Thursday, November 09, 2006

More Cock Robin Defections

Melanie Phillips, who should be read often, has some interesting information about the expansion of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This reminds me to go into the several reasons for Cock Robin’s recent Sky is falling obsession: human caused "Global Warming" See also here for her link to this interesting site about former believer and now enviroskeptic Claude Allegre, a French geophysicist.

Phillip quotes Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, saying that

[O]ver the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been cnstructed [sic]in this country - the phenomenon of ‘caastrophic’[sic]climate cange. It seems that mere ‘climate change’ was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be ‘catastrophic’ to be worthy of attention.

The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers 'chaotic’, ‘irreversible’, ‘rapid’ - has altered the public discourse around climate change. This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as 'climate change is worse than we thought’, that we are approaching 'irreversible tipping in the Earth’s climate’, and that we are ‘at the point of no return’.

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric…

I would add that the alarmists have other agendas. Firstly, to redistibute both power and money to multinational political institutions which can be controlled by a large number of undemocratic and anti-democratic states, to the loss of the Americans above all and to any European state that bucks the general trend to humble the US. If Kyoto were really about the environment, why would the Russians not be forced to pay instead of being recipients of "bad environmental citizens?" Look at a nighttime view of the Urals. See all those bright lights? They aren’t cities: they are 24/7 natural gas burn-offs. This stuff could be moved to market but for a pipeline. Where will they get the money if capitalists (boo!) want 50% for their risk (the gas belings to the Soviet — oops — the Russian people)?

Another one is even more amusing. Freud got a lot wrong but he’s right about this: we are witnessing his "return of the repressed content:" i.e. Christianity of the most primitive pre-scientific kind. Though about 93% of "Greenhouse gasses" are water vapour, the infinitessimal contribution of humans is said to be the thing pushing us into unavoidable chaos. We humans are evidently back at the center of the universe, as in the time of Galileo, and our actions determine the events of the universe! We have been bad and WE WILL BURN! Sound familiar?

2 comments:

Lili Gans said...

All
this talk about global warming leaves me cold. As a fan of Melanie
Phillips. I can also recommend her book "Londonistan', whose theme is
obvious.
The hysterical global warming lobby seems to be reveling in a mea culpa
mentality, which implies that man is the root of all evil and will
inevitably destroy himself and the world. This is patently ridiculous
since man can adapt and has always been able to overcome the direst of
situations. May I invite you to read my website at www.liligans.com for
more examples of how silly we can be

Abu Nudnik said...

Well, yes, this guilt is part and parcel of a kind of gluttony that is perceived by the global warming folks and, in a way, they're right. There is much amiss in the culture. There always is. In ancient days, the Prophets would thunder against such ills. Today the moral carpet has been ripped from under the religious institutions (or they have defected their position) and there's not much else for these erstwhile modern prophets except these symbolic expressions of nagging guilt.

In the same-sex marriage debate in Canada, a senior minister of the then-Liberal government under Paul Martin thundered - and you'll find this amusing Lili - "The Church has no business making pronouncements on moral affairs."