Christopher Booker has a great article in the Telegraph titled Watch the web for climate change truths, which shows that The One True Faith of Anthropogenic Global Warming, having used the internet to preach their gospel, are going to have a hard time suppressing global warming non-conformists using the ‘net to do the same.
Last November, viewing photographs of a snowless Snowdon at an exhibition in Cardiff, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson, said “we must act now to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change”. Yet virtually no coverage has been given to the abnormally deep spring snow which prevented the completion of a new building on Snowdon’s summit for more than a month, and nearly made it miss the deadline for £4.2 million of EU funding.
[…]
On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a “tipping point” where “irreversible change” takes place. This was based on last September’s data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million. What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded
So not such a bad time to be a polar bear after all. It is also nice to see in-article out-linking to a source on a newspaper site.
Also Daniel Hannan has a Telegraph blog article called How bad does the UN have to get? which presents the difference between the ideals and reality of that vast organisation, mentioning ivory poaching, the Iraq food-for-oil scandal, the betrayal of Bosnian Muslims massacred in Srebrenica and the appalling UN role in the Rwanda genocide. However the most interesting part for me was in the comments, a defender of the UN replied thusly:
I don’t think you have bothered to give us enough information regarding the various allegations you have made about the UN.
There isn’t enough information on the Bosnian Muslims being betrayed for any of us, lefties or righties, to make a reasonable assessment. Where in the chain of command did this betrayal happen? What, exactly, was the UN betrayal of these Muslims? What else was the UN doing in Bosnia and in regard to Bosnia at the same time, so that we can come to some opinion as to whether what happened in Srebrenica was a small part or a large part of the total UN activities there in that region?
Was the oil-for-food scam [in Iraq] the activity of a small group of UN employees or was it what all UN staff were engaged in directly or indirectly? We don’t know because you haven’t told us! Was the UN institutionally guilty right through all its employees for the oil-for-food scam or was it down to a few individuals, whom the UN may have disciplined in some way by now? You didn’t tell us!
What were the UN reasons for not seizing the arms caches [in Rwanda]? We need to know! Did they make a mistake in not realising that the genocide would follow? A mistake is not corruption nor is it a failure to deliver overall.
So we need more information before rushing to judgement. That is a very representative defence of the UN of the sort I have heard for years. It is the equivalent of the time hallowed tactic of a UK minister responding to embarrassing questions by saying “we must hold an enquiry before rushing to judgement” in the knowledge that by the time the enquiry gets under way, said embarrassing news will be months or even years in the past and the the headlines have vanished down the memory hole, allowing harsh reality to be safely reinterpreted into something more ‘nuanced’ and the gravy trains will still keep running along their well polished rails undisturbed… except in the cases of Srebrenica, Food-for-Oil and Rwanda, the nasty truths are very well documented and understood. All this is only ten seconds of typing and click of the Google button away.
The internet really does change almost everything.
Yes, the internet is marvellous. but you have to be able to use it freely. As an offshoot of the topic of this post, I would like to ask what the Samizdatistas’ stance on net neutrality is?
Terrible idea.
Simply Googling Claudia Rosset gets you a series of articles on the Oil for Food scam that names names in the best traditions of investigative journalism and which should have won the Pulitzer.
Unfortunately, the Pulitzer prize, and indeed investigative journalism, is completly tarnished by the Gramsci brigade these days.
So we’re dealing with liars? Or at least distorters?
They distort the truth in order to get what they want politically. And yet you look at what young people are most politically active about, and you’ll see it’s climate change.
It is a shame we can’t get them hooked on liberty. Oh well, it’s their loss eventually.
Here in the US the polar bear may be elevated to “Endangered Species” because of “Climate Change” by the environuts. More here:
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Pushing For Polar Bear Protection/Paralysis
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 8:35 AM
The editorialists at the Houston Chronicle want the polar bear listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
(Link)
“Terrible idea?”
I can’t quite see any logic or rationale behind ISPs charging web content providers differentially, me. The business an ISP is in, the only business they’re in, is carrying content from providers to consumers. They don’t have a product other than that (they may add in value added services like email or whatnot, but that’s besides the point). They seem to be trying to claim that web content providers are some kind of burden on their service, which is bizarre. Carrying data from A to B is their core business. If the data isn’t there, they haven’t got a business. If anything, they ought to be paying content providers for the data they provide and which thus gives them something to charge for the carriage of!
It makes no odds where the data comes from; famous google or a lowly personal home page. It’s all just bits and bytes. The consumer is paying (quite handsomely, too) for the bandwidth. I’m paying for 100GB or whatever a month, and it’s nobody’s business where it comes from, is it? It doesn’t cost the carriers any more if I download 100GB from Google, samizdata or ladieswithnakedankles.com, does it?
I’ll admit I haven’t followed this closely, being more interested as everyone knows in the censorship threat to gay hobbit porn. But I can’t for the life of me fathom how the net, rationally, can work as anything other than “neutral”. Am I going to have to start paying protection money to ISPs all over the world, just so people can see my damned website? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick again?
This article on net neutrality is quite interesting IMHO.
Wait, so they thought that Arctic Sea ice dropping precipitously between March and September was evidence of global warming? Call me crazy, but I’ve always interpreted that as summer.
Fine but also irrelevant because ‘net neutrality’ is about compelling ISPs to charge everyone the same for something.
Not as far as I can tell it isn’t. It’s about whether ISPs will start charging content providers, erm, “visibility money” which looks suspiciously like some kind of extortion to me.
Net neutrality campaigners are urging regulation to prevent this, yes, and as libertarians we all oppose regulations, yes. That doesn’t necessarily mean we support protection racketeering either; I think that’s where we have laws, kind of thing.
“Now Mr de Havilland, nice website you’ve got here. Be a pity if it had a little… accident… wouldn’t it?”
Did you read the article I linked? I think it’s pretty good.
Sorry to bang on with another post, but I just thought I’d add that so far as I’m aware the market is doing fine with bandwidth costs already. For instance my websites are hosted somewhere in America in a server center. They’re paying for the hefty bandwidth to service that heap of servers. At the other end, surfers are paying their ISPs by various models, normally bandwidth costed. In between are various other companies running things called backhauls or backbones I’ll be bound, all charging per bandwidth e.g. it costs so much for a 100Mb (or whatever) pipe between any two nodes. It doesn’t change the running costs of that pipe regardless of where any packet originated or is destined. Nobody’s currently getting ripped off by high bandwidth sources as they are already paying for their bandwidth.
It seems what some companies are hoping to do is charge again by charging each packet, effectively. There’s no justification for that, is there? All the bandwidth to service the capacity required is already paid for.
Except that is not what is really being talked about here. It is about giving bandwidth preference to people who pay for it. Do I think that makes sense? Probably not, but it is a very bad idea indeed for the state to introduce price controls on bandwidth (and that is what is being suggested when you wade through the arguments). Yet there is nothing here that cannot be ‘solved’ with competition.
Yes, when Doc first wrote it, he is a great guy (I know him, in fact).
I take the view the net needs the old legacy regulations demolished, not new ones added.
Nice post. It could be broken into two separate but related subjects, both of which happen to be my favorite hobby-horses.
And if someone really wanted to follow a conspiracy theory that actually has a little meat on it, a detailed look at the career of Maurice Strong makes a nice project. Destruction of modern developed western societies? Check. Global control by unaccountable bureaucracies? Check. Massive redistribution of wealth world-wide? Check.
On the reality of Global Warming? Great picture(Link), via Tim Blair.
Personally, I am waiting to see Al Gore deal with the lawsuits which will take up the rest of his life.
You mean we won’t be able to go to the north pole on bear hunting expeditions ?
Sam S, redistribution of wealth in Maurice Strong’s universe means from us to him. He started from more or less nowhere in Manitoba and is now a gezillionaire without having had a real job in his life but with lots of connections to the ‘right’ sorts. Y’kow people like Fidel who start with not overwhelming financial resources and end up billionaires on someone else’s dime.
Since we’re into conspiracies, how can anyone not have mentioned that the guiding force behind the UN’s founding was the notorious communist spy Alger Hiss?
Also, Perry, I’m not arguing in favour of regulation- not really arguing at all, more thinking (typing) out loud, and more from the POV that the business model proposed by the anti-neutralist net “carriers” doesn’t seem to make any business (or any other kind of) sense to me. It’s a little like, say, record shops trying to charge successful artistes for carrying their records. All the successful artistes have to do is say “no, without my records you’ve nothing to sell” and they win. No rational artiste would pay the “sales tax”, since a moment’s thought would reveal that all their major competitors will pay it as well, resulting in no advantage while paying more money. Surely?
One of the things Ron Paul did very well was get young people enthusiastic about Liberty. He’s got a new book out, and it’s #1 in sales on Amazon right now. I suggest getting a copy for your favorite young person today.
As I see it the whole point of the internet is that everyone has a relatively equal voice. My website has no greater priority when being transmitted over the wires than Samizdata, this is IMO a good thing. The only thing differentiating my website from yours is the content, not whether or not I’ve paid extra for my data to have priority over yours. The content should be enough to get people looking at my site, if I have to pay an ISP an extra fee so that people can see it then those with the most money are going to decide the agenda. It boils down to someone else deciding for me what I should be looking at online, which I would have thought would go completely against the grain of what Samizdata stands for. Its like bus lanes; I pay for all of the road so why shouldn’t I be allowed to use all of it? An oversimplification maybe, but Ian also has a valid point. The bandwidth is already paid for, why should anyone be made to pay for it again?
Mandrill, I think you misunderstand me… I do not think pay-for-bandwidth-priority is a good idea. In fact I think it is an unsupportable business model (i.e. it is a daft idea).
However I do not think the state has any role here. This is a matter for the market to decide. THAT is why I think net-neutrality legislation is a bad idea and the whole discussion is in fact about legislation.
While the Net Neutrality article cited is a good one, it still muddies the waters a bit.
Very briefly, ‘Net Neutrality’ is a misleading title, which should be no surprise. The initiative springs from the desire of telecom companies to regulate in wholesale access to competitor networks (chiefly, cable companies). The reason they thought they could justify this, was that telecoms fought a lost battle for access to the ‘public voice network’. There is a thick volume of information about THAT battle, but suffice to say, the telecoms were in the wrong, and the public in the right, to gain access to the same facilities the telecoms were managing.
Then came cable companies, who built largely UNREGULATED data service infrastructure, and made heavy investment in the ‘last mile’ to the customer. the telecoms and other competitors wanted access to that last mile network, for cheap. Your libertarian forehead vein should be pulsating heavily about now. Of course, nobody should get access to a private company’s assets, just because they want to.
On top of that, net neutrality has become a kind of loose regulatory cannon, looking for a way to impose regulation on domestic portions of the internet. There are other forces who want it badly; for instance, those who think carriers should carry the burden of packet sniffing to keep us all ‘safer’.
Cable companies and telecoms naturally see the internet as data that rides on top of their carrier services, and not only feel that they have the right to manage their networks any way they wish (such as providing asymetric services only, or diddling with BitTorrent traffic), but, they have admitted to lusting after charging for the content they carry.
I believe, from a libertarian perspective, we want no regulation, and to let the free market sort out the problem. Fat chance. While any of us are free to invent our own competing data services, and try to make money deploying them to the last mile in a profitable fashion, realistically, it wont happen. So, the next best option is to lobby for as little regulation as possible, and to encourage cut-throat competition from a number of innovative, hungry providers.