I'm against most things the Greens say
about biotech, agriculture, genetics and medicine.
Much of it is provably false.
The Green movement is largely a movement that does not believe
in science and reason,
and often even explicitly rejects it.
I'm sceptical about their claims of looming apocalypse
due to climate change or population growth.
The threat of apocalypse due to
nuclear-armed communism
seemed real to me.
Apocalypse due to
nuclear-armed Islamism, or other future tyranny,
seems real to me.
Apocalypse due to peaceful consumerism seems far-fetched.
There might be climate change issues in the future,
but whether they will be apocalyptic I am not yet convinced.
We shall see.
I'm against almost everything the Greens say
about economics, trade, war, terror and international politics.
That's because it's just standard socialist nonsense.
I'm big into
preserving old buildings,
and preserving endangered species, but I'm afraid that
much of the other things the Greens campaign for leave me cold.
Many of the Green campaigns look to me
driven by a fear of wealth, science, technology and knowledge,
and a preference for mysticism, ignorance and
New Age mumbo-jumbo.
UK temperature
since 1659.
Are we simply warming up after the
Little Ice Age
(16th cent to 19th cent),
and returning to something like the
Medieval Warm Period
(10th cent to 14th cent),
or is it something more sinister?
Temperature in C from
Greenland ice core.
It does show a recent warming,
but one that started in the early 19th century,
and also a modest one compared to the
Medieval Warm Period,
which itself is modest compared to earlier historical warm periods.
History of medicine
and its struggles against the superstition of religion.
The story continues today in its struggles against the superstition of the greens.
Le Carre's propaganda overdose
by Cristina Odone
- In defence of multinational pharmaceutical companies,
and their aid to the third world.
Comparison
by Alan Charles Kors
of the ban on cloning
with the ignorant
18th century ban on innoculation,
which ban was also maintained
by primitive, superstitious enemies of science and humanity,
in this case theologians rather than Greens.
Ronald Bailey
is good on defending science against the modern successors
to the medieval theologians.
I'm not opposed to
animal rights.
I would grant a sliding scale of rights to human unborn,
primates,
and higher animals.
But one must recognise that the use of animals in medicine
is a great social good, saving thousands (maybe millions)
of human lives.
(And, incidentally, animal lives
- where do you think vet treatments come from?)
What exactly can be done with animals can be debated in each case,
but it is an issue that should be resolved by
democratic debate, not by violence.
Vegetarianism and veganism make some moral sense,
but it's hard / impossible to fight evolution on this one.
Nature evolved us as animals (exploiters of plants)
and predators (exploiters of animals).
It's not our fault.
Not respecting this in
children
in particular
can be a form of child abuse.
Is it really happening?
I am not qualified to say if global warming is happening or not.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was,
and there are certainly heavy-duty scientists behind it,
but it is funny how conveniently it meshes
with left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist ideology,
and westerners' post-religious need to feel guilty
about their fantastic prosperity and consumer riches.
It may be just a coincidence.
But it's quite an amazing coincidence.
How bad will it be?
It's not enough to say that changing the climate is scary. I agree.
It would be better not to do it.
But how bad will it really be?
Maybe it will just be a problem that we can adapt to,
and that can be reversed as technology (e.g. of cars) changes in the future.
We need to compare the cost of global warming with the cost of the solution,
and then make a rational decision as to which one is worse.
In particular, the proposed "solution"
to global warming seems to be to reduce development
and to keep the
third world
undeveloped (i.e. starving and poor).
It seems to me that is worse than global warming.
In short, if global warming is happening,
the greens need to tell us how we can be rich, developed,
consumerist, drive cars,
and still avoid global warming.
If the choice is between poverty and global warming, then
any sane person should choose global warming,
as the price we reluctantly have to pay for prosperity.
If the greens don't like that, they have to give us another choice.
The movie The Day After Tomorrow
hilariously makes my points for me.
They obviously felt that showing a slightly warmer planet would not be very scary,
so they claimed that
what would actually happen would be
global cooling.
The movie thus
tacitly admits that:
Global warming may not be armageddon.
That's why they didn't show it - because it's not scary.
Global warming theory is rather new and speculative
- otherwise how could they get away with showing global cooling
and still be applauded by their fellow greens?
In truth,
scientists have difficulty predicting whether climate will
warm,
cool,
not change at all, or just change locally.
Why?
Because climate is practically the definition of a complex, chaotic system.
You can try to simulate such a system,
but you do not really know what will happen
short of trying it out.
Global warming theory is new and speculative, and
hardly has the same status in science as, say, the theory of evolution.
To repeat, global warming theory is one of the more speculative theories of science.
There is a long history of
failed predictions
in this kind of field.
I am old enough to remember, for example,
the great fear in the 1970s
of the world population explosion.
The predictions made about this turn out to have been nonsense
(Europe, for example, is facing a population crash),
so it is hard to take the green doom-mongers seriously about a new topic.
I agree people should be cautious,
and I agree that we should be looking at new technology that impacts less on the environment.
But I'm just explaining why I'm not very worried so far.
If global warming is happening,
then technology, not rustic poverty, will be the answer:
If global warming is happening, the only solution that will
actually work
will be a technological one.
That is, new technology to stop (and reverse) global warming,
yet still let us be rich, own houses and drive cars.
No solution based on returning to rustic poverty will work.
The third world must become rich like us, and own
houses and cars like us.
It's up to us to invent technology to ensure that can happen without
ruining the environment. I'm sure we can do it.
Average for 1951-80: 14.00 ° C.
1997: 14 + 0.40 = 14.40 ° C.
1998: 14 + 0.70 = 14.70 ° C.
1999: 14 + 0.43 = 14.43 ° C.
2000: 14 + 0.40 = 14.40 ° C.
2001: 14 + 0.56 = 14.56 ° C.
2002: 14 + 0.67 = 14.67 ° C.
2003: 14 + 0.65 = 14.65 ° C.
2004: 14 + 0.58 = 14.58 ° C.
2005: 14 + 0.75 = 14.75 ° C.
2006: 14 + 0.64 = 14.64 ° C.
2007: 14 + 0.72 = 14.72 ° C.
2008: 14 + 0.55 = 14.55 ° C.
That is, clear evidence of a warming in the late 20th century,
but not so much recently.
While temperature rose in the 20th century before 1998,
I must say that the last decade or so
doesn't look very scary.
Certainly,
the actual figures above seem quite a contrast to the alarmism that everyone
is meant to believe in.
Average global temperature in ° C
since 1880.
Graphic is from
here.
Data is
the Dec-Nov averages from NASA GISTEMP above.
At no point since records began in 1880 did average global temperature
go down to 13 ° C
or up to 15 ° C.
Natural disasters
There is a claim that natural disasters are getting worse because of climate change.
There is very little evidence for this.
Obama asserts that climate change
is already causing disasters:
"the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. ...
Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.
More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.
More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.
On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees."
The evidence for all these confident assertions is
pretty weak.
Some data in response to Obama's UN speech above
notes that deaths from storms, floods and droughts have not increased.
If the Greens lie about this, it is hard to totally trust them on more opaque topics
such as temperature and sea level.
Review of the book
makes a great point about how the left used to want people to be prosperous:
"It was not that long ago that the main complaint of left wing critics of the American economy was that it produced poverty and appalling social conditions. "Capitalism" was simply a code word for the rich getting richer and everyone else getting poorer.
... while the original critique was flawed, the sentiment was one of generating wealth for average Americans. Even as late as 1962 .. this sentiment still dominated left wing politics. How things have changed.
Today, the political left is "green" and their main complaint is not that capitalism produces poverty. They know capitalism produces affluence. And they oppose it. Americans, they complain, consume "too much" and need to make do with less, because the planet is threatened ... Global warming is only the latest of their concerns, having replaced the completely discredited 'population bomb' threatened in the late 1960s. And their proposed solutions .. are truly frightening. The old left proposals did not produce affluence, but the new "green" proposals will surely accomplish their goal of impoverishing people".
As I say above,
environmentalism (or at least some of it) may be true,
but it is funny how conveniently it fits in with left-wing anti-capitalist ideology,
and our post-religious need to feel guilty
about our fantastic prosperity and consumer riches.
It may be just a coincidence. But it's quite an amazing coincidence.
"certain human social
structures always reappear. They can't be
eliminated from society. One of those structures is
religion
...
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the
Western World is environmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice
for urban atheists."
"The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real
nature. What people want is to spend a week or two
in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the
windows. They want a simplified life for a while,
without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a
few days, with somebody else doing the cooking.
Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way,
and nobody does. It's all talk - and as the years go on,
and the world population grows increasingly urban,
it's uninformed talk.
...
It's all fantasy."
"We know from history that
religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism
has already killed somewhere between 10-30
million people since the 1970s."
Without, of course, giving up his
"elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue".
Or his computer.
Or his cleaning lady, for heaven's sake.
The guilt that sensitive westerners like him feel, and the absurdity of that guilt,
is replicated throughout the western world.
As Scott Burgess notes, this is very much like
traditional religious guilt,
mortification
and
flagellation.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods
by Henry David Thoreau (published 1854)
shows that guilt-ridden green asceticism has been around for a long time.
A wealthy, university-educated man, in his late 20s,
with no wife and no children to support,
lives a simple life "in the woods"
in 1845-47,
and then
tells us we should all live
in some back to nature style,
and that our own lives are pathetic and conformist.
He famously says:
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Timothy Sandefur on Thoreau:
"Thoreau's ignorance of economics is absolute. His hostility to material prosperity and spiritual invocations to "simplify" are nothing more than the old asceticism of Savanarola tranplanted into a quaint country cabin. "Trade curses everything it handles," for instance. Yeah, right - unless you have a family to provide for.
...
And how it is expressed! In aphorisms as trite as they are stupid. Oh, yes, many men are owned by their houses. Very deep from a man who at the age of thirty has no wife and children to shelter; no small business to finance through a mortgage; who lives on a sinecure from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
...
There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who "starve for want of luxuries." But it is always easy to regard another man's things as superficial and another man's pursuits as greedy, while one's own belongings have sentimental value and one's own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences). It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access."
What is really funny is that while Thoreau
lived "in the woods",
his mother, who lived nearby, delivered meals to him every week.
His family wealth, of course, was based on commerce and trade.
Asceticism
- There is a long history of guilt-ridden believers
mortifying their body to do penance for the world.
Cilices
- undergarments that torment the flesh
(e.g. hairshirts).
Sadhus
- Hindu ascetics, some of whom practice extreme mortification,
such as
vowing never to use one leg,
standing on one leg for years,
holding an arm in the air for years,
or
remaining silent for years.
Stylites
- the ancient Christian ascetics
who sat on pillars in the desert for years.
Other mortification included standing upright for years,
and a hermit who for decades never turned his face to the West.
St Simeon the Stylite
lived for 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar in Syria.
The fucking loony.
Of course most greens are wealthy urban consumers,
who often lead a far more extravagant lifestyle
than I do (e.g. I fly less than once a year).
They have to struggle with this hypocrisy and their feelings of guilt.
I just laugh at them.
Al Gore's mansion in Nashville
consumes more electricity every month
than the average American household uses in an entire year.
And this is just one of his multiple homes.
And see update.
"Thanks to carbon offsets, Al Gore keeps his mansion
- and still feels good while warning others we all can't live as he does."
"George Soros ...
can lavishly fund liberal causes such as left-wing think tanks,
Web sites and ballot initiatives - and thereby offset his millions made speculating on exchange rates
and bankrupting small depositors."
"John Edwards ...
lives in a 30,000-square-foot home, gets $400 haircuts and recently made a lot of cash
by working for a profit-driven, cutthroat hedge fund.
How's he supposed to alleviate his guilt over this? Presto!
He can lecture others about the inequity of an American system
that unfairly created two unequal societies"
The Live Earth concerts, July 2007,
burned more carbon in a day than 3,000 average Britons do in a year.
Estimate:
"Its total carbon footprint, including the artists and spectators' travel and energy consumption, was likely to have been at least 31,500 tonnes".
More:
"The most conservative assessment of the flights being taken by its superstars is that they are flying an extraordinary 222,623 miles between them to get to the various concerts - nearly 9 times the circumference of the world.
...
The total carbon footprint of the event .. is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes
...
Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces 10 tonnes in a year.
The concert will also generate some 1,025 tonnes of waste at the concert stadiums - much of which will go directly into landfill sites."
And of course we are being lectured to on our destructive habits by
obscenely wealthy multi-millionaires
whose habits are a thousand times worse than ours:
"an audit of the lifestyles of the A-list performers appearing at Live Earth, reveals that they are among the worst individual polluters in the world, as their world tours and private jets billow thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. One hour in a Gulfstream jet burns as much fuel as driving a family car for a year.
The Daily Mail has found that five of the top performing acts together have an annual output of almost 2,000 carbon tonnes. Madonna alone has an annual carbon footprint of 1,018 tonnes ...
Remember, the average Briton produces just 10 tonnes.
...
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has learnt that Bon Jovi left the UK this week to travel back by private jet to the U.S. to perform at the New York stadium for the American leg of Live Earth."
With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming, 30 Mar 2007.
John Travolta encouraged his fans to "do their bit" to tackle global warming.
He himself owns 5 private jets.
"Clocking up at least 30,000 flying miles in the past 12 months means he has produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions - nearly 100 times the average Briton's tally.
...
Travolta's five private planes - a customised £2million Boeing 707, three Gulfstream jets and a Lear jet - are kept at the bottom of his garden in the US next to a private runway."
Travolta
commutes by private jet
5 days a week.
Harrison Ford
campaigns for the rain forest, saying:
"When rainforests get slashed and burned, it releases tonnes of carbon into the air we breathe. It changes our climate. It hurts."
However, he owns a number of private aircraft, and says:
"I often fly up the coast for a cheeseburger."
Arnold Schwarzenegger
commutes by private jet to his office.
"Some environmentalists say the trips expand his carbon footprint enough to undermine his image as a crusader against global warming, despite the pollution credits he buys to offset the damage."
No kidding.
"The governor's Gulfstream jet does nearly as much damage to the environment in one hour as a small car does in a year".
As Libertas says:
"People like Schwarzenegger and Al Gore, those who claim to study global warming and believe in it, aren't acting like there's a crisis. Why the hell should I?"
In 2009, Trudie Styler (Sting's wife)
took a private jet from New York to Washington DC for the
White House correspondents' dinner. She was accompanied by an 8-person entourage, which included her Manhattan-based hair guru.
Previously she made an 80-mile journey to the home of fellow environmentalist Zac Goldsmith by helicopter.
Wikipedia
says:
"Sting owns several homes worldwide, including Elizabethan manor house Lake House and its 60-acre country estate near Salisbury in Wiltshire, England, a country cottage in the Lake District, a New York City apartment, a beach house in Malibu, California, a 600-acre (2.4 km2) estate in Tuscany, Italy, and two properties in London".
Michelle Malkin
is hilarious on the hypocrisy of the modern
urban "greens",
from the Hollywood celebrities with their private jets
to the liberal-left upper middle-class
with their regular flights, second homes and multiple foreign holidays.
I don't mind them being wealthy and travelling.
I just think they ought to shut up lecturing the rest of us.
A commenter on the ridiculous green ad
by the immensely wealthy multi-millionaires Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow:
"You have GOT to be kidding. Those two wasted more energy and causing more pollution
MAKING THEIR COMMERCIAL than I do in a year. The private jets and giant SUVs
THEY drive everywhere do more environmental damage in a day than I do in a decade.
And they're lecturing me?"
Prince Charles
The immensely wealthy "green"
Prince Charles
generated more than 1,500 tons of carbon dioxide in 2006
(the average British person emits 10 tons per year).
Charles and Camilla flew 70,000 miles in 2006 alone
(the average British or American person flies 1,000 miles per year).
"In January he travelled first class to the United States with Camilla and 14 aides,
where he picked up an environmental awareness award.
...
In February he hired an Airbus A319, which can seat 140 people, to carry him,
Camilla and 23 aides to the Gulf at taxpayers' expense.
...
In May Camilla .. took a private jet to Greece for a short break with friends."
Meanwhile back home, the carbon dioxide emissions of
Charles's three homes
are equivalent to the emissions of 500 average houses.
2,200 mile tour by private jet by Prince Charles to promote environmental issues, 25th April 2009.
He hires private jet for tour of Europe to promote environmental issues.
The Prince and Duchess, plus 10 staff, fly from London to Rome, then Venice and Berlin,
back to Britain.
Instead of using scheduled flights, they hire a private plane.
The 5-day trip leaves a carbon footprint of 53 tons - nearly 5 times the average person's 11-ton footprint for an entire year.
The Prince also used a private jet on a controversial 16,000-mile tour of South America in February 2009 as part of his crusade against global warming.
Prince Charles warns that climate change will drive starvation and terrorism, Dec 2009.
Of course, starvation is mostly caused by third world government,
and terrorism is mostly caused by Islam.
But how nice to be able to blame middle-class western consumers instead!
To deliver this important message to the world, Prince Charles flew from Britain to Copenhagen
"by private jet".
Prince Charles totally opposed the Iraq War,
mocked Blair,
and
believes the root cause of terror and violence in the Middle East
is not Islamism and Arab dictatorship
but rather "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict".
An Open Letter
(also here)
by Richard Dawkins
to the fuzzy-headed Prince Charles.
Nice for some:
From 1970 to 2008, Prince Charles
drove
a 4 litre, 280 bhp,
13 mpg,
150 mph
Aston Martin DB6 Volante.
In 2008, after 38 years of driving,
in a fine example of token greenery,
he converted it to run on
bioethanol.
Image from here.
See terms of use.
Radical environmentalism, if taken seriously,
threatens billions of innocent people with starvation and death.
Of course, radical environmentalism is only a pose
by people who live comfortable lives
in a wealthy, inter-connected,
industrial consumer society,
and it will never be adopted en masse.
But it is interesting to consider that it is the only major, popular philosophy
that, if it were actually adopted,
would threaten the human species itself
with global death and extinction.
As Scott Burgess
notes,
if everyone lived like "No Impact" man,
urban civilization (i.e. all civilization) would quickly collapse,
hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people would die,
and the world would return to the stone age.
"Eventually some kind of equilibrium may be reached
- a low-population, low-lifespan, pre-industrial world in which
the material and intellectual achievements of the last thousand years or so;
such as, for example, the extension of human lifespan
and mass inter-generational transmission of knowledge (no paper!) are wiped away."
Towards a Deep Green Stone Age by Scott Burgess, March 27, 2007
- He finds some radical environmentalists who actually admire the Stone Age.
And they want to use violence to get us there.
"their .. aim - to
bomb us back to the stone age.
Literally."
Make Wealth History
are at least honest about it.
Socialists pretended they weren't going to make everyone poor.
The Cambodia democide
of 1975-79
was all about back-to-nature,
empty the cities,
anti-property, organic food produced with no technology, and alternative, non-western medicine.
If you want to know what society the radical environmentalists would lead to,
just look at the Khmer Rouge.
Pull down the castles
(or via here),
by Melanie Reid
- A writer in The Herald, 25 Apr 2006,
actually advocates destroying Scotland's heritage,
apparently
because it offends in some way her unexplained
(socialist? green?)
beliefs.
The spirit of Marx, Lenin, Mao
and the other barbarians and destroyers
is still very much alive.
"Think of how liberating it would be if we could flatten such divisive symbols, escape from their faux-ancient yoke, and start to enjoy the freedom to build afresh; to design modern buildings for a technological age. I'm talking about buildings scaled to the lives people must lead in the future, not to the empty reassertion of status and excess. Society has changed. Tomorrow's enemy - the global shortage of energy, the prospect of a world reduced to a husk - is a far more grave one than we realise."
I suggest that tomorrow's enemy is, as it has always been, people like her.
Eco-terrorism in Ireland
Eco-terrorism came to Ireland in 2007,
when disturbed Englishman
Noah Bunn
attacked one of the most beautiful roads in Dublin,
Eglinton Rd,
and burnt the beautiful old headquarters of the
Jesuits.
Bunn, from Northampton, age 26,
destroyed an invaluable library and irreplaceable old Jesuit records
in an arson attack.
He was a member of
Friends of the Earth,
and destroyed the house
because he believed the Jesuit order
"were not using their moral authority to alert the world to the dangers of climate change".
The wonderful alternative to green poverty and terror
is that we use our fantastic human brains,
and our ever-improving science and technology,
to make the entire world rich and comfortable like us,
while preserving (and even improving) the planet.
I'm sure we can do it.
Science, democracy and capitalism will save both the planet and the third world.
In favour of capitalism
- Enjoy wealth. Stop making people feel guilty about it.
Let's make everybody wealthy!
Low-cost airlines have liberated the ordinary people of the West.
At last, the lower middle-class can visit the Continent too.
Or go to New York at least once in their lives.
It is not just rich people like Al Gore and Prince Charles
that can do this now.
"no one was putting forward a positive case for the social benefits of increased mobility.
The particular debate [on airports and airlines]
was mired in a false opposition between the economic case (put forward by government and business) and supposed environmental collapse (put forward by green campaigners). There is more to transport and travel than these competing alternatives.
Flying is a freedom millions have only recently been able to afford.
... lower fares and faster transport ultimately give people more time and money to do the things that matter. The majority continue to vote with their feet by taking flights .. while they can still afford to."
"Crush a Third World Economic Development Movement. One of the most pressing threats facing our environment is rising income in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A generation ago these proud little dark people were happily frolicking in the rain forest, foraging for organic foods amid the wonders of nature. Today, corrupted by wealth, they are demanding environmentally hazardous consumer goods like cars and air conditioning and malaria medicine. You can do your part to stop this dangerous consumerism trend by supporting environmentally progressive leaders like Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe, and their programs for sustainable low-impact ecolabor camps."
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008).
Earth is invaded by genocidal alien eco-nutcases.
To "save" the planet,
these cold alien bastards
plan to exterminate every human being,
and destroy all our works, our libraries, our science,
our art, our buildings,
our history.
This film is a
grim warning of the dangers of deep green extremism.
Or at least it would be, if not for one bizarre thing:
We are actually meant to sympathise with the aliens.
We are meant to
agree that humans are destroying the planet
(a claim that everyone in the film accepts without question).
We are actually meant to
agree with the humans who beg forgiveness for their "sins",
and beg for a chance to exist.
At the end, humans are allowed to exist (for now) by the alien overlords,
but all human machines are destroyed.
Cars, oil, electricity - all must cease.
There is then an absurd shot as humans listen to birdsong that the machine noise had drowned out.
Not shown is what happens next - global famine and democide.
If all human machines were destroyed, at least 1 billion people would die in agony,
perhaps 5 billion.
And yet we are meant to think it wonderful that city folk can hear birds singing!
Are there people so nutty in their green beliefs that they sympathise with this film?
It seems so.
Maybe this film is a warning - a warning of a small-scale green democide
that some group of starry-eyed believers
will carry out this century.
Theodore Dalrymple
has a nice line on how green theory is both
incredibly speculative (with a weak track record so far of successful predictions)
and yet incredibly arrogant (it almost wants its critics banned or
prosecuted):
"though Monbiot
says that it is uncertain that anything we do now will make any difference, he nevertheless proposes that every human being on the earth follow his prescriptions."
Since 1995.
