Twinkle in his eye

Allah is an environmentalist.

A MUSLIM cleric has blamed the drought, climate change and pollution on the lack of faith Australians have in Allah.

Sheik Mohammed Omran told followers at his Melbourne mosque that out-of-control secular scientific values had caused environmental disaster.

“The fear of Allah is not there,” he said at a recent meeting. "So we now have a polluted earth, a polluted water, a wasteland."

However, another of his representatives is calling for more CO2-emitting babies. But since it's in the good cause of Islamising Australia, that's all right. London-based neo-colonialist, sheik Abdul Raheem Green:

"The birth rate in the Western countries is going down. People are more interested in their careers . . . they don't want to have babies,” Sheik Green says in the DVD [sent to Australian mosques].

"So don't you think, Muslim brothers and sisters, we've got a bit of an opportunity here? They're not having babies any more. So what if, instead, we have the babies?"

How do you read that "brothers and sisters" bit?

Wall falls. Gas rises.

Richard North at PJM thinks that the Channel 4 attack on the theory of human-caused global warming was a "pivotal moment in a major political debate". Robert McKie in The Observer, on the other hand, says that there are "many reasons to deride it", not the least of which is that its "contents are largely untrue".

I don't know either way. However, I did like the fifth of the excerpts available on the PJM page in which several people link the heat of passion in the global warming cause to very earthbound events. Principally, the political and economic disarray of the Left after 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Revolutionaries needed a new cause with the following prerequisites: it must be anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist and, above all, anti-American. They found one. (Well, the more desperate found two, actually. The second involves the sudden release of CO2 in unannounced explosions, which has the additional benefit of reducing the number of CO2 producing people.)

The Independent will soon be calling for new Sumptuary Laws.

The revolutionary's Christmas tree

Robin McKie in The Observer on the social costs of climate change.

After decades of waiting, the green movement has found the cause of its dreams: a crisis that gives them carte blanche, they believe, to rule our lives. Hairshirts are being knitted and the self-righteous are gathering...

Climate change is a bigger, more pernicious problem [than ozone depletion] and will require broader, more intense efforts to cut back on carbon emissions, which, in turn, offers more opportunities for campaigners and politicians to hijack a sound cause to gain control of people's lives. 'That is the striking thing about global warming,' says Myles Allen, of Oxford's climate dynamics group. 'It is a Christmas tree on which each of us can hang virtually everything we want.'

The sun's to blame. Regulate it.

Last month I linked to an article in Corriere della Sera according to which all the planets in the solar system are globally warming due to the sun, which evidently is hotter now than it has been for 1,000 years.

Well, someone is saying it in English too. Well, Russian actually. In what the National Geographic called a "controversial" theory (as opposed to an hysterical one), a Russian scientist has found rising temperatures on Mars, too.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun...

"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said.
By studying fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, Abdussamatov believes he can see a pattern that fits with the ups and downs in climate we see on Earth and Mars.

Abdussamatov's work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists.

Now, I wonder why not.

(via Dinocrat)

Salvation for athiests

One of the great weaknesses of Classical Liberalism is that it does not give adequate ritualised space to two permanent human qualities: the sense of guilt and the consequent need for salvation. Both are necessary to a well-run society, but like sex, are very difficult to keep in proportion. Religion, which gives them a greater importance, is a more congenial home for them.

Industrialisation has been a great progenitor of guilt. It has granted an unparalleled power over nature and an enormous and visible inequality of means and wealth. The violence generated in the 20th Century to overcome or rationalise those gaps is indicative of the sense of guilt induced by them. (Mr Smith's speech to Morpheus in The Matrix is a good expression of this.) We have been made aware of the enormity of what we have created at the same time as we have slowly realised just how inadequate our power and importance are in relation to time, space and the rest of it. Unconscionable power and inadequacy: explosive combination.

So, where lies salvation? Let's save the planet. Our nest. Surely that will help. That's gotta be a plus. At the end of the days.

The new religion. Environmentalism.

the religion of choice for urban atheists ... a perfect 21st century re-mapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
Michael Crichton

A new book by a mathematician called David Orrell, The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, describes the inadequacy of our models, our need for prophecy and “the gospel of deterministic science”. There's a review here.

Global warm air

I preface this with a disclaimer: I know next to nothing about geology, climatology, ecology or hysterology. Moreover, I will add now that the following is not a reasoned or even reasonable reaction to the sincerely expressed and strongly felt concerns of many people. But ...

It's just that as soon as someone starts talking about apocolypse or amageddon or both, I immediately file them under the bulging Cranky, Loud and Annoying tab to sit snugly next to Holocaust-deniers, 911 conspiracies, the Priory of Sion and the followers of the Great Prophet Zarquon. I just can't help it.

So with the human impact on climate change. That the climate changes is obvious. That it is changing therefore follows. That it's all our fault doesn't. A couple of hundred thousand years ago, there were forests in the Antarctic. Now, that's warm. It was, I believe, a period when life flourished on Earth as never before or since. What did humans have to do with it?

This current hysteria seems to me egotistical (it's all about ME), without perspective and ... hysterical. It may have some good effects through the technology it brings into being, but I foresee way too much public space for the puritans, the party-poopers and the eternal in-your-face change-your-life-now finger-pointing Righteous. I stand with Jules Crittenden.

Re Earth. It gets hot. It gets cold. This is what Earth does. No one knows why. Even the scientists who say its getting hot because of human activity, when pressed, have to admit it might be only heating up at a greater rate because of human activity, but even then, no one can really say for sure.

It’s hotter now than it’s been since the time of Jesus. What that means is, 2,000 years ago, the Earth was as hot as it is now. I’m blaming Iron Age farming practices and smelting for that New Testament uptick. Or maybe it was the righteous fire and burning passion of the age … have to go back and have another look at the ice cores. Might find some particles of faith.

By the 14th century, it was wicked cold. And I do mean wicked. Like, medieval cold. Even all those witch burnings had no effect. But not as cold as it was 10,000 years ago. We’re really only just starting to warm up from that. We have a long way to go before it is as warm as it was 66 million years ago, you know, Everglades in Montana warm.

(via Confederate Yankee)

You may also be interested to know that Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and every other planet in the solar system are warming globally because of ...the sun, which is hotter now than it has been for 1,000 years. An article in Corriere della Sera (in Italian).

More myths

Myths are going pop everywhere at the moment. From the Washington Post, 5 Myths About Suburbia and Our Car-Happy Culture

1.Americans are addicted to driving.
2.Public transit can reduce traffic congestion.
3.We can cut air pollution only if we stop driving.
4.We're paving over America.
5.We can't deal with global warming unless we stop driving.

Regarding Point 4 and thinking only of bitumen, according to The Independent, usually a source of environmental hysteria, roads takes up less than 1 per cent of the UK's surface area.

The new Stalinists

Dr. Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel on how to deal with those who do not acknowledge the culpa of you and me in global warming. The American Meteorological Society should suffer no dissent.

If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.
[my emphasis]

The Party Line has been determined, and anyone fool enough to fly in the face of Historical Inevitability deserves to be disbarred, and worse...

When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards* -- some sort of climate Nuremberg.
[my emphasis]

*Climatology jargon for those in the denial industry who will be first against the wall...

This is how someone called Dave Roberts, who has appeared as an expert on Ms Cullen's TV programme, greeted the publication of George Monbiot's book, Heat, which he seemed to like.

Strangely, the many commenters who say nasty things about Ms Cullen's view of scientific debate refer often to Hitler, as does Roberts, but never to the master of ideological tyranny, Stalin. Which is a shame, because what we are embarking on now is yet another voyage into the stormy waters between the Scylla of righteousness and the Charybdis of salvation. That is Stalin's territory and the heritage of the Left.

Check out the list of the disasters global warning has already caused. Keep checking back because it grows by the day and you wouldn't want to miss one.

(via Tim Blair)

Local belief systems

This is the right approach.

Environmental evangelists are therefore not interested in pragmatic solutions to climate change or technological fixes for it. They are even less interested in evidence that if we were really serious about reducing carbon emissions we could do so by large amounts without significantly affecting our economies or our lives. Windmills on roofs and cycling to work are insignificant in practical consequence, but that is to miss their point. Every ideology needs rituals of observance which demonstrate the commitment of adherents.

Business should treat the environmental movement as it treats other forms of religious belief. Business leaders do not themselves have to believe its doctrines. Indeed we should be wary if they do: business linked to faiths and ideologies is a sinister and unaccountable power. But companies must respect the belief systems of the countries in which they operate, and acknowledge both the constraints these structures impose and the commercial opportunities that arise.

Last week (was it only last week?) we had to sit and listen as the High Priesthood and their acolytes hurled fulminations at Tony Blair because he had travelled by plane to Florida and then to watch him squirm from common sense towards cringing acknowledgment that he had sinned and would do penance. There's that faint echo of Bukharin reciting that hanging was too good for him.

(via Tim Blair)

Inadequate fervour offends

Tony Blair when questioned on his 'carbon footprint', his holiday in Florida, and making people better.

"So we've got to be realistic about how much obligation we've got to put on ourselves. The danger, for example, if you say to people 'Right, in Britain ... you're not going to have any more cheap air travel,' everybody else is going to be having it. So you've got to do this together in a way that doesn't end up actually putting people off the green agenda by saying you must not have a good time any more and can't consume. All the evidence is that if you use the science and technology constructively, your economy can grow, people can have a good time, but do so more responsibly."

He's right. People are not going to change substantially. Make flying expensive, and the same sort of people who complain now about cheap flights will complain about the inequality of travel. Same with cars, which have probably done more to inculcate the sense of freedom than any legislation. Stopping people moving would do more to undermine the capitalist economy, the most successful economy in history, than the Soviet Union ever managed. I suspect that this is actually the motivation behind much of the passion for draconian environmental policies.

There's something else as well, which Blair nods at with that phrase "you must not have a good time any more". It is the eternal spirit of the Puritan, present in all self-respecting revolutionary movements, always striving to change not just what people do, but how they think, what they say. The Puritan would pierce the walls of our houses and mount guard on every room to regulate and improve our behaviour, to make us better. For the Puritan is anguished by the mere suspicion that somewhere someone is having a good time; that millions are doing so before his eyes is unendurable.

There are other satisfactions to be gained by transforming a practical issue into a moral one - the invigorating air of the High Moral Ground; the warm furry security of moral superiority; the easy, quick-reference ranking of sinful actions and words allowing for on-the-spot verbal fines and, last but never least, a handy lexicon of anathema to be used loudly, repeatedly and as if spitting. Righteousness is irresistible, indignation addictive; lack of fervour unforgivable.

Red and Green

Ryskind (via Wheat and Weeds)