I haven’t had the chance to have much of a look at what some climate activists are calling the ‘sceptics climategate’.

Except it isn’t. The sums of money involved here are minute, compared to the budgets of companies, NGOs, governments and bodies like the EU and UN to spend on environmental propaganda.

And this epitomises yet again the environmentalist’s failure to develop a sense of proportion. Not only are the Heartland’s funds dwarfed, there is no substantial relationship between it, the state, and other policy-making processes, as there are between NGOs, national governments, scientific research organisations and the UN, and of course, huge firms.

It is amazing to see how the environmental movement responds to challenges to its claims, authority, and privileged access to policy-makers. The UK’s GWPF has a budget a fraction of the size even of the Heartland Institute, yet activists seem to believe that Nigel Lawson and Benny Peiser have between them prevented the possibility of the much sought-after international agreement on carbon emissions.

The documents allegedly reveal that some funding came from oil interests. If so, again the question is ‘why so little’? If oil companies really were concerned about protecting themselves from regulation (in fact corporates benefit from tight regulation), why wouldn’t they spend $tens or $hundreds of billions on campaigns? Why wouldn’t they spend $billions — they have the resources, after all. But, of course, this ‘oil companies fund denial’ nonsense is a zombie argument; it’s been put back to death so many times, it’s barely worth repeating: oil companies also fund research and organisations that are impeccably green. As do people with substantial interests in oil — my favourite being Jeremy Grantham, who employs climate big mouth, Bob Ward at the Grantham institute. Grantham funded the Grantham Institute to the tune of £12 million — way more than the budget available to the Heartland — presumably, some of which came from dividends from the $1.5 billion dollars he has invested in oil company stock.

None of this bothers Bob Ward though, who is shamelessly tweeting about the leaked documents, as though there were no flies on him.

Ditto, green activists all over the web and twitter, as if they really had uncovered a conspiracy: a hidden network of relationships between huge firms, governments, secretive and undemocratic international agencies, and other vested interests.

But that description still much better suits the environmental movement.

These alarmists — aren’t they! — have got hold of a number of strategy documents that might just as easily have been produced by the environmental movement, to discuss budgets, ways to intervene in the climate debate, how to do PR, and organise research. There’s nothing dodgy about that — it’s the way contemporary politics works. Strategy documents and business plans are not very exciting.

In contrast, Climategate — which I’ve never actually had much time for — surprised people, because the environmental movement had made claims about researchers’ unimpeachable moral conduct, and pure, unadulterated scientific research.

The message from all this must be that the environmentalists who bang on about funding must be very, very desperate indeed to find ways of avoiding debate about climate change.

I have an article over at Spiked about the way climate change alarmism seems to hide in the most remote locations.

A study published in Nature last week has found that the effects of climate change on Himalayan glaciers have been overstated. But rather than facing up to their alarmism, those who have been guilty of exaggeration remain as unreflective as ever. Perhaps they are intent on continuing to make political and moral capital out of the possibility of climate catastrophe.

Read on…

You have to admire the shameless abuse of words… Even when alarmists are being honest, they’re being dishonest.

Damien Carrington — who is head of environment at the Guardian, which tells you almost everything you need to know about what’s going on inside his head (if at all) — writes about the discovery that Himalayan glaciers may not have been as vulnerable as previously thought…

The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows
Meltwater from Asia’s peaks is much less than previously estimated, but lead scientist says the loss of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern

It’s a don’t-rush-back-into-the-water moment, isn’t it. {Cue ‘Jaws’ theme}.

Carrington quotes one of the researchers behind the study,

People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before. […] The new data does not mean that concerns about climate change are overblown in any way. It means there is a much larger uncertainty in high mountain Asia than we thought. Taken globally all the observations of the Earth’s ice – permafrost, Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers – are going in the same direction.

Hold on a minute. Environmentalists have been banging on about Himalayan Glaciers melting for bloody years. Even when it turned out that the IPCC had take a completely wrong figure from ‘grey literature’, the claim that Himalayan glaciers are vulnerable to melting persisted. For instance, only this week, Donald R. Prothero, who claims to have been ‘Professor of Geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and Lecturer in Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena’, writes in an article called ‘How We Know Global Warming is Real and Human Caused‘, that,

Glaciers are all retreating at the highest rates ever documented. Many of those glaciers, especially in the Himalayas, Andes, Alps, and Sierras, provide most of the freshwater that the populations below the mountains depend upon—yet this fresh water supply is vanishing. Just think about the percentage of world’s population in southern Asia (especially India) that depend on Himalayan snowmelt for their fresh water. The implications are staggering.

Not only was doubt cast over the pace of Himalayan Glacial retreat by the IPCC/2035 claim, it was widely reported at the same time that the dependence on the glaciers by Asia’s population was massively over-stated too. What sceptics have tried to explain is that, when you overstate things like the speed of change and the human consequences of that change, other people naturally start to question the argument. It’s no good restating the same mythology that existed before, in defence of the idea that we ‘know’ that ‘climate change is happening’ and that ‘we caused it’.

And the same is true of the most recent discovery. Of course it means “that concerns about climate change are overblown”. What else could it possibly mean, when one of the concerns turns out — yet again, as it happens — to have been overblown? How many times were the Himalayan glaciers pointed at? How many times did sceptics reply that there wasn’t sufficient data? how many times did alarmists claim in response that the sceptics had ‘denied the science’, and even that they were being paid for by Big Oil? I have quite definitely lost count. Donald R. Prothero, like many before him, tried to make the claim that a billion people depend on the glaciers. In just one discovery, we’ve established that Climate Change is a problem which has been reduced by that same magnitude. It’s a billion people less of a problem.

Elsewhere on the Guardian blogs, Leo Hickman asks,

Are the world’s glaciers threatened by climate change?
A Nature study has shocked researchers by finding that the Himalayas have lost no ice over the past decade. Leo Hickman, with your help, investigates. Get in touch below the line, email your views to leo.hickman@guardian.co.uk or tweet @leohickman

It’s an interesting inversion of traditional journalism.

In the past, journalists went out to discover things. They then formulated an argument about what they had researched and wrote about it. (Assuming that they didn’t just make it up in the pub). And then it would be read by readers, who, presumably, then made up their mind about the article given their confidence in the journalist, and the quality of the article. Now, however, it seems it is the readers who are being asked to do the research, and then the journalist makes up his mind…

If quoting figures to support your points, please provide a link to the source. I am particularly seeking links to data and papers which show the wider, global picture regarding the impact of climate change on glaciers, and, crucially, the impact on humans and habitats if they do melt. I will also be inviting various interested parties to join the debate, too. And later on today, I will return with my own verdict.

I will return with my own verdict, he promises, from ‘pon high. All of which begs the question, what is the point of Leo Hickman? We can all go and do our own research, and read it alongside others’, and form our own analyses; Hickman adds no value to the process of journalism — journalism 2.0… perhaps?

Adam Curtis produced an interesting feature on a similar phenomenon — the decline of TV journalism — a while ago for an otherwise terrible TV programme… (Watch it, it’s brilliant).

I wonder if there’s something similar going on here. The real authority is in the blogosphere, the energy of which the Guardian has attempted to capture with this ‘live blogging’ thang. It’s no longer really enough to rehash the words of scientists with whichever alarmist slant the eco-hacks want to treat them with — it doesn’t really give purchase any longer. Sales are flagging. Even Guardian print readers are switching off to the alarmsim. The online edition seems to be the only way the organisation can sustain its presence. Climate change alarmism turns out to have very little to do with climate change.

Sometimes it’s hard to know if things you encounter in the climate debate are real, or clever works of fiction or satire.

For example, the website Trees Have Rights Too – ecological justice for all sounds to me very much like a joke, parodying the excesses of some eco-warrior. But it is in fact the website of Polly Higgins, the barrister-turned-Gaia’s-advocate, who really does think that non-human things have ‘rights’. The deranged lawyer wants to make a crime of ‘ecocide‘ comparable to genocide, because killing a nest of ants is a bit like the systematic murder of a race of people. Higgins view of people, then, is that they are no better than ants — so why not let them suffer?

Another crazy idea that has resurfaced recently is Jean-François Mouhot’s idea that

Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels

Pointing out the similarities (and differences) between slavery and the use of fossil fuels can help us engage with climate change in a new way

In an article in the Guardian last week, Mouhot said,

Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: both perform roughly the same functions in society (doing the hard and dirty work that no one wants to do), both were considered for a long time to be acceptable by the majority and both came to be increasingly challenged as the harm they caused became more visible.

Back in 2008, I thought it was a joke when I came across the author making the same argument in an article in an edition of History Today. I blogged about it back then, but perhaps too verbosely. More briefly: the use of oil and slaves can only be moral equivalents of course, if we think oil is capable of subjective experience — will, in other words. There’s nothing about using a substance or an object which is ‘like’ using a person against their own will. Yet it takes an academic historian to wonder whether or not there is.

Trying people for ‘ecocide’ and making moral equivalents of slavery and burning oil speak about two, very much related phenomena: total moral disorientation, and the completely diminished view of humanity.

Which brings me to my most recent discovery, and which I still cannot quite believe, and which I am urging caution on, before any comments are made.

This email found its way to me…

Dear Author:

This is the official solicitation for open peer commentaries for the Summer issue of Ethics, Policy, and Environment (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cepe).

For this next issue, 15.2, we have selected a Target Article by Matthew Liao (NYU), Anders Sandberg (Oxford), and Rebecca Roache (Oxford) titled “Human Engineering and Climate Change.” The abstract follows:

Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change is arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today. There is ample evidence that climate change is likely to affect adversely many aspects of life for all people around the world, and that existing solutions such as geoengineering might be too risky and behavioural and market solutions might not be sufficient to mitigate climate change. In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed.  Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change.

 We are now soliciting approximately 4-6 open commentaries in response to this article.  Potential commentators will be invited to write short 750-1500 word responses which will be published simultaneously with the lead target article.

[…]

Sincerely,

Benjamin Hale and Andrew Light

Co-editors

I have no idea how humans could be modified, so that they can become walking, talking solutions to climate change. And I have no idea how the authors make an argument that ‘ethical concerns’ about modifying people to become climate change solutions can be overcome. I am still not sure that it isn’t a joke.

However, the journal exists.  Ethics, Policy & Environment will cost you £109 for just three issues a year.

While Ethics, Policy & Environment centers on environmental ethics and policy, its substantive coverage is wider. Authors have been concerned with a range of subjects, such as applied environmental ethics, animal welfare, environmental justice, development ethics, sustainability, and cultural values relevant to environmental concerns. The journal also welcomes analyses of practical applications of environmental, energy technology, regional, and urban policies, as well as theoretically robust discussions of common arguments that appear throughout debates on environment and energy policy, either in the scholarly literature or in the broader civic sphere.

The articles authors, Matthew Liao (NYU), Anders Sandberg (Oxford), and Rebecca Roache, all seem to be real researchers at respectable institutions — Oxford and New York Universities.

More surprisingly, the journal doesn’t appear to be some half-baked vanity project either. Roger Pielke Jr. and Max Boykoff are listed as Associate Editors, and the Utilitarian moral philosopher, Peter Singer is on the journal’s editorial board.

Academia is of course an area where ideas should be free. (And again, we should wait until we’ve read the paper before leaping to too many conclusions.) But it is increasingly the case that academia isn’t where ideas are free: it is increasingly the place where unorthodox ideas and opinions are shut down, and where independence, which gave the freedom to speak truth to power has been sold off, to instead speak official truth for power. The demand for ‘evidence-based policy-making’ has forced the colonisation of the academy.

Whimsies such as pondering ‘I wonder if it is right to subject people to biological modifications to suit my political ambitions’ once had little or no application outside the stuffy old ethics corridor in the philosophy faculty. Questions about ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ did not concern many outside the quad. But increasingly, the university department has had to prove its value in the real world.

All three researchers, you see, work at the Oxford Martin School (OMS) at the University of Oxford. The slogan on the website of the OMS boasts that they are ‘TACKLING 21ST CENTURY CHALLENGES”. Says their about page:

The Oxford Martin School was founded as the James Martin 21st Century School at the University of Oxford in 2005 through the vision and generosity of Dr James Martin. It is a unique interdisciplinary research initiative tackling global future challenges.

Our mission: to foster innovative thinking, interdisciplinary scholarship and collaborative activity to address the most pressing risks and realise important new opportunities of the 21st century.

There are two main focuses for our work:

Research – supporting forward-looking and interdisciplinary research to address 21st century challenges and opportunities.

Impact – fostering impact-oriented initiatives and facilitating public engagement that will influence policy and effect positive change on a global scale.

Moreover, within the OMS is yet another little school, to which at least one of the authors belong:

The Future of Humanity Institute is a multidisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford.  It enables a select set of leading intellects to bring careful thinking to bear on big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects.  The Institute belongs to the Faculty of Philosophy and the Oxford Martin School.

So it would seem that the journal article really does intend to offer to the world an ethical argument for the modification of humans, to deal with climate change.

But we will have to see what that is. Perhaps it will make us less sensitive or vulnerable to temperature. Perhaps it will a modification that allows us to run really really fast, so that we no longer need to use cars. Or perhaps it’s a device that makes us more obedient. I look forward to finding out.

Meanwhile, there is more to be said about the institutions that have been set up in Oxford.

The Future of Humanity Institute is the leading research centre looking at big-picture questions for human civilization. The last few centuries have seen tremendous change, and this century might transform the human condition in even more fundamental ways.  Using the tools of mathematics, philosophy, and science, we explore the risks and opportunities that will arise from technological change, weigh ethical dilemmas, and evaluate global priorities.  Our goal is to clarify the choices that will shape humanity’s long-term future.

One of the things I’ve tried to stress on this blog is the difference between positively and negatively defined ideas about humanity and its future. The institutions at Oxford, it seems, have founded themselves on the idea that the ‘big-picture questions for human civilisation’ come from without. Climate change and other risks seem to ‘define’ this generation — it doesn’t get to define itself.

Let’s call the bluff on this idea that the institute is exploring ‘big questions’. The preoccupation with risks is not about finding and answering ‘big questions for human civilisation’. Institutions such as this are simply performances, which act out the narratives that reflect the political establishment’s anxieties. Looking again at the homepage of the Future of Humanity Institute, it is clear that it is preoccupied with ‘global catastrophic risk’, following the link, reveals the claim that,

Global catastrophic risks are risks that seriously threaten human well-being on a global scale. An immensely diverse collection of events could constitute global catastrophes: potential factors range from volcanic eruptions to pandemic infections, nuclear accidents to worldwide tyrannies, out-of-control scientific experiments to climatic changes, and cosmic hazards to economic collapse.

The Future of Humanity Institute is simply cashing in on contemporary scare stories, and the fashion for political ideas to be grounded, not on ideas about progress, liberty, or development, but on catastrophe, disaster, and the impossibility of any form of progress. The purpose of such exercises is to arm increasingly disoriented and disconnected public bodies with legitimacy and purpose. Insofar as the Oxford Martin School, and the Future of Humanity Institute are the coming together of the academy and policy-making worlds, then, they also represent the point at which the establishment sticks its head up its arse.

From the pages of the Guardian…

Use Rio+20 to overhaul idea of growth, urges EU climate chief
Connie Hedegaard says GDP model of growth causes overconsumption, drives up commodity prices and ignores the environment

Connie Hedegaard is the European Commissioner for Climate Action. It would be easy to think with such a role, and expressing such sentiments that she was something of a lefty, but she in fact belongs to the Danish Conservative Peoples Party.

The Graun continues:

The world must use a landmark environmental summit this year to change forever the current damaging model of economic growth, Europe’s climate chief has warned, or face future crises as severe as the one currently enveloping the eurozone.

Overconsumption of critical resources, and the rising prices of key commodities such as food, energy and natural materials as a result, risk derailing the world economy – but these problems will not be tackled unless today’s economic models are overhauled, according to Connie Hedegaard, EU commissioner for climate action. That is because judging economic growth purely on the basis of production and consumption, as happens now, encourages rampant overconsumption and fails to value the natural environment.

Fiona Harvey — who wrote the article — has little in the way of a faculty of reflection. I’ve met her, and she’s nothing if not zealous. This article is an argument for the complete change to the global economy, on the say so of some figures who are even more self-regarding than the author. Fine, Fiona, Connie (and Joseph Stiglitz gets a mention too), you want to change the world and save the planet. These are noble aims. But the idea that it should be changed at conferences in Rio, rather than by the actual inhabitants of the planet is surely a problem. Why doesn’t Harvey write instead ‘big-headed climate twonk wants to change the world through an entirely undemocratic institution’? Environmentalists, although bang on about ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’ are the first to put aside such concepts when, as ends, threaten to deprive them of means.

Shock, horror, slightly thick Guardian eco-hack doesn’t think idea through. We’re talking about Hedegaard here… The journalism is merely disappointing, the politics is disgusting. Says Hedegaard:

“The 21st century must have a more intelligent growth model, or else it’s really difficult to see how we feed 7 billion people now and 9 billion people [by 2050],” she said. “Resources were cheap before, but it seems we are in for a period where resources become more and more expensive. Oil is coming up in price, so many other commodities are coming up in price. Food prices are rising. We need to deal with this.”

The Commissioner’s solutions are, of course, ways of producing energy that are more than twice as expensive as the resources they are intended to replace. But resources could be cheap once again, were commissioners to argue for R&D in sectors that could produce energy for less, in increasing abundance: new nuclear techniques, for instance, or new ways of exploiting gas, oil, and coal. The more expedient story for undemocratic and unaccountable commissioners, however, is that ‘stuff is running out’. It’s not.

“This is an opportunity to rethink [how we measure growth],” Hedegaard told the Guardian. “The knowledge is out there, the analysis has been done. We can take this decision in Rio.”

Current models of growth prize only consumption and production, rating countries’ performance according to their GDP.

However, there is a growing belief among some economists that this long-standing model has outlived its usefulness, and provides no protection for the natural world. The Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz has been one of the leading voices calling for a change, and world leaders including David Cameron, the UK prime minister, have heeded the call, promising moves towards a broader definition of economic value.

“This has a lot of relevance to the euro crisis,” said Hedegaard. “We’re trying to make it clear that the climate change crisis is an economic crisis, a social and a job crisis – it should be seen as a whole. If we do not tackle these, we will be in crisis mode for many, many years.”

This is what Rio is really about. Politicians have given up on the idea of growth. I haven’t. You probably haven’t. But politicians, left and right alike, have. They don’t know how to deliver it, though they certainly still know how to keep it amongst their own. Growth, in the West, is in reality, off the agenda. And once there is a political consensus that this is the case, and that the job of politics is not about economics, but to save the world and make people happy (apart from money), you don’t need to ask the public for a mandate. You just need to have huge meetings every N years, to make real the sense that the world is about to end and that Something Must Be Done, and that therefore whatever happens in the political sphere is legitimate. The mandate comes from above — supranational, planet-saving political institutions — not from below, us. The rest is sheer Disney – a product of cold, faux sentimentality delivered by people only too happy to tread on your face. “We care“, they want to tell you.

Hedegaard reveals the truth. It was supposed to be about saving the planet, protecting the environment. But it soon turned out that it was much more about changing the human world, and of legitimising political institutions that struggle to identify their purpose. Things are running out, she claims, yet all indications are that there are more fossil fuels at our disposal than ever before. Where prices have risen, it is because of political uncertainties, created as often as not by politicians like Hedegaard, creating scarcity where there might easily be abundance. Sanctions, wars, environmental regulation: these are the things that have pushed up energy prices, not its depletion.

So Chris Huhne has resigned, pending something or other about perverting the course of justice. Sceptics and other critics of UK/EU energy policy  are understandably happy.

Good riddance, perhaps. It also gives the opportunity for some pause on the UK’s energy policy. But I think some of the celebration is misplaced. Wouldn’t it have been better to have won a victory over the ideas Huhne represented? Instead, it looks more like Huhne simply got himself in a mess, all by himself. Would we have a much different situation if Huhne had not taken the job of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change? Or perhaps a more interesting question: had the Party of David ‘vote-blue-go-green’ Cameron won a decisive victory at the last election, would we be in a different situation?

Counterfactuals aside, Huhne’s arrogance came to stand for the way environmentalism has been foisted on us without much in the way of democratic debate. He was as contemptuous of critics and the idea that he should answer them as any zealous environmental activist is. Where there were any questions about the policies he was executing, or the ground on which they were formulated, he would not engage with the debate but would assert the same claims, slowly, repeatedly, monotonously, in that tone, with his eyebrows hooked up beyond his grey fringe… ‘This is my sincere face’, he seemed to be saying, ‘trust me’.

Huhne’s spin was astonishing. It’s been covered before on this blog. But briefly, Huhne is claiming that energy bills will go down, because we will be using less energy — a bit like saying a packet of biscuits is less expensive, even though the price has gone up, because you should only eat half of them.  How come it wasn’t that sort of doublethink and complete indifference to people that saw him chased out of politics? It seems that, in today’s stange world, you can spin numbers out of thin air in support of expensive and damaging energy policies, but get someone to take your speeding ticket, and you end up in prison.

I really don’t care about the speeding ticket. And really, I don’t care that he and his department would spin such yarns. What is disappointing is that nobody else in the coalition government or the opposition could or would challenge him. It was a left to bloggers and the think tanks like the GWPF and TPA to challenge Huhne, amid howls of protest from the likes of Bob Ward, the Carbon Brief, and other shrill, greenish foot soldiers. Amazingly, they would complain that the figures used to criticise energy and climate policies didn’t stack up; never mind Huhne’s spin.

That’s because they were fully involved in manufacturing it too, of course. His own party and the major partner in the coalition wanted to sustain the fragile relationship, if they weren’t already committed to being the ‘greenest government ever’, as they had promised. The opposition was completely sympathetic to this aim, though the public didn’t really ever get a chance to say how green it wanted its government to be. NGOs and most think tanks already too involved in the green agenda, and too dependent on state funding to be worried by the Secretary of State’s gaffes.

Huhne, like his predecessor, Ed Miliband rose quickly from relative obscurity, to make leadership bids for their party. Huhne put himself forward after just a year in Westminster, having spent  6 years previously as an MEP. Miliband did not win a seat in Parliament until 2005. Just five years later, he was leader of the Labour Party. What these two characters have in common, apart from having been at the top of the Dept. for Energy and Climate Change, is their sheer lack of charm, their arrogance, and their naked ambition, in spite of it all. This much is obvious, not simply for the fact of their own mealy-mouthed words about climate change policy — they are clearly less committed to environmentalism than their own careers — but also from what we know went on in the background. Here, for instance, is the halfwit eco-baroness,  Bryony Worthington, revealing that the Climate Change Act 2008 was a rush job, designed to maximise Miliband’s profile.

As is clear, figures at the NGOs were happy to work with cynical, and self-serving politicians. And politicians, devoid of their own ideas, were happy to give NGOs influence in return for direction. ‘Showing leadership’ mattered more than considering the consequences of ill-conceived notions of leadership were. Doubts from realists within government were brushed aside, or worse still, sneaked past with trickery. And a bill, dictating four decades of energy, industrial and economic policy was drafted in just 3 months, and after scant scrutiny by Parliament, became an act. Drafted by just one department, it would make the ‘whole government responsible for delivering emissions reductions’, and the cost taken by the public. Miliband got a department with an extended reach, a direction legitimised by civil society (and, in theory, with public approval), and an opportunity to strut his stuff on the world stage. Worthington got a seat in the House of Lords.

But this is about Huhne, who inherited the role from Miliband. Where his predecessor had created a ‘Green New Deal’, itself lifted from the New Economics Foundation, Huhne put his own mark on the idea, by drafting a ‘Green Deal’. It was in fact a more modest proposal: the number of jobs that these policies would create was slashed from nearly half a million, to just a quarter.

This shameless reinvention of what the previous government had proposed was however, still sold as ‘nothing less than an industrial revolution’. Shameless plagiarism, shameless overstatement of the value these policies would produce, and shameless failure of the good — i.e. jobs — to materialise does not bother men like Huhne (and, I suspect they don’t bother the likes of Miliband much, either). Outside the blessed green industrial sector — growing, if at all, only because of the continued subsidies promised to it — people continued to lose their jobs. Energy costs continued to soar. It wasn’t his fault; it was the ‘Big Six’ energy companies, or the stupid, lazy energy consumer for not finding he best deal. The morally bankrupt political hack could not take responsibility for his policies.

The establishment’s vacuity and credulity towards environmentalism, and its cynical regard for the public and democracy allows ambitious but hollow individuals to embarrass it, while stamping their mark on public policy. The ascendency of these mediocre personalities through the party ranks must speak about the dearth of ideas, talent, and vision. And this is echoed in the broader inability to challenge environmentalism. This is what creates men like Huhne (and Miliband). Little will change by his departure. Huhne’s replacement may be more sober, and perhaps less self-serving, but will that be sufficient to stop the absurdities of UK and EU energy and climate policies, the dodgy relationships between governments and NGOS, and the excesses of UNFCC process? It seems unlikely.

A letter at the Guardian says,

Science is by its nature sceptical: scientists interrogate information and only on repeated investigation does data become science. The science of climate change has been established through numerous high-profile studies (IPCC, NOAA, Nasa) and was even verified by the sceptic-led Best report. In 2009 one of the world’s leading medical journals, the Lancet, declared climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”. Denying the links between greenhouse gas emissions and man-made climate change is akin to denying the links between HIV/Aids and unprotected sex, smoking and lung cancer, or alcohol consumption and liver disease. In each of these cases, well-funded deniers have had to be exposed and confronted before appropriate health-promoting legislation was put in place.

Okay. Let us agree, you shouldn’t ‘deny the links’ between causes and their known effects. But what if people claim that if you have unprotected sex you will get HIV? What if people claim that, as soon as you have just one puff on a cigarette you will get lung cancer? And what if people started claiming that, the moment you took a sip of beer, wine or cider, your liver simply melted? What then?

And what if someone said that this was so much nonsense? What if he or she suggested that you actually have to drink or smoke quite a lot to suffer illness, and that although one could theoretically have unprotected sex just once and contract HIV, it’s very very very unlikely? Would he or she be ‘denying the links’ between such effects and their causes? Shouldn’t we start to ask questions about the nature of the ‘links’ between causes and effects? And shouldn’t we ask questions about the extent to which they are stated?

‘Links’ between causes and effects have magnitude. It is incumbent on those wishing to bring those ‘links’ to bear over public policy to enumerate them. But often, risk becomes politicised. Any non-zero amount of risk becomes, in the official jargon ‘unacceptable’. ‘One death is too many’, and so on. Crusaders elevate themselves on the basis that ‘if I can save just one life, then my work is done’. This is how proportion is lost, and how the ‘links’ between causes and their effects get amplified from weak, to huge. Theoretical risk becomes immanent danger.

And just as it ought to be incumbent on those wishing to capitalise on risks for professional and political gain to enumerate risk, it should be incumbent on them to explain how a cheque for £50,000 represents a donation to a ‘well-funded denier’. Yes, this is all about the FOIA to the Charities Commission about the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The letter continues…

The Climate and Health Council supports Nasa scientist James Hansen as he joins the campaign to uncover secret funders bankrolling climate sceptic Nigel Lawson and his lobbying think-tank (Climate experts back unveiling of Lawson thinktank donor, 23 January). The public may finally discover who is secretly influencing UK climate policy – contrary to scientific consensus – today (27 January), when the Information Rights Tribunal hears this key freedom of information case. Some anti-climate lobbyists routinely misrepresent and cast doubt on the work of climate scientists. Although Lawson and his Global Warming Policy Foundation have been discredited and attacked by numerous scientists and senior politicians, his thinktank continues to receive significant coverage, wrongfully distorting the public and policy debate over climate change.

What is the extent to which the GWPF has ‘influenced policy’, as the letter’s authors claim? Nothing.

At every leap in the argument made by the authors, all proportion is lost. All ‘links’ between causes and effect are infinitely amplified, such that any amount of CO2 is indistinguishable from total Thermageddon. A cheque for sufficient money to employ someone on a decent wage for a year becomes the total failure of the UK’s climate policy. Never mind that, as I pointed out in the previous post, there are £billions available for the PR message in the other direction. £50,000 is all that it takes to completely subvert all policy-making in the UK. And it gets worse…

Perverting the course of evidence-based policy…

What?! When was there ever a ‘course of evidence-based policy’, such that it could be ‘perverted’? The complaint clearly borrows from the offence of ‘perverting the course of justice‘, but it has no analogue in policy-making. Having an opinion and wishing to intervene in a debate about policy might qualify as ‘perverting the course of evidence-based policy’. And as we have seen, the difference between opinions amounts to the difference between having a sense of proportion and not having one at all. And it is those without who seem, somewhat ironically, to be complaining about ‘perverting’ ‘evidence-based policy’. All the more an irony, that this climate inquisition are assembled from some leading UK scientific institutions.

… on climate-change adaptation and mitigation damages our health resilience, our economic prosperity and our environmental stability. Transparency around climate-sceptic funders is essential. We support freedom of information to reveal those deliberately preventing the UK’s sustainable future.
Dr Fiona Godlee Editor-in-chief, British Medical Journal
Dr. Richard Horton Editor-in-Chief, The Lancet
Professor Ian Roberts Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health
Professor Hugh Montgomery Professor of Intensive Care Medicine
Professor Anthony Costello Professor of International Child Health
Rachel Stancliffe Director, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare
Dr. Robin Stott Co-chair, Climate and Health Council
Maya Tickell-Painter Director, Medsin Healthy Planet Campaign

A few of these names are familiar. Ian Roberts, for example, was the subject of one of the first posts on this blog, back in 2007. He had argued in the New Scientist that the obesity epidemic is aggravating global warming.

We tend to think of obesity only as a public-health problem, but many of its causes overlap with those of global warming. Car dependence and labour-saving devices have cut the energy people expend as they go about their lives, at the same time increasing the amount of fossil fuel they burn. It’s no coincidence that obesity is most prevalent in the US, where per capita carbon emissions exceed those of any other major nation, and it is becoming clear that obese people are having a direct impact on the climate.

Roberts didn’t make it clear how it was ‘clear’ that ‘obese people are having a direct impact on the climate’, nor what the climatic effects of fat people were supposed to be.

Robert’s claims are sheer bullshit, of course, and the cost of allowing such bullshit to flow so readily from respected scientific institutions for the service of political ideas will be that science will ultimately undermine its own authority. If you think I over-state the point, examine the liberties that Roberts has taken with science so far in order to win a political debate.

As pointed out here:

When all that the best clinical minds can offer is the political idea that people’s desire for food and labour-saving devices (ie, higher standards of living) are expressions of a kind of false consciousness, small wonder that people complain about ‘health fascism’. Roberts has such contempt for the public that he assumes to know their political and material interests better than they do, and pretends that it is ‘capitalism wot makes ‘em do it’… that people are too fat headed to know what to eat.

It must be lean times at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, because this poverty-stricken argument is so bloated, it needs four bandwagons to wheel it onto the pages of the New Scientist: obesity, global warming, anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. All that’s missing is a photo of a polar bear perched on a dwindling ice floe.

The conceit of the scientists — if that is what they really are — who have put their names under the letter to the Guardian is that their opinions, their prejudices, their politics are ‘science’. This is obvious, because not only do they fail to give proportion to their arguments, they also completely fail to identify what it is that the GWPF have argued that is so objectionable. It is merely the fact that the GWPF exists to scrutinise climate policy at all that bothers them. And this fact, when seen alongside the fact that the GWPF hasn’t influenced policy reveals the real object of their panic…

The GWPF has pricked the consciousness of some of the public, and given institutional credibility to the cause of policy-scepticism. Public opinion, however, has not had any real influence over climate and energy policy. Indeed, the point of supranational institutions such as the UNFCC process, the UN itself, and the EU also, is to overcome the problems of domestic politics. But the attempt to build international agreements has failed. (And that failure has nothing to do with either public opinion, or the GWPF). What the signatures beneath the letter to the Guardian have in common is that the belong to individuals heavily invested in public health and climate bureaucracies, whose influence is increasingly justified on the basis that it will mitigate an inevitable disaster. Such a disaster is epitomised by Roberts: climate and obesity — two of the biggest scare stories out there.

And if you don’t believe me about the scale of this absurd phenomenon, consider this BBC article today:

Miliband attacks Cameron over chocolate oranges
Ed Miliband has attacked David Cameron for failing to stop the sale of cut-price Chocolate Oranges – something the PM complained about in opposition.

In 2006, Mr Cameron criticised WH Smith for discounting chocolate rather than fruit despite the UK’s obesity crisis.

But the Labour leader told The House magazine the situation had not changed.

“If he can’t sort out the chocolate orange, he’s not going to sort out the train companies, the energy companies, the banks, is he?” Mr Miliband said.

With politicians like these, is it any wonder that public health bureaucrats and climate change fear-mongers are in the ascendant? There is a compact between them, in which the mediocrity of the former is offset by the scientific authority of the latters. The cost is democracy. The letter, entirely devoid of a scientific argument, uses scientific authority to make a political argument, and to close down debate. The substance of the relationship between these pseudo-scientists and their backers needs to be exposed.

I have a piece up on Spiked today, about Brendan Montague/Request Initiative and their ongoing attempt to use the FOIA to ‘find out’ about the GWPF’s donors.

The first question asked about anyone making a non-conforming argument in the climate debate is ‘who funds them?’ And so it is with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – a three-man, cross-party, independent think tank with charitable status, which dared to challenge climate orthodoxy. The Charities Commission rejected an Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding to know who gave the GWPF its first cheque of £50,000. Several climate scientists have backed the call for the Charities Commission to reveal who backs the GWPF.

Read it here.

I’ve never been a fan of the follow-the-money argument, as all we need to do to show that the other argument is just as lame is to follow the money in the other direction. But perhaps more importantly, energy corporations don’t really care where they get their money from. If they can get more of it by doing less, so much the better for them. (Have they forgotten Enron already?)

This silly case must indicate that environmentalism is suffering intellectually lean times. Leo Hickman’s Guardian article on the case was especially poor, and the thinking lopsided. I perhaps unwisely suggested in a ‘tweet’ that the quality of the article reflects him being a w**ker. This led in turn to some Twitter exchanges, in which it was suggested I was a ‘troll’ rather than a proper sceptic, and the complainant — a somewhat naive and a little bit daft climate scientist — dropping me from her Twitter feed.

Funny, I suggested, that one can claim that the GWPF are guilty of ‘crimes against humanity’ — i.e. that their words are morally comparable to the systematic murder of people — and nobody bats an eyelid, but suggest that members of the Guardian’s environment department play with themselves, and your a troll. All the more an irony that the claim comes from the Guardian’s ‘ethical’ correspondent, whereas it was my ethics that were questioned, as though I had lost my moral compass.

A sense of proportion is all that it takes to see through environmentalism.

In a moment of boredom, I watched a few minutes of this Channel 4 documentary on the Mayan prophecy that the world will end this year.

Prophecies of doom and destruction crop up in all cultures and at all times throughout history, with dire predictions about the end of the world, and even the end of time itself.

But one prophecy stands out from the rest and seems to be gaining more and more credibility: a belief that cataclysmic or transformative events would occur in 2012, pinpointed thousands of years ago in Central America by the Maya.

Film-maker Paul Murton explores what has become known as the ‘2012 phenomenon’, travelling to the United States and the rainforests of Guatemala to find out if there is a future after all.

It’s pretty silly stuff. But a couple of interesting things emerged. First, it turns out that the descendent of the Mayans aren’t all that bothered about the prediction, and the end-of-the-world phenomenon seems to be much more located in the West. Second, a woman who runs a company specialising in providing equipment and training necessary to survive the coming apocalypse said that she didn’t want to sound like a religious fundamentalist.

Of course not, she just wanted to make some money. She was referring of course to the ‘End Time’ and ‘Rapture’ movements, in which the Earth will be cleansed of all the nasty people, etc. Unless they’ve bought survival bunkers, of course.

War and conflict was pretty high up on the list of things being discussed. Apparently, war is a sign that The End is upon us. But according to this book (which I’ve just added to my optimists-vs-pessimist-reading list),

the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. With the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker presents some astonishing numbers. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals—all substantially down.

I’m not sure about the cog-sci approach to these questions, but I’m looking forward to reading the book, nonetheless. What needs explaining, then, if Pinker is right that the world is a less violent place than it has been, is why does everybody think it’s all going to hell in a handcart?

The other theme of the Channel 4 documentary was, inevitably, ecological catastrophe. The film itself is unremarkable for its comments. It merely demonstrates the ubiquity of doom in today’s culture. It’s funny how secular liberals have developed their own Rapture movement. I came across a series of online films that reflect precisely that tendency. According to the Youtube channel,

Peak Moment is a biweekly series about resilient, locally reliant living for these challenging times. Programs feature host Janaia Donaldson’s conversations and tours with guests responding to accelerating energy and resource decline, climate chaos, and economic uncertainty.

You can find out what to eat, it seems…

And how to get around town…

And find out how big a house you deserve…

You see, doom has become the measure of all things for some people. It informs their choices about their lives, jobs, relationships, children… Everything. It’s all answered by the doctrine of doom.

I don’t think the claims made by Janaia Donaldson and her associates are worth debunking. They are as absurd as they are unpopular. Few are going to be convinced in the mainstream. There are some fairly extreme cases of environmentalism, but they’re generally completely alienated, rather than influential. What is interesting, however, is to see just how internalised the idea of doom has become for some people — how central it is to their outlook.

Back to the Mayans. If they really were so good at telling the future, it wouldn’t be 2012 they were worried about.

Nothing to do with climate change… Or not much, anyway… Food, rather than climate alarmism…

If you’re in or near Oxford next week, you may be interested in an event I’m hosting….

The Oxford Salon will launch in the new year. Our first event will be kicked off by Rob Lyons, deputy editor of Spiked, and author of Panic on a Plate  – How Society Developed an Eating Disorder.

From the Amazon.co.uk review:

The availability, range, cost and quality of food in Western societies have never been more favourable, yet food is also the focus of a great deal of anxiety. There are concerns that our current diets will mean we will get steadily fatter and more unhealthy while consuming junk food’, with consequences for our quality of life, our children’s behaviour and even the environment. This book challenges these ideas and places the food debate in a wider context. As the political imagination and the scope of social policy have narrowed, the focus on the personal and corporeal has filled this gap, creating an inward, individualised perspective that breeds a personal sense of vulnerability and distracts from issues of broader social importance. The book also examines the current use of food as metaphor the way that bad food and obesity, for example, have become code words for an elite disdain for the masses, implicitly promoting the idea that the consequences of poverty are the fault of the poor, and that a solution to the problems of social inequality lies in the consumption of five fruit and veg a day. The author also discusses how health fears around food are used as a lever for greater official control of our everyday lives, from lunchbox inspections and school food crusades, to endless media health advice and scientifically-dubious healthy labelling initiatives. The upshot of these connected trends is misplaced anxiety and wasted effort fixing what, for the most part, does not need to be fixed. Our modern food system allows us to be healthier than ever before, while transforming food from fuel into a source of entertainment, pleasure and choice.

Rob Lyons will present the main arguments from his book, which will be followed by Q&A and a discussion about the issues raised, such as:

• What is meant by ‘junk food’?
• Are we really getting fatter and does it really matter?
• Is it right for the state to offer us guidance on our diets, and to try to get us to eat healthily?
• Are campaigning celebrety chefs and nutritionists good for us?

More information on the Oxford Salon website and Facebook group.

And here’s the author himself, talking about his book.