We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Eat, drink and be merry. Tomorrow comes the Ice. Hat tip to Ed Driscoll of Instapundit for at least giving Britain a few hours’ notice of its icy doom.
The news was first reported by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in the Guardian‘s Sunday sister the Observer on Sun 22 Feb 2004. Since the world did not take the preventative measures the experts warned were necessary it is clear that nothing can save us now:
Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
It is still possible that the C02 emissions cause global warming theory is true – even though northern India is having the coldest weather in over a 100 years.
However, if the theory is true the correct response is the radical deregulation of nuclear power – so that it can expand more cheaply and (yes) more safely. For the regulations not only make things wildly more expensive – they also make things much less (less) safe.
The person to not follow is Chancellor Merkel (Chancellor M. is normally a good inverted guide – whatever she is doing, do the opposite) who is closing down German nuclear power stations, whilst talking endless pius sounding cant about Global Warming. No windmills and solar cells are not going to make a big difference – if they were, then Chancellor Merkel would not be busy selling out Germany to Mr Putin in return for natural gas (whilst denouncing President Trump, Merkel repeating Democrat Party Talking Points, – who is actually NOT selling out to Mr Putin, and is in fact his COMPETITOR in energy supplies).
By the way my favourite Chancellor M. line was her recent one “we must do this to preserve our free society” what was the lady saying we “must” do? Why impose yet more censorship of course.
A society where the state tells everyone what they must say and must not say (and what they must do) is Chancellor Merkel’s definition of a “free society” – remember she was brought up in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
2009 – President ‘has four years to save Earth’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama
Make fun of the stupid predictions of doom, but they’ve funded radical environmental/socialist parties for decades and have been instrumental in putting them in power. The “follow our precepts or you’re going to a hot place” is a tried and true political/social argument in use for centuries. What’s amazing now is it’s usually only used in cases where it’s impossible to disprove, but turns out nearly as effective in cases like this – when the predictions are reliably wrong over and over again.
I like how they try to push ‘suppressed by defense chiefs’ when in reality its more like ‘ignored by’, ‘disregarded by’.
I believe in the science of global warming, but the authors of crap like this don’t.
People talk about cities being flooded. I went and looked up the predictions of sea-level rise in the latest IPCC report. Assuming business as usual, with no meaningful efforts to mitigate, the sea level rise by the year 2100 is expected to be…less than two feet. By the year 2500, it’ll be a whopping dozen feet or so. If we do nothing. These are levels the Dutch handled without any major issues before the steam engine. (See page 1191 for the details)
The actual science of global warming isn’t all that scary. It’s perfectly plausible, but it’s also something that we can handle pretty easily as a society. It’ll impose costs, but fairly moderate ones in the grand scheme of things. It’s worth mitigating, as long as we can do so cheaply. (Paul’s suggestion of making nuclear plants easier to build is a good start, for example). A carbon tax **where the proceeds are used to cut other taxes** would be a perfectly reasonable policy on the topic – the net burden on society is negligible, and it’ll help incentivize pollution reductions. But it doesn’t justify all that much freaking out. This is a canker sore, not cancer.
Obama went on about climate change while in office but oddly enough bought a $15 million house in Martha’s kitchen, very close to the waters edge after he left. Clearly a believer now not…
As for IPCC reports, Extinction Rebellion etc all take the worse case scenario 8.5 as if its going to happen while in reality, its been about half of the IPCC best case. Sea level rises seem to be constant at a couple of millimetres a year so realistically 6-9 inches by 2100. In other words, nothing to see here folks.
Even we sceptics could live with that as energy security and flood prevention. Moderate voices are always drowned out!!!!!!
The UK perspective is that our establishment are too busy using a molehill to mountain narrative to lock in their advantages to actually deal with the problem like grownups….
The question is why, when these absurd prediction repeatedly are so wrong, that the same people keep repeating them and each time the political and celebrity class and media believe them and promote them?
Now they follow the instruction of a mad girl who in former times would have been confined either to a lunatic asylum or a nunnery.
Is it perhaps the case they have all gone insane? Are we dealing with an epidemic of psychiatric illness?
How do we get these people to accept treatment and go on medication?
‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.’,
Extraordinary popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay is an interesting book. It was published in 1841 so it shows that this kind of mass hysteria is nothing new.
How much damage is going to be done to Western Economies before reality intrudes and lays this particular delusion to rest is a worry. If it wasn’t for that we could just point and laugh.
The “Carbon Tax” is a good example of what is behind all this – it would not be used to reduce other taxes, a “Carbon Tax” and “Carbon Credits” would be used to enrich politically connected “Woke” Big Business operations, such as Goldman Sachs (hence the support for such policies by the Economist magazine – whose reason for existence is to maximise subsidies for bankers and other such).
Is this why “Woke” Big Business supports these far left groups? If so they are short sighted – as the “Green” movement is actually Marxist (listen to them) and they will still destroy the Big Business types, no matter how much money “Woke” “Social Justice” Big Business gives them.
There are real Greens, such as James Lovelock, but they are few – the way to tell a real Green from the fake ones is to ask “are you in favour of a massive expansion of nuclear power?” – a real Green will say YES.
Its another manifestation of corporatism. Where is there more money – in treatment or in a cure?
The cure is, as many have observed Gen IV nuclear with significant investment in next gen techs such as Thorium.
The treatment is Solar, wind, Biomass etc etc. The orgy of subsidy and graft.
Or would have been the subject of an exorcism.
Yes.
I doubt that medication is effective, and i doubt even more that it is cost-effective.
I’ll never tire of repeating it: the root cause is a diet rich in seed oils, refined sugars, and cereal grains. “Balanced” meals might also be part of the problem: better to segregate animal protein from veggies imho.
Before you tell me: ‘but i eat all 3 and do not believe in CAGW!’, keep in mind that not everybody is equally sensitive.
Great book! Everybody should read at least the 3 chapters on financial bubbles.
“The question is why, when these absurd prediction repeatedly are so wrong, that the same people keep repeating them and each time the political and celebrity class and media believe them and promote them?”
Irrelevant. Like i said before being right or wrong ultimately does not matter to Marxism.
How many devils you exorcise is what matter, it is irrelevant if those devils really exist.
Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow comes the ICE.
Because after Mr. Trump replaces the desk calendar for his second term, illegal aliens in the US, and their criminal abetters, shall be further tended to.
The climate? Oh, THAT is forecast to be….average, for the period beginning with human writing and record keeping.
So if climate change is inevitable, if it is too late now, if it has gone so far that we can’t do anything to prevent it, can you guys please stop bugging us about it? If we can’t do anything about it can we just focus on enjoying our last pitiful excessively warm (or is it excessively cold, I find it hard to keep track) years as our doom approaches?
I think perhaps that is the point Natalie was making in her allusion to “eat drink and be merry”. If we are all doomed, if we are all going to die, we might as well have a party on the way down. Yet you bastards won’t even let us drink our Piña Coladas through a plastic straw.
So England will soon resemble Greenland, and the Danes will claim it as a separate part of Greenland, being indistinguishable and all, except in Scotland where no one will notice any difference. Who knows? The Danes may be willing to sell us the Lesser Island.
This is an example of the genuine existential threat posed by “global warming”. The authority and credibility of science has been established over centuries. Now it is being squandered.
Chesterton is quoted (though he never actually wrote): “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.” When people stop believing science, they become vulnerable to plausible pseudo-science. Vide the damage caused by anti-vaccine panic, fear-mongering against GMO food, and now bogus lawsuits against the herbicide glyphosate (in part intended to destroy its manufacturer, Monsanto, for its involvement in GMO products). And on the other side, rising interest in pseudo-science such as “alternative medicine”. It will also weaken the barriers against short-term benefit actions with long-term harms.
The economic damage from all this, and from the rejection of science and engineering for political and religious dogmas (because nobody trusts science) could drive general social breakdown and eventual failure of civil order.
The exotic technologies that underlie modern life are vulnerable to disruption, especially in the complex international supply chains of manufacturing.
Such disruption would aggravate the civil order problem. Gangsters and warlords would fight over the functioning remnants of tech, each smashing what he doesn’t control.
A negative-sum feedback loop would ensue, until civilization is largely destroyed.
And it all starts with “global warming”.
@Rich Rostrom
Your comment is interesting and I’d like to come back to it when I have more time. However, I did want to address this, which I consider a cheap shot:
Chesterton is quoted (though he never actually wrote): “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”
I’m an atheist, in fact I am specifically a man who stopped believing in God. The idea that that makes me credulous is utterly backward. I came to my conclusions by examining the evidence. In fact it is religion which is, if you will excuse the pun, the apotheosis of credulity. The idea that one should believe what one is told irrespective, in fact in denial of, the evidence. I have respect for people with religious views, they are entitled to think what they will, but to suggest that the credulity pendulum swings more toward the atheist than the theist is ridiculous.
I don’t believe “anything”, on the contrary I try to garden my belief system so that it fits with the evidence I see and the logic that I follow without the need for appeal to authorities like the pope, or the preacher or the good book. Of course there are a few weeds in there, and the hedges are getting a bit out of control, but I certainly try my best to honor logic and data more than I try to honor God and the putatively holy.
The military is always thinking about apocalyptic scenarios, gaming different ways of responding to events that disable the systems that enable modern civilization. In any of these thought experiments, the precipitating event is just a macguffin. If I recall correctly they used a zombie apocalypse a few years ago. The only question I have is whether the Observer was actually dumb enough to believe that the climate change macguffin in this case was something that the military actually expected, or was the Observer just lying to the public?
‘By 2020’ can be extended to mean, ‘By the end of 2020, at one minute to midnight, on the westernmost point of Alaska’. Less than a year to go!
Mikesixes
“The military is always thinking about apocalyptic scenarios, gaming different ways of responding to events that disable the systems that enable modern civilization.”
Gee! Apparently, so have science fiction and Bible writers.
Hey Brits! How is that “Siberian Climate” you’re enjoying these days? “Climate Change” is a religion that pretends to be science. It’s not science at all.