Yes, I quite agree. It would indeed be absolutely marvellous if we could spend the rest of our lives swanning around in some carefree pastoral idyll. But unfortunately, that wouldn’t actually happen if you stopped – or, worse still, reversed – economic growth. Instead, you’d get a miserable period of stagnation and decline very much like we’re starting to experience now: increased poverty, ill-health and crime, decaying infrastructures, and greater global tension and competition as the growing world population competes for fewer resources. You certainly wouldn’t have much time for paddling in streams or chasing butterflies: leisure is the product of economic abundance and specialisation of labour, not of pre-Industrial Age ‘self-sufficiency’. Nor would you bequeath a better world to your children and grandchildren. They’d be the first in generations to enjoy a lower standard of living than their parents.
Scarce resources, then. You’re worried about the thing they call ‘peak oil’. You think there’s only a limited amount of stuff on our planet to exploit, and that we have a moral duty to safeguard as much of it as possible for future generations, even if this means state-enforced rationing.
Yep, well, I understand your concerns. Of course your gut feeling that resources are bound to run out eventually makes some sense. But it fails to take into account the power of human ingenuity and market processes. ‘The Stone Age didn’t end because man suddenly ran out of rocks,’ the saying goes. And while glib, it’s also true. Maybe if ships were still made of wood, we’d now be suffering a grave shortage of forests. Maybe if our transport was still drawn by horses, our cities would now be buried in manure. Neither crisis came to pass, however, because of technological innovation. Steel-built ships and the internal combustion engine saved the day, in much the same way that future technological advances will overcome our dependence on dwindling quantities of oil.
You may say that this is a process that our governments are merely helping to accelerate with their well-meaning green taxes and subsidies, designed to give the market a steer towards ‘renewable energy’. But that would ignore the real-world evidence that government meddling serves only to clog, corrupt and distort a natural process that would be far better – and more cheaply – effected within the private sector. If ‘renewable energy’ really was any good, it wouldn’t need bankrolling through government subsidy. Investors would be flocking to use it anyway.
Convinced yet? Look, I’m not pretending that I have all the answers. But what I hope at the very least I’ve helped you begin to understand is that the ‘climate-change’ debate is in fact about something much, much bigger and more important than man-made global warming. What it’s really about is perhaps the biggest and most important questions we can ask and ever will ask:
Who are we?
Why are we here?
I’m not sure exactly what the green response would be to these questions. But to the first, it would be something like: ‘A species, just like any other.’ And to the second: ‘Only Gaia knows, but I wish we weren’t. The planet would be far better off without us.’
If you still doubt that this bitter, self-hating misanthropy lies at the very heart of the green movement, please re-read Chapter Nine. It is a battle between two world views – one where humans are an asset, the other where humans are a liability. It’s not as though I’ve had to work very hard to pin this vile philosophy on the many leading watermelons I’ve quoted: they’re quite capable of condemning themselves in every speech they make and every book they write.
This is why I myself am not a ‘green’. And why I hope I’ve managed to persuade you that you’re not one either.
It’s not because I’m selfish. It’s not because I’m greedy. It’s not because I don’t love plants and animals and beautiful countryside and fresh water and clean air. It’s not because I’m too lazy to change my ways. It’s not because I’ve been lavishly funded by Big Oil or Big Carbon or (one more time) Big Koch.
It’s because I believe we’re better than that.
I believe that we humans are here for a purpose and that this purpose is to flourish.
Sure, we’ve made mistakes and continue to make mistakes. But just think of the wonders we’ve achieved on the way:
We’ve painted the Sistine Chapel and sculpted ‘The Thinker’ and choreographed Swan Lake and designed the Taj Mahal. We’ve written the US Constitution and the complete works of Shakespeare and the Goldberg Variations and the ‘Battle of Evermore’ and The Chronic 2001. We’ve climbed Mount Everest with and without oxygen. (And the north face of the Eiger, and K2.) We’ve invented football and baseball and cricket and ice hockey and bridge and tiddlywinks and curling and liar dice and Monopoly and Settlers of Catan. We’ve discovered fire and the wheel and longitude and the neutron and the neutrino and double-entry book-keeping and how to fly. We’ve invented the internet, the microscope, the clock, the pepper grinder and the concept of zero. We can do yoga and t’ai chi and Swedish massage and pilates and calisthenics and judo and ballet and acupuncture.
We’ve shaped our planet to suit our special needs and whims, from the Panama and Suez Canals to the faces carved on Mount Rushmore to the drained swamps of New Orleans to the reclaimed polder land of the Netherlands. Our population has swollen from a few million to seven billion and – despite the gloom-and-doom predictions made by each generation – we’ve achieved this without mass starvation and while living in ever-increasing comfort. And still we’ve managed to preserve vast swathes of wilderness and unspoiled countryside, teeming with animal and plant life.
And this list I’ve just described barely scratches the surface of our species’ myriad achievements. Truly we are amazing, and blessed. The longer we stay on the planet, it seems, the more amazing we grow. With each new generation, our technological advances are accelerating, while simultaneously that proportion of our planet’s inhabitants living in absolute poverty grows smaller and smaller.
How can we reconcile all this with the widespread view – as taught to our children in schools and repeated to us every day by progressive churchmen and bleeding heart enviro-campaigners and MSM editorials – that we humans are a blot on the landscape, a crime against nature, something the world would be much better without?
We cannot. It’s impossible. Either you believe, as I do, that we humans are essentially a beneficent presence on Earth: within certain legal and social constraints – such as property rights and the rule of law – we are all best left to our own devices, free from government interference, and we can generally be trusted to do the right thing and enjoy all those benefits that, history tells us, accrue from free markets and free trade and personal liberty.
Or you take the pessimistic view that we’re a menace to be contained and constrained with ever-greater regulation and control from experts over whom we have no democratic control – and over whom we have no need of democratic control because, after all, they’re the experts and they have our best interests at heart. Rest assured, this kind of collectivism – in all of its ugly forms – will always end in tears.
There is no middle way. Even if you think there is a middle way, the people who would wish to steal your freedoms and your democratic rights in the name of ‘environmentalism’ have seen to it that there is not.
It really is that simple: optimism or pessimism; freedom or tyranny; joy or misery. You choose.
POSTSCRIPT: THE BIG LIE
Every snowflake is unique, but attacks on climate science all seem the same. I should know. I’ve been one of the climate contrarians’ preferred targets for years.
A recent op-ed on this page by blogger and climate-change denier James Delingpole attacked the ‘hockey-stick’ graph my co-authors and I published more than a decade ago with well-worn, discredited arguments.
Michael Mann, letter to the Wall Street Journal, 5 December 2011
Sometimes, I wonder why I bother. Here we are over two years after Climategate, and despite all the shocking revelations about the corruption, bullying, lies, incompetence, g
reed, waste and wanton destructiveness of the global AGW industry – the biggest and most expensive scientific scandal in history – the bastards are still getting away with it.
How, in God’s name. How?
Actually, I think we know how by now. What we’re seeing with the Climate Wars, writ large, is the phenomenon Hitler described in Mein Kampf when he talked about the ‘Big Lie’. The theory is very simple: confine yourself to small lies and you’re liable to be found out; but tell a real whopper and you’re made. Why? Because if the lie is big enough it defies disbelief. ‘No one could possibly have the gall to tell a lie that huge!’ the Big Lie’s audience reasons to itself. And so it is that the Big Lie assumes the mantle of accepted wisdom.
Such, to a large extent, has been the case with global warming. Sure, in all the opinion polls public scepticism continues to rise. But given the weather, given the economy, given the growing resentment towards wind farms, biofuels and carbon taxes, that shouldn’t be surprising. No, what is surprising – and also very depressing – is just how many people there are out there who, despite everything, still cling onto Man-Made Global Warming as an article of dearly held faith.
Let me give you some recent examples:
1. A phone conversation with the deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday. He’s an old friend of mine and used to run my articles a lot, but when he rang the other day for some help with a book he was writing, I ventured to enquire why he didn’t use my stuff any more. ‘Well, if you will insist on writing all that nonsense about Climate Change, dear boy, what do you expect?’ he replied. (The Independent on Sunday, to be fair, is a fanatically Warmist newspaper) I asked: ‘How do you know it’s nonsense?’ And he replied: ‘Well, I just take the view that if all the world’s scientists say one thing, and you and Nigel Lawson say another, I’m probably going to take the side of all the world’s scientists.’
2. A Tweet from a Leeds University student who describes herself as a ‘Tory, Champagne & baking enthusiast’, i.e. not a militant socialist. ‘@jbloggs220 just told me he doesn’t believe in global warming. Please tell me he’s the only one.’ Then, when someone pointed out that no, JBloggs wasn’t the only one, she Tweeted: ‘But it’s insane. It’s scientific FACT.’
3. A radio interview I did with America’s Radio News Network in late November 2011, to discuss Climategate 2.0 – a new, even larger batch of incriminating e-mails from our old friends Mann, Jones et al., released on the internet on the anniversary of Climategate. Before I had a chance to explain why they mattered, the show’s co-host was already telling me why they didn’t. Not only had the Climategate scientists been exonerated by several enquiries, she asserted, but the e-mails had been ‘stolen’, and those that had been released by deniers onto the internet had been ‘redacted’ in order to make them look more damning than they in fact were. I felt as bemused as a round-the-world sailor being told: ‘You can’t possibly have done what you say. Either the dragons would have eaten you or you would have fallen off the edge of the world.’ But clearly this woman believed what she was saying – as I’m sure did many of her listeners.
So where are we sceptics going wrong?
One answer, I fear, may be that we’re just too damned scrupulous. What former leftist activist David Horowitz says about conservatives applies just as well to climate sceptics: they’re ‘too decent, too civilised’ to wage successful war against an opposition which plays so dirty. Often, I’ll hear sceptics chastely assert that as long as they stick to the facts and hold themselves to higher standards than the Warmists the truth will eventually out and the public will be won round. I applaud their integrity; I envy their optimism; but while they’re busy congratulating themselves on how fundamentally decent they are, their much less principled enemy is running rings around them.
Consider, for example, how cunningly in October 2011 the Warmists spun the results of their Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project. These apparently demonstrated that the planet had warmed by as much as 1°C since 1950, that concerns about the distorting influence of the Urban Heat Island effect had been overplayed and that the case for scepticism about ‘global warming’ was now over.
Or at least that was how it was reported in the media. The campaign began with an opinion page article in the (normally sceptical, conservative-leaning) Wall Street Journal by the head of the BEST project, Professor Richard Muller. ‘Are you a global warming sceptic? There are plenty of good reasons why you might be,’ Muller began. By the end, however, Muller had concluded: ‘Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool that portion of the climate debate.’
Naturally, the story was seized on by all the usual suspects – the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist, the Washington Post, the New York Times, even Forbes magazine – as evidence of a major, possibly fatal, blow to the cause of AGW scepticism. This, unfortunately, is the version of events that will have stuck in most readers’ minds.
Only those prepared to dig a little deeper beneath the surface – sceptical bloggers and their sceptical readers, mainly – would have appreciated the truth of the matter: the BEST story, planted so slyly by Professor Muller in the midst of the enemy camp, was nothing but a Trojan Horse.
Not only did Professor Muller give himself a misleading air of neutrality by presenting himself as a ‘sceptic’ (he wasn’t) but he utterly misrepresented the sceptical position. Few, if any, sceptics deny the existence of late twentieth century global warming; what they do very much dispute is the idea that this has been caused primarily, or even significantly, by anthropogenic influences. Muller’s claim that ‘global warming is real’ was therefore a straw man. Of course global warming is real, if you choose the right time scale.
Then, in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Muller compounded his dishonesty by claiming: ‘In our data, which is only on the land, we see no evidence of [global warming] having slowed down.’
As the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s David Whitehouse pointed out, this simply wasn’t true. Plotting a chart using BEST’s own figures, Whitehouse showed that the ten-year trend from 2001 to 2010 shows no warming whatsoever. What Whitehouse also noticed was that BEST, on its own chart, had worked hard to obscure this issue by using a ‘short x-axis and a stretched y-axis’ to accentuate the apparent temperature increase. Shades of Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick, perhaps.
Whitehouse was not the only one unimpressed. Muller’s colleague Judith Curry – who, besides being a BEST co-author, chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, and is not known as a sceptic – said:
There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped. To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.
But do you see what happened there? Suppose you’re an ordinary punter, with a completely open mind about AGW: which version of the BEST story are you more likely to heed? The version that appeared in all the big newspapers and on the BBC, telling you that ultra-spiffy new scientific data has proved that GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL? Or the version that appeared in a few specialist blogs, explaining, ‘No, wait. It’s a bit more complicated than that…’?
The alarmist establishment is, of course, fully aware of this imbalance of power. The quote you see at the top of this chapter comes from a letter to the Wall Street Journal in which Michael Mann reiterates that his Hockey Stick theory is still valid, that the Climategate scientists have been exonerated by numerous enquiries, and that ‘deniers’ are funded by Big Oil. He can get away with this because a) on the whole, readers are predisposed to believe that when public figures make statements in national newspapers they are telling the truth, and b) what Michael Mann is saying here is really little different from the way the AGW debate is reported in the rest of the mainstream media, so it seems to most people to make perfect sense.
Perhaps the worst offender in all this is the BBC, the extent of whose bias – thou
gh long suspect – only came fully to light in Christopher Booker’s devastating December 2011 report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Booker’s report describes how the BBC was nobbled by a handful of activists in league with environmentalist campaign groups and Warmist academics, so that Britain’s state broadcaster became little more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the AGW industry.
Sure some of us knew this already. The problem is just how many people don’t know it: how many assume that because of its Reithian traditions and its Charter obligation to ‘ensure that controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality in all relevant output’ the BBC can still be relied on as an arbiter of authority and truth? (Similar misconceptions apply throughout the mainstream media, from the New York Times to Australia’s state broadcasting propagandist ABC.)
According to Booker’s report, the rot really set in on 26 January 2006 at a day-long ‘high-level’ seminar at BBC Television Centre entitled ‘Climate Change – The Challenge to Broadcasting’.
The chief guest speaker was Lord May of Oxford, former chief scientific advisor to the UK government, whose balanced and reasoned position on AGW is evident in a speech he gave while President of the Royal Society. In it he claimed that ‘there exists a climate change “denial lobby”, funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by sections of the hydrocarbon industry’ with ‘similarities in attitude and tactics, to the tobacco lobby that continues to deny that smoking causes lung cancer, or the curious lobby denying that HIV causes AIDS’.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 26
