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]
|
The good news: those polars bears killed by “global warming,” were not.
From the AP:
Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.”
… observations suggested the bears drowned in rough seas and high winds and “suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.”
Bad news for some, I reckon.
Ezra Levant:
There are about 100 professional anti-oilsands activists in Canada, who do nothing but attack Canada’s oil industry. Typically they pose as grassroots environmentalists. But the facts are different.
Most environmental activists are actually paid professionals. And most work for foreign lobbyists.
He is talking only of Canada, but even so, it puts a whole different slant on things, doesn’t it? Read the rest of the piece for a few details.
I also think it puts a different slant on the constantly heard – and utterly ridiculous – claim that in the absence of Old School Dead Tree Media news reporting, there will no longer be any news, just bloggers blogging and twitterers twittering, about nothing.
There will still be plenty of news. But it may be somewhat different news.
Seriously, I mean man, SERIOUSLY Asia doesn’t give a fuck about your white, western, self flagellating, puritanical eco religion.
– commenter ‘twostix‘ on this Catallaxy thread
As someone who has lived in the rapidly developing part of Asia for the best part of four years thus far, I cannot stress how strongly the above is true. Oh, sure, people worry about Climate Change (in fact, I would say they are less skeptical about it than the average westerner), but virtually no one would sacrifice development in its name.
I have said it before, and the greens really need to get it through their thick skulls – if global warming is real, it is now inevitable. For the reason so eloquently stated above.
Owing to my habit of listening to the BBC radio news at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, on account of me liking to record CD Review, I just heard about this:
The heads of 15 green campaign groups have written to the prime minister warning the government is in danger of losing its way on environmental policy.
I do hope so.
The letter says the coalition should promote a green economy with “urgency and resolve” if it is to follow its vow to be the “greenest government ever”.
The groups include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB.
Downing Street says it stands by its record of protecting the environment and delivering a low carbon economy.
A year ago, David Cameron said the environment would be a top priority.
I love the phrase “a top priority”, in particular the “a”. And when a government says that it “stands by its record”, that often means that it realises that it’s a stupid record and is about to attempt a somewhat different record. It will never apologise for past errors, but is now wanting to make different errors, now that the political wind has altered somewhat. It was trying to get elected. Now, it is trying to at least to appear to balance the books that the election has placed in front of it.
David Cameron is the sort of politician who cannot be relied upon even to break a “vow”, but this news sounds, if not good, then at least like an improvement. There has been quite a little furry of news lately to the effect that his government is starting to have doubts about its electoral promise to wreck the British economy in the name of junk science, by making modern life illegal. Given that the British economy is already being wrecked in the service of junk money, I guess they are starting to reckon that one self-administered catastrophe is probably as much as the country can take just now.
Presumably similar calculations are going on in all other countries. Again, I hope so.
There is a nice exposé in the Telegraph indicating that tax money and the tax funded BBC are funding key people and institutions in the warmist/environmental movement. The article provides a useful who’s-who of establishment figures with their snouts in the public trough…
…but what a pity they did not just read the indispensable Biased-BBC blog because the Telegraph could have written this exposé more than a year ago.
During a discussion with other board members of the National Space Society, someone noted this lecture by Albert Bartlett, a retired Physics prof. at the University of Colorado-Boulder on the subject of “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy,” After watching it, I felt a discussion was in order on how someone can say things that are absolutely correct and yet not map them correctly to the boundary conditions in the reality we actually inhabit.
I had been putting this off due to an overly busy schedule but I finally had a little time free this morning and watched all eight sections. 1-6 are math; the remaining two are primarily politics. What I find wrong is what is missing. We all know how exponentials work and we all know that they do indeed stop in real life. In electronics a rising exponential means clipping, feedback, etc as the circuit response transitions from linear to nonlinear.
It is also present in economics and in demographics both of which have the S curve as a fundamental form. The S is a combination of a rising exponential and a falling exponential glued together at an inflection point. This is the ‘growth’ curve that matches the Bell Curve he shows for oil production. The two are closely related mathematically.The inflection point on the S-curve is the peak on the Bell.
A very big missing fact in his discussion is that population growth peaks in the mid to late part of this century by all the demographic studies I have seen. I was part of a University wide collection of summer seminar givers on this subject at CMU back in the early 1980’s (I presented in one course on the implications of the space option naturally). The UN projections that were part of our study guide showed a family of curves of which we seem to have followed the lower growth curve in the ensuing decades.
Even then it was known that the biggest factor reining in population growth is women’s education and per capita wealth. One could even say the faster economies of the third world grow, the sooner they are likely to get through the demographic transition (ie the S curve in populations) and the lower their final population will be. Europe went through the transition a century ago; the US in perhaps the 40’s (I would have to research that timings, I do not remember them precisely). China has gone through it also now and the population is still going up only because there is a coasting phase due to previous growth. In the terms I used earlier, they have passed the inflection point of the S curve or the peak of the Bell Curve.
Europe faces a collapsing population, a falling exponential, something that was not really predicted 30 years ago. Russia has a demographic disaster on its hands. Very few places still show population growth and those are primarily in the Middle East. It is no surprise this an area dominated by a culture where women are allowed the least control of their lives and bodies and are least likely to be educated.
The good professor also ignores economics although they show indirectly in his curve. Economics, not a bunch of self-congratulatory tree huggers, is the driving force behind a growing efficiency in products or the useful part of that efficiency at least. The market gives a price signal on a resource; capitalists then innovate to find ways to do the same with less or with different so they can make more money. This was the most important message from Julian Simon’s writings.
I found it interesting how he went out of his way to denigrate Julian Simon rather than engage the very real ideas Simon espoused. Most notable was the uncomfortable fact of the bet Simon won against Paul Erlich on the declining real price of resources. Perhaps the difference is that Simon’s world is one in which nonlinear dynamics rule. Simple linear models of classical physics are simply not a good model for economics or civilizations over the long term.
So, absolutely, long term exponential growth would be a bad thing if it ever really happened. But it will not. Population on the planet will stabilize; per capita use of resources will rise for a while after that until everyone in the world comes up to the wealth level of us hated capitalist Americans who have the temerity and the creativity to make our lives better than those with crap governments and worse cultures. They will emulate us, not vice versa.
Market signals and competition will drive down the per capita use of resources and the energy per unit of production; if we get lots of solar power satellites the actual energy per capita may go way, way up… but not necessarily as an exponential, or at least not one that runs for a long period of time.
I foresee stable planetary populations living at levels of wealth beyond the wildest dreams of our most creative billionaires. Since I just saw “Atlas Shrugged” yesterday afternoon, I very much hope we do not make our billionaires go on strike. They are the ones who make real things happen. Without the generations of their kind we would all still be spending our days watching the backside of a mule.
Yesterday I received a spam-email, with a link to this, which begins thus:
The public sector has a key part to play in the fight against climate change, as well as ensuring the security of the country’s energy supply. The Public Accounts Committee has criticised the UK’s ‘unacceptably slow’ progress towards meeting its renewable energy targets. Understanding the scale of change required, and the public sector’s role in leading the way, is vitally important.
And the Gadarene Swine are moving towards the cliff edge with abysmally insufficient urgency.
Later:
Greening the heat supply is extremely important – heating accounts for roughly half of Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions. The Department for Energy and Climate Change recently announced the launch of the world’s first Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), which aims to increase renewable heat generation from 1% to 12% by 2020. The £860m scheme aims to encourage the installation of equipment such as renewable heat pumps, biomass boilers and solar thermal panels to reduce emissions and support the existing 150,000 jobs in the heating industry.
Once again, we observe that Law about how, when you name a government department after some problem, this guarantees that the problem will only get worse.
All of which just goes to show the power of momentum. The mere arguments in favour of such policies have taken a hammering during the last year or two, and I daresay that the event that this piece of spam was alerting me to won’t have quite the buzz that its organisers had been wanting when they first set it up. Doubts – in the form of puzzled and angry questions about what to do about the rising tide of climate denialism, but doubts nevertheless – may be heard during it. And that matters, because unless there is global unanimity on this issue, curbing some of the CO2 emissions of little old Britain will be so extremely pointless as actually to seem somewhat pointless to some of those who favour such a policy. But, too many bets have been placed, too much Green Money is now swilling around, for this foolishness to end at all soon.
In the recent Local Growth White Paper, the government emphasised its commitment to delivering a huge expansion of renewable energy over the next 10 years. Recognising that community renewable energy projects play a vital role in meeting the national need for secure and clean energy, they will now be allowed keep any business rates generated. Moreover, the planning system has caused hold-ups in the past, but imminent changes to planning powers will make it simpler to take advantage of such opportunities.
In other words, this Good Cause is now deep into the racket phase. Which means that the end is in sight, but not before a lot more money has been given to some very undeserving people.
From – where else – The Guardian: Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth
“Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.
The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.”
The first comment to the Guardian piece said, “So much for evolution.”
“Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature “to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities”.
The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities.”
Votes for bacteria now!
“Little opposition is expected to the law being passed because President Evo Morales’s ruling party, the Movement Towards Socialism, enjoys a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament.
With the newly-enfranchised bacteria supporting him, I’m not surprised.
“In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being.
The draft of the new law states: “She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation.”
Nice to see Bolivia following Britain’s England’s example and instituting an Established Church.
Computer modellers have long been accused of inventing extreme weather events at some deliberately vague point in the future. But here is an Australian story about how another kind of modelling invented extreme weather conditions at an exact moment in the recent past, that other forms of actual measurement didn’t register.
The claim by SEQWater in its official report that a “one-in-2000-year” rainfall event occurred over the Wivenhoe Dam at a critical stage on January 11 has been widely reported in the media and cited by senior public servants to justify the near loss of control of the dam at the time.
But no such rainfall event was measured by any rainfall gauges. Instead, the claim was manufactured by SEQWater after it modelled the rapid rise of levels in the dam, repositioned rainfall data to an area immediately upstream of the dam, and then doubled it.
After extrapolating in this unusual way to achieve an extreme number, the SEQWater report states: “Rainfall of this intensity and duration over the Wivenhoe Dam lake area at such a critical stage of a flood event was unprecedented.
“The resulting run-off could not be contained without transition to (an operating strategy that led to the operator opening the dam’s gate for huge releases).”
But:
Senior independent engineer Michael O’Brien, who has spent the past nine weeks analysing the performance of the dam and SEQWater, said that while the rainfall was heavy, he did not believe it was extreme and he doubted it was ever close to the range claimed by the operator.
This is no mere academic spat. SEQW’s allegedly flawed decision making contributed hugely to the serious flooding that recently hit Queensland.
Mr O’Brien, who has mounted a strong case that the devastating floods in and near Brisbane would have been almost completely avoided with better management of the dam, said the one-in-2000-year event was an “invention” that could not be taken seriously.
The modelling-trumps-measurement vibe to all this is the reason that climate skeptics like Anthony Watts are already onto this.
Delingpole hasn’t yet had a gloat about it all, but doubtless he will, because this just begs to be amplified into a big story, of the sort that the world’s Old School Media will either run with, or make further climate-prats of themselves by ignoring.
Every day is Earth Day in North Korea
– Samizdata commenter ‘newrouter’
It is 8:30 pm in London and ‘Earth Day’ has begun. Every single light in our house and garden have now been turned on.
I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron – I think he is both.
– A comment on a Christopher Booker article. Bishop Hill already has this as his quote of the day, but I think it really deserves to get around.
It is often assumed by opponents of big government that all those on the government payroll are automatic believers in big government, because it suits them to be. But it just doesn’t follow. They may start out believing in big government, but what they then learn when part of big government may cause them to have second thoughts.
LATER: Yes, I have demoted this posting, as it were, basically by pretending that this went up an hour sooner than it really did. This is because I have been updating the posting that is now next, and because I consider that posting, although no more important than this one, to be be more urgent.
|
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.
|
