Often I read, in various Climate Alarmist articles, words to the effect that “time is running out on a global climate deal“… which is great news if it is actually true. It suggests to me that perhaps they realise that the “universally accepted” One True Apostolic Eco-Faith is really the very epitome of a paper tiger as there is far from a genuine consensus on the subject.
So if time is running out, it would seem hard to overstate the importance of running interference and generally throwing spanners into the works for as long as possible. To prevent the latest transnational ‘tranzi’ red-wrapped-in-green statist power ploys, friends of liberty need to do whatever they can to ‘run out the clock’ and then encourage as much international political recrimination post-failure as possible, in order to keep the ball out of play for as long as possible. I think it is time to suggest creative but practicle ways to help sow discord and disunity amongst the predatory political elites (and their supporters) of the various countries seeking to extend ever more control over their national subjects under the cloak of green politics.
Certainly if overtly totalitarian measures like carbon rationing are ever brought in, truly the time for unambiguous direct resistance to the state will have arrived, so preventing things getting to that stage is more than a little important.
Time is running out seems to be used in every new move they make. It’s not just climate change, health care, crime, terrorism, everything. A game of “Beath the Crock”. Almost seems like gallows humor.
If “we” (them) must destroy every village to save just one, it is worth it. To them. One of the oldest “hooks”
in the book is a sense of im-MEDIA-cy.
The closest thing to this bum tactic, is to having my bed
near the bathroom door.
This isn’t going to lead to toe-tally tarianism. We’re there.
Global warming or no, I think we can all agree that better, cleaner sources of energy are worth pursuing. Nuclear power can satisfy all of our power needs, and it’s low carbon emissions will keep the climate crowd pacified.
The anti-nuke crowd will be an obstacle, but a little science and good argument can handle them; scientific opinion isn’t on their side this time around, as nuclear power plants are much safer than they used to be. Less wasteful too.
Just an American libertarian giving tips and support to my British comrades. Keep up the good fight; I sadly think that the sun is setting on American libertarianism, but it still has a chance in the United Kingdom. Good luck.
I’d love to stick around and take part in this debate about global warming, sorry, climate change. Unfortunately, I can’t, as I’m off the the Moon for a few days. Doubtless you’re wondering how I’m going to get there. Easy: I’m going to drive.
I’ve got a ’96 Toyota Camry. It’s got about 180,000 miles on it by now, but I reckon it’s still good for 0-60 in ten seconds. I’ve also got a computer model. (Actually, it’s an Excel spreadsheet, but it’s running on a computer, so it’s a computer model.) Extrapolating from my data points (both of them!) my computer model says my car should reach 120 after 20 seconds, 180 after 30 seconds and so on. (You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?) Things add up pretty quickly and after 50 minutes I’ll reach orbital velocity (about 18,000 mph) and escape velocity (25,000 mph) after about an hour and a quarter. I’m in my way!
I’ll reach midpoint – 120,000 miles – after about three-and-a-half hours, by which time I’ll be doing about 70,000 mph. Applying the brakes I’ll then decelerate at the same rate I’ve previously accelerated, for a gentle touch down on the Moon about seven hours after I started. Not bad for a ’96 Camry. I just can’t understand why NASA didn’t think of it.
Anyway, I’ve got a computer model and the science behind it was settled by Newton in the seventeenth century. Now, where are my car keys?
“I’ve got a ’96 Toyota Camry…”
I’m not impressed – Kenny McCormick once drove a 70s’ Corvette to the planet Boob.
“I think it is time to suggest creative but practicle ways to help sow discord and disunity amongst the predatory political elites..”
Until I can think of more mature ideas, there’s always the urinal soap cake featuring the face of Al Gore…
It’s sunday morning.
“Nuclear power can satisfy all of our power needs, and it’s low carbon emissions will keep the climate crowd pacified.“
Sorry, I don’t agree. The goal of the “climate crowd” isn’t simply stopping “global warming”. Their true goal is control itself; raw political power. Carbon emissions is merely their latest vehicle toward that end. Stick a pin in the “global warming” balloon and they’ll merely inflate another, different one. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t get out our pins; of course we should. It’s just that success on this issue, even if achieved, will be merely a victory in this latest skirmish, not the end of the war.
“…friends of liberty need to do whatever they can to ‘run out the clock’ and then encourage as much international political recrimination post-failure as possible, in order to keep the ball out of play for as long as possible. I think it is time to suggest creative but practicle ways to help sow discord and disunity amongst the predatory political elites (and their supporters)…”
For those of us (?) in a position to have anything at all to do with the ruling classes (other than being routinely raped and pillaged) the value of that imperative is obvious enough.
But isn’t there a danger here of being a bit too clever by half?
Condemning Al Gore for his carbon footprint might help to burst a few watermelons but it doesn’t serve the clarity of our basic objection very well – and this is very important in ensuring that the premises from which the objection springs are not misunderstood (as I believe they currently are) and misrepresented to the wider public.
When I personally find myself with the opportunity to say something to somebody about this, I never raise scientific criticisms of AGW without also raising the anti-government objection as context.
I go straight to the contrary premises:
A global commons problem should be dealt with by increasingly total government.
VS
A global commons problem should be dealt with by increasingly total freedom of the individual.
That’s the real nature of the contest, but there is barely even a hint of this in Guardian and Telegraph articles. But this is what needs to be communicated much, much louder and clearer.
I reckon the most dangerous thing, (for the climate alarmists), going on at the moment is not the lack of global warming or the possibility of a solar minimum or even the plunging belief among the public. Those can be explained away. No, the big danger, (for the greens as well as the world), comes from the EPA endangerment finding for CO2.
A lot of people are assuming that this, (like Waxman-Markey), is just another chance to extort money and power from the energy providers, and ultimately consumers, but a sufficiently motivated law-suit using this finding could shut the US down, and this would show all of us the price the eco-loonies are attempting to extract to pacify their goddess.
So if the sensible among us fail to delay the lunacy long enough for it all to fade away, then it’s pretty likely that the greens will do it themselves, and disastrous as this would be in the short term, in the long term it might be the better solution.
In the Booker-North book Scared to Death, panic stories of the past thirty odd years are analysed. Their actual content, the damaging panic measures that were implemented by the government and the fact that the predicted disasters never happened.
The interesting thing to me was that until I re-read the stories in this book I had forgotten all about them. The stories were big in the MSM at the time and then just quietly faded from view to be forgotten about.
Is there reason to suppose that the global-warming thing might turn out differently? Has this particular story become so big and widely publicised and with its protagonists so sure that they are right that when none of their apocolyptic predictions come true they will have lost their credibility for life?
Yes Stonyground, but what if this one turns out to be true? We must stay on the safe side – for the children, of course! (I am beginning to wonder if these are the actual children that never grow up. Someone remind me to tell the story about the Bedouin and the tea kettle).
The disappearing new is not new. I’ve monitored certain stories and seen them disappear after the first report. There are also the stories reported with certain
facts not mentioned, giving a far different impression than the whole would have.
News is given Orwell’s Ministry of Truth treatment often
Once burning issues become ashes, when the real use
is done.
Yes of course there is a possibility that these apocalyptic predictions could actually happen. The fact that at the moment they are failing to happen could be the calm before the storm. So from this time forward things could go one of two ways. Either the predicted climate meltdown will start in earnest or it will continue not happening and the doom-mongers will be proved wrong.
Every year that goes by, since these dire predictions started being made, without any kind of increase in temperature or extreme weather events chips away at the alarmist’s credibility.
As a suburbanite in one of the UK’s largerprovincial cities all the eco-types I know all still have more cars, more foreign holidays and larger houses than the average person and live a very comfortable middle class lifestyle with all the associated energy use. They even buy their teenage children cars for university and pack them off on gap years in faraway places.
It looks like most greens mean to enjoy themselves in the short time they allege the planet has left. I do too.
Just a thought for you. Consider the huge crisis surrounding the Y2K bug. It is interesting because it had a hard, hard date associated with it. However, the evidence is that it was a vastly overblown panic that amounted to a little more than a hill of beans. (Based on, for example, the inconsequential effects in countries that did almost no preparatory work such as Italy.)
This was a hard, undeniable date, with great predictions of doom that did not materialize one whit. What exactly were the huge consequences to the prophets of doom? Basically nothing. It was all forgiven and forgotten before the January first hangover was cured.
Now consider the putative global warming crisis. What is the date you say it didn’t happen? There will always be “tomorrow disaster will strike.” We have been hearing these disaster scenarios since the Club of Rome in the 1970s. Yet still we believe them, and still not consequences to these predictors of doom.
I think your article betrays your naivete of the way these things normally play out. It will be an aching cancer for years to come. They already changed tack from “global warming” to “climate change”, because global warming wasn’t working out. No doubt we will be concerned about an ice age twenty years from now.
Exactly, Jessica.
I think we already went through that one in the 70s (the scare, not the actual ice age – for the age-deficient among us). But sure, why not try that one again? As you say, our collective memories are very short indeed.
Hey, why are we all concerned about Global Warming when we have 2012 to worry about? Let’s focus on something real for a change!
Sadly one of the main headlines of the Times poll was that this means that the Gov’t’s message is not getting across. i.e. we need to vote out the people.
QED we need more Gov’t messages and adverts with dogs drowning.
Enter Stage Left, Lord Mandelson, at the new Ministry of Truth and Information.
actually, i can hear it now. You know the way that things we eat (an aspirin a day anyone?) are good for us, and then suddenly bad, how long before the news reports start with “… latest research suggests that CO2 is actually causing temperatures to fall worldwide…”
2012 is bullshit; nothing is going to happen that year. I may find myself being a pariah on this; I think global warming is happening, and it is a big issue. I never specified my position in the earlier post.
However, like Michael Shermer, I don’t think government is the answer; removing subsidies and protections on the oil industry would work, as well as not allowing oil companies to interfere with companies who would challenge them. Right now, the government is the biggest reason why the oil industry is allowed to get away with holy hell.
Alisa:
Well, it’s real.
Look out the window. Despite all the global warming that’s going on, I hit some black ice and put my truck into a ditch last night. And there’s nine inches of snow on my driveway. And it’s only November!
And this is DESPITE the Earth getting warmer!
So you people need to stop causing this ice age!
This is only true if I look out your window, Sunfish:-) Here it has been unseasonably warm, although it is cooling down a bit today and tomorrow. It’s weather, people, that’s all it is.
tbd, what we’re talking about isn’t “global warming” per se (if it isn’t happening now it will someday, followed by global cooling, over and over again until the sun explodes; that’s how the world works), but rather the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which is an entirely different matter. Only after you get past the hurdles of demonstrating conclusively that we’re entering a warming phase (which I don’t think is all that clear) and that human activities are affecting it (which at this point is totally unproven) does one reach the question of what if anything to do about it. Even if we were at that point in the analysis committing mass economic suicide on the altar of Gaia is not the proper response. That is the true “bullshit”.
Has anyone noticed that merely because we can’t bear to endure a relatively brief period of economic privation we are willing to go so deeply into national debt that our grandchildren will never escape economic bondage, yet we nonetheless claim that we have to “stop global warming” to “preserve the planet” for these same grandchildren? What exactly is it we’re “preserving” for them, if they are reduced to penury by our insane economic policies and pseudoscientific hubris? Can anyone say “schizophrenia”?
Laird – *this* “we” is not “willing to go so deeply into national debt that our grandchildren will never escape economic bondage” – nor do I think it is true of most people … and, fortunately, more and more people are realising that that is the logical consequence of current US and UK government thinking/planning …
Alasdair, obviously I was using “we” to refer to the nation as a whole, and notably our current leadership (perhaps “rulership” would be a better term). You, and I, and perhaps lots of others, may object vehemently, and perhaps may even manage to turn out the rascals at the next election, but in the end if the debt has been incurred it will have to be repaid whether you and I like it or not. So unfortunately both of us are trapped within that “we”, like insects in amber. We can see freedom but we’ll never get there.