The mistake made by Greenspan, Carter, Gladstone, Harding, Schumacher (not forgetting our crazy boiler-suit-wearing friend M. King Hubbert, the Godfather of Peak) was to ignore the power of human ingenuity. As scarce resources (coal, oil, gas, whatever) are exhausted, so their market price rises. This higher price sends a signal to mining and drilling companies that hitherto inaccessible resources – e.g. deep sea oil – might now be profitable to extract. It also sends a signal to entrepreneurs and inventors that the time may have come to try and find a rival energy source. If humans really behaved in the unimaginative way that the ‘peak energy’ experts seem to imagine we do, then we’d all still be living in caves. Simon understood this perfectly – and it led him to a daring conclusion: that population growth, far from being our most pressing problem, is in fact the very thing that rescues us from disaster. In Simon’s words:
One cannot disentangle from human numbers the effects of the human brain and its contents – call it human capital – any more than one can disentangle the effects of the human digestive or procreative anatomy from human numbers. It is a crucial element of the model … that population growth and density affect the structures of markets, law, tradition and political institutions.
The more people that exist, in other words, the greater the opportunity for the division of labour and the specialisation of skills that enable our species to thrive.
And this doesn’t even need to be at the expense of the environment. The more efficiently we are able to utilise the land, through technologies such as GM, the more we will be able to leave it in (or return it to) its natural state:
As Stephen Budiansky puts it:
In India alone, improvements in wheat farming alone have spared 100 million acres of additional cropland that would otherwise have had to be slashed out of forests somewhere over the last fifty years to produce the same amount of wheat that Indian farmers produce today thanks to technological advances. That’s the equivalent of three Iowas or fifty Yellowstone National Parks. Without modern farming, we literally would have already cut down every acre of rainforest just to grow the staple food crops that feed the world. Would that be ‘sustainable’?
When I read that passage I was as surprised as you probably are. Sceptic I may be, but I’d long assumed – without ever having thought particularly hard about it – that there must be something intrinsically wrong with ‘intensive farming’, that organic food just has to be better for us than artificially fertilised food, and that there’s probably something ever so slightly dodgy about GM. (Certainly, when I fed my first-born his soya milk to cope with some sort of lactic intolerance, I remember being quite relieved to see on the packet of powder that the soya was ‘guaranteed non-GM’.)
This, of course, is the great difficulty with the ‘Cornucopian’ view of the planet. It goes against a profound instinct that we know from Tertullian has been with us for at least 2,000 years, and most likely since the days when Ug grunted to Uglugug that caves were becoming far too crowded and there didn’t seem to be nearly as many mammoths to kill as before. The Romans called this sense ubi sunt. Today, we call it nostalgia. The past, we tend to believe, was golden and idyllic. The old, traditional ways were better. Ahead lies only misery. And of course, it’s all our fault.
Now whether or not you choose to follow this atavistic impulse is entirely up to you. It might be that if you do, you will be quite marvellously vindicated and rewarded with a series of apocalyptic scenarios so spectacular they make The Day After Tomorrow look like High School Musical III. But my advice, if you’re a betting man or woman, is: don’t – for the entire weight of history is against you.
TEN
THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM
As far as I can tell, the debate is not, by and large, a debate about science. There is broad agreement over major scientific facts among experts who therefore have difficulty even understanding the existence of the popular view. There is broad misunderstanding by many, including non-specialist scientists. The debate is largely a matter of spin control and intentional misrepresentation. The bulk of relevant information suggests little warming.
Richard Lindzen, Sloan Professor of Meteorology, MIT
Sometimes I give public talks to promote my repellent, dangerously subversive views on global warming and when I do, I like to kick off by showing a short film you may have seen on YouTube. It’s the ‘No Pressure’ video which was made by writer/director Richard Curtis for a resolutely genteel pressure group called 10:10. (That’s as in ‘let’s all reduce our carbon footprint by 10 per cent in 2010’.)
If you have seen it, you’ll know why I’m so very fond of it. Just like that shamelessly anti-capitalist Friends of the Earth leaflet I mentioned in Chapter Four it does my work for me. The mask of warm, compassionate eco-friendliness slips to reveal the intolerance, hatred and snarling misanthropy beneath.
The film is set in a school classroom where an easy-going, lovably kooky teacher (played by Gillian Anderson from The X Files) asks her pupils how they plan to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions in support of an eco-campaign called 10:10. Obviously, she adds, participation isn’t compulsory. If the children don’t want to play ball, that’s entirely up to them. ‘No pressure,’ the teacher says.
But most of the children do want to participate. One little girl sticks up her hand to say that from now on she’ll be cycling to school instead of travelling by car. ‘That’s fantastic, Jemima!’ says the teacher. She asks for a show of hands from all those children who want to join the 10:10 campaign. Only two children abstain: a glum-looking pair called Philip and Tracy. ‘That’s absolutely fine,’ the teacher reassures them. ‘Your own choice.’
Then the bell rings, signalling that the lesson is over. ‘OK class, thank you so much for today and I will see you all tomorrow,’ says the teacher, remembering one last point. ‘Oh, just before you go, I need to press…’ (the teacher absent-mindedly searches among the papers on her desk to reveal a black box with a red button) ‘…this little button here.’
The teacher presses the button and in an instant, the scene turns to horror. First Tracy explodes in a hideous mush of deep red gore. Then, at a second push of the button, Philip is exterminated too. Their classmates scream in terror, recoiling in panic and disgust at the bloody remnants of Philip and Tracy now smeared all over their white school shirts, their exercise books, their faces. A dismembered limb lands with a thump on a desk. Entirely unperturbed the teacher wipes a smear of blood from her glasses. ‘Now everybody please remember to read chapters five and six on volcanoes and glaciation. Except for Philip and Tracy, of course.’
Within hours of its internet release in September 2010, the video went viral. But not quite for the reasons its makers intended. Instead of raising laughs – and money and support – from its target audience, it led to a wave of public outrage. A planned cinema release was cancelled, several companies withdrew their sponsorship and the team responsible had to issue a public apology on The Guardian website.
We sceptical bloggers gleefully christened it ‘Splattergate’ – and also, ‘the gift that goes on giving’. It provided material for an endless stream of blog posts (on everything from 10:10’s frantic damage limitation exercises to all the Downfall-style parodies which were cropping up on YouTube). Better still, it revealed in glorious Techni-gore detail just how far the fascistic instincts of the watermelons had now penetrated the cultural mainstream.
Remember, this mini-snuff movie inviting us to rejoice in the deaths of kids who believed the Wrong Thing was not made for some whacko fringe outfit – Earth First!, say, or the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. The 10:10 campaign was run by nice, middle-class people with names like Franny and Eugenie. Its sponsors – at least before the furore – included Sony, O2 and The Guardian. The campaign had been endorsed by everyone from Prime Minister David Cameron to food writer Delia Smith to fashion designer Nicole Farhi. And of course, it had Richard Curtis, writer and director of such eminently lovable and u
nimpeachably safe, middlebrow comedies as Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Notting Hill.
This was what made the video so shocking. Not the content per se, but the fact that a collaborative team of at least fifty film professionals and forty actors, led by so assured and bankable and cosy a director as Curtis, could remain so blissfully unconscious of just how toxic the video’s underlying message actually was.
‘Wouldn’t it be great if instead of having to argue the pressing urgency of our cause with all those pesky, stubborn, selfish climate-change deniers we could just – teehee – press a red button and kill them all?’ it ventured. And of course it didn’t ‘mean’ it. Of course it was all done in a spirit of fun. But suppose for a moment that some campaigning group had made a similar ‘joke’ video in which the troublemakers to be righteously exterminated were homosexuals. Or Muslims. Or disabled people.
Well, of course, that would never happen – and for reasons that are quite obvious. So why does this same obviousness not apply in the case of climate-change ‘sceptics’? Is ecological correctness really so firmly established and all-encompassing now that the civilised majority of decent people can afford to cease further discourse with dissenters?
In the eyes of the ‘No Pressure’ team, the answer was apparently ‘yes!’ It was a cultural assumption they believed would be shared by a significant proportion of their prospective audience. And indeed a significant proportion of alarmists do share this assumption: as they’re apt to tell me in the hate e-mails and Tweets I get almost every day. (Sample Tweet: ‘Sorry to learn that c*** @jamesdelingpole has kids. So that means more c***s in the world than I thought.’ Needless to say, the original came without asterisks.)
But before I go on to describe in more detail the vicious bullying inflicted by the watermelons and their sympathisers on anyone who disagrees with them, I think it’s important that I first answer a question often posed by critics: ‘But aren’t you just as bad?’
Perhaps they’re referring to my description of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, esteemed head of the IPCC – at least at the time of writing – as a ‘cricket-loving, jet-setting, soft-porn-writing, ice-shunning, vegetarian troll-impersonator’? Or maybe to the way, in the pages of The Spectator, I once denounced my future king – the Prince of Wales – as a ‘poisonous loon’ and a ‘terrible prat’?
Or do they perhaps think it was wrong of me to provide a weblink so that readers could see transcripts of the witness statement from the masseuse Al Gore (allegedly) groped in a Portland, Oregon hotel – the one where she describes him as ‘like a sex-crazed poodle’?
Or possibly they think it’s below the belt of me to do what I’m about to do now, which is to quote an excerpt from Dr Pachauri’s recent foray into soft-pornographic literature, Return To Almora.
She removed her gown, slipped off her nightie and slid under the quilt on his bed… Sanjay put his arms around her and kissed her, first with quick caresses and then the kisses becoming longer and more passionate. May slipped his clothes off one by one, removing her lips from his for no more than a second or two.
Afterwards she held him close. ‘Sanjay I’ve learned something for the first time today. You are absolutely superb after meditation. Why don’t we make love every time immediately after you have meditated?’
Well, yes, I do indeed like to spice up my copy with colourful invective, snarky asides, sneering put-downs or indeed any kind of anecdote that shows the other side for the pompous, slippery, lying, cheating, arrogant, corrupt, bullying, money-grubbing hypocrites they are. But this hardly seems unreasonable. The first job of a writer, after all, is to be read. If my prose were as dry, worthy and dull as some of my critics apparently think it ought to be, my blogs wouldn’t have half the following they do, no one would have paid any attention to my Climategate story, and you wouldn’t be reading this book. So there.
That said, I’m always careful to draw a distinction between lively invective and a gratuitous ad hominem. The difference is important. For example, if I call the Prince of Wales a ‘fool’ I’ll always make sure I justify the term. I’ll explain, for example, that his public pronouncements that we have ‘one hundred months left to save the world’ are overstated, that I believe it’s irresponsible for a future constitutional monarch – a role which requires him to remain politically neutral – to take such a nakedly biased position on an issue as fraught as climate change, and that his airy dismissal of ‘so-called climate sceptics’ is ill-informed and an abuse of privilege.
Warmists tend not to be quite so scrupulous. All too often, you’ll see them making personal attacks on their opponents, not to enhance the argument, but to circumvent it altogether. This is the true meaning of ad hominem abuse: you’re not going to win the debate on points, so you attack the opposition’s character instead.
Here, for example, was the response of one of my menagerie of alarmist blog trolls when I wrote a piece in praise of Professor Freeman Dyson, generally esteemed as one of the world’s most brilliant scientific minds, after Dyson had expressed scepticism about the reliability of the science supporting AGW: ‘James – are you really that stupid. When you have heart disease do you seek out an expert on dermatology? You are just so incredibly dumb about science it’s not funny. He’s a theoretical physicist – an old one. Not a climatologist.’
There was a similar response to the public resignation letter written by Hal Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to the President of the American Physical Society. Professor Lewis gave this reason for his resignation:
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the Climategate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organises the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
Devastating stuff. And did the alarmist community seek to rebut it by proving that, contrary to Professor Lewis’s claims, the American Physical Society had not been hijacked by shills for the global warming industry? Or by demonstrating that the ‘science’ underpinning AGW was entirely reliable?
Of course it didn’t. Instead, its propagandists sought to portray the distinguished professor as a man of no significance. (‘Who is Hal Lewis? I’ve been studying physics for thirty years and I’ve never heard of him,’ wrote a blogger called David Appell.) Another blogger, William Connolley – a Green Party activist and, until he was banned, a ferociously dedicated Wikipedia spin merchant – sought to dismiss him as a time-serving second-rater:
So, where are the papers? You can’t have a scientific career without papers. There are some early ones – The Multiple Production of Mesons from 1948 with Oppenheimer, no less. Or Multiple Scattering in an Infinite Medium, 1950 – worthy maths-ish thing, I’d guess. But past the late-50’s early 60’s [sic] it suddenly gets very thin indeed. I’d guess, without knowing more, that he gave up science and moved into admin.
This is ‘playing the man, not the ball’.
And it’s a game at which the watermelons excel. I had a taste of this myself when a young member of the (ardently Warmist) British Antarctic Survey bought the website address www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk so that he could direct casual browsers, via hyperlink, to the alarmist website RealClimate. My actual website address is www.jamesdelingpole.com – and I can’t pretend I was particularly harmed by this stunt. What did puzzle me, though, was the mentality behind it. Surely if you believed as fervently in the unimpeachable truth of AGW as the British Antarctic Survey apparently does, what need would you have to sabotage the websites of irrelevant sceptics? How could these sceptics possibly pose any kind of threat if what they were saying
wasn’t true? After all, all you’d have to do to prove those pesky sceptics wrong would be to expose the manifest flaws in their pitifully weak theories with some cold, hard British Antarctic Survey facts. Er, wouldn’t you?
Other sceptics have had it far worse. Children’s TV presenter Johnny Ball – dad of DJ Zoe; honorary favourite uncle to three generations of children thanks to popular kiddie series from Play Away to Think of a Number – discovered that websites containing pornographic images were set up in his name, inciting bloggers to run campaigns against him saying he should not be allowed near children; an imposter even tried to cancel his booking at a training day for maths teachers.
Something similar happened to another old children’s TV favourite, David Bellamy. Few have done more for the cause of the environment than this genial botanist, with his familiar bushy beard, hyper-enthusiastic manner and trademark mangled ‘r’s: not only did he co-found the Conservation Foundation but in 1993 he was jailed for blockading Australia’s Franklin River in protest against a proposed dam. But his television work dried up completely once he began publicly expressing certain ‘unforgivable’ views. And what were those offensive, career-destroying views: an admiration for the work of Charles Manson? A penchant for paedophilia? Why no. Like Ball, Bellamy had made the fatal error of speaking out against the nonsense of ‘global warming.’
Yet bizarrely the Warmists persist in maintaining that they get it worse, far worse, from us evil, malignant sceptics. Here, for example, is Steven Sherwood, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, writing in Physics Today:
The ugly nature of the current climate debate, with its increasingly frequent characterisation of scientists as opportunists, totalitarians, or downright criminals, is also, unfortunately, not new. Copernicus (posthumously) and his prominent followers through Isaac Newton were all accused of being heretics or atheists. Einstein was derided by his political opponents through the 1920s and 1930s as a Communist … or a fraud.
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