My OperaSo you thought I held "green" opinions
Saturday, November 28, 2009 2:34:13 PM
I suspect that some people who've known me for a long time may be confused by some of my postings as twenty-plus years ago I was fairly vociferously "green" in my views.
Well, the big news is: I'm still pretty "green" in my views, in fact most of them haven't changed. What has happened is that I fell out with the wider green movement some time in the 90s, mostly over climate change issues. I'm not even sure when it happened - it was gradual rather than waking up one day and thinking "I've had enough of this".
There are elements of the green movement who are essentially Luddite and won't be happy unless we all revert to living in caves, freezing in the dark and scrabbling around in the dirt for food, never able to travel anywhere on pain of execution and preferably having even our breath rationed. I have no time for this (New Troglodyte) view: it's irrational, more like a religion (complete with puritan zealotry, orthodoxy and heresy) and results in a lot of fake greenery as bad as that of the suits who've also latched onto this for their own nefarious purposes.
An example being the woman who was invited to her friend's wedding in Australia and instead of flying (boo, hiss, kill the heretics), gave up her job and spent 3 months travelling overland and by sea (in a range of doubtless dodgy vehicles with poorly maintained diesel engines spewing particulates etc). While the plane she could have caught just flew anyway, with either someone else on it or (worse) an empty seat. FFS.
So what's the problem?
That climate change happens is patently obvious: it's a dynamic system and is therefore changing all the time. What I don't buy into is anthropogenic (look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropogenic) climate change, due to global warming caused by human-generated CO2.
I really don't like the way the whole thing has been turned into a neo-religion, to the extent that anyone disagreeing gets branded as a heretic and called a "denier" as if they are equivalent to neo-nazi holocaust deniers, despite the fact that the science increasingly supports those of us that are sceptical.
I don't like the cynical way the whole thing has been adopted by the aforementioned suits, mainstream politicians (and others), as a way of scaring people into accepting yet more control/regulation/taxes/surveillance, as just another weapon in their anti-freedom, artificial-fear-induction armoury, alongside terrorism and "think of the children" paedo-hysteria.
I especially object to being patronised by said politicians (and others) about how I should support their propaganda, stupid policies etc when these are the same people that 10 or 20 years ago were calling people like me nutters, and who quite frankly wouldn't recognise "green" if it bit them on the backside...
Even worse is the kind of ignorant hysterical stuff as seen on this week's Question Time where someone was asking about why only one view of this is ever covered in the media or allowed to be discussed: some mad person started accusing him of shameful behaviour because of the people suffering in the Cumbrian floods. Which are the worst in 50 years, ie not that long ago, and if it were down to some cataclysmic temperature rise, it would mean that it was as hot then and that there has been a dip in between. Of course this is complete tripe: temperature etc goes in a bunch of cycles anyway and 50 years doesn't even constitute a blink in geological terms. As for the rapid rise in temperature causing everything bad that happens with the weather, there is a very real Inconvenient Truth: there hasn't been any rise in mean global temperature this century so far. There was 0.5 of a degree in the 90s, but nothing since. Tough one to argue against, that one...
Why am I writing this now?
Because it's looking like there are an increasing number of people who think the same way, and more who are prepared to voice their views, and because the cracks in the pro-anthropogenic-global-warming theory which were always there are beginning to become much more visible and straightforward to comprehend.
We are also beginning to see that prime movers on the pro-anthropogenic-global-warming side can be just as dodgy as their supporters claim their opposers are, when funded by oil companies and the like. Unless you think a small cartel of scientists mutually peer-reviewing each others' papers based on dubious data isn't dodgy...
In particular, check out a few things from The Register - not a comprehensive introduction or a literature search, just some articles that caught my eye over the last few months:
Well, the big news is: I'm still pretty "green" in my views, in fact most of them haven't changed. What has happened is that I fell out with the wider green movement some time in the 90s, mostly over climate change issues. I'm not even sure when it happened - it was gradual rather than waking up one day and thinking "I've had enough of this".
There are elements of the green movement who are essentially Luddite and won't be happy unless we all revert to living in caves, freezing in the dark and scrabbling around in the dirt for food, never able to travel anywhere on pain of execution and preferably having even our breath rationed. I have no time for this (New Troglodyte) view: it's irrational, more like a religion (complete with puritan zealotry, orthodoxy and heresy) and results in a lot of fake greenery as bad as that of the suits who've also latched onto this for their own nefarious purposes.
An example being the woman who was invited to her friend's wedding in Australia and instead of flying (boo, hiss, kill the heretics), gave up her job and spent 3 months travelling overland and by sea (in a range of doubtless dodgy vehicles with poorly maintained diesel engines spewing particulates etc). While the plane she could have caught just flew anyway, with either someone else on it or (worse) an empty seat. FFS.
So what's the problem?
That climate change happens is patently obvious: it's a dynamic system and is therefore changing all the time. What I don't buy into is anthropogenic (look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropogenic) climate change, due to global warming caused by human-generated CO2.
I really don't like the way the whole thing has been turned into a neo-religion, to the extent that anyone disagreeing gets branded as a heretic and called a "denier" as if they are equivalent to neo-nazi holocaust deniers, despite the fact that the science increasingly supports those of us that are sceptical.
I don't like the cynical way the whole thing has been adopted by the aforementioned suits, mainstream politicians (and others), as a way of scaring people into accepting yet more control/regulation/taxes/surveillance, as just another weapon in their anti-freedom, artificial-fear-induction armoury, alongside terrorism and "think of the children" paedo-hysteria.
I especially object to being patronised by said politicians (and others) about how I should support their propaganda, stupid policies etc when these are the same people that 10 or 20 years ago were calling people like me nutters, and who quite frankly wouldn't recognise "green" if it bit them on the backside...
Even worse is the kind of ignorant hysterical stuff as seen on this week's Question Time where someone was asking about why only one view of this is ever covered in the media or allowed to be discussed: some mad person started accusing him of shameful behaviour because of the people suffering in the Cumbrian floods. Which are the worst in 50 years, ie not that long ago, and if it were down to some cataclysmic temperature rise, it would mean that it was as hot then and that there has been a dip in between. Of course this is complete tripe: temperature etc goes in a bunch of cycles anyway and 50 years doesn't even constitute a blink in geological terms. As for the rapid rise in temperature causing everything bad that happens with the weather, there is a very real Inconvenient Truth: there hasn't been any rise in mean global temperature this century so far. There was 0.5 of a degree in the 90s, but nothing since. Tough one to argue against, that one...
Why am I writing this now?
Because it's looking like there are an increasing number of people who think the same way, and more who are prepared to voice their views, and because the cracks in the pro-anthropogenic-global-warming theory which were always there are beginning to become much more visible and straightforward to comprehend.
We are also beginning to see that prime movers on the pro-anthropogenic-global-warming side can be just as dodgy as their supporters claim their opposers are, when funded by oil companies and the like. Unless you think a small cartel of scientists mutually peer-reviewing each others' papers based on dubious data isn't dodgy...
In particular, check out a few things from The Register - not a comprehensive introduction or a literature search, just some articles that caught my eye over the last few months:
- Interview with Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at UEA on why the current trends towards absolutism and orthodoxy are fundamentally flawed from a scientific viewpoint.
- Raw data used to build climate models mysteriously disappearing when requested by Freedom of Information requests.
- An introduction to the Yamal scandal, selective use of tree ring data to produce results not backed up by other, more extensive, data sets.
