A Personal Note

 My last active post on this blog was in November 2016. At that point I'd run out of things to say about the perpetuation of the many Ecomyths I had sought to dispel over the previous decade of postings. I was tired and found that I any new posts were repeating arguments I had made many times earlier and that my efforts to refute Ecomyths with empirical data and the evisceration of their underlying ideology was not sufficient to cease their promulgation. 

The issues are largely political in both origin and potential solution. Sadly I lacked the stamina at that point in my career to pivot the focus of the blog and engage fully and effectively in partisan politics that feature little debate and civil discourse.

I did not realize how exhausted I was both emotionally and physically from the academic and institutional marginalization that occurs when the individual takes a stance contrary to the prevailing ideology that has infused and chilled the contemporary academy.  De-platforming and cancel culture takes many guises. To all who are recipients, the result is equally unpleasant.

In April 2019 in the space of one week I gave my final lecture, received news that my father had died and was offered an early retirement buy out from my university position.  I retired formally in June 2019.  I did some initial traveling and was thwarted by the onset of Covid restrictions from undertaking 2 of the more adventurous trips I had planned to mark my retirement.  

This is my first post since I retired and it has taken me nearly 3 years to find my physical and mental health.  I might yet write another book, even one of fiction.

Today's post is to thank all those who read the blog in its heyday as one of the leading blogs in its field and to those who have discovered my posts more recently and to those who continue to read despite my retirement: I felt I owed you the reader a note of explanation for the lack of posting the past 5 years.  

I enjoyed writing the blog. It was fun and it kept me sane in an academic environment that was not conducive to critical thought or independent thinking.  I was born with an intellect that questions. I am inherently resistant to authoritarianism and blind acceptance of authority.  As a teacher I was able to inspire independent thinking and curiosity in thousands who took my courses. I also aggravated and annoyed many who just wished I would just confirm to their stereotype of compliance and passivity. To those who benefited from my courses, I hope the lessons still resonate and inspire you today. 

The ends never justify the means

By definition, a democratic free society cannot be achieved through fiat nor imposition. A democratic, free society must be the result of transparent, open and fair processes. Paramount of these is freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of speech.  The imposition, assertion and promulgation through dogma of predetermined outcomes is totalitarianism defined by the nature of its preferred vision of what society should look like.  Irrespective of which elite or what version of social justice or what religious tenets are used to wrap and disguise it, totalitarianism is easily recognized by its focus on the denial of the processes that define an open society, including: 

• independent judiciary
• an independent media wherein mutiple perspectives prevail
• preservation of free speech
• the promotion of independent thinking
• education free from dogma and censure of divergent views

This sounds like a description of the enlightenment or at least a precis of its key tenets and principles, but it appears necessary as we head into the pending US election at a time when censure,conformity, political corruption and collusion are all manifest and reinforced by a MSM oligarchy, a plethora of SJWs and an apparent diffidence among millennials to reading, divergent thinking and an understanding that the end never justifies the means.

Today is the 5th of November and perhaps now more than ever the concept of blowing up the cesspit of elitist power structures has never had greater resonance. 

I hope Trump wins and I hope he wins in a landslide so that the US can begin to cleanse itself of political corruption, collusion and gross inefficiency.  My hope is that this political transformation is the catalyst to a resurgence in the implementation of the processes of free democracy. AT the same time, this will result in necessary and serious weakening in the "progressive" imposition of censure, conformity and compliance that has masqueraded as the "correct" narrative of political discourse for the last 20 years.

Intellectual Yet Idiot

Elites favor democracy only as long as it suborns their abuse of power. Any deviation they consider invalid or stupid. Brexit + the imminent election of Trump signify an electorate re-asserting control over democracy at the expense of a power elite abusing the power of office for personal advancement + profit. 

Trump never positions himself as a paragon of virtue. His appeal is his express willingness to hold the beltway cabal to account for all the collusion + corruption that the Wikileaks and Clinton scandals are revealing. The Clinton Foundation has clearly only ever been a vehicle for graft. If there is no malfeasance, why the illegal server, the deletion of email records and the clumsy intervention of the Obama + Lynch DOJ to obstruct the FBI investigations? Lastly, if the abuse of power is not indictment enough, people still want to find ways to excuse the cabal rather than amend their view or accept that a cleansing of the system is paramount. 

Not unsurprisingly, I find so many who are virulently anti-Trump are the same people who thought Trudeau as PM was a good idea, Wynne as Premier was necessary and that climate is actually a pressing political issue. IYI.

Resist the Echo Chamber of Confirmation Bias and Presumptive Thought

Nothing like politics to constrain + manifest social media as an echo chamber of presumption + confirmation bias. Such a massive waste of technology. People are seriously afraid to think for themselves, to cast a wide net in what they read, watch + listen to. Change is not our enemy. Throughout history, progress is the manifestation of change + intellectual growth. What is the point of education if all it does is confine + bully people into an acceptance of presumptive narratives and memes? Educational indoctrination breeds convergence and followers, not creative, dynamic learners. The world is not static and the future needs divergent, creative thinkers, not drones who conflate a GPA with actual understanding and comprehension. The echo chamber is the intellectual closed mind. It is a norm that deserves and requires our active resistance.

environmentalism as misanthropic narcissism

In the latest in his series of excellent posts, Ben Pile considers the central conundrum of contemporary environmentalism that as a popular movement it is fundamentally elitist and in opposition to most actions, ideas and beliefs that stem from the principle of individual liberty. Environmentalism as an ideology is profoundly, and irrevocably, a stasist instrument for the enforcement of conformity to elite constructs.

Pile notes that while the ideology of environmentalism is primarily a political construct, it is never presented as such.  Rather,environmentalism is present as a moral imperative and compliance always is couched in terms of deep guilt and emotional rhetoric.

In its substance, environmentalism relies upon presumption, axiomatic constructs and referrals to authority to bolster its assertion of preferred, nay, essential actions to avoid the coming Armageddon.  In reality, the substance is always rather less dystopian and most, if not all, doom scenarios are invalidated and rendered moot by prosperity and continued advancements in technology -- a premise that environmentalism dismisses with derision rather than any valid consideration of the historical precedent of civilization to date.

Pile concludes that environmentalism is merely misanthropic narcissism. It is less real political ideology and more performance art, a contemporary theater of illusion to delude, seduce and ultimately suppress the masses into conformity and compliance with the preferences of an elite who are removed from the restrictions they impose on others. The environment is a prop and its vagaries a mere contrivance to be used as necessary to invoke fear and provide justification for continued control of society.

Environmentalism has assumed the mantle of political ideology as a proxy measure that illustrates the absence of true political debate and analysis. It is the last vestige of stasist control in an era when stasism is an anachronism and the realization of individual freedom has never been greater in history.

Far from being progressive, contemporary environmentalism is a fundamentalist, reactionary imposition of stasism.  And like all forms of fundamentalism, it will be overthrown by the progression of change that is immutable because it is definitive to the human experience: basic to change is the liberation of the individual. 

Sustainability is change. Change is sustainability.  Environmentalism adopted the slogan but has never understood the defining construct of the narrative.

When politics doesn't provide options

Recent elections in Britain caused great dismay and conjecture, causing many observers to condemn the irrationality and sanity of the populace.  This is part of a wider trend observable in all Western democracies of alienation of the ruling elites (a.k.a. the Clerisy) from large parts of a populace disenfranchised by the edicts of an elite whose values they neither share nor embrace.  Popular movements such as the Tea Party in the US are vilified by the intellectual elite and the mainstream media.  Both largely misunderstand both the genesis and motives of such expressions of discontent.  The elite are simply unable to understand why their ideology could be rejected and, thus, they condemn what they can neither condone nor comprehend.  Their ideology is inviolate, so axiomatic that it can only be that the populace must be lacking in morality, social responsibility or intelligence.

In Starship Troopers, Heinlein takes time to discuss the nature of morality and social responsibility.  He writes:

• Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not ...We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind. 
• The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. 
• A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive--and nowhere else!--and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
• We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . 
• The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual.  
• Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination-- devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues -- which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out.

The lesson that Heinlein provides is powerful.  There can be no social responsibility where there is no shared identity nor sense of community.  If an elite ideology of politics, intellectualism and environmentalism is sufficiently removed from the populace to be merely the perspective of the oligarchy which it benefits, then there will be no resonance, no acquired sense of morality, no behavioral change in compliance with that ideology.  There will only ever be resentment, disconnection and political ennui.  Provided the elite do not over-step their intrusion into daily life, they will be tolerated.  The political process offers a small range of alternative elites from which to choose.  But when the intellectual and political elites become too intrusive, too incumbent on daily life and too arrogant to perceive the discontent they are prompting, then a change will occur.

Revolution is a big jump for any democracy.  So instead, discontent first manifests itself in the recognition of populist movements.  Many of these may appear to be simplistic, xenophobic and divisive in their ideology.  No matter.  It is not the substance of the movement that appeals to the disenfranchised: it is the very act of signifying rejection of the status quo, of the dogma, morality, ideology and accompanying polices being imposed by the oligarchy.

For environmentalists especially, this is a hard message to absorb, as it contrasts so markedly with their own image they have of themselves.

IPCC over estimates climate sensitivity

Posted over at WUWT is a link to a significant new report by Lewis and Crick examining climate sensitivity.  

Along with the report, is a foreword by Judith Curry in which she writes:

• The sensitivity of our climate to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide is at the heart of the scientific debate on anthropogenic climate change, and also the public debate on the appropriate policy response to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 
• Climate sensitivity and estimates of its uncertainty are key inputs into the economic models that drive cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon.

• This report by Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok addresses this gap between the IPCC assessments and the primary scientific literature by providing an overview of the different methods for estimating climate sensitivity and a historical perspective on IPCC’s assessments of climate sensitivity. 
•  The report also provides an independent assessment of the different methods for estimating climate sensitivity and a critique of the IPCC AR4 and AR5 assessments of climate sensitivity.

As Lewis notes, the report is significant as it

•  ...shows that – contrary to the impression given by the Summary for Policymakers – the observational, scientific evidence in the main IPCC AR5 report actually supports much lower estimates of how sensitive the climate system is to greenhouse gas levels, both in the long term and over the remainder of this century...

The narrative for CAGW has been loosing impetus for some time. Despite this, the data are still being juiced to imply and promote a crisis not evidenced by empirical observation.  Bottom line:

• The GCMs overestimate future warming by 1.7–2 times relative to an estimate based on the best observational evidence.

CAGW isn't happening.  Won't be happening in the future, probably never was happening.  Climate changes as a dynamic natural system. Always has, always will.  Humans do modify both the weather and the climate, but not near to the degree that has been implied nor implicated in advocacy of the CAGW narrative.  Severe weather has always been a feature of human occupancy of the planet and there is insifficient evidence to support the contention that either the frequency nor intensity of weather events has changed in a manner inconsistent with the historical record.

Climate was and remains a proxy for a supposed scientific imperative for a set of political policies designed to suppress growth, control economic development, centralize governance and curtail globalization.  These policies reflect a particular morality and ideology that is both elitist in design and lacking on poplar support and resonance, hence the attempt to co-opt science as a mechanism to compel compliance by invoking an authority that is difficult to challenge and contradict.

After all this  (the IPCC, the Hockey Stick, the blogs, Climategate and the constant revisionism from global warming to AGW to CAGW) the central issue remains the provision of cheap energy and not climate.

And without the stigma of CAGW, what is the rationale for windmills? For solar panels? For constraint and increasing carbon taxes?  Fracking has removed the peril of an energy crisis for the West.  What is the cheap energy option for Africa?  Why is energy not dropping in price and fueling a new age of innovation and economic prosperity?

And, lastly, absent of any climate crisis, what possible purpose is there to zero-carbon as a goal?

Remove the presumption of CAGW, dismiss the narrative, and the value of pursuing zero-carbon as a goal is similarly removed.

Scary bananas: How environmental exaggeration harms emerging economies: ...

ennui or just resignation?

Read Dale Franks post over at QandO today about how his blogging had lost its passion and become steadily less frequent, less inspired and less purposeful.  I empathized.

Then I read Don Easterbrook's rebuttal to the reaction he'd received to a previous post pointing out the correlation between PDO cycles and temperature cycles and Tim Ball's post on climate as a political dichotomy and not one of science.  And I despaired.  What they write is so transparently obvious to anyone with an open mind on the topic but, apparently, open minds are in short supply despite the age of enlightenment and the extant technology to bring that enlightenment to all.

Between my empathy and my despair, was I enveloped with a profound sense of ennui with the continued intransigence of political authority and the academy to neither see nor accept what people like Easterbrook and Ball so eloquently and clearly expose?  Or was I overcome with a deepening resignation born from personal empathy with their situation?

My own blogging has become sporadic.  I have spent a career trying to change the system from within and it appears that far from taking either Manhattan or Berlin, I have failed to hold even my own home court in the form of my own academic institution.  Ennui or resignation?  Am I simply tired of the stupidity of others? Or am I conceding the field and ceasing to engage in an artificial war of words in which there can be no resolution as the other side simply refuses to accept any evidence as factual that does not accord with their narrative?  When academics blithely and routinely ignore empirical data as irrelevant, the medium has not just become the message, it has become the sole narrative of Big Brother University as funded by Big Brother Government in the cause of Big Brother Media.

Is it ennui or resignation to reject a worldview as promulgated by mass media social theorists?  Moreover, when did social theorist cease being an oxymoron?

In a conscious act of personal salvation and sanity, I have moved my teaching into a large course on tourism and an interactive senior seminar on change.  Professionally, I can survive, still exercise and extend my creative juices in the ongoing delivery and improvement of my pedagogy, and draw considerable satisfaction from the response of those students who value what I offer them: the opportunity to think, reflect and create.

I still believe in the power of education, but I am less confident that there is sufficient interest in using both the extant and future technology to enlighten, to educate and to empower.  Instead, I have a deep sense of ennui with the axiomatic dogma peddled by self-interested stasists and a sense of resignation that the forces of conformity will persist in suppressing ideas in the ongoing oppression of true freedom.

But hope is a funny thing...it persists despite all rationality and tiredness.

The Road to Redemption

I have long contended that the faux concern over AGW had little basis in the science of climate change and large reliance upon the symbolic use of climate as a contrivance for compliance with environmentalist control and censure ideology.  The science was co-opted merely as a tool to embed an axiomatic authority to the alarmist and dystopian assertions activists invoke to compel compliance with their command and control agendas.  Thus, the muted media reaction to the 5th IPCC Assessment is indicative that the conversation on climate is now closed.

In the wake of IPCC5 we have indictments of the IPCC as failed instrument of enforced international consensus, its incoherence and lack of scientific credibility, some insight into the manipulations and deceit utilized to obscure and hide facts within the Summary most media use for their summaries and some excellent summations of the present state of affairs.

I was recently faced by two different requests at my own institution. One was for a repeat of a debate on climate change I had participated in a decade ago.  The second was to promote a student event on the 'growing climate conversation". 

I decided to decline the first: nothing good can come of disabusing people of their faith and that's all a belief in AGW is today, all it ever has been.  Any pretense of scientific imperative, of pending crisis and human induced catastrophe has ceased to exist with the release of the very data contained within the full version of IPCC5.  Climate sensitivity is now estimated at its highest to be below the lowest of the lowest possible scenarios contemplated within previous IPCC supported AGW hysteria.  Moreover, climate change at 0.8 degrees Celsius per 100 yrs. can't be spun as alarming to anyone let alone a developed, technocratic and fast changing world.

And yet, the student run environmental association on campus is still in thrall with the anti-hydro carbon, zero-carbon, environmental Armageddon caused by humans message that both initiated and fueled the AGW myth.  Ignorance is pervasive, especially within the academy that has feasted at the AGW trough for the past two decades, that thrives on the clarion call for intellectually derived command and control compliance with expertise and authority acting in consensus and uses intimidation politics to marginalize its critics.

I decided to use the second request as a teaching example of the pervasiveness of environmentalism as a religion and as a placebo for real caring, real action and real implementation of change.

Its been a long 20 years of futility, chasing a false God and a mythical Holy Grail.  The AGW myth has been a blight on intellectualism, academic integrity, environmental thought and effective policy making.  The only question facing its proponents, adherents and inductees is how quickly they will recant and at what cost to their own personal integrity, careers and credibility.

The road to Damascus will indeed be crowded.

why blogs persist and scare stasists

Here is the latest excellent post from Ben Pile.  Given the flurry of discussion this week over the sate of the climate blogosphere, why it exists and what it does, Ben's points are important:

• This blog has always identified itself as sceptical of environmentalism — environmental politics, especially climate politics — rather than climate science.
•  Environmentalists ... simply do not recognise their own perspective as ‘ideological’. ‘Ideology’ is what other people do. The conceit — in all senses of the word — being that the environmentalist simply takes ‘science’ at face value, whereas those he points his fingers at refuse to see the science because they are somehow blinded by ‘ideology’. 
• Putting it simply, the ‘ideology’ of the political establishment is a system of ideas that would put political institutions above democratic oversight, and under the direction of panels of technical experts. But one can agree or disagree with the scientific consensus independently of one’s view that political institutions should be arranged in that way. One can disagree with policies independently of the consensus. In other words, the idea that the scientific consensus is equivalent to the configuration of supranational and national political institutions and their respective policies is ‘ideological’. Indeed, as this blog has also pointed out, ad nauseum, the notion of the scientific consensus is used in political and policy debates at all levels, with no regard for the substance of the consensus. As I explain it elsewhere, it is a consensus without an object.  

For some unknown reason the very basis and logic eloquently summarized by Ben is ignored, missed or simply mis-understood by those who persist in wishing to demonize, silence and otherwise marginalize those of us who blog to question the ideology of environmentalism and the effects it has on contemporary society, politics and public policy.

As Ben concludes:

• The problem is not now, nor has it ever been, ‘ideology’. Ideology has not itself turned people blind to science or anything else. ‘Ideology’ is nothing more than a system of ideas, or beliefs, much of which is embedded in, and transmitted through, culture. 
• The problem is instead an inability to reflect...
• The problem, then, is the same as with any religious zealot, ideologue, tyrant or bigot. Proponents of orthodoxies do not recognise themselves as vulnerable to ideology. Why should they, since prevailing hegemonies don’t need to justify themselves — their preferences and prejudices appear to them as manifestly ‘common sense’, and challenges to their authority seem impertinent and obtuse.  

The environmentalist imperative has always rested on the certitude of the science that its adherents assert to compel compliance with their political edicts.  As a consequence, environmentalism has become shrill, anti-humanist and devoid of meaningful morality and ethics.

But to see that from within takes an element of self-reflection most zealots are unwilling and/or unable to achieve. (Sadly it is a capacity even many reasoned, moderates fail to practice). Instead they cast aspersions with invective language at those with the temerity to deviate from their sense of correctness, of compliance, of consensus and then they seek to use the social tools of media, authority and fear to bolster their believe in scenarios of doom and gloom that the science itself does not support, validate nor justify.

The climate blogosphere is not one uniform template of ideas, focus or expertise.  There are technical blogs that assess data and methods (like Climate Audit) there are sites that discuss environmentalism (like this one and Climate Resistance), there are those that act as window on the "climate debate" (such as WUWT ,Bishop Hill and Climate Etc), those that act as a news clearing house for environmental stories (Tom Nelson) and those that present investigative insight and revelations (No Frakking Consensus).  Beyond this, I am not sure what a mapping of the blogosphere achieves -- it appears to me an exercise without clear intellectual purpose, unless that purpose is merely to box all the deviants together ready for metaphorical or literal abuse.

That an effort was made to map the climate blogosphere reveals the extent to which the intellectual and political elite (the climatocracy) is threatened and has failed in its attempts to use climate as a contrivance to compel compliance with its message of austerity chic as a necessary ethic for the masses.

And then, of course, there's this:

• I urge the minister, in the light of all the evidence that has come out about the lack of any change in temperature over the past 15 years, to think again about the Climate Change Act and to revoke it, amend it and support home owners and British businesses.

– David Davies MP

A quick summary

I mentioned  the latest article from Peter Foster in the last post but it is worth pulling some excerpts because he so nicely summarizes the present situation with climate alarmism.

As he writes, the

• alleged climate catastrophe is based not on “simple” atmospheric physics but on the computer models of the... IPCC
• which assume that CO2 drives the climate
• then assume the multiplication of that driving force via positive feedbacks
• then assume the worst possible implications.

All of these assumptions can and have been successfully challenged. Some would say debunked and discredited.

Meanwhile, there is no disputing that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have now reached 400 ppm.  However, the breathless reporting of this figure reflects numerical mysticism, not science, especially as the  period of years during which there has been no warming is now 16 years.

Not only is the science not settled but the situation is muddied further by that fact that

• ...the policy measures taken to address this alleged existential crisis have been (a) climatically pointless, and (b) economically disastrous.
•  However, any suggestion of revisiting the science is treated with primal screams because the climate industry has succeeded in framing this as a “moral issue,” all about hurting poor people and recklessly endangering the future of the planet. 
•  This moral crusade has been so successful because it is fed by the anti-capitalist psychological compost that has been piling up since Marx stalked the earth.
• The issue also remains politically toxic due to the vast and disproportionate power of radical environmental NGOs, who have very deliberately been cultivated both within the UN and by nodes of Global Salvationism

Anyone who persists in positing climate policy as an issue of science is both disingenuous and misleading.  Climate policy has always been an environmental morality play and the role of science has been as a tool of authority to bully and intimidate people into conforming with prescribed policy outcomes that conform to an elitist ideology of environmentalism that in practice contrasts markedly with the pragmatic environmental ethics of common sense.

The underlying problem with any elitist ideology is that it is not sustainable in a free democratic society.  Zombies, vampires and ghosts make for good scary stories but they are ephemeral and as mythical as the sky is falling alarmism of climate catastrophe.

Can Climateagate Mann evolve?

Sometimes students will ask me why if everything I am telling them is the truth (and it is!) do other professors and the media still propagate the myths I have just exposed?

I can think of no better example than the continued and ongoing attempts to re-assert the sky is falling, climate alarmism narrative, long after that ship has sailed (much like my efforts to avoid mixed metaphors).  In the wake of Climategate 3.0, we have yet another example of climate scientists acting badly.  

In this superb summary, Roger Pielke Jr. is careful to leave everyone's dignity intact.  He is polite, constructive and wonderfully constrained.  I admire his patience and continued belief that accidents can and persistently do happen.  Sadly, what he sees as accidental is all too easily construed as intentional malfeasance (again).

What this latest example demonstrates is how "findings" are spun, spiral into "facts" and become embedded as the dominant narrative of consensus science.  Along the way, there is an embrace of misrepresentation, the inclusion of significant impropriety and the adoption of an attitude that is especially illuminating and immoral in the post-Climategate era.

No more. No longer. Get it together and act honorably as scientists should. Embrace some ethics, work on your integrity and check you personal ideology at the door.  Enough already.  Personally I am tired of professional colleagues who should know better not doing better because they lack the will to try.

Cartoon from Josh. 

and a real world up date from Peter Foster who offers the insight that ...facts always need perspective. 
A sentiment heartily endorsed by this blog!

Climategate 3.0

Any good sequel will spawn its own sequel, and so it is with Climategate. Apparently there is indeed a Climateate 3.0, although the biggest impact of this latest revelation is the accompanying letter which confirms the leak was that, a leak, and the actions of a civic minded single individual and not the manifestation of an oil funded, massive conspiracy.  Another myth laid to rest.

In the real world, Climategate has served to help shift the climate narrative away from AGW alarmism and into a more considered re-assessment of green-inspired energy  lunacy policy.  

Sadly, in the halls of academia, Climategate is rarely mentioned, never discussed and, especially, not brought to the attention of tender, impressionable undergraduates for fear they loose their faith in the environmental dogma most courses still spoon feed to their compliant stooges more focused on strategic education (is this on the exam?) than deep learning.

As always, truth will out and inquiring minds will re-assert the necessity for academia to actually practice critical thinking rather than merely espouse its virtues.

don't foget to double tap

I am invited to speak next week at an environment conference being hosted by one of the colleges on my home campus.  I am excited as my views and alternate perspective will broaden the range of discussion and my inclusion on the list of invited speakers offers a sign of hope that a new, more enlightened environmentalism may yet emerge from the ashes of the past 20 year in climate alarmism.

But just as every playbook has a silver lining, there's always a counter point to remind you that mental illness is real and requires infinite patience.  Just as ecomyths seem to rise Phoenix style every time they are dismissed, so do old environmentalists.  So it was a great pleasure to read the latest missive over on Climate Resistance, once more eviscerating the latest reincarnation of ideological doom and gloom from Paul Ehrlich which Ben encapsulates in his essay Malthus's Zombie.

Can sustainability ever be achieved?  What is the greatest barrier to successful implementation of effective strategies and policies?  First, we must begin to recognize, acknowledge and finally ignore the willful stupidity still firmly embedded within the heart of environmental ideology.  Rather than recycle the alarmist Zombie, we need to recognize that:

• the earth's resources are not limited: technology is advancing more rapidly today than at any other point in human history
• limits do not define the human existence: hope and ingenuity do.  Sustainability must be built upon incentives, not censure.
• science and an understanding of the environment are not our primary constraint: politics and political will are
• before governance can be efficient, it must first be effective: zero-carbon is the wrong goal, we should be seeking to provide low-cost, decentralized energy worldwide to liberate people from poverty
• education needs to create divergent thinking and creativity: not conformity, fear and censure.

if you didn't laugh, you'd cry

This cartoon from Josh was too good not to re-post: the original courtesy of the impeccable Bishop:

after the summit, the descent (the dissent was always there)

• Posturing, in fact, is one of the biggest weaknesses of the environmental movement, where everyone wants to be seen doing the right thing, without paying the costs of actually doing it.

This article in today's National Post commenting on the inevitable demise of the global climate summit industry. 

The summits have actually outlived the problem they were initiated to discuss.  Their demise will force many charlatan professors to look elsewhere for their boondoggles, expenses paid catch up visits with friends from around the world in exotic locations, mutually reinforced by their research findings recommending the very same meetings they then attended.  It's a wonder PhD programs have difficulty recruiting.  Never mind philosophy and methodology -- how good are you at self-promotion, the art of implied crises and the conceit that an annual conference of like minds ever achieved even a modicum of divergent, let alone creative, thought?

Not to despair, there's always a new environmental dystopia waiting to be "discovered", embraced and fearlessly promoted by those same displaced intrepid summit groupies.

Meanwhile, the world continues to flourish and improve, globally.  No, it is far from perfect and it is still has ample room for improvement.  But it is steadily, and occasionally spectacularly, better than in the past.  So why do environmentalists persist in dystopian visions of limits, impending doom, stasist control and constraint?

The environmental movement will continue to be irrelevant, and a circus for Orwellian distraction of the chattering classes, until such time as it embraces the necessity for the future to be embraced with hope, optimism and creative energy, with ideas that actually transpose and facilitate empowerment, improvement and sustained growth that is the very imperative inherent in human existence.

rio revisited

I was not in Rio for the original Earth Summit in 1992.  Neither was I invited to Rio+20.  In fact, the closest I got to Rio was writing a chapter on Rio as a one of the gateways for my Tourism text Gateways to Discovery being released this fall -- so I was thinking about Rio but not one of the 50,000 delegates in attendance.  Funny, after a lifetime career in the field of resource management and sustainability, I don't make the top 50,000 to receive an all expenses trip paid by somebody else but after 6 years of blogging I make the world's top 250 climate skeptics: oh, the vagaries of fame and fortune.

Sidebar: best line of the year from the movie Contagion. 
Character 1: "you're not a writer!" 
Character 2: "I am . I blog". 
#1: "Blogging is not writing: its graffiti with punctuation."

Anyways, back to my musing on Rio and now Rio+20.  I was pondering what to say when I read this excellent summation by Peter Foster:

• The failure of Rio does not mean disregard for “The Environment.” Environmental protection is a branch of human protection. The environment has no value except for what it means to humans. The outrage that this observation will promote serves to prove the point. The environment can no more value itself than it can express outrage. Human development inevitably involves disturbance of land and potential pollution of air and water. The issue is never people versus the environment. It is the interests of some people vs. the interests of others. The question is one of balance, and that pollution should not be suffered without compensation. A bigger question is one of entirely bogus eco scares being manufactured as a rationale for payoffs to the very kleptocrats who are responsible for global poverty.
•  The Rio+20 text was originally sold as promoting “The Future We Want.” However, the “We” in question was always a self-selected group of UN bureaucrats, alarmist NGOs, corporate rent-seekers and main chancers whose interests were sharply at odds with those of ordinary people. Rio+20’s failure should be celebrated as The Future We Avoided.

Good stuff. Accurate, pithy and just a little acerbic.

I was going to add some more of my own commentary when I read this by Ben Pile:

• A lot is expected of ‘science’. However, the failure of Rio+20, like the failure of many global conferences to produce agreements, such as the meetings at Durban, Cancun and Copenhagen, reveals once again that the real function of ‘science’ is a fig leaf for their delegates’ bad faith. 
• Rio+20 was the ideal marketplace for such bland pieties. It’s not as if economic growth, short- or long-term, is a problem the UK enjoys. Politicians and ‘thinkers’ who lack the ideas necessary to produce positive change – growth – turn the concept of growth into the enemy. The anti-growth lobby congeals at events such as Rio, where there’s ample opportunity to swap ideas about how to turn their own mediocrity into a worldwide political project under the pretence of ‘saving the planet’. In reality, the desire for powerful global political institutions owes much more to politicians’ own domestic crises of legitimacy than it does to any real threat to the world’s rivers, trees and oceans.
•  By winning whatever passes for the hearts and minds of the political establishment, environmentalism has been installed throughout political institutions without ever having won a democratic contest of its ideals. Such is the extent of this insidious colonisation that any public debate about the future, especially of energy policies, is already prefigured according to environmental precepts.
•  This assumption that the masses are suffering from consumption addiction allows world leaders to step in and make the big decisions about the future on our behalf. Yet conferences like Rio+20 are not about protecting us plebs; these shindigs are really about protecting the elites.
•  NGOs are only too happy to help. As I have argued previously on spiked, environmentalism has comprehensively failed to establish itself as a popular movement. Instead, environmental NGOs – a pale imitation of mass movements – were given access to political institutions to overcome the disconnect between political elites and the public. As ‘pressure groups’, they pretended to be holding governments to account, but by raising the issues the government wanted to identify with, NGOs were actually doing governments’ bidding.
•  This supranational institution-building needs its own legitimising basis: environmental crisis. And this is where the science is recruited. Scientific organisations all over the world plan for years to produce the most ghastly predictions from measurements of our relationship with the natural world.

Thank you Ben.

The context within which both Rio and Rio+20 should be viewed is a wider worldview which recognizes the role contemporary environmentalism now plays within politics.  It is the de facto moral agenda for political poverty. The science does not require nor compel the subjugation of the human race by elites.  There are no limits that are not ideologically created by the self-serving political elites seeking to impose them on humanity. The world has spent 2000 years finally learning how to take the majority out of the default condition of human existence: poverty.  The methodology is political freedom, followed by economic freedom, followed by the opportunity for entrepreneurship and technological advancement.  Given choice and opportunity, the vast majority of the human race has proven they will choose advancement and with that advancement, both a compassion for the rest of the human race and an increased concern for the health of their environment.  In human history, no authoritarian, centralized elite or government has ever succeeded in doing the same.

About the only other thing history has proven as totally unnecessary? Global gabfests in exotic locations at tax payers expense by phony-baloney hacks.

the great wind fallacy

The world has progressed and prospered through time on the basis of the development of cheap, accessible energy.  To replace existing power sources, any new energy will have to be similarly both cheap and accessible, something existing supposedly "green" candidates are not.

As Matt Ridley aptly summarizes, the situation with wind power is that the option is both ineffective, inefficient and irrelevant:

• To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world's energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine - despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide. 

Too often, contemporary environmentalism fails to acknowledge that nothing is sustainable if there is a failure to fully integrate the economics of life with both its social and environmental imperatives.  There is no prospect for a future energy policy premised on a culture of poverty.  Poverty is the default condition of the world. It does not need to be created: it is.  Wealth has to be created.  Prosperity takes development in all its manifestations: social, cultural, environmental and economic.  There is a world of difference between efficiency of resource use and wise use of the environment implicit within the construct of sustainability, and the deprivation and pious imposition of censure and the morally induced poverty emblematic of contemporary environmental ideology.

the long slow death of a faulty paradigm

The environmental movement is as promiscuous with its ‘ethics’ as it is with ‘The Science’. This pithy conclusion comes courtesy of Ben Pile writing in Spike on the non-similarities between Fakegate (the falsification of material to incriminate the Heartland Institute) and Climategate 1 and 2 (the massive leak of evidence of malfeasance by the core of the IPCC climatocracy).

Ben ably summarizes both the facts of the Hearltland situation and the inescapable reality that the opposition to the imposed AGW consensus at the center of the IPCC has never been a conspiracy, it has never been massively funded and it is neither exclusionary, nor authoritarian in its ideology.  Indeed, perhaps the only factor that universally applies to all climate realists is their sense of abhorrence of an authoritarian, imposed ideology of a conformed political consensus being imposed under the guise of an incomplete science. 

Fakegate reveals how deeply the environmentalism narrative of limits, pessimism and dystopia is embedded within academic and intellectual discourse.  Environmentalism has become so convinced of the correctness of its own mythology that its adherents are no linger able to see the blue skies of future prosperity for the storm clouds of their own bleak attitudes.  Dialogue is near to impossible.  Those who question the stasist paradigm are dismissed, ostracized and finally, framed with falsehoods.

Except, a funny thing happened along the way.  Those pesky skeptics refused to wear the tag of denial, sulk and wallow in shame -- instead they stood firm, resolute and, as realists, re-affirmed the primacy of empirical data, scientific method, the differentiation of science from politics, the dissociation of economics from social engineering and a confidence that when one speaks the truth, time will eventually validate you.

While environmental activists in NGOs, politics and academia collectively scrambled to more elaborate means to spin the redeeming correctness of the central narrative, that their end somehow justified whatever means were employed in its imposition, the paradigm at the center of it all has quietly and very publicly been refuted, repudiated and discredited. But, in scientific terms it is not yet refuted: an ideological proposition can not be refuted, and that is all AGW has ever been, an ideologically conspired assertion.

The paradigm that has galvanized environmentalism for the past 40 years (ecological limits, driven by human mismanagement, inducing a catastrophic and dystopian future) has been overtaken and bypassed by dynamic, progressive and prosperous change...worldwide.  It is self-evident that the world has many remaining issues.  But it is equally self-evident to the lay public that the world's problems are all issues for which progressive, astute human management can resolve and replace with something better.  That process is rarely easy, seldom quick but it is inexorable. 

Fakegate reveals that the faulty paradigm of AGW is dead.