Over at Comment is Free, George Monbiot attempts to rescue the eco-movement from the criticism that they're a bunch of toffs by launching a campaign to 'ban the aga'. "This is indeed a class war," he says. So where is the campaign against Agas? There isn't one. I've...
Road to an Atomic Damascus or the Green Reformation?
Poor old Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: our future on a hotter planet, who once thrust custard pies into the faces of people who dared to question environmental orthodoxies. He now finds himself on the receiving end of eco-dogma. Fancy that. Just a month ago I had...
Identity Crisis Politics
According to commentisfree, Ewa Jasiewicz is a writer, journalist, human rights activist and union organiser. In a recent post to the site, she identifies a split in the environmental movement between those who aim to stop climate change through ‘the system’, so to...
Smoking Out Unreasonable Certainty
In conversations with our exasperated green friends, we are often asked what we would accept as 'proof' that global warming ‘is real, and is happening'. This is a fairly typical misunderstanding of the sceptical position. Well, ours anyway. We do not argue that humans...
Polls Apart
One of our major gripes with Environmentalism concerns the claims made by its adherents that it is some sort of popular, grass-roots movement. Time and again, polls suggest otherwise. And yet these polls are rarely, if ever, reported in terms of the undemocratic...
The Royal Society: From Science to Fiction
Eco-activist Mark Lynas, has won the Royal Society's prize for popular science writing, for his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Except that it isn't science, it's fiction. Science fiction; it takes a vaguely plausible scientific possibility,...
The Well-Funded “Well-Funded Denial Machine” Denial Machine
One of the arguments which frequently emerge from the warmers in climate change debates is that the scientific expertise of sceptics has been bought – literally – by oil companies. We see this tired argument again wheeled out in the aftermath of the Inhofe 400 list....
Six Degrees
Josie Appleton has written an excellent review of Mark Lynas' book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet Appleton takes issue with many of Lynas' claims and dismal prophecies, and lucidly argues that catastrophic narratives offered by environmentalists may owe...
Poor Thinking
Apparently, 'climate change will be worse for the poor'. Who'd have thunk it? We really don't need the IPCC WGII report to tell us that - things are always worse for the poor. And yet the report seems to have taken many by surprise.Stranger still is how this rather...