As Paul Marks mentioned the other day, sometimes something happens that makes you proud to be English. A case in point: I read an article in the Guardian by Marcel Berlins called If half the nation is in denial about the threats we face from climate change, what hope is there? and felt a frisson of excitement wash over me. Perhaps, just perhaps, we are not so totally fucked after all.
I was more depressed by the findings of a single public opinion survey on climate change than I’ve been by all the pessimistic stories about how little is being done by governments and individuals to combat global warming. An Ipsos Mori poll, published this week, found that 56% of more than 2,000 adults interviewed believed that scientists were still questioning the existence of climate change.
[…]
So how come more than half the British nation still believes that climate change is a questionable, arguable proposition, still a matter of scientific debate? Is the media at fault by not informing the public of the true situation? Or are we facing an epidemic of mass denial, because it is too horrifying to think of the ghastly consequences of unchecked climate change?
Of course whenever the other side is ‘depressed’ because the great unwashed refuse to believe their betters, that is a good reason to light up a nice pungent cigar to celebrate. But might I suggest an alternative option to Mr. Berlins: could this be the beginning not of a mass epidemic (oh how the control freaks loves to pathologise disagreement as a disease… of course two can play at that game) but rather a mass revolt. No prize for guessing how the authoritarians will respond to that.
Surely the cumulative effect of all this truth-telling would have persuaded the doubters by now, not just of the effects of global warming but of the almost total unanimity of scientific opinion on the issue? It seems not.
It matters. Up to a point, laws can be passed to combat climate change, and offenders who don’t conform can be punished. But any successful policies will depend on the cooperation of a population that truly understands the dangers and threats we face. If half the nation continues to be ignorant or in denial, there’s not much hope.
The Big Lie of scientific unanimity will be endlessly repeated and they will naturally try to impose their will with the violence of law, driven by the increasing ferocious indignation of the scorned righteous of the One True Faith. But Berlins is quite correct that in the end if much of the nation refuses to cooperate, all their attempts to control us will come to nothing. Remember the chorus of Rule Britannia, hehehe.
I don’t think it’s a Big Lie to say that climate scientists know more about climate than you do. So do you actually care what they say about climate change? Or are you looking beyond mere reality at this stage?
But the Big Lie is not that some climate scientists say x rather than y, it is that they all say global warming has an anthropogenic basis. THAT is the Big Lie. The Medieval warm period and melting Martian ice caps suggest other theories are more likely.
And in any case, climate scientists cannot reliably predict next weeks weather so imposing political controls over all human activity on the basis of what some members of such a flaky scientific discipline are currently theorising seems like a pretty daft idea.
The “big lie” is of scientific unanimity. It’s true that general consensus in the scientific community is that there is a certain amount of climate change owing to human activity. But there is nothing anywhere near “unanimity” on (a) how serious this is (b) whether and how it can be stopped or reversed and (c) what the likely consequences are. It’s equally true, for example, that most climatologists think Al Gore’s movie was way overblown and pseudo-scientific. So yes, it’s a “big lie” to claim that all scientists agree that Global Warming is a major and pressing problem – even if it’s true that most of them agree that it’s happening and that at least a small part of it is due to human activity.
My history tells me that all there needs to be is a galvanized third to effect policy. If 56% are still in doubt to some degree, then that leaves 44% who aren’t. All that is needed is a strength of cause in that 44 % to create the necessary third. Given that they have “the cause” behind them, and the rest are divided between mid-ground “complacents” or hardline proof-seekers, they have the momentum behind them. The article never says how many of those 56% who think scientists have some doubt themselves will acquiesce to the State regardless.
In comment section to the article someone supplied a number of 22% who believe that it is exaggerated, 75% didn’t think it is exaggerated. That’s 2 to 1 in favor of the zealots (44% to 22%), and 3 to 1 whether global warming is exaggerated. The article linked said the 70% think that the government should take the lead in changing behaviors. Just 9% thought that global warming was exclusively due to natural causes. The article the comment maker referred to linked here.
All it takes is the mobilized minority to gain access to the power structure. It will take an active third to respond to offset it, which I don’t see happening. Liberty is lost most effectively through division and complacency.
Any worries by the Guardian crowd about not having a larger crowd with surety just means a preliminary lack of desire to use force against the majority. This soon goes away the more righteous the cause. Significant fines and levies (or threats of a cinder block box) will soon put peoples minds right. Theocracies don’t ask for full belief from all, just outward manifestations of compliance. They reserve the harshest treatment for those manifestly unrighteous.
If Marcel Berlins believes that human activity created emissions of C02 are leading to harmful climate change why is not campaigning for atomic power?
Fusion power is not practical at this time (and if the matter is really so time sensitive…) and therefore one needs atomic energy both to provide electicity and to power transport (either by electricity or by “cracking” sea water for hydrogen).
Perhaps Marcel Berlins is campaiging for atomic power. But too many “Guardian” and “Independent” newspaper types (such as Mr Cameron) like to pretend that the need for energy can be met by solar cells and windmills. As even James Lovelock (the father of the modern environmentalist movement) has pointed out, this is simply false (which is why James Lovelock is a supporter of atomic power).
For the same people to denounce “man made globel warming” and then to say “nuclear power, no thanks” shows them to be the ones who are “in denial” – which appears to be the modern way of saying “are demented”.
Look, it’s simple.
Most of us aren’t scientists but have had a fair amount of education in science, history and so on.
We can understand the concepts, we understand that climate is a system of massive complexity and delicacy. But intuitively feel that much of the climate change debate is driven by politics, not science.
We see the science willfully simplified and shouted at us as if we were 4 year-olds, ignoring all complexities, and it annoys us. We see pseudo-science which even we can see is plainly wrong. Historical levels of CO2 are shown in line with temperature changes, with the assertion that for former causes the latter, when exactly the opposite is demonstrably true. When we challenge these, we are told that the science is too complex for normal mortals and what’s most important is The Message.
Then we see what sounds to us like quite reasonable objections from big-name scientists which are answered with “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” insults rather than rational debate.
Then we see for ourselves the massive level of uncertainty in the science of climate and weather, compared to the certainty of huge economic problems if we were to stop producing energy, and we believe this is not a step to be taken lightly.
Then we see campaigners who howl with outrage at any proposed attempt to tackle “climate change” other than by hair-shirt sacrifice; any clever ways to reduce solar energy or increase cloud cover or create carbon-neutral fuels are dismissed as “dangerous messing about” – all of a sudden the science is portrayed (rightly) as highly uncertain.
And we just don’t like the most vociferous campaigners. They have an unsettling fervour about them that we’ve seen before, and they’ve never been right so far.
Finally we are dismissed as ignorant “deniers” when we are unconvinced, and (this is the bit that really hurts) categorised with all those clowns who think that the moon landings were filmed in Shepperton.
Ultimately, people are much cleverer than our leaders seem to think and have an extraordinary ability to smell phony politics, and this smells bad.
Well put.
“But the Big Lie is not that some climate scientists say x rather than y, it is that they all say global warming has an anthropogenic basis.”
I find it more interesting that those who deny anthropogenic global warming constantly harp on about the absence of complete consensus, when they must know that complete consensus is vanishingly unlikely, simply because any near-consensus creates strong incentives for someone to ‘speak up’ in opposition and (a) be feted as a brave iconoclast by a media misguidedly pursuing false ‘balance’ no matter how false(Link) the content of what they’re saying and (b) secure a place on the lucrative circuit of lobbying / think-tankery supported by those with a major financial or political interest in the issue. This is basically rent-seeking, of course, and it never ceases to surprise me how many self-described sceptical, ‘rationalist’ free-marketeers accept it so uncritically.
So it’s not complete consensus, it’s ‘only’ the vast, vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science that supports the theory. That’s all.
“The Medieval warm period and melting Martian ice caps suggest other theories are more likely.”
Heh. No they don’t. Here, inform(Link) yourself(Link). I would also add that anyone who thinks the Medieval Warm Period is analogous to the latter half of the 20th Century is having some difficulty with the concept of rates of change.
“And in any case, climate scientists cannot reliably predict next weeks weather”
Oh dear. There isn’t much point having this conversation if you can’t get your head around basic concepts such as the difference between day to day weather and long-term changes in climate, is there?
The “big lie” is of scientific unanimity
Quite.
Although it is generally agreed that CO2 does cause an increase in temperature, it is not agreed by how much or which CO2 scenario is the most appropriate one.
Oh I understand the difference but I also understand that much of climate science is just guesswork and it is only ‘science’ in the sense Psychology is ‘science’.
The confluence of interests that gets so many people with a control based view of the world to support it has all sorts of historical antecedents. It is like the way socialists used notions of ‘wasteful competition’ to ‘prove’ socialism was more efficient than capitalism. It is like the way racists and sundry control based collectivists used the scientific consensus of their day to support sterilisation laws and anti-miscegenation laws in such diverse places as Nazi Germany and the USA, so too those with a desire to collectivise and control use the consensus on global warming to justify their pet mode of control so they they can impose rents on whoever they think should be controlled. Seen it all before.
Great post Manuel.
One point you missed is that the leaders of the Global Warming movement are (where they are old enough!) the same people who used to try to scare us with global cooling in the form of “nuclear winter” or “the coming ice age” .. right up until they noticed a bit after 1975 that temperatures had stopped decreasing and had started increasing.
They don’t want us to be safe, they want us to be scared.
Quite right Bruce, but no doubt anthropogenic global warming’s supporters would say “but it must be either global warming or global cooling so either way we need more state planning, oops, I mean ‘democratic control’ over the economy!”
Where the climate alarmists lost me was the hockey stick graph. This graph appeared in the IPCC report and was said to be peer reviewed.
When it turned out that the scientists had fudged their data, and that this was easily discovered by a mining businessman in his spare time, I started to wonder what other crap they were putting in the report.
Sure enough, the section on diseases such as malaria was written by two physicians without a single research paper on the subject between them. They claimed, to hilarity among people in the field, that malaria cannot spread in cooler climes, when anyone with Google knows that malaria once plagued parts of Europe and the US. George Washington had it.
God knows how deep the rot goes with climate science, but I’ve seen enough to tune Al Gore out and wait for more reasoned contributions to the subject.
Well I’m off to bed, looking out on a landscape that looks like a re-make of A Midsummer Night’s Dream out there-
They dont make scientists like they used to do they?
I seem to vaguely remember Einstein being interviewed about one of his theories
Let’s say the general theory, I cant remember which
And being asked
So how many scientists would it take, to convince you that your theory was wrong?
This is true genius for you!
Albert answered
Only one.
If he were right!!!
Well, I was going to waste some bandwidth, but the emperor of the Byzantines did just fine, so now I don’t have to. Just as well.
For a long time I wondered whatever happened to global cooling. Remember that? We were all supposed to freeze in the dark. And then it bonged me. Freezing in the dark leaves few opportunities for control freakery to run rampant through society but global warming – now that’s a real winner. Micromanaging even our choice of lightbulbs pops up on the radar screens of the truly dedicated control gurus. The possibilities are mind boggling and explain the great freeze turned into a global fry up virtually overnight.
If he has similar thoughts on the smoking ban I wonder what his reaction would be to this.
http://tinyurl.com/yu377q
This would be the sort of peer reviews that Mann got for his awful ‘hockey stick’ with his methodology that would have generated a hockey stick with random numbers plugged in? The sort of peer reviews that, when Mann and his science were investigated by professional statisticians, highlighted that not only was his method worthless but he operated in an almost watertight clique of like-minded scientists who peer-reviewed each others work? Social network analysis is awesome – it’s ad hominem with evidence. Even now people at climatescience.com are trying to resurrect his laughable “well I’ll use satellite data for the most recent decades and then before that ground measurements and then before that tree rings” ‘science’.
You are right in pointing out that the majority of scientists believe climate is changing (it certainly seems to be) and that mankind has an effect (seems plausible). But to say that there is an “overwhelming consensus” when you can see peer-reviewed (possibly even real peer reviews!) scientific papers coming out weekly that poke holes in the IPCC’s findings. And, lest we not forget, the IPCC’s reports are vetted by representatives of national governments before they get published. Roger Pielke, the large number of different scientists who have been studying the influence of the sun, the groups of Chinese scientists that claim that the urban heat island effect would have importance in climate science readings (papers published within the last few months), and many other groups and individuals have all picked holes in the Chicken Little school of environmentalism.
And, since Jim was talking about deception and falsehoods: link. Nice of the IPCC to declare that certain data is “inappropriate” for public consumption.
Jim, I would actually care what the “climate scentists” think if they published their raw data. Speaking as a researcher in the physical sciences, I have absolutely zero patience for computer simulations and other-such video-game-science, when unsupported by physical, real-world testing. If I had a bit of pocket change for each time I’ve read papers presented in the hallowed ‘peer-reviewed journals’ that run boil down to “Well, here’s what our computer approximation of the equations we derived from equations X, Y, and Z says *should* happen. We have no idea why the lab experiments and field observations show the exact opposite, but we retain confidence in the accuracy of our simulations,” I could retire next year.
You should remember that appeals to authority hold no weight with those scientists who have so much as a shred of integrity. Look to the example of Einstein, when a body of scientists signed a statement refuting his theories of relativity. He was unconcerned; “If they were correct, it would only take one,” to paraphrase his reply. Good data trump good theories any day. To date no reputable climate scientist has released any raw data. Aside, of course, from the aforementioned Mann paper. The one that generates flat-handled hockey sticks from the output of any random number generator, to say nothing of doubly-included tree rings and other such numerical artefacts.
In science, there can be but one authority–direct observation. And from the observations of Mars and the various Jovian and Saturnine moons–not to mention the quicker thickening of Earth’s glaciers (z-direction) than their retreat in length (x-direction; long story short the glaciers aren’t getting any smaller, they are in fact getting bigger on average)–anthropogenic global warming looks like a weak case of someone’s deeply-thought equations getting preference over the actual phenomenon.
The collectivist clowns who chose climate change to replace communism in the early 90’s didn’t see a capitalist China coming! Any/all CO2 reductions made by the well-off west are going to be swamped by the increasing emissions of China and India. Give it up folks – you’ll not convince them to remain mired in poverty to accomodate your sandal wearing proclivities!
Any attempt to discuss the climate on Mars (or Earth for that matter.) that does not mention both Solar Radiation in all its various forms, including Coronal Mass Ejectctions (CMEs) and Cosmic Rays in irrelevent.
CMEs are some of the most awesome sights in the Solar System, check out the ones on the SOHO web site which is at Soho.nasa.gov or at the ESA web site.
Trying to bully people into shutting down a scientific debate shows that they cannot be very sure of themselves or of their facts.
Regarding the RealClimate.org links Jim so helpfully provided Perry for edification purposes, I’ll simply quote “Morgaine” (a contributor at Educational Global Climate Modelling forum) in response:
Sure, some quality scientific debate happens over at RealClimate.org, but only a fool would claim there isn’t a blatant pro-AGW agenda being pushed by the site’s owners and contributors.
James put it more politely, but Realclimate Jim, is not a scientific blog, but a totally politicised one. Just try to make a reasoned arguement about, for example, whether Bristlecone Pines are a temeprature proxy, and see if they will permit your comments to pass uncensored. RC is the simply THE place to go and have your prejudices confirmed.
To be fair, Paul, I think that “in denial” did originally have a respectable meaning beyond “demented”, but the phrase, as abused today, sometimes puts me in mind of the following Pythonesque dialog:
Quite so Alan Peakall.
This puts me in mind of Oliver Cromwell (the dictator during the last great witch hunting craze in England), His health was broken by malaria (yes the sickness, that as pointed out above, the United Nations morons claim can not exist in a temperate climate). Cromwell was offered treatment (which would have done him some good), but he rejected it as herbalist “superstition”. In many places I have visited in this country the damage to churches done by Cromwell’s forces in the name of fighting “superstition” reminds me how glad I am that he applied his rationialistic (very different from rational) attitude to himself.
Of course a British army (some 40,000 troops) was undermined by malaria (4000 dead, 12000 so badly hit by malaria that they never served again – the rest recovered, sort of) in the Netherlands (Walcheren 1809). Although no doubt the powers-that-be are busy rewriting the history of this campaign – if they have not decided to simply decree that it never happened (it was, after all, part of the shameful effort to prevent the noble scheme of European unity).
If the U.N. people really cared about malaria they would be demanding the unbanning of D.T.T. (this ban has cost tens of thousands of lives).
As for the sacred “wet lands” (where the vile malaria carrying insects breed) – these are what we used to call swamps or bogs, the only thing they are good for is as a dump for the bodies of people one has killed (the bodies sink are unlikely to be found till such time as it will not matter).
I am a engineer by training and it is my experience that you won’t find one in ten of that profession who buy into the global warming crisis as presented in the media. Anyone who has had even a basic course in thermodynamics will know that you can’t really solve a problem that involves an open system and is as complex as the environment of the earth. Anyone who claims otherwise automatically has no credibility. I would imagine that the 56% figure is much higher amongst people whose professions are in the sciences.
James, there really isn’t much point, as you said, if you can’t get your head around the basic idea of being able to link competence to the ability to do things, not ‘expertise’.
By the way, has anybody else noticed that two months ago another record-hot Summer was predicted due to global warming, and that now, further downpours are also predicted, due to ‘global warming’?
Sorry. I can remember weather like this in the seventies.
We had a little thunder last month described as freak thunderstorms by the press; in 1978 I had to take cover from a thunder cell that was striking all around like something from special effects or an artillery barrage.
Obviously in 1978 nobody paid any attention to it.
One issue with the anthropogenic cause theory is the time frame of human activity that causes global warming. The 250,000 to 2 million years when humans and our ancestors were setting fires to grasslands and forests, draining swamps, altering the courses of rivers and streams, hunting and domesticating animals, and building different urban centers and settled agriculture don’t appear to be climate changing phenomena; only the last 200 or so years of industrialized capitalism in human society appear to have climate altering capability even though industry has become more efficient (less polluting) during this period and modern industrialized countries with large carbon footprints are more clean than those countries which have populations living constantly on the margins of survival, or rather “living harmoniously in a sustainable relationship with Nature.”
Oh Dear Jim, what a tangled web we weave when we try to be clever. Your little comment, sneering that : There isn’t much point having this conversation if you can’t get your head around basic concepts such as the difference between day to day weather and long-term changes in climate, is there?”
Apparently, neither can the man who said: ‘How can we predict the shape of [a] warmer world 50 years from now? We can’t even forecast if it will rain next week.’ It’s taken from Global Warming Survival Handbook by one David de Rothschild, and published in aid of the Live Earth fun fest. (Note to self: must avoid references to “It’s Hot to Trot”)
Anyway, if one of the erstwhile killjoys of the global warming crowd can say that, perhaps you Jim should have a quiet word and put the man straight. Read the full thing here
Sorry, I think I made a bad link in my previous note… for those who care, it’s from a good article on http://www.spiked-online.com
Berlins sounds like a schoolteacher in this article – if we won’t do the sensible thing when told how to and given every chance to, then we’ll have to be told what to do whether we like it or not. He hits just the right note for a paper read widely by those in the education industry. He knows exactly how to appeal to the average Guardian reader’s well developed sense of intellectual superiority.
Paul,
Between the late 1940s and 1970 DDT prevented around 50 million human deaths from the fever. In 1963 there were 17 cases of malaria in Sri Lanka, and in 1968, after DDT was banned, there were over a million.
Derren Brown – Tricks of the Mind.
Thank you Rachel Carson. You’ve killed more people than Stalin. Quite an achievement.
Voluble,
A few years ago I was a computational astrophysical fluid-dynamicist. I was working with a tinker-toy model of a star and trying to plot the transition from deflagration (burning) to detonation (big kaboom!) Now that’s a complicated problem. That’s a real Fozzie Bear of a problem. Oh, I’m not saying it’s especially hard in the way that getting Cosmological Inflation to make sense is hard. It ain’t hard like that but it is complex. You just can’t make the usual approximations. You ever seen Ohm’s law in it’s full non-linear, non-isotropic, non-homogenous form. You ever seen the circular restricted three-body problem and the result – the disturbing function – written out to fourth order in orbital elements? It scared the bejesus out of me and I was a theoretical physicist, happy as Larry to cover page after page of A4 with hieroglyphs*. Now, that’s an approximation to the solution of the problem of three mutually interacting gravitating bodies and it looks like something from Isaac Newton’s worst nightmare. Three bodies, under very constrained circumstances, mutually interacting in a vacuum. That’s it, and it produces an approximate solution that would make your hair stand on end.
Now, some bunch of “climate scientists” and Al Gore wanna tell me that “the debate is over” when they’re talking about a system vastly more complex than any I would ever dare attempt to analyse. I know what I’m talking about (Does the Goreacle?) because I aced fluids at Nottingham and London Universities and this is clearly (amongst other things) a fluid dynamical problem. Amongst other things… Well it only has the admixture of ecology, thermodynamics, atmospheric chemistry… Where do I stop?
So, Jim, who’d ya trust? D’ya trust a qualified astrophysicist like moi, or d’ya trust Al Gore. What exactly is he qualified in again? Once more for the record – AGW – I don’t know and I very much doubt anybody does but I feel it in my bones to be a con. And I am utterly ashamed of those “scientists” who are pushing a theory that they must at some level feel to be dubious. There is no victory here. I have little doubt that AGW will be shown to be total rot but… that’s a hollow victory for me. Will we ever trust science again? I love science. Without it life would be kinda dull. Science is the reason I’m typing this to a global audience rather than hollering it in a town-square (and no doubt about to be carted off to be burned at the stake).
I’m majorly pissed off.
*Well, we started with Latin, rapidly moved up to Greek and then Hebrew (I think there was even a hint of the old Russky). And rapidly scrawled in pencil by yours truly it even more rapidly became incomprehensible even to me.
Personally I’d say that the far bigger lie – because it doesn’t have any claim at all to scientific backing – is the idea that the way to stop any greenhouse effect is to grind the economy to a halt. Even their own projections show a marginal, slow response to merely stopping adding CO2. But they refuse to contemplate as preferable the use of technical fixes – because they would allow consumer culture to continue un-reproached. And that would spoil the whole point of it.
Do you think it’s time for a variation on those charming bumper stickers which said `Nuclear power? No thanks.’?
Several possibilities spring to mind, starting with `Al Gore? No thanks.‘
Oh! I forgot to say – `Jim, a lot of the posters and commenters here are scientifically trained, so directing us to politicised sites like RC and an article which quotes the laughable Hockey Stick is about as clever as trying to combat climate change by giving up smoking.
I work in a large and prestigious university stats department-none (that’s 0 out of over 20) of my academic colleagues believe any of the models or conclusions of the climate change lobby. The most common description of it that they offer is `millenarianism’ (you may have to look that one up).
Hi,
I’ve written a couple of articles for National Review that go directly to some of the issues discussed in this thread.
The first focuses on the structure and uncertainty of Global Climate Models:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmViY2Y3YzY1YmVkYTg4NjczODhkYWU1Mjg1YzhjMTI=
The second is the cover story form the last issue of the magazine which focuses mainly on policy implications of the science:
http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/3/19/902907/NR%20%20%20Digital%20Article.pdf
Best,
Jim Manzi
What Manuel said, well put!
Jim. There seems to be evidence that some of the key data is being fiddled. Sea level for instance. Also didn’t they try and remove the little climatic optimum from the graph to avoid ‘confusing’ the punters? That sort of stuff combined with the quasi-religious behaviour of the ‘committed’ is enough to make any reasonable person suspicious.
Re Pietr’s “By the way, has anybody else noticed that two months ago another record-hot Summer was predicted due to global warming, and that now, further downpours are also predicted, due to ‘global warming’?”
Yep! were did that “Hottest summer for 30 years go?” I expect if we were to have the colderst winter for 30 years then that would be down to global warming too – and Binge Drinking…
Yes the vile Rachel Carson did cause millions of deaths – not “tens of thousands” (although Stalin was responsible for tens of millions of deaths – and he wanted these people dead, the lady was just a …..).
Rachel Carson with her made up stats, and made up (and absurd) stories. “The Silent Spring” is a good example of junk science.
Almost needless to say John Kerry and Albert Gore regard as a great work (former Vice President “Al” Gore wrote the introduction to most recent edition) praising Rachel Carson’s “honesty” and “painstaking reaseach” how the lady “checked and rechecked” everything (and so on).
If it were not so disgusting it would be unintentionally funny.
As for “binge drinking”, the latest “Conservative” idea is higher taxes on booze (in the deluded belief that this will reduce the problem).
The “broken society” (i.e. young, and not so young, people with no meaning in their lives) is not caused by booze – people turn to booze (in the “binge drinking” sense) because their lives are a mess.
The “Conservatives” have got cause and effect the wrong way round and the proposal (higher taxes) will achieve nothing good.
Almost any Tory would have understood all this (and not just in the 18th or 19th century even quite recently, and non Tory folk like the conservative Whig Edmund Burke understood it all to), but modern “Conservatives” do not have a clue.
But then they do not know what “social justice” means either – they even seem to think that it means something good.
Again even the most ordinary Tory (be he factory worker or farm hand) might not have understood the fine details – but he would have understood that one faces a choice between “justice” (to each his own) and “social justice” (some form of “distribution” of income and wealth by the state). And not just centuries ago – only a few years ago.
But modern “educated Conservatives” have no idea what they are talking about.
D’ya trust a qualified astrophysicist like moi, or d’ya trust Al Gore
Well, I’ve a couple of friends who are qualfied physics of various stripes; Oxford grads for the basic degree, other places for the doctorates.
One of ’em works in climate modelling, cool toys he has too. I remember back in 1998 when they upgraded his workstation to 128 GB ram, very cool I thought.
Anyways, I do trust him, over a guy on a comments page in a blog, and he thinks there’s something to it. He’s not convinced that we can change it but he’s fairly comfortable that it’s going on and that humans are probably the cause.