and tomorrow is a brand new day

Whereas yesterday was for reflecting on the year past, today is for considering the optimism of the New Year -- or not.


Over at Spiked, the always excellent Brendan O'Neill has these thoughts:

• You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the chasm that divides today’s so-called expert classes from the mass of humanity than the snow crisis of Christmas 2010. They warn us endlessly about the warming of our planet; we struggle through knee-deep snow to visit loved ones.

• ...the snow crisis demonstrated, in high definition, the gap between the fear-fuelled thinking of the elite and the struggles of everyday people. It illuminated the million metaphorical miles that now separate the fantasy politics of our so-called betters from the concerns of the rest of us.

• What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear.

• This reveals the stinging snobbery at the heart of the politics of global warming. Because what we have here is an updated version of the elitist idea that the better classes have access to a profound and complicated truth that the rest of us cannot grasp. Where we have merely sensory reactions (experience), they have reason and analysis (knowledge). Our critical reaction to the snow actually revealed our failure to understand The Truth, as unveiled by The Science, rather than revealing their wrongheadedness in predicting an ‘end to snow’. We are ‘simple’, they are ‘reasoned’. 
• In 2011, we should take everything that is said by this new doom-mongering expert caste with a large pinch of salt – and then spread that salt on the snow which they claimed had disappeared from our lives.

One of the joys of on-line publishing is the access one has to excellent prose and stimulating ideas.


I have long subscribed to the view that the fuss over climate is nothing but a contrivance, the climatocracy merely invoking the latest of a long series of potential doom scenarios as an imperative that justifies their continued and expanded control over society.  The interest of the ruling elite is solely in the promulgation of the exercise of power, a control greatly diminished by the inherent democratization of globalization stemming from dynamic changes in technology, communication and finance.


Ecomyths are not about the science.  They are founded on the selective use and exploitation of science in the service of elite ideology. 


What is re-assuring is that the lay public has not yet completely succumbed to somnolence and winter remains palpably still winter despite any amount of alarmist AGW hype.