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]
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Bad News! The Earth is doomed! Eco-disaster will be here by 1999! So… oh… hang on… what year is it now?
Over on Climate Depot, they have a wonderful run down on how the climate’s doomsday clock keeps getting reset.
But of course THIS TIME ITS FOR REAL.
Honest.
Sadly this 2007 prediction has proved to be a few years out, because whilst the hysteria is indeed visibly on the wane, a great many people do not seem to have got the memo telling them it has been noticed that their Emperor has no clothes.
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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.
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To be honest, I’ll act like it’s a crisis when the people who say it is a crisis really act like it is.
And I say this in the midst of a rather heavy April snowstorm that is covering the Upper Midwest. The winter’s accumulation was almost gone yesterday.
This is one of the best things that the internet has done. These hysterical claims are now remembered and disintered by a few specialist hysteria spotters and publicised for all who are interested, which is now a lot of people. Our own Natalie Solent has written about this in a number of postings. The internet remembers!
The regular media were never going to tell this story, because they are actors in it. EARTH ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT GOING TO END BUT IT MIGHT GET A BIT COLDER OR THEN AGAIN MAYBE A BIT WARMER doesn’t make nearly such a good headline. So, instead, they lied. Many of them are still lying.
Indeed Brian. That is why such worthy works need as much publicity as possible.
In the words of her divine dingbatness Sinead O’Connor:
Everyone can see what’s going on
They laugh ’cause they know they’re untouchable
Not because what I said was wrong
Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies
I will sleep with a clear conscience
I will sleep in peace
Maybe it sounds mean
But I really don’t think so
You asked for the truth and I told you
Through their own words
They will be exposed
They’ve got a severe case of
The emperor’s new clothes
It’s all a bit “Rocky and Bullwinkle”: “This time, fer shure!!”
WOLF!
No, really, look over there… Ignore the long ears and cotton tail. It’s vicious, it is.
Actually, there’s an interesting juxtaposition between the left crying wolf and the Fabians aim to be wolves in sheeps clothing
New snow on the ground AGAIN this morning in New England. Right now(night time, 28deg.F
Reminds me of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The climate change lot will have their final 1976 moment when the rapture fails to take place and then it will be all about some indeterminate date in the future that it will take place.
Just as a point of interest –
Since out ‘climate’ apparently hasn’t changed for the past 15-20 years, despite computer models screaming that we’re all doomed –
Does anyone know just who the hell decided that the climate we have right now is the PERFECT climate and that we should move Heaven and earth, spend untold $trillions to keep it this way ??
I want to know WHO made that decision !
I quite like to visit various sciency type blogs and I find it odd that it is those sites that seem to be the slowest to catch on that climate change alarmism isn’t based on actual science. Nowadays it seems to be more like a religion based on Lysenkoism.
Of course the earth is warming as it emerges from the Little Ice Age that ended in the early to mid 1800’s.
The planet cycles through colder and warmer phases on a multi-century schedule, as well as alternating warm and ice age periods on a multi-millennial schedule.
The assertion that a minor atmospheric gas, in concentrations of hundredths of a percent, could overpower these natural cycles is ludicrous.
And, once again, its not the warming that is the issue, but the relentlessly collectivist policies that are alleged to be the only possible solutions.
When these “concerned” types start proposing policies that emphasize individual liberty and freedom of action, then may be I will get interested.
It’s the rights and liberties of the individual which are facing a threatening and deteriorating future, much more so than the climate is from a few cow farts.
Like many climate skeptics, I find myself actually siding with the greenies on the issue of developing alternative energy, for myself it is down to (a) plain old progress and (b) removing reliance on Arab and Russian sources.
However, while the “science” is often used to state the problem, the real science to provide the solution is relatively simple.
Solar, wind and wave energy are essentially sunlight, as is fossil fuel (condensed sunlight). The problem is the pesky 149 million km it takes to get to us and when it does arrive is spread over a vast area, with fossil fuels there is the added waiting 50 million years for it to form.
The best answer would be if we had sunlight right here on earth, and that is essentially nuclear. We haven’t got it exactly (fusion) but we’ve got the next best thing (fission). So the proposals of turbines and PV cells are already behind the curve, if science is to deliver an answer it would certainly be fission now and fusion later.
As the green movement is stocked full of anti-nuclear hippies who had to find a new home once the Berlin Wall fell, the chances they will go with the real science is unlikely.
Following the links in the article there are quite a few ex-greenies who agree with this policy, most notably Patrick Moore (Greenpeace) and James Lovelock (Gaia).
RB the Green movement is essentially a patient Khmer Rouge, anti-human and anti-progress wishing to drive us all back to the fields to die of hunger and disease.
Runcie, that analysis is brilliant in its simplicity, from a purely scientific POV.
Got to agree Runcie. Spot on. Mr Ed, also spot on. It’s Year Zero and 2014. But back to the nukes… It is so obvious that it is staggering it is controversial. And if by the by it sticks a weed up the ass of Putin and assorted theocrats then we can call it a win/win and celebrate by firing Caroline Lucas out of a cannon in a false Dmitri manner. Oh, and by the way Runcie, on the subject of the Berlin Wall (I have a bit it) the environmental depredations of Communism far out-stripped what we did. East German brown coal springs to mind as does the hell wrought in China by Neodymium works which are of course vital for wind turbines.
One thing that I’ve often considered but never read anyone more scientifically literate than me discuss is the idea that if fossil fuels are made from plants and animals that are millions of years old, but the earth is billions of years old, then the CO2 they have sequestered was once in the atmosphere. And as such, the atmosphere must have at one point contained virtually all the CO2 that is now in the ground in the form of oil/coal/gas etc, of which there is still a massive amount, including huge amounts that are in trace form, and not economic to extract. Thus if that is the case, then there can be no problem releasing all this CO2 by burning fossil fuels, because its just returning the earth to it ‘natural state’, given that fossil fuels are between 15 and 600m years old, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old. And given that the earth did not destroy itself when all that CO2 was in the atmosphere there is zero possibility it can now, within the timescales of both known and potential future human existence.
Jim, the scare promoted by the climate scaremongers is not that the Earth will destroy itself, but rather that it will cease to be fit for humans to live on, and that among other possibilities, it may return to its early condition, before humans appeared.
But Alisa, isn’t that what the rabid greens want: for humans to die off so Gaia can return to its pristine state?
Indeed, that’s one of the (many) problems I have with those folks. Do they want to save the planet or to save people? Because if it’s the latter then modern technology is demonstrably the best way to improve the lives of more people, and if a scattered few are displaced by rising sea levels so be it; just offer them help in moving. But if it’s the former then they should be glad that we’re ruining the environment so it can kill off our species faster. Either way, if we truly are affecting the climate (rank hubris, in my opinion) they should be glad.
Anyhow, George Carlin got it right.
Yes Laird, I believe this is what they want, but this is not something they admit. They are rather clever about telling people that if we don’t protect the environment, it will become unfit for human habitation, which is far from being untrue and which rightly scares many truly good-intentioned folks (albeit possibly to a degree that is not entirely justified). That’s why the debate should be about the best and most effective ways to protect the environment, not about whether it is worth protecting.
Speaking as rationalist with a strong environmental and skeptical scientific bent, and with a background in operations research, I was surprised that I had been asleep to the climate hoax for so long, when, in 2009, I was awoken by reading the leaked Climategate emails from the so-called “university” of SE Anglia and it’s Climate Research Unit and its so-called “scientists”. Then one studied the revelation of the scientific and stochastic crimes of the Mann “Hockeystick” myth and as contained in various of the IPCC’s reports. Then the revelations regarding the GISS/NASA manipulation (cooling down) of the time series climate data which they are custodians of – and which manipulation apparently still continues unabated, today.
Then the quiet release of a report by the UK Met Office in October 2012, and – after some Met Office denial/obfuscation – their equally quiet confirmation on New Year’s Eve in December 2012, that there had been no warming trend (anomaly) for at least 16 years – now it’s 17.5 years and still counting. It was flat – “The Pause”. The Climategate emails had revealed that Trenberth and others at SEA CRU were well aware of this statistical plateau back in 2008/9 and it became known as “Trenberth’s missing heat” because he said it was a “travesty” that they couldn’t explain where all the “heat had gone” (or words to that effect). Never question the model or the theory, but blame it on the data.
In all of this, truth seems to have been deliberately defenestrated by the perpetrators, presumably for political purposes, and all at the taxpayer’s expense.
As I explained to my 12½ y/o daughter – all that “Global Warming” that she had read about and seen on BBC TV documentaries and news reports: none of it had so far taken place in her lifetime.
Amongst the things I detest most are a lack of scientific rigour and integrity coupled with deliberate dishonesty/obfuscation.
@Brian Micklethwait makes a valid point where he says (above):
It is a tribute to the service that the Internet has done for us, helping to make us less ignorant than we might otherwise have been and as these fraudsters would have apparently liked to keep us.
There is thus some not inconsiderable irony in the publication on a blog of this animated GIF showing the death spiral of the press: The Decline Of the Dead Tree Press
Wasn’t 1999 supposed to be the year the Moon was blasted out of its orbit around the Earth by a gigantic nuclear explosion?
Dog, sorry to burst your bubble, but that was a science fiction series, made by those clever British puppeteers who made the Thunderbirds, and Aliens, etc. I was amazed at how fast the moon could zip around neighbouring stars, and how their shuttle-craft never needed refuelling!
they never showed what the effects would have been on Earth of the moon going walkabout, either. Pity.
And I thought that the Polar ice caps were melting away, but here is a plan for the UK’s new Polar ship.
Another £200,000,000 on the National Debt, nicely termed ‘investment’.