When you use that kind of analogy, the Warmists love to take extravagant offence. But it’s worth remembering this, next time you hear someone like Australian economist and arch-Warmist Ross Garnaut complaining about how hurt he is at having been called a Nazi by Viscount Monckton or a scientist like Phil Jones, complaining about how hard it is to do his job, what with all those FOI requests he gets from troublemakers like Steve McIntyre: the great debate on ‘climate change’ has never been one about shades of grey. It is not one in which there are sensible arguments on both sides or where the reasonable ground lies somewhere in the middle. And it is certainly not one in which there is any moral equivalence whatsoever between the two sides.
The Alarmists would like you to think there was: of course they would. It suits their interests very nicely to be seen as victims rather than oppressors. (That’s why, for example, as we saw in Chapter 2, they were so keen to make out that the Climategate e-mails had been ‘stolen’ by criminals rather than ‘hacked’ by a whistle blower; and why, in the aftermath, they made such great play of all the personal threats they had received.) But just consider for a moment where the balance of power lies, where all the money is, who has the most political influence and ask yourself: ‘Who do these charlatans think they’re kidding?’
Certainly, last time I checked, there was no A$180,000 a year advisory position with the Australian government available to any of those sceptical scientists who’ve been consistently proven right on the climate change issue – Ian Plimer, say, or Bob Carter, or David Archibald or Garth Paltridge. No, to land one of those cushy numbers, to get the grand title Climate Commissioner, you need to be somebody like Tim Flannery: someone who might have a near-100-per-cent failure record on all his doomsday predictions but whose eco-loon narrative just happens to coincide neatly with the current political ‘consensus’.
Remember, by Jo Nova’s highly conservative estimate, the Warmist side is currently outspending the sceptical side by a factor of about 3,500 to one. Remember, too, that a large part of that money, being ‘government’ money, is siphoned out of your and my pockets. This, you might not unreasonably think, places a greater burden of probity, rigour and transparency on the Warmist side than it does on the Sceptical one.
After all, if Andrew Bolt or Jo Nova gets one of their facts wrong, what’s the worst that can happen? For a brief period until the correction duly appears one of their readers might run the risk of having been slightly misled. When, on the other hand, someone like Ross Garnaut or Tim Flannery gets a fact wrong (one fact? We should be so lucky!), the fate of a nation depends on it: misbegotten A$1bn desalination plants are built, flood prevention schemes are shelved, carbon taxes are imposed, landowners lose their property rights, economic growth is set back, unemployment rises, livelihoods are destroyed.
See the difference?
Oh, and just one more thing: there’s only one side of this debate which believes its cause is so just and urgent that it relieves them of the need to observe any standards of decency. There’s only one side which thinks it’s OK to: rig public enquiries, hound blameless people out of their jobs, breach Freedom of Information laws, abuse the scientific method, lie, threaten, bribe, cheat, adopt nakedly political positions in taxpayer-funded academic and advisory posts that ought to be strictly neutral, trample on property rights, destroy rainforests, drive up food prices (causing unrest in the Middle East and starvation in the Third World), raise taxes, remove personal freedoms, artificially raise energy prices, featherbed rent-seekers, blight landscapes, deceive voters, twist evidence, force everyone to use expensive, dim light bulbs, frighten schoolchildren, bully adults, increase unemployment, destroy democratic accountability, take control of global governance and impose a New World Order.
So to all those Warmists who claim to be upset when nasty, cruel deniers like me call them on their appalling behaviour, here’s a tip: if you don’t want to be called Nazis, then try to stop acting like Nazis. Apologising for that bloody awful ‘No Pressure’ video would be a good place to start.
ELEVEN
DECLINE AND FALL (PT II)
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
Lenin
It is the fourth century AD and the Barbarians are at the Gates of Rome. Around the Imperial capitol, the citizens of the greatest civilisation the world has ever known are tearing at their togas, quite unable to agree as to what – if anything – should be done.
Some, peering over the ramparts towards the hairy hordes encamped across the Tiber decide they rather like what they see. There’s something wonderfully echt and earthy about these splendidly unkempt men with their rich, musky smell and their delightfully untutored table manners. Also, having dwelt so long away from the corrupting influence of the City and having imbibed the purifying spirit of the deep forests, these so-called Barbarians are very likely nice, caring, nurturing types. Probably all they want to do is say ‘Hello’ and share some of their woodcraft skills at the nearest Transition Urbes meeting group
Other Romans, more fatalistic, take the view that the reason the hordes are carrying spears and swords and are now busy spit-roasting a captured legionary is that they are here with hostile intent. But perhaps this is no more than Rome deserves. Yes, it may well be that the Barbarians have come to impose on the Romans one or two significant lifestyle changes, possibly including violent death. But the truth is that Rome has had it far too good for too long. It has expanded its empire way farther than is natural for any reasonable society. It has developed far too many wholly unnecessary technologies, such as under-floor heating, straight roads, aqueducts and municipal bathing facilities, which will almost certainly deplete the world of the scarce resources that future citizens of the planet will need to survive. Sure, the coming Dark Ages may result in the odd century or so of extreme misery and hardship, but a planned recession like this may regrettably be necessary to secure the long-term future of the planet.
Others, more rapacious and cynical, watch with a barely concealed delight. That fake beard and those Barbarian-style furs and trews they bought from the costume shop the other week are increasingly looking like a canny investment. Sure it will be a nuisance when the Pax Romana is finally over, the economy’s in chaos and it’s every man for himself. But think of all the business opportunities that are bound to arise as Western Civilisation crumbles: private security contracts for all those newly unsafe roads, monopolies to be bought and exploited, alliances to be forged with the new regime etc. As a wise man from Judaea once said: ‘With crisis comes opportunity.’
Still others – and perhaps these represent the majority – glance towards the gathering hordes with a brief tremor of concern before turning to look away at what’s showing this afternoon at the Coliseum. ‘Nah,’ they’ve decided about the alleged Barbarian threat. ‘Never going to happen. After all, we’re not inhabiting some poxy little provincial capital in the arse-end of beyond. This is Rome, mightiest and most enduring civilisation the world has known. It has lasted over a thousand years and is destined to last just another thousand, wait and see.’
Finally, there are the Realists – and unfortunately they’re very much the minority – who can see what’s coming. They don’t like it one bit and believe something should be done before it’s too late. Of course, they are not at all popular with most of their fellow Romans, who variously consider them to be hysterical, naïve, or tiresome reactionaries, unhealthily wedded to the old ways and too selfish to make the radical lifestyle changes that will be necessary if Rome is to progress with the times.
‘But what was so wrong with the old Rome?’ plead the Realists. ‘Didn’t we have a good thing going, what with all the trade and abundance and order and peace and prosperity and comfort and sanitation and cleanliness and under-floor heating and learning and technology?’
No one else, though, is much interested in what the Realists have to say. In the unlikely event the Barbarians do prevai
l, well, all good things must come to an end and there are bound to be at least as many benefits as there are downsides. Why, already, there are rumours in the Forum that the new Barbarian economy will result in a whole slew of new Barbarian jobs. Once the pampered Romans get used to the more austere Barbarian lifestyle, fuel costs and living expenses will fall dramatically. Their diet will be a lot healthier because now food will be grown locally rather than transported laboriously and decadently from the far reaches of the Empire. Plus, there’ll be a lot less of it, so no more obesity.
And if Western Civilisation does come to an end, well, what the hell. Western Civilisation was always so terribly over-rated, anyway.
If you’ve reached this point in the book, you know which camp you’re in. You understand what’s at stake and you understand the vastness of the challenge we face. Here we are on the brink of an economic and socio-political precipice. And instead of saying: ‘Whoa! Let’s stay away from there!’ most of our political leaders are competing to see who can carry their people soonest and farthest into the stygian void of eternal doom. A pliant science establishment, a rapacious business lobby, a cheerleading media, a hell-bent green lobby and a sizeable portion of the blissfully ignorant populace (giving up their wallets along with their common sense) all stampede towards the cliff, yelling: ‘Wheeeeee!!!’
It’s a situation so bizarre that if it weren’t actually true, you’d think it could only exist in the fevered brain of some whacko, paranoid fantasist. Which, of course, is exactly how the many critics of this book are likely to label me.
‘Conspiracy theorist James Delingpole…’ they’ll begin. And they really won’t need to say any more because already they will have ‘closed down’ my argument. After all, if global warming really were a conspiracy it would have to have involved the complicity of: Tony Blair; Barack Obama; Al Gore; Greenpeace; the WWF; the United Nations; almost the entire mainstream media; the Royal Society; the National Academy of Sciences; almost the entire specialist scientific press from Science and Nature; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Goldman Sachs; the Rothschild family; the Prince of Wales; George Monbiot; Big Oil; the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia; and most likely the Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Lizard-Headed Master Race, too…
As we’ve seen, this isn’t a charge that can be answered in one easy sentence. Nor can questions like:
If global warming isn’t happening, then why are the polar ice caps/glaciers melting and my daffodils coming up earlier?
Why would the world’s top scientists all agree there was a problem if there wasn’t one?
But surely you must agree we have to rein in our greed and consumption to preserve scarce resources for future generations?
Can’t you see, we have to do something, even if it’s just on the precautionary principle?
All right, so it may be that the risks of man-made global warming have been exaggerated, but don’t you think the measures we’re taking to deal with it, and all of these new jobs and technologies, will be good for us anyway?
It has taken me an entire book to try to address these common questions and even then, I’ve barely scratched the surface. This has always been the great challenge for those of us trying to explode the great AGW myth: you’re grappling not only with complex facts but also with emotions and passions as powerful, deep-seated and irrational as you’d find among the adherents of a religion.
AGW is a religion. It has its high priests and prophets: Al Gore, the Prince of Wales; the Hon. Sir Jonathon Porritt. It has its temples: the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy, the IPCC. It has its warrior monks (and nuns): Leonardo DiCaprio, Ed Begley Jr, Tamsin Omond. It has its concept of original sin – the Carbon Footprint – which can be bought off with the help of indulgences – Carbon Offsets. It is motivated by an overwhelming guilt that we are all sinners but that we can redeem ourselves through mortification of the flesh (e.g. replacing bright lightbulbs that work with flickering, yellowish, eco-friendly ones that give you a headache but are apparently better for the environment, so long as you forget about all the mercury they contain) and self-abnegation (taking fewer holidays, paying more money to the government, sacrificing present pleasures for the sake of future generations).
And most important of all, it is based on no hard evidence whatsoever. Only on faith. Pure, blind faith.
This lack of factual basis ought to be a weakness. Unfortunately, though, it’s what gives the religion such enduring strength, for how can anyone ever disprove something that was never provable in the first place?
Even without this faith element, AGW was always going to be a tough nut for us Realists to crack, for in so many ways it passes the test of Occam’s Razor.
William of Ockham was the fourteenth-century monk and logician who formulated the influential principle – entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Loosely translated, this means: the simplest explanation is the best one.
Now apply Occam’s Razor to AGW and ask yourself which is the more likely explanation:
1. That, as countless respected scientists have noted, our planet is warming as a direct consequence of the increasing amounts of CO2 man is pumping into the atmosphere, and that unless something is done to contain our CO2 output, the planet will experience catastrophic overheating.
2. The whole thing is little more than an outbreak of mass hysteria on a scale unprecedented in human history. It was cooked up over a period of decades by an unlikely cabal of scientists, politicians, ecological activists, corporate fat cats, newspaper editors, diplomats and quasi-Marxist ideologues. Its ultimate goal – unbeknownst to most of the useful idiots participating in the scam – is the destruction of Industrial Civilisation, the end of national sovereignty and democratic government, and the governance of the world by a new order run by faceless technocrats and shadowy plutocrats.
I know which position I’d prefer to defend in a 30-second soundbite.
Then, there’s the question of motivation. And again the argument seems to point in one direction only. After all, which side appears to be more virtuous and trustworthy:
1. The side that cares so much about the health of the planet and the security of future generations that it considers no act of self-sacrifice too great to preserve Mother Gaia?
2. The side so wedded to the comforts of the Western lifestyle that it refuses point blank to amend its selfish ways, because it believes that the planet and future generations can take care of themselves?
Yes, all right, so I’ve cheated slightly by phrasing it in a loaded way. But this is what happens all the time in the debate on AGW, and it’s why for years the Warmists were able to push their agenda almost unchallenged. When one side has such raw, visceral emotion and ardent belief, and the other side has little more than arid facts and cautiously expressed uncertainty, it’s inevitable that the side with more passion will capture the public imagination.
And so it will continue to do until reality overtakes it in the form of higher taxes and energy costs, increased regulation, and weather that stubbornly refuses to accord with the climate doom-mongers’ apocalyptic predictions. By then, though, it may already be too late. Governments find it much easier to make laws than repeal them, much more satisfying to raise taxes than to lower them. Long after the urgent threat of climate change has been replaced by a more fashionable scare, the stringent regulatory measures taken to deal with that now-non-existent urgent threat will remain firmly stuck in the statute books.
If you don’t believe this, consider one example provided by Chris Horner in his book Power Grab: ‘It took until 2006 for Congress to get around to repealing the 3 per cent telephone excise tax originally imposed (at 1 per cent) to pay for the Spanish–American war conflict in 1898.’
And what is true of taxes and regulations is also true of eyesores. How long do you think it will take before someone eventually finds the money to clear up all those redundant wind farms blighting every view for miles? Longer
than any of you reading this are going to live, I would suspect.
So what do we do, we few, we happy few, we band of climate realists?
Well, the good news according to the sage Christopher Booker is that ‘We have two very powerful allies on our side: time and weather.’
The weather especially seems to have a mischievous sense of humour where climate alarmists are concerned. Remember the flurries of snow that swathed Air Force One as President Obama arrived at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit to discuss the deadly peril of ‘global warming’? Remember the ‘climate awareness’ march that was cancelled in Washington, DC, that same winter because of an unseasonal, heavy blizzard? It’s almost as if Nature is trying to tell us something. Gosh. What could it possibly be?
If we are to believe a growing number of meteorologists, polar experts, climatologists, geographers and geologists, the biggest joke of all is yet to come. Many of the signs are there – low sun-spot activity, changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, increased volcanic activity, global temperatures that have been flat then in slight decline since 1998 – that we are entering a prolonged period (perhaps thirty years) of global cooling. The question now is not ‘Will it happen?’ but ‘Just how bad will it get?’
If we’re lucky, perhaps it will just afford us a nostalgia trip to the bitterly cold winters some of us remember from the period between the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. If we’re less lucky, we’ll be revisiting the Little Ice Age, perhaps recapturing the pleasures of the Maunder Minimum (1645 to 1715) when ice fairs were held on the River Thames or perhaps the Dalton Minimum (1790 to 1830), which gave us Napoleon’s Retreat From Moscow and the terrible ‘Year Without a Summer’. Alternatively, just supposing Mother Gaia really wants to rub our noses in it, we could be entering a proper new Ice Age – just like the one James Hansen and Stephen Schneider were predicting in the 1970s before the weather started getting warmer and they changed their minds.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 24