, which happened to be right under an apple tree.
“Hmmmm” said Merlin, “seems to be a mystery, indeed!”
“Don’t you think it was probably just an apple?” said the newspaperman.
“Perhaps” said Merlin, “but then where is the apple? If it were an apple we would see it, the sky is hard to really see, right? And since there seems to be nothing to see here, it leads me to believe it may be the sky! I think we definitely need to investigate further!”
So they all went back to town to make their reports. Merlin somberly told his story to the King, who gave him a large grant to investigate monkyboy’s story. The newspaper headling said: Sky May Be Falling! King is investigating! It was selling like hotcakes and people were pleased with the King’s diligence.
And they all lived happily ever after.
In this case your thesis that these groups that have little or no monitary gain from an issue must therefore have no reason to lie is even more absurd. Like it or not, that then just about describes both sides of the gun control and abortion debates. (Any comparison is likely to be inexact)
My reason for using the nuclear argument was simple. If global warming is such an important issue, you’d think the environmental lobbies would get behind it one hundred percent. But no, they’re willing to pursue their other policy objectives even to the point of harming the fight against global warming.
And of course you ignore Kyoto. It is the current de facto example of what an treaty to combat global warming will look like, and is currently what the environmental NGOs are basing their policy recommendations on. You’re right it got voted down overwhelmingly.
One further suggestion. Use the internet and look up who donates to all those environmental groups you’re so fond of. You’ll find that most of the donations are from businesses or people who made their money in business. Remember: you’re not paranoid if THEY’RE really out to get you…
I’ll keep asking this question until I get a response that makes any kind of sense (notice I dropped the logical qualification). What will sending vast sums of domestic taxpayer $$$$$$$$$$$$ abroad (to non-complying Kyoto signatories) do to curb emssions here ?
Guess another thread dies from a simple question.
GWQ is real (to an insignicant point), but NO ONE can pin it on human influence.
Check out this place. It’s got apretty nifty page about GW.
The partr I have trouble with, is how do we humans make so much CO2 that we are melting the ice caps on Mars?