Instapundit today links to a bizarre article at something called The American Interest Online, by someone called Walter Russell Mead, which summarises itself thus:
Short summary: the current iteration of the movement – with its particular political project and goals – is dead.
Incidentally true things are said by Mead about the “movement to stop climate change”, to the effect that it has indeed taken a severe beating in recent weeks, and that its denizens will, once they get this, become extremely distressed, and will blame everyone except themselves, rather as Mead himself blames Al Gore. He calls his fellow Warmists “immature, unrealistic and naïve”.
But the most obvious and most important truths of the matter that Mead does not mention are that this “movement to stop climate change” was trying to do something hideously destructive on the basis of a huge pack of lies. This movement was and is both intellectually and morally wrong, and all the more morally wrong as its intellectual failure becomes ever clearer. Mead merely says that warmism has, this time around, been a political failure. It tried to reshape (i.e. utterly screw) the world economy, but (alas?) it failed.
Mead even has the nerve to compare these would-be climate tyrants with the people who, in the 1920s, tried to put a stop to world wars. Bit of a difference there, Mead. There actually was a horribly destructive world war, not long before those efforts. Another equally real world war soon followed, which would also have been well worth stopping. Whereas your planet catastrophe now stands proved as having been imaginary.
I’m with Mead’s appropriately scornful commenters, like this one, “RKV”:
“The climate change movement now needs to regroup.” Excuse me for asking the obvious, “Why?”
What they really need to do is shut the hell up.
And this one, “Lazarus Long”:
Sounds like a defense of the Soviet Empire, after its defeat.
“Darn it, if only the right people were in charge communism WOULD work!”
Sorry, the AGW myth collapsed under the weight of it’s own lies and corruption.
Sorry, as in: you’re a twat, rather than as in: I actually do apologise for anything.
These two worthy commenters, and this posting, all illustrate an important technique of propaganda. Which is: when you have your opponents on the run, keep them there. Do not, because they have started to acknowledge parts of the truth, let them get away with continuing to tell unchallenged lies about other parts of the truth, and especially not if the parts of the truth that they continue to contest are the most important parts.
Do not, so to speak, let them get away with a draw, and with it the continuing prospect of long-term victory, out of a misplaced sense of fair play. I have long known this, but was still extremely glad to find the commenters on this earlier Climategate posting here also getting this particular point so well.
Absolutely right, Brian. We must grind their political bones into powder and then scatter it to the winds. No let up, no mercy, no quarter, no respite and, above all, no forgiveness. Ever.
What we have seen, and are seeing, is something commented on years ago:
There is a coalition of the Political Class with the Academic Class, producing a continuing symbiosis, with the Academic taking on the characteristisics of the parasitisms of that co-habitation.
Of course, a solid case may be made that this coalition is an example of parasitism upon other parasites.
However, it is not likely that the propagation of such symbiotic parasites will be seriously diminshed in the near future.
The political solution is simple. Ask a candidate this question: “Do you believe in man-made climate change?”
If the answer is yes, then said candidate is unqualified for office, for if a politician is incapable of independent and accurate thought, then he/she does not possess the intellectual cojones to lead. In other worlds, if you’re swayed by popular opinion when it’s obviously incorrect, you’re not up to the job.
The same method that works so well as a contraceptive also works to rid us of brainwashed politicians: pointing and laughing.
I agree RRS: they never go away, only metamorphosise from one form and shape into another.
Off topic: hosts please post to top level if you deem it appropriate.
My cousin Robert Cole writes for the Times and he has a new book coming out.
Unwritten Laws of Finance and Investment (Link)
There’s a launch party next week at the Cheshire Cheese pub on Fleet Street.
I told him I might share that with the one English blog I read and don’t be surprised if a bunch of libertarians show up. LOL
I can not recall a single politician (except John Redwood) who has denounced the AGW scam. Political commentators on TV and in the tabloids (again with notable exceptions such as Andrew Neill) are also still largely mute on the topic. I suspect the absolute truth or otherwise of AGW isn’t the key to this stance since it’s managed truth and perception that really matters to these people. In the short term they will continue to ignore climategate until they have identified an exit stategy.
The good news is that while climategate is still fresh in all of our minds, politicians will be trying to obtain our votes over the next few months. The bullying, the lies and the bombast will be suspended, as it is every four years, to be replaced with a sickening chuminess as they pretend to be our best friends.
I don’t see AGW surviving this period. Many politicians will surely break ranks as their need to be re-elected will temporarily overcome their need to further their own hidden agendas.
Personally, it’s too late for me. The most cynical and obvious liars, like Cameron, will now never get my vote. When they eventually repent and give up on AGW it’s clear that their delayed recognition will be no less cynical than was their earlier acceptence of the scam.
Sadly, because I disagree with many of their policies, the BNP has come out of this so much better than most other parties. At least their stand has been consistently anti-AGW all along.
From the article linked in the posting:
That is a “Quote of the day” if I have seen one.
A thought occurred to me while following a comment thread which quickly descended into a very polarised argument between the “Catastrophists” and the “Deniers”. That thought being that the Catastrophists do seem to remarkably calm and relaxed considering the massive calamities that they are 100% definitely sure are about to happen. I wonder what precautions these people are making right now to ensure their own survival of this coming apocolypse, have they for instance sold their house and all their posessions and retreated to a hill fortress with its own generator and a huge stock of tinned and frozen food?
It seems to me that though they talk the talk, their lack of action suggests that they don’t believe this stuff any more that I do.
When your enemy is fleeing the field, send in your light cavalry to saber them in the back.
The AGW advocates are hurt and have hunkered down—gone to ground to use a hunting phrase—but they are far from done and the movement is far from dead.
The basic contentions of climate change belief are now ingrained in our media and educational cultures.
Businesses routinely advertise and market themselves as green and anti-warming.
The political drive to gain the enormous power and graft inherent in any legislation/regulations alleged to prevent or inhibit climate change is undiminished.
Any number of stealth regulations from various agencies are in the works to fill in for the larger legislative packages that may stall due to the ongoing controversy.
Socialism/marxism was alleged to be dead also a few years ago, yet it has had a resurgence in several places around the world, fueled by the same drive for power and lust for graft that has always driven collectivist fantasies.
Don’t start counting chickens just yet.
I don’t think point and laugh can work with the current crop of politicians and their press enablers. I mean this guy is talking about the ‘Movement to stop climate change’. Is that like the movement to stop entropy, climate division? Then there’s the pols who sat in the House of Commons and voted to cut UK emissions by 80% by 2020 or whatever. While it snowed outside. In London. In October.
And the EU signed an agreement to limit the rise in global temperature to two degrees centigrade. And everyone nods seriously or complains that it’s not enough.
How can laughing at these buffoons help? They are beyond humour, beyond satire. They’re in some lunatic la-la land which is totally proof against all sanity. It’s not even hubris, it’s psychosis.
In the end, when all is indeed lost because although we beleiev what we say, and they (the watmists) believe what they say too, we are not sufficiently bloodthirsty bastards. Not as much as they are anyway.
After the lights have gone out, and there’s no food except what you can hunter-gather, we may still just have to kill and roast and eat them, making their children watch. Or the other way round, it won’t matter by then.
We have to keep sticking it to them. They are not going to give up on all this lovely lolly now are they? Just because it it made up bullshit.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jeremywarner/100003851/here-comes-the-next-bubble-carbon-trading/
This is the money quote in the New Emperor’s New Clothes scam…
And here’s the great thing about it. Unlike traditional commodities markets, which will eventually involve delivery to someone in physical form, the carbon market is based on lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no-one.
Sorry, just found out that book launch party next week is a private thing…not an open public event. Apologies!
Still…buy the book. 😉
Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Russell_Mead
I had to re-read Mead’s post to understand your scorn. I suppose one could mistake this one post as a rallying cry to the AGW polity, but Mead is hardly a warmist. See just about anything here(Link).
(Also, whether it’s a fair comparison or not, I agree with Mead that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was ridiculous.)
lets be real. its great reason to increase tax, its great topic to discuss in media and on the kitchen with the cigarette in your mouth, but are we really able to fight against climate changes? does it really depend on humans? i doubt it
RAB’s comment should be the Quote of the Week:
“Unlike traditional commodities markets, which will eventually involve delivery to someone in physical form, the carbon market is based on lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no-one.”
Believing in *that* IS delusional.
A small item tucked away in today’s ‘The Australian’ is a report from the World Meteorological Organisation, with the news that 1998 was the hottest year for the globe on record.
So much for global warming! 12 years dead, apparently! (Australia, as a continent, is going through a hot year, but the globe is not.)
A caveat- how reliable is the WMO? Can anyone tell me?
Mead being a foreign policy person explains it all, for me. When the USSR was collapsing, those people, in London as in Washington were so busy trying to find face-saving excuses for the USSR and its rulers that they quite forgot about the little matter of destroying the damn thing, and achieving a stunning victory. That all happened despite them.
In their world, no power is ever destroyed. So, axiomatically, the Warmism camp cannot be completely destroyed, and the idea that we should try to accomplish this is evidence of naivety and ideological blindness. Which was exactly what they said, and equally wrongly, about the USSR. On the contrary, it was their anti-ideological blindness which blinded them.
It’s not that they are immoral people. It is merely that, for them, morality is a juvenile indulgence. Grown-up diplomacy means living permanently with enemies, with their inevitably and permanently different worldviews.
This is entirely consistent with Mead himself being an anti-Warmist, in much the same way that those non-Cold War diplomats (most of them!) were anti-Communists, in the sense of not wanting it to spread to their countries. They just didn’t approve of people who took anti-Communism to the point of wanting Communism destroyed. The world, dear boy, doesn’t work like that.
But, sometimes it does. Especially if lots of people get angry – about Communism then and about Warmism now – and decide that it bloody well should.
Call it the unrealism of the “realists”.
I will feel more confident this war is going to be won when I see some high profile converts from the AGW camp admit they were wrong. If Cameron were to say “Sorry, we were following the best scientific advice available but we will change our position now that the science has undermined the theory,” then I would view that as a politician flipping to what he imagines to be the winning side. Not glorious but at least encouraging. That hasn’t happened yet. All the sceptic voices were either sceptical or open minded all along. On a more encouraging note, nobody outside of the grant-funded scientists seems scared to admit they are AGW-sceptics any more.
Isn’t that just a special case of the general definition of immorality?
Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations
Ah. Explains a lot. Is it too tinfoil-hatted to acknowledge the possibility that for such individuals AGW is simply one in a long line of conveniently agenda-advancing vehicles?