Catastrophism and Greenmail

The Greatest Irony of our Generation

When C0₂ is released into the atmosphere, wonderful things happen.  These things are so basic and obvious that a ten year old middle schooler can grasp them (if they attend a reactionary institute that still teaches science).  But adults long ago gave up on science and replaced it with ideological catastrophism.  There is a certain attraction to believing the world is on the verge of destruction.  It relieves the general ennui.  It makes one feel alive.  Much like the endorphin laden thrill after bungy-jumping. 

Carbon dioxide, we are told, is going to destroy the planet by heating the atmosphere and baking us all to death.  Except for a couple of realities.  The first is that C0₂ is a “heavy” gas and one would expect that it would naturally slurp around the surface of the earth, rather than head off into the upper atmosphere.  This is good news because of another reality: large amounts of carbon dioxide are absorbed by the oceans and green growing things.  It is the latter which interests us.

The reality is that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide greens the earth.  It is the greenest gas there is.  Ideological Greenists stupidly oppose the cutting down of the world’s forests and the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What the left hand gives, the right hand would snatch away.  It turns out that the world’s forests are growing much faster thanks to all the wonderful food they are getting from increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The Greening of the Earth

90 Percent of CO2 Emissions Go Towards Fuelling Rapid Forest Growth Rate

by Donna Rachel Edmunds  

12 Nov 2014

BreitbartLondon

 

A new examination of the distribution of CO₂ has found that some areas of the earth experience huge seasonal variation by as much as 16 parts per million (ppm), whilst in other areas, notably at the Antarctic and equator, levels remain relatively stable. The analysis suggests that vast majority of CO₂ emissions are captured in boreal forests, which have consequently been enjoying a ‘greening’ over the past few decades.

Writing on the blog of Joanne Nova, the Australian science writer who uncovered the vast amount of money driving the climate change industry in 2009, fellow scientist Tom Quirk explains his findings. Quirk explains that a recent isotopic analysis of atmospheric CO₂ shows that only around 10 percent of man-made emissions find their way into the atmosphere. He asks, where, then, is the remainder going?

In order to solve this question he turned to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography’s data on atmospheric CO₂. The Institute provides both raw and ‘smoothed’ versions of the data – but only the raw data exposes the seasonal variations experienced by certain regions. At Barrow Point in Alaska, for example, the levels swung by as much as 16ppm each year, well beyond the 2ppm that humans are contributing to the atmosphere. Moreover, the swings are amplifying as the years progress, causing Quirk to deduce that they are down to the seasonal variations in plant growth (as the plants grow in spring and summer they suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere; in the winter the CO₂ is left in place, causing the swings observed).

The amplification is down to the fact that, across the northern hemisphere, plants are becoming more abundant (the more plants there are, the more CO₂ they can capture). Quirk cites three studies showing increases in vegetation over the last few decades. In Sweden, biomass was recorded as increasing by as much as 19 percent between 1997 and 2010 in birch forests, whilst in Russia, forest biomass increased by 11 percent. A third European report attributed 61 percent of forest growth to an increase in CO₂ availability, and only 26 percent to changes in climate.

“These three reports give an annual forest growth of between 0.5 percent and 1.6 percent while the annual growth rates for the seasonal variations [of atmospheric CO₂] are between 0.5 percent and 0.9 percent,” Quirk writes. 

With such entirely expected positive outcomes for the world’s forests because of more CO₂ being released into the atmosphere, we would expect the climate change doomsters to rejoice.  But no.  Pseudo-apocalypticism will never let the facts get in the way of a scary story.

Even NASA’s own satellite data shows that the planet is steadily greening, by as much as 1.5 percent a year in northern latitudes. Yet in May last year, the world’s media mournfully reported that atmospheric CO₂ had just passed the 400ppm mark for the first time in three to five million years, with NASA clamouring to paint the news in a calamitous light.

NASA scientist Dr Michael Gunson said “Passing the 400 mark reminds me that we are on an inexorable march to 450 ppm and much higher levels. These were the targets for ‘stabilization’ suggested not too long ago. The world is quickening the rate of accumulation of CO₂, and has shown no signs of slowing this down. It should be a psychological tripwire for everyone.”

To be fair, maybe the NASA ideologues are on to something.  Maybe the increase in  CO₂  does represent a clear and present danger, but “not as we know it, Jim”.  Maybe the forests and the plants are going to take over and squeeze humanity off the earth.  The Day of the Triffids draws nigh and H. G. Wells becomes a true prophet.

His colleague Laura Faye Tenenbaum, an Oceanography professor was more emphatic: “As a college professor who lectures on climate change, I will have to find a way to look into those 70 sets of eyes that have learned all semester long to trust me and somehow explain to those students, my students – who still believe in their young minds that success mostly depends on good grades and hard work, who believe in fairness, evenhandedness and opportunity – how much we as people have altered our environment, and that they will end up facing the consequences of our inability to act.”

Dr William Patzert, a Research Oceanographer, was more political in his outlook: “Scary scorecard: catastrophic climate change 400, humanity zero. Listen to the scientists, vote wisely, beat carbon addiction and put humanity into the game,” he said. 

Whoa.  We find the passion compelling as we do the All Blacks’ performance of  the haka.  But the facts, ma’am.  We need reliable data and reasonable inferences in this matter–not apocalyptic scare-mongering.

But Nova and Quirk are firm that there is no reason to draw alarming conclusions over rises in atmospheric CO₂, as nature is more than capable of not only dealing with the rise, but of capitalising on the extra CO₂.

Commenting on Quirk’s findings, Nova says “the northern Boreal forests are probably drawing down something like 2 – 5 gigatons of CO₂ every year, and because the seasonal amplitude is getting larger each year, it suggests there is no sign of saturation. Those plants are not bored of extra CO₂ yet. This fits with Craig Idso’s work on plant growth which demonstrates that the saturation point — where plants grow as fast as possible (and extra CO₂ doesn’t help) is somewhere above 1000 and below 2000ppm. We have a long way to go.”

And that, dear friends, is that.  More atmospheric CO₂ please. Quickly. Wonderful, beautiful green growing things depend upon us releasing more of the greenest of all gases into the atmosphere.  Breathe faster. 

The End is Nigh

Fashionable Nutters

The Climate Change Doomsday Cult has tossed up more than its fair share of nutters.  If you stupidly, but genuinely, believe that “the end is nigh” for the human race, let alone the planet, then such desperate times call for desperate measures.  We can understand the logic, just as we grasp the logic of those who have believed that the world will end at midnight on the 13th of June, 2001 (or whenever) and who have traipsed out into the desert to set up survivalist compounds, thereby avoiding the worst of Armageddon.

In each case, the logic is sound; it’s the premises that are false.  The Climate Change Doomsday Cult has  this one distinction from apocalyptic forbears, however.  It has managed to capture the fears and febrile imagination of the chattering classes and the Commentariat, normally too urbane and sophisticated to get taken in by Doomsday cults.  Here are a couple of examples of the elites having been suckered.  First, the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, as reported in BreitbartNews: 

NEW YORK CITY — New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Sunday during the People’s Climate March that the city’s private sector buildings may be mandated to be retrofitted to adapt to the city’s green house gas emission reduction plan. “We are now the largest city on the earth to adopt the 80/50 standard. We are going to retrofit all of our public buildings. We are going to work with the public sector. We are going to work with the private sector to retrofit their buildings. I’ve said very clearly, I think the private sector is ready and willing. I think it’s in all of our interests,” he said. “It’s a matter of survival. We’ll work with them. We’ll incentivize. We’ll support. If that is not moving fast enough, we will move to mandates because we have to get there. This is a matter of survival.” 

Mayor de Blasio announced he was committed to an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, beginning with sweeping regulations among buildings in the city.

The cost impost upon New York City will be horrendous.  Unintended perverse effects will follow: businesses migrating out of the city, owners of buildings going bankrupt; buildings being abandoned, economic growth (also known as employment, wages, and the ability to provide for families) will lag.  The only growth industry will be the power, organs, officials, and rules and regulations of the city government.  De Blasio is going to command and control New York into becoming a giant survivalist compound.  Paradoxically this will bring upon the city the equivalent of a nuclear winter, albeit by other means.  His plan will cause the alleged disasters hectored abroad by the Climate Change Doomsday Cult to come into being. But it’s all OK, because New Yorkers’ very survival is at stake. 

And here are some examples of the Climate Change Doomsday Cult in action the UK:

Actress Emma Thompson, arguably best known for her Best Actress Oscar in Howards End and for her courage in naming her daughter Gaia, has declared that anyone who doesn’t believe in climate change is “bonkers”.  . . .

“Unless we’re carbon free by 2030 the world is buggered,” Ms Thompson claimed, apparently unaware that the trace gas carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of almost every industrial process and that if anyone took her prescription seriously then Western Civilisation would be brought grinding to a halt and the world would indeed be “buggered.”

Yup.  Doomsday is looming.  Here is another version of the Climate Change Doomsday Cult, this time from a fashion designer.

Emma Thompson and Gaia weren’t the only celebrities lending their expertise to the climate march. Also present was fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who averred:

“A triad of [fossil fuel] monopolies, banks and politicians are ruining the planet. If runaway climate change kicks in then within a generation, there will be very little habitable on the planet and the suffering will be unimaginable.”

Could these icons of the Commentariat be wrong?   Yes.  Their passion may be compelling–but that’s always been true of Doomsday Cults.  Here is the “other side” of the argument, as summarised in the New York Post, soon to become the ex-New York Post (we confidently predict, if the madcap mayor has his way): 

Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”
Consider:

•  According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
• Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
•  Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
•  A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.

The climate scare, Fulks sighs, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus.” . . .The costs of feeding the climate-change “monster” are staggering. According to the Congressional Research Service, from 2001 to 2014 the US government spent $131 billion on projects meant to combat human-caused climate change, plus $176 billion for breaks for anti-CO2 energy initiatives.

Federal anti-climate-change spending is now running at $11 billion a year, plus tax breaks of $20 billion a year. That adds up to more than double the $14.4 billion worth of wheat produced in the United States in 2013.  Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion a year by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century.

Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, notes that this would buy imperceptible improvement: “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”  Al Gore was right in one respect: Climate change is a moral issue — but that’s because there is nothing quite so immoral as well-fed, well-housed Westerners assuaging their consciences by wasting huge amounts of money on futile anti-global-warming policies, using money that could instead go to improve living standards in developing countries.

That is where the moral outrage should lie.

Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition. Bob Carter is former professor and head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia.

Letter From Australia (About a Caravan of Doom)

Caravan of gloom slowing down

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
April 02, 2014 8:00PM

The latest IPCC doomsday report induces a big yawn in Oz.   

REALLY, if journalists must terrify us about the end of the world, they shouldn’t be this damn lazy.  
Take the ABC, which on Monday waved a vague arm in the general direction of the planet: “Climate change will impact everything everywhere.”  Come on, guys. That’s not even trying.

Put some pep into it. If the world really is ending I want gory details. I want screaming. I want children held up to the pitiless sky by wailing mothers as fathers curse their fate.  But, no, even reporters of The Age, Australia’s most fervent global warming newspaper, sounded listless this week as they promoted the latest scare-report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  “Irreversible and severe damage is to be inflicted on the planet from climate change,” plodded writer Tom Arup before he sighed.  “I know, this does feel familiar doesn’t it? You are a little bored, I can sense your eyes glazing over.”

But that’s odd. If you were told your children would soon die in a ghastly fireball, you wouldn’t be yawning. Not if you believed it.  And death and doom is exactly what we’re told to expect.
Take Professor Helen Berry, a University of Canberra health academic who helped write this IPCC report and told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Unless we get control of (this warming), it will mean our extinction eventually.”

Extinction?  Yes, indeed. Two other IPCC co-authors, Australians Tony McMichael and Colin Butler, agreed “human-driven climate change poses a great threat … perhaps even to human survival.”  Gosh, that’s stuff you usually get from street preachers in sandwich boards black with quotations from the Book of Revelation: “There were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.”

Professor James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia theory of a living planet, used to do that apocalypse shtick, too. In 2006, he thundered: “Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”  But Lovelock now admits he and alarmists Tim Flannery and Al Gore just lost their heads and the warming scare is a beat-up.  “It’s become a religion,” he said last week, “and religions don’t worry too much about facts.”  [At least not Flannery’s.  Ed.]

How true, as we saw again this week.  How many journalists did you hear this week mindlessly repeat the IPCC’s latest claim that “no one will be untouched by climate change”?  How few did you hear add that past IPCC predictions of warming catastrophe proved hopelessly wrong and the world’s atmospheric temperatures had shown no real warming in 16 years?

Instead, watch them again buy the latest IPCC claims that we really are warming the planet dangerously.  Example: the ABC’s 7.30 asked a key IPCC author, Professor Chris Field, to identify “the changes to the climate that have already occurred”.  Field gave as his first example the “impacts on food systems” which sure surprised me.  You see, back in 2001 the IPCC was already banging on about how warming would “adversely affect wheat and, more severely, rice productivity in India”, only to see India repeatedly break harvest records. In fact, world harvests of three major crops — maize, wheat and rice — continue to grow.
True, Field admitted to the ABC that, yes, “year-on-year, yields have increased by something like two per cent”.

But then he claimed: “For at least two of the world’s major food crops, wheat and maize (corn), the increases in yields year-on-year have slowed, partly as a consequence of climate change.”  Oh, really?
That slowing is not obvious from recent record harvests and it’s not obvious either to Andrew Lake, head of Pristine Forage Technologies and author of peer-reviewed papers on crop yields.

“There is not the slightest supportable evidence of a global downturn in actual yield increases,” says Lake, a former chief scientist who investigated crops for the South Australian Research and Development Institute.
“In fact, the rate of increase has been the same for at least 30 years; at 33kg/ha per year.”  Lake says that suggests the very opposite to the IPCC’s scare: man’s emissions of carbon dioxide, a plant food, mean “future global food security is being enhanced”.

“That an increasingly idiotic non-science nonsense consensus would seek to have us believe otherwise is nothing short of an alarming abuse of scientific process and analysis.”  But the great caravan of IPCC alarms has now moved on again.  It will return, of course, with another end-of-world sale of scares, but buyers next time will be even warier.

They bought that cheap stuff last time and see how it keeps falling to pieces.

Thankfully We Live in an Enlightened Age

A Warning to Jews and Lepers

Atmospheric calamities provoke ignorant fears.  Scapegoats must be found.  In the early 14th century, Europe was troubled by very, very bad weather–somewhat akin to what the UK, Europe, and the United States have experienced over the past eighteen months.

The summer of 1314 was uncommonly cold and wet in Europe.  Crops rotted, harvests were late, and alarmed authorities placed price controls on farm products and firewood.  All these were routine disasters that had happened many times before. 

The awful weather of 1314, however, was just the beginning of a succession of catastrophes.  Bad crops seldom happen two years in a row, but the weather in 1315 was even worse than during the previous year.  Heavy and incessant rains caused flooding that smashed dikes.  Rising rivers destroyed villages.  Violent storms crashed onto the coasts [c.f. the floods and storms in the UK this winter, Ed.]  The tragedy stretched from Scotland to Italy and from the Pyrenees to the homes of the Slavs.  Food prices rose over fivefold and starvation was widespread.  Even that was not the end.  The weather wreaked havoc once again in 1316, causing the worst famine in European history.  People ate cats, rats, insects, and animal droppings, and then, lacking anything better, dug up corpses in the burying grounds.  Epidemics and violent crime were widespread.  Bloody and public self-flagellation was common.  Scapegoats–Jews, lepers, noblemen–were murdered without hesitation.  [Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000),  p.97]

Some observations spring to mind.
  Clearly, the early fourteenth century was enduring climate change of the most extreme kind.  Equally clearly, at least to the enlightened modern scientific mind, the cause was global warming.  Equally, equally clearly, the fourteenth century global warming was caused by the excrescence of  copious amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  What else could explain it?

Secondly, the scapegoats of the day (Jews, lepers, noblemen) were alighted upon out of ignorant prejudice.  Thank goodness such days of alarmist ignorance have passed, and we live in a more enlightened, scientific, evidence-based age. 

Thirdly, let this warning suffice.  If we do not learn from history, we will be condemned to repeat it.  If we don’t see the damage climate change can wreak, as illustrated so graphically in the fourteenth century, we will end up suffering a similar fate.  Our advice to Jews, lepers, and noblemen is to get out while you can.  And if you are approaching the terminus of your earthly life, maybe cremation is the way to go.  No-one wants the starving to feast on one’s mortal remains.  Climate change and its dangers are both apocalyptic and very real.  The early fourteenth century proves it beyond doubt.  The science is settled.  

Drowning in Oil

Peak Oil, Where Art Thou?

The catastrophists have been warning for the past ten years of mankind approaching “peak oil”–that is, the time when oil consumption exceeds supply, leading to a drastic global shortage of energy.  Peak oil was supposed to have occurred around now.  Except . . . .

North America to Drown in Oil as Mexico Ends Monopoly

By Joe Carroll and Bradley Olson 
Dec 17, 2013 6:54 AM
Bloomberg News


The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.
  Plagued by almost a decade of slumping output that has degraded Mexico’s take from a $100-a-barrel oil market, President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking an end to the state monopoly over one of the biggest crude resources in the Western Hemisphere. The doubling in Mexican oil output that Citigroup Inc. said may result from inviting international explorers to drill would be equivalent to adding another Nigeria to world supply, or about 2.5 million barrels a day. 

Note: the lack of production and supply from Mexico was due to stupid, myopic, misguided protectionist policies in that country.  The shortage was an artificially induced situation, created by bad government. 

That boom would augment a supply surge from U.S. and Canadian wells that Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) predicts will vault North American production ahead of every OPEC member except Saudi Arabia within two years. With U.S. refineries already choking on more oil than they can process, producers from Exxon to ConocoPhillips are clamoring for repeal of the export restrictions that have outlawed most overseas sales of American crude for four decades. 

US oil production has suffered the from the same kind of Malthusian ignorance and misguided protectionism as Mexico.  The US government has systematically locked-up huge oil deposits in no-mining areas.  But developments in new exploration and oil production technologies (such as fracking) has allowed the private sector to boost its production substantially.  The pressure to remove the export restrictions upon oil produced in the US–another stupid, myopic, misguided protectionist policicy–will put the Obama administration in a bind.  Reflexively this is not what the president will like–being a warrior to stop global warming and all.  His best-case-scenario is to have oil priced at $1,000 a barrel so that wind power will become more economic. But that hand can only stop the leaks in the dyke for so long. 

An influx of Mexican oil would contribute to a glut that is expected to lower the price of Brent crude, the benchmark for more than half the world’s crude that has averaged $108.62 a barrel this year, to as low as $88 a barrel in 2017, based on estimates from analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Five of the seven analysts who provided 2017 forecasts said prices would be lower than this year.

The revolution in shale drilling that boosted U.S. oil output to a 25-year high this month will allow North America to join the ranks of the world’s crude-exporting continents by 2040, Exxon said in its annual global energy forecast on Dec. 12. Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will be the sole crude import markets by that date, the Irving, Texas-based energy producer said.

Rats.  Another looming catastrophe bites the dust.  But let’s never forget, this catastrophe was the result of illicit government overreach in both the United States and Mexico.  When governments get involved and meddle in areas in which they have no competence or divine warrant, bad things happen.  The unintended, unexpected consequences are the real catastrophe.

Letter From Australia (About Human Maggots)

David Suzuki drives me crazy

Miranda Devine – Wednesday, September 25, 2013 (7:48am)

The Daily Telegraph
  

DAVID Suzuki’s appearance on the ABC flagship program Q&A spelled the death of any credibility left in the fag end of the climate alarm movement.  The affable climate alarmist is described by his acolytes in the Australian media as “iconic scientist and thinker”. He is really the Canadian Tim Flannery, with an expertise in insects rather than mammals.

At 77, Suzuki describes himself modestly as an “elder”. But his performance indicates he only has mastered the age bit of the equation, more than the wisdom.
On his latest ABC-feted trip to Australia he’s described Tony Abbott’s election mandate to axe Flannery’s Climate Commission and remove the carbon tax as “criminal negligence”.

In an opinion piece last week, he airily claimed the Great Barrier Reef “could” shrink to one quarter of its 1986 size in the next ten years, because runaway global warming is increasing the frequency and severity of cyclones, despite evidence to the contrary.  But on Monday night’s fawningly titled “an Audience with David Suzuki”, he showed himself to be astonishingly uninformed about the science he proclaims on, from climate to the dreaded genetically modified crops.

When tackled on his reef cyclone furphy by IPCC expert reviewer and environmental engineer Stewart Franks, he rolled over:  “I have to admit, that that was suggested to me by an Australian, and it is true, I mean, it may be a mistake. I don’t know.”

When a scientist in the audience defended working on genetically modified bananas to counter Vitamin A deficiency so that poor Ugandans don’t go blind or worse,” Suzuki said: “what’s the rush?”. Just a few dead and blind Africans, I guess. By the end, even Q&A’s greenie host Tony Jones looked sheepish.

“Corporations are not people”, opined Suzuki at one point, prompting a twitter spurt of ridicule such as “clouds are not unicorns”.  Suzuki was sunk on the first question put to him by Bill Koutalianos of the Climate Skeptics Party, asking why man-made global warming advocates refuse to acknowledge that global temperatures have remained relatively flat for 15 years.

“Where are you getting your information” Suzuki asked.  Koutalianos cited the major temperature data sets used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Suzuki burbled about “cherry picking” facts. “There may be a climate sceptic down in Huntsville, Alabama, who has taken the data and come to that conclusion.”

Umm, no.

The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is out this week and no doubt will package up the latest climate science in the usual alarmist language.  But the inconvenient fact remains that real world observations since 1998 have defied climate models which predicted catastrophic global warming. AR5 is expected to concede this fact, even if prominent eco-alarmists ignore it: the world’s average surface temperature has not increased for 15 years, despite increased human emissions of carbon dioxide.

In other words, the computer models which predicted drastic global warming, on assumptions of the atmosphere’s extreme sensitivity to carbon dioxide, were wrong.  Which is not unprecedented. Computer models are not magic boxes of wisdom. They are a powerful tool for simulating the future but they are only as good as their human-designed assumptions and their human-collected data inputs.

Eventually scientists will emerge from the muck of politics and ideology to explain why the predictions were wrong.  In the meantime, we should be free from the imperative to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on vast green bureaucracies and schemes to reduce carbon emissions which just damage Australia’s economy and outlaw the cheap coal-powered electricity which used to be our competitive advantage.

With the Greens vote plummeting from 13 percent in 2010 to 8.6 percent this election, a catastrophic drop of more than one third, it’s clear the Australian public is coming to appreciate the danger of eco-zealotry.

Suzuki has a beatific smile and endearing manner, but he is not an elder or a sage of science. He is an environmental extremist, a relic of the 1970s. He may not wear the bandana and John Lennon glasses of his youth but inside still beats the heart of an anti-capitalist hippy.

A piece of footage doing the rounds of social media this week shows a young Suzuki in 1972 sitting cross legged on the ground, describing humans as “maggots” that “defecate all over the environment”.

Almost half a century later, nothing much has changed.  Asked if he still wanted to jail politicians for “denying what you call the science of climate change”, Suzuki said: “You bet..  it is a crime against future generations and there ought to be a legal position of intergenerational crime and I think there is criminal negligence.”

What about reckless endangerment of the economy with fairy stories from eco-pseuds. Is that a crime?

Simplistic Nostrums Don’t Cut It

More Full Than a Craft Beer Bar

Consider the following testimonies.

Citation One:

Feeding the masses will be a problem if the population continues to soar.  The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations’ World Population Prospects, two years ago, predicted just over 10 billion people by 2100. The latest revision, just out, predicts almost 11 billion.

 

That’s a truly alarming number, because it’s hard to see how the world can sustain another 4 billion people. The current global population is 7 billion. But the headline number is deceptive, and conceals another, grimmer reality. Three-quarters of that growth will come in just one continent: Africa.  The African continent has 1.1 billion people. By the year 2100, it will have 4.1 billion – more than a third of the world’s total population. Or rather, that is what it will have if there has not already been a huge population dieback in the region. At some point, however, systems will break down under the strain of trying to feed such rapidly growing populations, and people will start to die in large numbers. 

Citation Two:

Everything has been visited, everything known, everything exploited.  Now pleasant estates obliterate the famous wilderness areas of the past.  Plowed fields have replaced forests, domesticated animals have dispersed wild life.  Beaches are plowed, mountains smoothed and swamps drained.  There are as many cities as, in former years, there were dwellings.  Everywhere there are buildings, everywhere people, everywhere communities, everywhere life . . . . We weigh upon the world; its resources hardly suffice to support us.  As our needs grow larger, so do our protests, that already nature does not sustain us.  In truth, plague, famine, wars and earthquakes must be regarded as a blessing to civilization, since they prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.  

Spot anything wrong here?  The first citation comes from international correspondent, Gwynne Dyer in a recent edition of the NZ Herald.   The second comes from Tertullian, writing about 200AD, quoted by Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009), p.246f.]

Clearly someone is wrong–or both are.  When Tertullian was working, the estimated global population (note estimate only) was between 190 to 256 million people at the time.  Yet to Tertullian and his contemporaries the earth was full, too full, of people.  So full that plagues were a blessing in disguise. 

What is wrong with his  assessment?  It was wrong because it was one-dimensional, and therefore simplistic and trite.  Subsequent centuries have demonstrated that with technological development and economic growth the earth can support a vast increase in human population.  And still it has only scratched the surface.  Today’s global population is 6.8 billion people, a 2.5 thousand percent increase from Tertullian’s day.  Yet the larger proportion of the earth’s surface remains wilderness and uninhabited. 

Tertullian might be excused the error, since he was ignorant of the historical explosion in knowledge, technology, and economic growth that in our day brings emphatic testimony to us moderns.  Dyer’s assessment, therefore, represents the greater error.  It is even more simplistic, trite, and ignorant because he has two millennia of human history to prove just how wrong Tertullian and others were.  Yet he recites the same simplistic nostrums as if they were proved beyond reasonable doubt. 

In other days, Dyer has written about the wonder of the green revolution in the latter decades of the twentieth century when genetic engineering produced a significant increase in agricultural output of such staples as wheat, corn, barley, rice  and other grains vital to support human life.  Where once doomsters such as Paul Ehrlich was announcing the population bomb and warning that mass starvation was just around the corner, in fact grain production increased so rapidly that his proclaimed doom never transpired.  Dyer knows this–but has apparently concluded that such technological and economic advances will not re-occur.  

The biggest impediments faced today to growing vast new supplies of food and sustenance are governmental and political ones.  Beneath it all runs a strong luddite stream.  Here is just one example.  Grass carp have been found not to reproduce naturally in the NZ wild.  They do not despoil waterways, but actually keep them clear of invasive grasses.  They are beautiful to eat–a wonderful food.  New Zealand could produce a limitless amount using judicious farming technologies.  But the resistance to this wonderful opportunity is strong: it comes from those who view change with fear, who have the view that the world is about to end in some great catastrophe.  It is better to do nothing than risk calamity. 

In the long run it is only Christians (better taught than Tertullian on this matter) who relish the divine command and responsibility to multiply  fill the earth and make it bring forth and bud. (Genesis 2:15,16; 9:1-4)  But when a culture or civilisation turns away from God deathly patterns begin to form and emerge.  Those who love God, love His creation; they love life.  They look forward to a world more joyous, merry, bounteous and full than a craft beer bar on a Friday night. 

While We are At It . . .

Ban Soothsaying

Foretelling or fortune telling has always been popular.  We want to know what’s coming down the pike.  We also like to worry about the future.  A sense of  fear or dread persuades us that we are not just alive, but that we are responsible, concerned, sober, and serious about life.  Those who worry about the future are the grave and weighty citizens, the leaders. 

The media, consequently, love apocalyptic stories.  Fear sells.  It grabs attention. 

But it would be a worthy public service for media to run “So how did it turn out” stories on a regular basis.  A healthy society needs a decent dose of scepticism when it comes to harbingers of doom.  The NZ Herald has done us a service when over the holiday break it ran a “So how did it turn out” story on bananas.  Yes, you read that right.  Bananas.
 

Apparently, back in the day, a decade ago we are assailed with the prognostication that bananas were at risk of becoming extinct.  Children used to sob in their beds at night with that terrible combination of sadness, regret, and fear.  “Save our bananas” pressure groups sprung up everywhere.  Greenpeace scaled tall buildings festooned with bananas to call attention to the threat.  Eco-terrorists threw banana skins on busy sidewalks causing havoc in rush hour. 

So how did it turn out?  Nada.  Bananas are more plenteous today than ten years ago.  The only upshot is the rise in orthopaedic surgery to repair limbs damaged by falling heavily on busy sidewalks as a result of the harbingers of deprivation.  No prosecutions of eco-terrorists were ever successful, however.  Everyone had a sympathy for them–they were trying to save us all; they deserved some slack.

In 10 years, it was said 10 years ago, we might have no bananas.  “Bananas could split for good,” the BBC declared in 2003, citing a Belgian scientist who urged swift action to create new types of bananas.  By now, the ubiquitous Cavendish variety was supposed to have been at least in apocalyptic decline.

Here is the considered response to such futuristic fear-mongering:

Maree Conway, a strategic foresight practitioner in Australia, said such predictions should be banned.  “I always think of predictions as living in our comfort zone. We like certainty – that’s a human trait – so we predict and think we’ll know what’s coming,” Ms Conway said. “We can’t know. There’s no data about the future. Predictions are based on data, and it’s data from the past.”

A prediction is to assume today’s trends will continue into the future. “And that makes us very happy.”  They were wrong 99 per cent of the time anyway, she said. It was futile to focus on a single trend – like Panama [banana] disease – when there were so many trends intersecting and emerging. All you could do was to keep an eye out for change, she said.

This lust to know the future which, in turn, panders to our self-glorification and sense of worth and power, this titillation with fortune telling has become endemic to many pseudo-scientists.  They have replaced the gypsy fortune tellers of old.   Global warming is the current version.  But that will fade, to be replaced by other fearful apocalyptic tales to make our children shake in their beds. 

It is doom, doom everywhere.  Evil portents are upon us, we are told.  Tell that to Alaskans who are bitter about the immediate future–due to the extreme cold they have had to suffer through.  They are asking, “How’s that global warming working out for ya?”.  Not so good.  We want more carbon dioxide out there.  Much, much more.

Forget global warming, Alaska is headed for an ice age

Alex DeMarban | Dec 23, 2012

 

Alaska News & Features

Alaska is going rogue on climate change.

Defiant as ever, the state that gave rise to Sarah Palin is bucking the mainstream yet again: While global temperatures surge hotter and the ice-cap crumbles, the nation’s icebox is getting even icier. 

That may not be news to Alaskans coping with another round of 50-below during the coldest winter in two decades, or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth.  Then again, it might. The 49th state has long been labeled one of the fastest-warming spots on the planet. But that’s so 20th Century.  In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Widespread warming

That’s a “large value for a decade,” the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in “The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.”  The cooling is widespread — holding true for 19 of the 20 National Weather Service stations sprinkled from one corner of Alaska to the other, the paper notes. It’s most significant in Western Alaska, where King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula saw temperatures drop most sharply, a significant 4.5 degrees for the decade, the report says.

The new nippiness began with a vengeance in 2005, after more than a century that saw temperatures generally veer warmer in Alaska, the report says. With lots of ice to lose, the state had heated up about twice as fast as the rest of the planet, in line with rising global greenhouse gas emissions, note the Alaska Climate Center researchers, Gerd Wendler, L. Chen and Blake Moore. After a “sudden temperature increase” in Alaska starting in 1977, the warmest decade on record occurred in the 1980s, followed by another jump in the 1990s, they note. The third warmest decade was the 1920s, by the way.

The Greens are always wanting to ban things.  Why don’t they ban dire predictions of eco-disaster?  Oh, but we would lose the thrill of the Crusader, they would say.  The self-importance, the self-righteousness, the spirit of being the “noble warrior”–it would all be gone.  Life would no longer be worth living if we could not be scared about the future, and we were forbidden to share our fear with others, winding them up to a state of perpetual bed-wetting. 

Where would be the joi d’vivre in all of that?  The world would be a duller place, right?  Maybe.  But it would also be a more sober, sane, and rational place.  Less childish.  Less superstitious.  More grown up. 

Society Afraid Of Its Own Shadow

Scorning the Propaganda of Fear 
A review of Pascal Bruckner’s  The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse

Emma-Kate Symons
20 Jul 2012 00:03:00
Australian Financial Review

When a celebrated French philosopher from the centre left assails the “despotic” politics of environmental fear he should expect a dressing down from his climate change-conscious comrades.  But Pascal Bruckner has incited such fury with a diatribe against green prophesiers of imminent planetary ruin, the reaction has surprised even this veteran of the trans-Atlantic culture wars.

“The planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay,” is how Bruckner caustically portrays the received wisdom on environmental “sin” and damnation in his latest book Le fanatisme de l’Apocalypse (The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse).  “Consider . . . the famous carbon footprint that we all leave behind us,” he writes in his introduction. “What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?”

Western Civilisation

The Age of Vaunting Pride and Gnawing Doubt

The title of Dickens novel “Great Expectations” aptly summarizes a dominant theme in Victorian England (and the West in general at that time, for that matter).  There was a widespread, burgeoning belief that nirvana was just ahead.  Much of the optimism was due to advances in technology and science. 

To our jaded eyes, technological advances have become the norm.  Another “breakthrough” has become decidedly deja-vu.  But in the late eighteenth century this was not the case.  Consider Sebastien Mercier’s account of the first balloon flight in November 21, 1783:

A memorable date.  On this day, before the eyes of an enormous gathering two men rose in the air.  So great was the crowd that the Tuileries Gardens were full as they could hold; there were men climbing over the railings; the gates were forced.  This swarm of people was in itself an incomparable sight, so varied it was, so vast and so changing.  Two hundred thousand men, lifting their hands in wonder, admiring, glad, astonished; some in tears for fear the intrepid physicists should come to harm, some on their knees overcome with emotion, but all following the aeronauts in spirit, while these latter, unmoved, saluted, dipping their flags above our heads.

What with the novelty, the dignity of the experiment, the unclouded sky, welcoming as it were the travellers to hsi own element, the attitude of the two men sailing into the blue, while below their fellow-citizens prayed and feared for the safety, and lastly the balloon itself, superb in the sunlight, whirling aloft like a planet or the chariot of some weather-god–it was a moment which never can be repeated, the most astounding achievement the science of physics has yet given to the world.  [Cited in I. F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation 1644–2001 (London: Book Club Associates, 1979), p.29f)

Very quickly, in the popular mind, arose the general belief that nothing was impossible from this point onwards.  Man could conquer every dimension, every limitation.  He would be as God.  He would become his own redeemer.

The poet, Robert Southey, reflecting on Jenner’s discovery of the healing powers of vaccination, called him the “liberator of mankind”.  Here is Southey’s picture of the glorious future about to dawn:

Fair promise be this triumph of an age,
When Man, with vain desires no longer blind,
And wise though late, his only war shall wage
Against the miseries which afflict  mankind,
Striving with virtuous heart and strenuous mind
Till evil from the earth shall pass away.
Lo, this his glorious destiny assign’d!
For that blest consummation let us pray,
And trust in fervent faith, and labour as we may.
Ibid., p.42

But, at the same time,  there arose a deeply pessimistic view of the future.  Thomas Malthus and his followers, arguing from the limit of finite resources, painting a picture of development and growth to the point of causing calamity.  Malthus raised the question of whether the human race would survive.  One vivid presentation of the forthcoming calamity was penned by Frenchman, Cousin De Grainville in Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man).  So distressed did de Grainville eventually become, he took his own life on February 1, 1805.  He had penned that, due to rapid human advances, the end of human life was very close.  Here is his vision of mankind’s future:

The inhabitants of the ancient world, after having exhausted their soil, inundated America like torrents, cut down forests coeval with creation, cultivated the mountains to their summits, and even exhausted that happy soil. They then descended to the shores of the ocean where fishing, that last resource of man, promised them an easy and abundant supply of sustenance.  Hence, from Mexico to Paraguay, these shores of the Atlantic Ocean and the South Seas are lined with cities inhabited by the last remains of the human race.
[Cited by Clarke, ibid., p. 44f]

These two contradictory themes were a distinct product of the Enlightenment: firstly, man builds Paradise upon earth through reason, discovery, and technological prowess; secondly, and conversely, man destroys the planet.  Both themes dominate discourse in the West to this day, with the balance currently in favour of the pessimistic option. The destructive power of technology so evident in two world wars and the bloodshed of the twentieth century has caused the optimistic belief in inevitable progress to wither.  Climate changers have become the modern-day manifestations of de Grainville and Malthus. 

T. S. Eliot told us the world would end, not with a bang, but a whimper.  When men proclaim their liberation from the Living God and replace Him with Mankind as the self-saviour, a paralyzing scourge of fear and doubt begins to gnaw at the edges of the mind.  It is inevitable.  Man was made to serve God, and therein lies his glory.  When he casts God out and seeks to take His place in the Garden, dread stalks his imagination.  His self-proclaimed glory is eventually overtaken by an insipid sterile whimpering and whining in the dark.

Byron has already written the obituary of Western Unbelief:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went–and came, and brought no day

Running on Fumes

It’s All Going to End–Not

Part of the catechism of Green Catastrophism is describing the forthcoming horrors of Peak Oil.  You know, the world is running out of oil and the dislocation and suffering that will bring to humanity is unthinkable–so, the governments of the world (through the UN) had better come up with a government led solution to save us all, yah de yah de yah. 

But, we recall the sage words of Sheik Yamani.  He opined that the Coal Age ended not for lack or shortage of coal, and the Oil Age will also eventually end, but not for lack of oil.  The Sheik knew a thing or two about economic development, it would appear.

“Peak Oil” looks a more and more distant risk.  Take this as an example (it’s not uncommon):

Massive Oil Deposit Discovered in Arctic Region

Norway’s Statoil said Monday it has discovered a large oil reserve in the Barents Sea, its second major oil find in the Arctic region in less than a year. 

The state-controlled oil company said a well drilled in the Havis prospect in the Barents Sea proved both oil and gas at an estimated volume of between 200 million and 300 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalents.
Last April, Statoil said it had discovered between 150 million-250 million recoverable barrels of oil equivalents in the nearby Skrugard prospect.

The company has received a huge boost to its reserves in the past year. In August, it announced the biggest find in the Norwegian continental shelf in 30 years with a massive discovery of 500 million to 1.2 billion barrels of oil in the North Sea.

Disastered Out

A Bit of a Dag

Disclaimer: We are kiwis–and as such we have been socialised into reflexive cultural cringe.  Consequently we can expect a visceral reaction when we are daily confronted with warnings of Armageddon happening off the coast of Tauranga.  One gets the strong impression that media organs are trying to cover the “big one” in such a way that they emulate more illustrious main stream media in the world.  “We can do it too”, is the impression.  We can foot it with the big guys.

A container ship heeling over, we are told, is New Zealand’s worst maritime disaster.  Puleeze.
  Exactly how many lives were lost?  Zero, zip, nada.  How many lives were lost when the SS Wairarapa went down near Port Fitzroy in thick fog on October 28, 1984?  Oh, a mere 121.  But that was nothing, nothing we tell you, compared to a container ship listing over and leaking some oil. 

But consider the environmental damage.  We weep for the pristine beaches.  We hold daily mourning sessions over the number of birds killed (is it hundreds, thousands)?  We do not know–all sorts of different numbers are found everywhere in the media like quavers in a musical score.  Ah, now we know why this disaster is our greatest.  What are 121 human lives compared to the wicked, untimely deaths of thousands of birds?  Very little it would seem.

Then the faux anger.  People are mad.  Yes, mad we tell you.  They want to blame somebody for doing this.  Unfortunately, there is no big corporate, like BP to demonise.  Only a tawdry little man who was the captain–and he is a Philippino.  So it is hard to get payoff from demonising the poor chap.  So, its the gummint.  Blame the gummint.  Daily TV news has endless interviews with people who are just plain mad, and sad, and about to breakdown.  The anger rumbles through the community like Waiouru on a Ruapehu-bad-hair-day.  When people who have made the gummint their god they get real mad, read quick when their god doesn’t act like it.

There are real physical dangers as well.

The Bay of Plenty Public Health Service is warning that direct contact with the oil could cause a rash or nausea and vomiting if ingested. 

Yup, eating bunker oil may cause vomiting–even on a good day.  

The psychological impact also is devastating.  People who have seen dead birds are offered counselling.  At least someone is doing something useful.  Cometh the disaster, cometh the counsellor-heroes of the hour.

We have seen all of this before.  Remarkably  it is almost scene for scene, word for word out of the media script when BP’s oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico sprang a leak, after an explosion on a deep sea rig.  The beaches.  The fishermen.  The wildlife.  The nasty gummint.  The NZ media trying to show themselves and the world that they can put on a good sensationalist show as well. “Me, too”–ah yes, good old Kiwi cultural cringe. 

Roll forward.  Where are the headlines screaming about the Gulf of Mexico now?  Why don’t we have daily shots of the environmental devastation in that region?  Why?  Because the environment is remarkably robust and adaptable.  With a bit of help it recovers.  We confidently predict that in the Bay of Plenty Armageddon will pass us by this time.  Catastrophism–the sensational hyping of a calamity into a portent of the end of the world–will be left exhausted and spent, as always, after its brief paroxysm.  The news cycle moves on, don’t you know. 

Behind it all, away from the madding crowd, responsible people are going about their work.  Jettisoned containers are being tracked, corralled, and captured.  Beaches are being cleaned up (by an army of enlisted volunteers).  Oil is being pumped off the stricken ship.  Birds are being cleaned and protected as best they can.  Local governments have combined to provide some organizational resource to ensure that volunteers get trained and deployed appropriately.  We confidently predict that in a year one will struggle to find any evidence of the “greatest New Zealand maritime disaster” at all.  They will have to send in forensic teams to find it. 

Now that is the real kiwi culture–and a culture of which we can be proud.  Rallying to a need.  Pragmatic solutions.  Realistic expectations.  No bleating.  Just results.  It is the “Good on ya, mate” response.  No cultural cringe there. 

But as for the sensationalists, the media–ever seeking sales and ratings–ever wanting to find their moment of glory, their place in the sun, their moment at the Qantas media awards, they rattle around like dags at the back of a sheep.  Ugly and of no use. 

Everyone knows what you need to do to get rid of dags.

>Environmentalism and Shonky Science

>United Only in Their Rejection of Modern Society

What the ‘green movement’ really got wrong

Ben Pile

Channel 4’s mea culpa from two leading environmentalists still took for granted that humanity faces insuperable natural limits.

Monday 8 November 2010

Environmentalists have long claimed that their desire to save the world has been thwarted by conspiracies of Big Oil and right-wing think-tanks. Channel 4’s What the Green Movement Got Wrong showed signs that some environmentalists are at last beginning to take responsibility for their failures. But does it tell us anything we didn’t already know, and will the new environmentalists be so different from the old?

The main thrust of the film is that, by opposing GM, nuclear power, and DDT, environmentalists have damaged the chances of a solution to climate change and have done serious harm to poorer people and their own public image. Critics have been arguing this for environmentalism’s entire history, of course. But it is interesting to see some sober reflection on green failure nonetheless. Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (see a review of the book here), speaks candidly about how his objection to GM ‘wasn’t a science-based rational thing. It was an emotional thing and it was about the relation between humans and other living things’. Since Lynas ‘came out’ in favour of nuclear power, he has found himself on the receiving end of the self-righteousness he once meted out to others.

Although it is interesting to see one-time activists reflecting in this way, the reformulation of environmentalism doesn’t really address the problems with its initial perspective. The arguments in the film don’t form a criticism of environmentalism as an instance of the politics of fear, but merely moderate some of its excesses. There is an interesting discussion about the shortcomings of the precautionary principle, and the film’s participants are far more circumspect about risk from certain technologies than they have been in the past.

But these risks are merely seen in contrast to the ultimate catastrophe: climate change. Technologies are not considered in terms of their potential for humans, but are embraced reluctantly as solutions to climate change. Genetically modified (GM) food is sold seemingly only on the basis that it is a means to begrudgingly feed the poor. The limitations of the catastrophic narrative still are such that they constrain discussion about progress beyond subsistence.

The new environmentalists’ point is that the environmental movement failed to protect the environment. So the tension between development and environment still haunts the debate, rather than being exorcised from it. And this is the film’s major shortcoming. The real claim of environmentalism – its ethics – is not merely that we must protect the environment, but that we should live within environmental limits.

This is explored only briefly in the film, by reference to Paul Ehrlich who, in the late 60s, attempted to give these limits numerical substance. Ehrlich predicted dire consequences, but the resource depletion, mass famine and economic collapse he saw in his calculations failed to materialise. Undaunted, the environmental movement merely deferred the date of eco-tastrophe further into the future, and made an ethic out of life within presumed environmental limits – ‘sustainability’. The result has been the tendency of the environmental movement to produce ideas which are hostile to technological development and appear to be anti-human in consequence. But this character of environmentalism is only superficially explored in the film.

This shallow treatment of environmentalism’s substance resulted in a heated but ultimately futile studio debate broadcast after the film. In this exchange, Guardian columnist George Monbiot, Greenpeace’s token scientist Doug Parr, and Craig Bennett from Friends of the Earth (FoE) criticised the film for what they saw as it’s preoccupation with technology as the means to overcome these limits. ‘You can’t look at technology in ideological isolation’, said Bennett, insisting that FoE have a ‘pragmatic rather than ideological approach to technology’. Monbiot claimed that this was the most ‘ideological film I’ve ever seen on television’. Each side now accused each other of ‘ideology’, while claiming science and pragmatism for themselves.

However, this kind of ‘pragmatism’ has long been a feature of the environmental movement. For instance, in 2004, Lynas declared that ‘[t]he struggle for equity within the human species must take second place to the struggle for the survival of an intact and functioning biosphere’. In 2008, Monbiot seemed to agree, arguing that the eco-anarcho-socialists gathered at Climate Camp were undermining themselves: ‘Stopping runaway climate change must take precedence over every other aim’, he said.

It is this claim about ‘pragmatism’ that allows environmentalists to smuggle their own ‘ideology’ into such debates under the cover of ‘science’. And it was only ever a clash between two groups of environmentalists – rather than criticism from without – that would finally expose the tendency of ‘pragmatism’ to produce its own crises. The same ‘science’ seems to produce different arguments, and here lies the biggest mystery about the greens. ‘Where’s the cohesion of the new environmentalists?’, asked Doug Parr; there is no new environmental movement, he pointed out.

In fact, there never really has been an environmental movement, full stop. Environmentalism has been a loud and bizarre spectacle of UK politics, but it has never moved more than a handful of people out onto the streets at any one time. It has never achieved sufficient numbers to count as a political force. And there has been no cohesive environmental philosophy. Instead, as Lynas admits, environmentalists were united, not by science, but by their emotional rejection of contemporary society.

As with most criticism of environmentalism, it is often the reaction to it that reveals more than the criticism itself. Monbiot replies that the movement was unsuccessful, not because it failed to capture the minds of the public, but because ‘we are massively out-spent by corporate-funded movements which have had hundreds of millions poured into them telling government and the media there isn’t a problem’, a claim which surely ignores the UK and EU governments’ environmental policies. He complains that Channel 4 has ‘broadcast a series of polemics about the environment… over the last 20 years’. But the three films he’s talking about – Against Nature, The Great Global Warming Swindle and What the Green Movement Got Wrong – occupied no more than six hours of two decades of near continuous broadcasting. What environmentalists lack in terms of a sense of proportion, they make up for with a sense of persecution.

What Lynas has realised, and Monbiot has not, is that ‘sceptics’ did not undermine the environmentalists’ cause. Environmentalists were their own worst enemy. They have alienated the rest of society by their own uncompromising and misanthropic outlook. The challenge for the new environmentalists is to emerge from this crisis of their own making into an era of growing scepticism, while keeping an eye on the consequences of their arguments. But without the precautionary principle, alarmism, doom and catastrophe, and premature claims to scientific certainty, what is environmentalism?

Ben Pile is an editor of the Climate-Resistance blog.

>Where has all the Oil Gone?

>Histrionic Alarmism: Who will Rid us of These Pestiferous Fools?

It’s now mainstream. Time Magazine has run a piece on the Gulf oil spill by Michael Grunwald that presents the case for it being a storm in a teacup. The real disaster has been the Federal Government’s handling of it and the economic damage it has caused as a result of suspending deep sea drilling. But as they say in the trade, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. . . .

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden, another former LSU prof, who’s working for a spill-response contractor, says, “There’s just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts.” Van Heerden, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid from BP’s spill-response funds. “There’s a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it.”

The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is unusually light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Alaska’s Prince William Sound, is very warm, which has helped bacteria break down the oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water have helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. And finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden’s assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I’ve ever seen that were actually black. “It comes back fast, doesn’t it?” van Heerden said.

Grunwald’s conclusion:

Anti-oil politicians, anti-Obama politicians and underfunded green groups all have obvious incentives to accentuate the negative in the Gulf. So do the media, because disasters drive ratings and sell magazines; those oil-soaked pelicans you saw on TV (and the cover of TIME) were a lot more compelling than the healthy ones I saw roosting on a protective boom in Bay Jimmy. Even Limbaugh, when he wasn’t downplaying the spill, outrageously hyped it as “Obama’s Katrina.” But honest scientists don’t do that, even when they work for Audubon.

“There are a lot of alarmists in the bird world,” Kemp says. “People see oiled pelicans and they go crazy. But this has been a disaster for people, not biota.”

>We are All Doomed I Tell You . . .Not

>Six-and-a-half billion reasons to be cheerful

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, tells spiked why eco-catastrophists are so wrong about humans and our impact on the planet.

Tim Black

Never has catastrophe seemed so mundane. The end, we are told, is always approaching. No sooner has one super-resilient-flesh-eating-virus been forgotten than an imminent ecological collapse or a new strain of influenza takes it place. All of which makes Matt Ridley – journalist, businessman and author of several books on genetics and biology – such a refreshing person to talk to. ‘Yes, we are too gloomy about the future’, he says, cheerily.

That’s the thing about Ridley: whatever else he is – diffident, humorous, engaging – he is also resolutely optimistic. And it is this, his optimism, which he has sought to justify, to rationalise, in his new book The Rational Optimist. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=006145205X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrGiven today’s readiness to imagine the apocalypse, especially in environmental terms, being an optimist is a very unfashionable position to take.

‘The imagining of imminent catastrophe is a routine habit and it’s been going on all my life’, says Ridley. ‘And to start with, when I was younger, I believed it. I thought people had good reason to raise the possibility of these catastrophes. When I was first becoming an adult it was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and all this anxiety about DDT and other chemicals, and how they were going to cause an epidemic of cancer. Then it was the population scare. And then it was the oil running out. And then it was acid rain. And then it was the Ebola virus. And then it was global warming. And on and on it goes… I’ve heard enough cries of wolf during my lifetime to become sceptical about imminent environmental catastrophe.’

Ridley’s unwillingness to accept the doom-laden predictions of environmentalists is not just born of his own experience. Wider history, too, is testament to the unreliability of the catastrophic, morbid mindset. Just after the end of the First World War, Britain’s Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George lamented: ‘How can Britain run an A1 empire with a C3 population [medical categories for army recruits]?’ This was no isolated complaint – it was indicative of a wider sense of Britain’s national decline refracted through the prism of biology. ‘If you go back to the turn of the twentieth century’, Ridley says, ‘there was an absolute domination of the book-publishing world by “declinism” literature, particularly about the so-called “degeneration of the race”. In the view of many at the time, this was because “stupid” people were having too many babies, the lower classes were evil, nasty and full of tuberculosis, and didn’t have the requisite physical strength. All this ludicrous stuff was hugely dominant.’

The biological deterioration of the British never came to pass, but catastrophists are nothing if not persistent: they always return with a new scare, or an old one tweaked and updated. ‘You can’t keep banging the same drum, something that environmentalists seem to have learnt’, says Ridley. ‘This is why you get this succession of scares: the GM crops scare comes along in 1998 as the Ebola virus is fading from the news.’

Ridley experienced the life and death of a scare at first hand during the 1980s: ‘For me, acid rain was the most influential one, because I covered it very closely as a science correspondent at The Economist. And at the time, I was a routine alarmist, like everyone else. But gradually worries were forming at the back of my mind. Some of the things that were being said, such as all the trees were dying in Germany, just didn’t seem to be quite true.

‘And now the data’s in, both on the Eastern seaboard of America and in Western Europe, it turns out that forests did not retreat in the 1980s – they actually expanded! There were a few isolated die-offs from some local pollution incidents but none of these were due to acid rain. In fact, because acid rain contains nitrates, it actually proved to be a fertiliser and accelerated forest growth. That isn’t to say acid rain had no effect. It had some effects, particularly on the acidification of some water courses, but not as many as people said, and not as permanently. The acid rain story was a case of huge exaggeration.’

And the aftermath? Is there ever a reckoning with such ‘exaggeration’? ‘When one of these scares doesn’t pan out’, says Ridley, ‘you don’t get a great big, drains-up inquiry into what went wrong, like we’ve had with Iraq. It’s quite the opposite. The issue will simply be allowed to fade away. It will just stop being talked about. Acid rain, for instance, just drops out of the news around 1990, only partly because of the Clean Air Act just then passed, which people presumed was going to solve the problem – despite it largely being a non-problem all along.’

So what of the latest, most dominant form of catastrophism: climate-change alarmism? ‘The thing about global warming is that it’s all about things that are still to happen in the relatively distant future. Hence it is very difficult for people to grow sceptical about it because of the difficulty of falsifying it.’ This is not to suggest that climate change has been falsified by any means, Ridley stresses. ‘I’m not denying that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas – and I never have – but I do think that we are gradually seeing the public wake up to the fact that the empirical and theoretical study of climate supports a small degree of warming and not yet a catastrophic effect from that small degree of warming. A lot of people are wising up to that, particularly over the last year. And you’re seeing that in recent opinion polls.’

While climate change might not seem to be the inexorable disaster it was just a couple of years ago, Ridley has observed another, often related threat looming ever larger. And it’s not a new one. ‘The population bomb is one that still rumbles on, and as spiked’s Brendan O’Neill has pointed out, it is remarkable the number of people who are reviving it, in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger way. They’ll sidle up to you and say “you know, maybe it’s not climate change that’s the real problem, maybe it’s because there are too many people” as if they were saying something new. One fact of which the population crew are seemingly unaware is that the rate of human population growth has been falling since 1967. It is now half of what it was in the 1960s.’

When it comes to this revival of Malthusianism, Ridley’s anger is clear. ‘There’s a general misanthropy to it’, he says. ‘If you read about the origins of the population movement, particularly in books like Fred Pearce’s Peoplequake, you realise how much of it was tied up with twentieth-century eugenics and concerns about IQ and the over-reproduction of people with low IQ. This had been a worry for many in the first half of the last century and it leaked into the second half, too. But it gradually changed from “there are too many poor people and stupid people having babies” to “there are too many people having babies altogether”. There’s such a misanthropic tone to it, even to this day.’

Listening to Ridley, it is clear that one thing he is not is misanthropic. Rather he seems animated and inspired by human achievements, by our collective, historically evident ability to continue to innovate, to change and improve the conditions under which we live. This is why overpopulation fears seem to Ridley to be such rubbish. ‘If we continue to improve agricultural yields at the rate we have been doing – and we have nearly trebled cereal yields from the same acreage in the last 50 or so years – then by the middle of this century we will not only be able to feed the nine billion people expected to be on the planet with the same acreage, we will actually be able to do so with a noticeably smaller acreage. So for the total farmed area allocated for cereal crops, you’d need roughly three quarters the size of Australia instead of roughly the size of Russia.

‘So, couple the population growth rate with the improvements in things like agricultural yields, and a fall in things like the amount of copper you need to provide a telephone wire or the amount of water you need for irrigation because of efficiencies, and it becomes possible to imagine a future in which more people have less impact on the planet. That’s exactly the opposite of what the environmental movement tends to say.’

The reason for environmentalists’ pessimism, Ridley argues, is that they unthinkingly extrapolate from the present state of society – the current means of production and so on – and project it into the future. In doing so, they fail to imagine the future in any terms apart from those of the present. So, assuming population rises, while the current means of production remain the same, the environmentalist concludes that we cannot go on as we are. ‘But’, Ridley points out, ‘we ain’t going to go on as we are’.

‘For the last 100,000 years at least, we have actually changed how we live on the planet in ways that are surprising and result from innovations that we can’t forecast’, he says. ‘So if you stand in the 1950s and ask “what’s the future going to be like?”, people extrapolate the improvements in transport that they’ve seen in their lifetime and talk about personal gyrocopters and supersonic transport and interstellar travel. Nobody mentions the internet and the mobile telephone. Likewise, you and I standing here will extrapolate into the future that we’re going to have even better mobile phones and even more websites. But I suspect that in 50 years’ time both of those phrases will be laughably old-fashioned. In the twenty-first century it might all be about bio-tech, or it might all be about something else. So while one can extrapolate just to see how much change can occur quantitatively, you’ve always got to bear in mind that qualitative changes will throw off those extrapolations.’

This is not to suggest that Ridley does not himself extrapolate. Indeed, some of his optimism is grounded in extrapolation. ‘I do believe in extrapolating – I already talked about if agricultural yields improve at the same rate as they have in the last 50 years we’ll be able to feed far more with far less. This is a big increase, and a big “if”, and there are times in history when trends don’t continue, so one mustn’t be a naive extrapolator. On the other hand, extrapolation does sometimes open up one’s mind to the possibility of how different the future will be.’

This openness to the future, to the possibility that life will get better, ought not to be confused with blind faith. ‘Rational optimism is not naive, personal and hopeful’, concludes Ridley. ‘It is something one arrives at by studying the facts. Moreover, rational optimism is based on the fact that there is a reason to be optimistic – namely that there is a grand theme in human history called the exchange and spread of specialisation, which, by enabling us to work more and more for each other, does raise living standards. So there is actually a rationale for my optimism. It is not just hopeful.’

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

>Global Warming Phobia Bad for Health

>Another Curse of Unbelief

Well, it’s now official. Psychiatrists are reporting that fears over global warming are generating obsessive/compulsive disorders amongst the credulous and fearful. Over 25 percent of people diagnosed with obsessive/compulsive disorders have been found to be both afraid of, and guilty over, global warming. This would be funny if it were not so tragic.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, May 6 /Medianet International-AsiaNet/ —

The Royal Australian and New Zealand Collage of Psychiatrists’ Congress at SkyCity Convention Centre in Auckland brings together mental health experts in a diverse range of areas; from children and adolescents to old age, mental health across the lifespan will be discussed. Here are some highlights from this morning’s program.

Global warming fears seen in obsessive compulsive disorder patients

A recent study has found that global warming has impacted the nature of symptoms experienced by obsessive compulsive disorder patients. Climate change related obsessions and/or compulsions were identified in 28% of patients presenting with obsessive compulsive disorder. Their obsessions included leaving taps on and wasting water, leaving lights on and wasting electricity, pets dying of thirst, leaving the stove on and wasting gas as well as obsessions that global warming had contributed to house floors cracking, pipes leaking, roof problems and white ants eating the house. Compulsions in response to these obsessions included the checking of taps, light switches, pet water bowls and house structures. “Media coverage about the possible catastrophic consequences to our planet concerning global warming is extensive and potentially anxiety provoking. We found that many obsessive compulsive disorder patients were concerned about reducing their global footprint,” said study author Dr Mairwen Jones. (9am)

>Teaching Children to be Neurotic

>Warning to All NZ Parents

Every parent worthy of the name wants his or her children to grow up in a safe and secure environment. Moreover they want their children to be able to face the future with confidence. If our children grow up fearful, neurotic, and ridden with anxieties we would rightly shoulder the blame. We would have failed in some of the basic obligations of parenting. Right?

Well, then, what would you think of parents whose children at age eight were clearly phobic and neurotic, expressing fears such as the following:

Recently I’ve been worrying about some of the wars that are happening on the other side of the world, why are we just killing people, why can’t we just kind of stop it? I kind of just think, I hope it doesn’t get any worse.

Or,

I’m worried about the environment and the global warming, the ice and how it’s going. I write it down in my little notebook … I’m thinking people should actually stop the global warming before it’s too late for their children.

Or,

The future, if we have children, would there be a future for them?

These attitudes and fears were expressed to a PhD researcher studying children aged eight to ten to find out what was causing stress in their lives. The researcher suggested that these kinds of fears partially explained why so many children are neurotic.

When children have those concerns it can be very distracting and I don’t think it’s surprising that we have increasing behaviour problems, increasing diagnosis of childhood anxiety disorders and childhood depression.

Then there is the case of nine year old Joanna Laxon, who is growing up in a world of fears, dreads, and neuroses:

Nine-year-old Joanna Laxon stresses about finishing school projects, “stuff outside of school”, the environment and “what will happen later on in life”.

It’s a lot for the Auckland girl to worry about but she has plenty of ways of coping with it, from talking to her parents to writing it all down.

According to research into what many 8- to 12-year-olds stress about, Joanna seems to be typical of New Zealand children these days.

When asked what things outside of school caused her stress she said “things that just don’t have to do with school”. Some are things she’s read in the paper or heard from friends.

She had plenty of environmental concerns, including global warming and Iceland’s erupting volcano.

“I don’t know much about it but I know it’s not very good,” she said about global warming.

Joanna said these environment issues stressed her out because they “could make a problem”. She also worried how they could affect her and other people in the future and the potential harm from pollution.

“Sometimes I just kind of worry about how so many people are killing animals, like in Africa a lot of people are killing lions because their territory is being ruined and then they come to the farms and kill the cows and the farmers shoot them.”

Where do children get this from? Well of course they get it from the media and from their parents.

Dr Peter Coleman, a developmental and educational psychologist, said many of the world stressors indicated by children were reflective of their surroundings.

“You’d expect it from the point of view that their parents are concerned about it, talk about it. They see it on the news so they would pick it up.”

But is that the whole story. We fear not. Think of the lexicon here: wars, global warming, pollution, and looming destruction of the planet. We fully and confidently expect that these kids–along with most of their age–have been fed these phobias by their teachers. We know that these issues are relatively unimportant to adults, as expressed through surveys ranking the relative importance of issues of voters. It’s highly unlikely these children are daily sitting around the evening table hearing their parents express doom and gloom about Icelandic volcanoes.

But the classroom is another matter. Now, we have completed no research into the matter, but we are confident school children (particularly intermediate school age pupils) are being fed a steady diet from their teachers of alarmism, global warming sirens, and a litany terrible things that are happening and about to happen. Just at random, here is a classic of the genre from Melville Intermediate School.

Polar Bears and Global Warminghttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=farahiasaveporlanet-100411195053-phpapp02&stripped_title=polar-bears-and-global-warming

View more presentations from Myles Webb.

Our view is that it is neither parents nor the media that is to blame for NZ children growing up racked with fears and neuroses about the future. It is our state schools and the tripe they are feeding our children.

It’s parents who should be alarmed–not at life in general, but over the damage government schools appear to be inflicting upon our children. Time to start asking the hard questions about a few sacred cows in the state education system.

>Here We Go Again

>Computer Models Have a Lot to Answer For

We have been reprised once again of the follies of relying upon computer models. Apparently it was the pesky models which led officials to shut down air traffic throughout Europe as a result of Iceland’s volcanoes erupting. The disruption and the costs, of course, are prohibitive. Well worth paying, however, if the risks and dangers were genuine.

According to a recent report in the Financial Times, it was more a case of virtual reality, rather than genuine reality which has shut down air traffic.

The computer models that guided decisions to impose a no-fly zone across most of Europe in recent days are based on incomplete science and limited data, according to European officials. As a result, they may have over-stated the risks to the public, needlessly grounding flights and damaging businesses.

“It is a black box in certain areas,” Matthias Ruete, the EU’s director-general for mobility and transport, said on Monday, noting that many of the assumptions in the computer models were not backed by scientific evidence.

European authorities were not sure about scientific questions, such as what concentration of ash was hazardous for jet engines, or at what rate ash fell from the sky, Mr Ruete said. “It’s one of the elements where, as far as I know, we’re not quite clear about it,” he admitted.

Sound familiar? It’s deja vu, all over again, as Yogi Berra would put it.

How can such complete faith be put in virtually nothing, or at least in the profoundly unsubstantiated? What happened to the so-called rigour of hard science? It never existed. But it’s even worse when the age becomes deeply superstitious–as ours has become. In a recent article entitled This shutdown is about more than volcanic ash, sociologist Frank Furedi hits the nail on the head.

Whatever the risks posed by the eruption of a volcano in Iceland, it seems clear that the shutting down of much of Europe’s air space is not just about the threat posed by clouds of ash to flying passengers. We live in an era where problems of uncertainty and risk are continually amplified, and where our fearful imaginations can make these problems seem like existential threats. Consequently, unexpected natural events are rarely treated simply as unexpected natural events – instead they are swiftly dramatised and transformed into ‘threats to human survival’.

We have termed this phenomenon the Culture of Catastrophism. But it is important to realise that this is not just espoused by a few superstitious folk on the lunatic fringe. It is now mainstream. Furedi goes on to explain how it actually works.

I am not a natural scientist, and I claim no authority to say anything of value about the risks posed by volcanic ash clouds to flying aircraft. However, as a sociologist interested in the process of decision-making, it is evident to me that the reluctance to lift the ban on air traffic in Europe is motivated by worst-case thinking rather than rigorous risk assessment. Risk assessment is based on an attempt to calculate the probability of different outcomes. Worst-case thinking – these days known as ‘precautionary thinking’ – is based on an act of imagination. It imagines the worst-case scenario and then takes action on that basis. In the case of the Icelandic volcano, fears that particles in the ash cloud could cause aeroplane engines to shut down automatically mutated into a conclusion that this would happen. So it seems to me to be the fantasy of the worst-case scenario rather than risk assessment that underpins the current official ban on air traffic.

Risk assessment has become risk avoidance. The best way to avoid risks is to shut everything down and live in a cocoon. It is to retreat into the safety of the bunker or the cave.

Tragically, this failure of nerve in relation to the volcanic ash is the inevitable outcome of the institutionalisation of worst-case policymaking. This approach, based on the unprecedented sensitivity of contemporary Western society to uncertainty and unknown dangers, has led to a radically new way of perceiving and managing risks. As a result, the traditional association of risk with probabilities is now under fire from a growing body of opinion, which claims that humanity lacks the knowledge to calculate risks in any meaningful way. Sadly, critics of traditional probabilistic risk-assessments have more faith in speculative computer models than they do in science’s capacity to use knowledge to transform uncertainties into calculable risks. The emergence of a speculative approach towards risk is paralleled by the growing influence of ‘possibilistic thinking’ rather than probabilistic thinking, which actively invites speculation about what could possibly go wrong. In today’s culture of fear, frequently ‘what could possibly go wrong’ is confused with ‘what is likely to happen’.

When individuals turn against God they may succeed in going through life with brazen arrogance and ill-founded boldness, being protected by the lawfulness and security of the surrounding culture. When a whole culture turns away from God, fearful superstition is the inevitable outcome. Decisions have to be made about things way beyond control or knowledge. The result is fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown and the attempt to avoid bad outcomes is the essence of a superstitious mind. Fearful superstition has now become the dominant culture of the day.

Worst-case thinking encourages society to adopt fear as of one of the key principles around which the public, the government and various institutions should organise their lives. It institutionalises insecurity and fosters a mood of confusion and powerlessness. Through popularising the belief that worst cases are normal, it also encourages people to feel defenceless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats. In all but name, it is an invitation to social paralysis. The eruption of a volcano in Iceland poses technical problems, for which responsible decision-makers should swiftly come up with sensible solutions. But instead, Europe has decided to turn a problem into a drama. In 50 years’ time, historians will be writing about our society’s reluctance to act when practical problems arose. It is no doubt difficult to face up to a natural disaster – but in this case it is the all-too-apparent manmade disaster brought on by indecision and a reluctance to engage with uncertainty that represents the real threat to our future.

Contrast this present condition of our culture of Unbelief with the reasoned calmness of Belief when faced with minatory uncertainty:

Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death?

Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

When Unbelief dominates a culture–as it does in the West–institutionalised fearful superstition is inevitable. It has always been the case. And so it has come to pass. This, too, will not change until we repent and return to the all wise, all governing God, Who has revealed Himself in Holy Scripture. Only then will our present fearful culture of  superstition dissipate.

>Advocacy Research

>Snake Oil, Hypochondriac “Science”

Over the past week or so we have seen “experts” advocating a complete ban on tobacco in New Zealand within ten years. As an interim measure, they are calling for the inevitable increase in taxes on tobacco, and much more radical, a ban on smoking in public places such as beaches and pretty much anywhere outdoors where other human beings are present or might be present some time in the future. These “experts” are actually “taxpayer funded health officials” aka bureaucrats. These health bureaucrats are very experienced and skilled at getting the government to swing in behind their causes.

They are politically savvy. They have tapped successfully into the “care for children” cause. They are now tapping into the “Maori problem” rubric, since plenty of Maori smoke. They know that if the smoking issue can be framed as one which disadvantages and hurts Maori, it will leapfrog in public traction.

The call from the Auckland Regional Public Health Service for a range of tough measures comes in its submission to the Maori affairs select committee’s forthcoming inquiry into the tobacco industry and the effects of tobacco use on Maori.

Hopes are high among public health campaigners that the inquiry will re-frame debate on tobacco and make it easier for the Government to adopt radical measures to make New Zealand smokefree within 10 years.

The Auckland service wants the law banning indoor smoking at workplaces extended to playgrounds, outdoor eating areas, beaches, the area outside buildings, cars when a child aged less than 16 is present, public transport stops and pedestrian malls.

Pity the poor worker who has now been banned from work when it comes to smoking. Now he or she will be banned from smoking outside as well, if these erstwhile human controllers have their way.

These measures would greatly reduce smoking opportunities for workers and bar patrons, who have been forced outside or onto the street by the smokefree environments law.

The regional public health service is funded by the Auckland, Waitemata and Counties Manukau district health boards and the Health Ministry. The Waitemata DHB has already endorsed its approach.

Like all bureaucrats they believe in redemption through laws and rules and regulations. The Prime Minister hastily dismissed them as taking one nanny-state-step-too-far. But one of the reasons these folk are so effective is that they think long term. No doubt they are well aware that they are unlikely to make much progress under the current administration (apart from the tax increases, since the government is rapaciously going after every dollar it can expropriate with a modicum of political acceptance). But, they will be figuring that when Labour finally comes back into government, their banning of tobacco will be up front and centre. The inconceivable will become the inevitable.

Local authorities are already on the kick.

The call to ban smoking in many public places comes as an increasing number of local authorities are putting up signs asking people not to smoke in areas used by children, such as playgrounds, sports fields and beaches.

Auckland University banned outdoor smoking at its campuses from last month, adding to the statutory indoor ban.

Behind all this lies junk science. We are learning that there are few things more dangerous than advocacy science–which is where “science” becomes handmaiden to political causes. In fact whenever this has happened it has become downright dangerous. In the past eighty years advocacy “science” in the West has, well, advocated eugenics, compulsory sterilisation, forced population control, substituting food for bio-fuel production, and the compulsory expropriation of private property to combat “global warming”. The damage inflicted by advocacy “science” has been considerable, indirectly causing untold human suffering, degradation, and death. All, we note, with the intent of “saving” humanity.

Rob Lyons details the junk science that lies behind the anti-tobacco crusade.

Advocacy research: what a filthy habit
New research suggesting ‘third-hand smoke’ is a major health hazard was spurred by policy, not hard science.
Rob Lyons

First we were told – quite reasonably – that smoking was bad for us. It increases the risk of a variety of diseases, particularly lung cancer and respiratory illnesses, as well as making heart disease and stroke more likely. No one who smokes regularly can be unaware that there is a fair chance that their habit will shorten their life, even if the immediate prospect of a stimulating drag is more enticing than a few extra years of old age. We’ve all got to die of something, at some point; it’s up to us to make a calculation about whether that nicotine hit is worth it.

Advocacy science could not stop at providing hard evidence of the health damage and dangers of smoking. Because governments now assert control over our bodies through public health systems, it was inevitable that the issue would spill over into laws, rules, and regulations over tobacco use. If the rapacious government was going to pay for treating tobacco related diseases, then would move to control its use.

But these things are relentless. Soon the advocacy moved on to second-hand smoke.

More controversial was the suggestion that breathing other people’s smoke might be dangerous, too. Okay, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if those nights of old spent steeped in a nicotine-tinged fug in the Dog and Duck didn’t exactly do one’s lungs the world of good. The smell certainly lingered on your clothes. Even then, anyone who remembers boozers in the past, or the top-deck of the bus on a winter’s evening, will know that the modern, well-ventilated, pre-smoking ban pub was a much less smoky environment. By rather dubiously extrapolating from some small personal risks, based on smoking studies that probably bear little relevance to twenty-first century Western workplaces, official estimates concluded that about 1,000 people per year die from ‘secondhand’ smoke in the UK. In July 2007, a ban on smoking in public places came into force in England. The tobacco lovers were turfed out on to the street.

Junk science just tore out another artery from the body politic.

But now we are moving from “secondhand” smoke to “thirdhand” smoke. The “thirdhand” iteration by junk science is critical to getting tobacco banned altogether.

Old tobacco smoke does more than simply make a room smell stale – it can leave cancer-causing toxins behind, Reuters reported today.

Researchers in the US found cancer-causing agents called tobacco-specific nitrosamines stick to a variety of surfaces, where they can get into dust or be picked up on the fingers.

Children and infants are the most likely to pick them up, the team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California reported.

“These findings raise concerns about exposures to the tobacco smoke residue that has been recently dubbed `third-hand smoke’,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As Lyons writes, we are now moving from the stupid to the unbelievably stupid–except he puts it more colourfully:

Now, claim researchers, you don’t even need to breathe smoke in, you simply need to be in contact with smokers or touch surfaces that have been in contact with their smoke to be at risk. If the dodgy research that produced the smoking ban was bullshit, the claims made for third-hand smoking are in a whole new category: ‘beyond bullshit’.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California found that carcinogens from cigarettes linger in the environment on clothing, floors and walls long after smoke has dispersed. Worse, their shock-horror discovery was that some of these substances can then go on to react with these surfaces to produce more carcinogens. Mohamad Sleiman, the lead researcher, told Scientific American: ‘Our findings indicate that third-hand smoke represents an unappreciated health hazard.’

This is why smoking is being banned in public places by local councils in New Zealand where children might be remotely present, let alone parks with playgrounds where they are usually present in abundance.

This is not cold, hard-headed investigation; this is ‘advocacy research’. Those involved have decided that tobacco smoke is not just a threat to smokers but to everyone, particularly children. Unsurprisingly, their work then confirms this prejudice. Winickoff is asked in that Scientific American article why the label ‘third-hand smoke’ was chosen. ‘This study points to the need for every smoker to try to quit. That’s the only way to completely protect their children… Really, I think that what this says is that we need to have sympathy for smokers and help them quit smoking… [And also] that the introduction of this concept will lead to more smoke-free spaces in… public.’

So, now children are exposed to deadly agents if they crawl on a carpet or sit on a swing proximate to where a cigarette has been smoked. Really. Yes, really! Yeah, right. Science has become a nonsense–as it always does when it moves from research to advocacy.

The mere presence of carcinogens does not mean that we will suffer from cancer. In fact, we are bombarded with carcinogens every day. Our food is packed with them, particularly naturally occurring substances that plants produce to ward off pests. If the microscopic quantities of carcinogens in our carpets and on our clothes left by tobacco smoke are going to be treated as a potential health threat, that makes every cup of coffee a caffeinated, cancer-causing cocktail, too.

If the chemicals in cigarette smoke were really so deadly as Winickoff and Glantz imply, it would be simply inconceivable that people could live – as many do for 50 years or more – while smoking a packet of cigarettes or more every day. It usually takes decades of effort directly polluting the body with tobacco smoke before someone becomes seriously ill because of it. The idea that a whiff of smoke in the air, or a thin coat of smoky tar on the walls, can put us in mortal danger is just laughable. Or, at least, it would be if the health authorities weren’t so keen to pounce upon each new study as a justification for ever-greater restrictions on lighting up.

All advocacy “science” posits a bogey-man, a monster hiding in the cupboard about to spring out and devour. It dovetails nicely with the prevailing pessimistic world-view which sees demons everywhere, threatening to overpower and destroy us all. But junk science it is–and junk science it will remain. As Lyons puts it, junk science is nothing more nor less than institutional hypochondria. When junk science teams up with nannying bureaucrats we really do have a demon from the ancient world.

Anti-smoking is hypochondria-by-proxy, an obsessive compulsive disorder whose sufferers demand that the normal pastimes of others leave them under attack. Contrary to what Winickoff says, it is anti-smoking campaigners and our health guardians who need help – to quit their disgusting, illiberal, interfering, busybody habit once and for all.

>The Phobic Noughties

>Running When No-One Pursues

Dread and fear, when misplaced and irrational, are debilitating and paralysing. Fear can be a very sound and rational state–when the threat is real and the danger consequential. But when people fear what is harmless or no danger at all we usually regard them as disturbed, or unbalanced. But when an entire society is swept up in irrational fears we face a cultural malady that inevitably has religious roots.

The particular social hysteria which has gripped Western cultures and peoples in the past ten years has been a phobia of end-times, apocalyptic, doomsday calamity. Toby Young, writing in the Telegraph, reviews the last decade (that is, the first ten years of the new century), and characterises it as a decade of longing and yearning for chaos. He writes:

One of the most striking things about the Noughties is that when terrible things did happen – when planes really did start falling out of the sky – we greeted them with barely concealed excitement.

We watched them being replayed over and over again on CNN, drinking in the wild overestimates of casualty numbers and nodding along enthusiastically as experts confidently predicted all the cataclysmic consequences to follow. It was a form of mass hysteria – something akin to Freud’s death wish, but writ large.

If the past 10 years had one defining characteristic it was that they allowed human beings to give full expression to their yearning for chaos, one of their darkest unconscious desires. It was the decade in which people’s appetite for destruction became almost insatiable.

What is happening when a culture or generation expects, looks for, or is mesmerised with an expectation that it is all going to end? What is going on in people’s minds when dark apocalyptic end-time visions incarcerate a culture? An apocalyptic doomsday scenario has to have a cause of some sort. Probably the most tortuous and “long-bow” explanation is that this current state of fear results from the deliberate manipulation of the masses by the rich and monied. Here is the intellectual left at its finest.

Among the liberal intelligentsia, the conventional wisdom is that this sense of foreboding that came to typify the decade was generated by corporate and political forces that had a vested interest in keeping the masses in a state of ignorance and fear.

Adam Curtis, the BBC documentary-maker, advanced this hypothesis in The Power of Nightmares, his three-part series in 2004 about the links between Islamism and Neo-Conservatism.

He argued that the widespread panic about the threat of Islamist terrorism had been manufactured by the British and American governments, in collusion with the media-industrial complex, to justify their erosion of civil liberties and accretion of power. The brouhaha over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the War on Terror was a case in point. . . .

But what such theories neglect is the sheer enthusiasm with which people embraced this scaremongering. If the climate of fear that characterised the decade was the result of a sinister plot, it was a conspiracy in which ‘the masses’ were eager participants.

One of the biggest phobic concerns of the decade has been the digital revolution and the internet. It opened up the technical feasibility of an Orwellian society.

Flick through any tabloid newspaper of the period and you’ll stumble across headlines like this: ‘HOW USING FACEBOOK COULD RAISE YOUR RISK OF CANCER.’ Or this: ‘HOW COMPUTERS CAN HARM YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE… BY DAMAGING THEIR BRAINS.’

Or this: ‘USING THIS PHOTO, OUR REPORTER POSED AS A 15-YEAR-OLD GIRL ON MYSPACE – ONE OF THE WEBSITES USED BY MILLIONS OF TEENAGERS. WITHIN HOURS SHE’D BEEN TARGETED BY A PREDATORY PAEDOPHILE. HOW SAFE IS YOUR CHILD?’

There were some genuine crises, however. In Young’s book the global credit crisis deserves its sobriquet.

There is one area, however, in which it’s difficult to argue with the prophets of doom: the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. The major US and European banks came perilously close to collapse in 2008 thanks to their exposure to toxic debt and would have failed if it hadn’t been for last-minute state intervention.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that by decade’s end these banks will have lost $2.8 trillion. In Britain, the nation’s economic fortunes could be charted by the rise and fall of property prices, an obsession that came to define the decade.

As with other disasters, however, the consequences of this financial meltdown haven’t been as catastrophic as some Eeyores had hoped. By the third quarter of 2009, the economies of the US, Japan and Germany had all returned to growth, with only Britain still officially in recession.

Contrary to some predictions, the credit crunch did not lead to the Second Great Depression. Indeed, for three quarters of the Noughties, the global economy boomed, producing a sustained period of unrivalled prosperity.

Young’s basic point, however, is that things are a lot better than our fears and hysteria would lead us to believe. We have spat out “Bah, humbug” at so much in the last ten years that a wonderful decade has been missed. Society has made the past decade a “glass half empty”, argues Young.

As such, people were expecting huge upheaval. All kinds of strange cults sprang up, eagerly looking forward to an earth-shattering event.

Among the technocratic elite this took the form of conjuring up the spectre of the Millennium Bug, but there were thousands of other examples. The world’s population was waiting, with ill-disguised glee, for the 20th-century equivalent of the meteorite that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs.

When nothing happened, people felt cheated. But instead of concluding that their prognostications of doom were irrational, they looked elsewhere to affirm them. They began searching for the slate-cleaning catharsis that had been denied them on December 31 1999.

In this way, all the anxiety that had been building up in the last decade of the second millennium seeped into the first decade of the third, poisoning the atmosphere.

What should have been a happy period – perhaps the happiest in history – became a fairly miserable one. For the first 10 years of the 21st century, mankind was in the grip of a fever dream in which they saw their world destroyed over and over again.

We believe that the hysteria and the phobias and the dark apocalyptic visions will not pass away any time soon. Unbelief oscillates between the extremes of unbridled optimism over the glories of autonomous man and his wondrous powers to the opposite extreme of dark pessimism that terrible calamity awaits. The vaunting of human pride brings guilt: true, deep, atavistic, profound guilt before the Living God. This guilt–far deeper and more profoundly atavistic than any superficial trivial Freudian construct–stands ready at a moment’s notice to erupt, incinerating instantly the vaunted hopes and dreams of Over-man. The world becomes a dark, dangerous, minatory, and ultimately deadly place. Fears real and imaginary haunt our darkening dreams.

For the Christian, however, this is not so. The Lord has established the earth on its foundations: it will not be moved. His faithfulness and covenant oaths bind Him to the earth and its continuance.

Tremble before Him all the earth; indeed the world is firmly established, it will not be moved. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; and let them say among the nations, “The Lord reigns.” Let the sea roar, and all it contains; let the field exult, and all that is in it. Then the trees of the forest will sing for job before the Lord; for He is coming to judge the earth. O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good . . . . ” I Chronicles 16: 30–34

The future is bright with promise for mankind, because He has sent forth His Son and crowned Him King over all the earth. His reign is the realm of the Gospel: good news to mankind. Whilst temporal and localised judgments will occur–they will not be the end, but a cleansing, a new beginning.

The earth is truly the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. As we contemplate the coming year, we early anticipate the 2010th year of our Lord’s reign.