The green fanatics have been running the debate for decades now so perhaps it is time to hear some scientific basis for their intrusive and reactionary measures.
Claude Allegre, one of France’s leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena.
Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.
Dr. Allegre is perhaps best known for his research on the structural and geochemical evolution of the Earth’s crust and the creation of its mountains, explaining both the title of his article in l’ Express and his revulsion at the nihilistic nature of the climate research debate.
The nihilistic nature of the climate research debate – spot on! What frightens me about the environmentalists is that they recommend restricting ourselves back to stone age. Instead of harnessing innovation and searching for alternatives, the doomsday scenarios is what it is all about. Coupled with the urge to dictate what the rest of us should do, we have a long-term restriction on the very things that drives innovation – clear understanding of the problem, redundancy and waste (yes, that too is necessary for change), experimentation and focus on the demand, not just on restricting the supply.
In June, I will be attending the Apeldoorn conference in the Hague. This year the focus is on sustainability – the conference title is Facing up to Reality: Choices for a Sustainable World. Well, you can guess what my contribution is going to be… I am looking forward to making the point for redundancy and playful experimentation by the markets. Otherwise, sustainability is nothing but another word for rationing progress.
cross posted from Media Influencer.
Yes, it’s more like the preacher in Huckleberry Finn – repent and spend!
Knowledge would hurt this process.
Did ya see that rot on BBC1 last night about a family agreeing to live for a year without a car or flights?
What I really disliked was the trailer for it which contained the quite provacative claim that “We may all have to live like this in the future”. Well, it provoked me. It provoked me into not watching the show because if I had watched it, it would have provoked me into putting my “carbon footprint” through the tube.
Yes, Adriana, it is nihilism. And possibly the result of the meanie greenies having tiny weanies. Either that or they’re just gits. I read somewhere recently that the Goreacle’s mansion in TN uses 20x the power of the average US home. But that’s OK because of course, he keeps the whole of the internet he invented running from his basement.
Yes, that panorama programme last night. The presenter did not appear to understand the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt hour……… ignorance is bliss, I guess…
Gore also buys his carbon offsets from his own company, thereby engendering himself a rather substantial tax break. You’d think the whole thing was a scam, really, wouldn’t you? Scare the crap out of everyone about carbon emissions, then sell them “offsets”. Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of it?
Adriana, I live just outside The Hague, fancy organising some kind of blogger meet up in a pub there (not that I have updated my blog for a month or 2…)?
Nevermind Nick, the counterblast
comes on Channel 4, 9pm on Thursday.
The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Watch it quick before the Government make Global Warming denial illegal!
What’s all this about addled Al and the internet?
I must have missed that story.
RAB: Al Gore is alleged to have once claimed that he invented the internet.
Steve P,
Let’s be fair to the Goreacle. He only ever claimed to have “practically invented the internet”.
I saw the Panorama programme and the sanctimonious Mon-bio-rot piece on C4 (he was a bit like John the Baptist wandering about in wide-eyed mode saying “I saw Jesus first…” and the drunk tramp offering a dog turd to people saying “I almost trod in this…”).
The Panorama show was unreason writ large in PAL/UHF. One bulb was 0.1kW, but kettle and tumbledryer was 55x that. Solution? Change the bulbs to economy…riiiiight.
No discussion of the fact that in winter, incandescent bulbs help heat the room (so do standby TVs come to that). No discussion as to the true cost of all these “ideas”. I am in West London, yet walking my wife to the labour ward is not something I relish. Kerbside birth, anyone?
The scariest part was in one of the programmes when they visited a village going Carbon Neutral (goodness knows how that plan was thrust upon the residents). The sight of the school kids singing some song about the environment reminded me of one of those modern happy-clappy hymns that sound so creepy. It was a mixture of Midwych Cuckoos and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Chilling stuff.
The programme should have been renamed “Econazis and the Green Religion of Unthought”.
“We may all have to live like this in the future”
Some of us already do – though my avoidance of both is more to do with hatred of bureaucracy than an ethical decision, for much of my life I didn’t have the choice. One of the more annoying things about greenlifestylists is that they assume that mildly cutting back on a cozy upper-middle-class high-consumption existence, and buying veg in a box, is somehow relevant to the much poorer and culturally entirely incongruent bulk of humanity in the West – never mind the rest of the world.
Nick M, please do not unleash your frustration on the hapless TV set. As a recovering academic I know the Al Gore D students of the world well. They fall into two categories – those who know they are dumb and accept their limitations and those who think they are really brilliant. The latter are very much of the don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up type. Unfortunately, those of the latter persuasion are overly represented in politics, the civil service and the media.
Millie,
I wouldn’t have really wrecked the telly (for one thing, the wife would have killed me). It would have just pained me so that I couldn’t. Obviously this would have been a poor alternative to slapping the self-righteous prigs behind this arrant nonsense.
TimC,
Yup. The total lack of basic scientific knowledge betrayed by these people appals me. What really outrages me is the way this bollocks is unloaded on kids by such spectacularly eminent scientists as CBBC and primary school teachers. (Link)
Just a quick comment on this topic:
I know Allegre from a research context (We’ve worked in the same field of Geochemistry) and would like to point out that while he is one of the world foremost experts on the geochemical evolution of the mantle, he also has a bad reputation for jumping in on insufficient evidence and working outside his field…
Asking Claude Allegre his opinion on climate change is much like asking Michael Cricton… He knows a LOT about the topic, but that doesn’t change the fact he’s too opinionated to be trusted.
I would suggest you stand back on going “well if Claude Allegre says so”.
Global warming has joined any number of other politicized issues, such as AIDS, the homeless, Iraq, Katrina, tobacco, and many more, in that never-never-land in which facts and rational science no longer matter.
Only political talking points and punchy sound bites are real and meaningful, because perception is the new reality.
It mystifies me that anyone is still surprised or indignant that, in an utterly irrational world, rational processes are abandoned in favor of the irrational fear mongering and doomsday predictions of a sensationalist media, and a completely politicized scientific establishment.
You don’t sell tabloids and get huge research grants by being calm and rational. And, in the final analysis, that’s really all GW hysteria is about —it’s a cash cow.
“…he also has a bad reputation for jumping in on insufficient evidence and working outside his field…”
Yes. I know what you mean. Self-absorbed know-it-alls willing to pretty much turn the world upside down based on nothing more than misplaced hubris and random emotional impulse. Al Gore springs to mind.
Nep: Het is niet gelukt, heh?
CFM – nee… Er zijn een hoop rechtse NL bloggers die in EN en NL bloggen, een zulke bloggersfeestje zou leuk zijn.
(Translation: there are a handful of right wing Dutch bloggers who blog in English and Dutch, such a bloggers party would be nice.)
veryretired writes:
Are surprise and indignation the rational responses? No, and neither is resignation. I’m just fighting back a bit, and hope to help win a few battles.
Try this book by Dick Taverne: The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism. While it’s not perfect (and what is), I find it helps with the rage. Page 200 (hardback) “The Values of Scientists” is especially comforting.
Roll on the new enlightenment.
Best regards
Add to your reading list “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” which was written by Charles Mackay in 1841, would you believe.
Man-made global warming is just the latest in a long, long line of lunatic propositions that were taken seriously and drove entire populations into crazy, usually self-destructive behaviour.
“This intelligent, humorous collection of popular delusions, from money mania to religious relics, has become a classic study of mass manias, crowd behaviour, and human folly. The book encompasses a broad range of scams, and deceptions, including witch burnings, the Great Crusades, the prophecies of Nostradamus, and tulipomania – where speculators lost fortunes on a single tulip bulb. Here are the human quirks that make hemlines rise and fall, hairstyles change, and beards sprout. For every reader who has ever been a part of it all – remember McCarthyism and Elvis? – or is just curious about grand-scale madness, major schemes, and bamboozlement, here is a book that shows how any age, even ours, is susceptible to mindless hysteria.”
Available from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_w_h_/202-3852587-5983856?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+madness+of+crowds&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go
Ah, Nigel, resignation was not my point, and I’m sorry if I gave that impression.
What I have seen repeatedly in any discussion of this question is an immediate descent into quibbling about some obscure computer model, or whether the temps have increased by .7 degree or 1.2 degrees, etc., etc.
Instead, I am suggesting that it is perfectly legitimate to question both the scientific analysis when it is clearly developed to justify increased grant money, just as those who dispute the CW on GW are routinely tarred as “industry stooges”; and, that the tabloid media’s role in creating an increasingly hysterical public furor over every hot day or big storm is both an obvious point of weakness in the crisis purveyor’s argument as well as an open invitation for the ridicule it so justly deserves.
It is not GW that is the issue, but rather the enormity of the negative consequences which would follow if the prescriptions of the crisis mongers are followed.
In order to get to that issue, it is necessary to stop fulminating about minutiae, and begin to strongly question the motivations and tactics of the Gore/Gaiae community of red-greens.
There are a whole lot of people making a very good living from GW fear mongering and doom saying. Let’s start talking about that, for a change, instead of how many icicles melted in Antartica last month.
And let’s force the GW activists to spell out very specifically just how much saving each one of those icicles is going to cost, both in money and personal liberties. So far, they’ve gotten a free ride because the media refuses to ask any of the hard questions that so desperately need to be asked.
So, anyway, it’s not resignation—it’s a call to start fighting smart instead of fighting mad. After all, too much heat is already part of the problem, no?
And the negative consequences are not just economic. When we actually DID ground all the airplanes for a while (post 9/11), the evidence is strong that it may have caused an unprecidented and sustained spike in the warming. We had by very far the warmest winter here in the heart of the great flyover, that we’ve had in the time records have been kept. Precisely the opposite of what the Green choir is singing.
It often seems to me the value of any study is inversely proportionate to the amount of funding it received.