Barrel Strength

The Vicar of the Glebe, the Venerable Archdeacon Jeffrey Simpson, has discovered that Canadians believe least in the man-made origins of global warming:

According to a recent international poll, Canada has the highest number of citizens (22 per cent) of any economically advanced country who deny that human activity causes global warming. We can fairly presume the vast majority of this 22 per cent are in what we might loosely call the conservative world in Canada. They read the anti-global-warming newspapers and commentators, and they rely on the handful of academics who debunk global warming.

If, despite the billions that governments have invested in the global warming scare, and the relentless stream of warmist propaganda, Canadians are least persuaded, perhaps it has something to do with the five months a year in which they have to heat their houses and put on hats, gloves, coats, and sweaters, just to go outside and scrape ice or snow of the windshield.

10,000 years ago this place had the same climate as Baffin Island, and 10,000 years from now it will have returned to that state, unless AGW is real and effective. Let us hope so, but if I am right, all the heating of the world by man that has occurred in the past 150 years will avail naught. Our descendants will be living in Tennessee, and over-wintering in southern Mexico.

Anthropogenic global warming will soon join phlogiston in the scrap heap of ludicrous ideas.

It has been proven – study shows – that the brains of conservatives are more resistant to change and novelty than those of liberals, or so says Chris Mooney.

“There’s a reason Winston Churchill was a better wartime leader than Neville Chamberlain. There’s a reason why the Tea Party got itself elected in under two years, while Occupy Wall Street is kinda all over the place. There’s a reason why we have scores of environmental groups that often can’t see eye to eye. There’s a reason, as George Lakoff and others have noted, why Democrats (and scientists!) focus too much on policy facts and details rather than winning over people’s hearts (and winning elections).

“But when it comes to determining what’s true about complex, technical subjects—issues full of ambiguity and uncertainty, where you can’t just jump to conclusions and have to stay open-minded and tentative in your beliefs—I’ll take the scientific-liberal approach any day. And after reading the book, I think so will you.”

The “scientific-liberal” approach? Methinks something huge is being assumed here, that the scientific method is fully consistent with liberal political values, in the American sense of the word “liberal”.

As Geoffrey Miller wrote in his book Spent (worth a read), people have been found to differ along six different axes. These results are robust, and represent what psychological testing has been able to show in its century-long development.

One of the axes of difference is openness. It is generally true that people who identify with conservative positions will be less open to novelty than people who identify with left-wing positions. Likewise, conservatives will generally be found to be more sociable, or agreeable, than liberals (in the American sense of that term). Thus conservative people generally place a higher value of manners, and less on autheticity, than the expressive individualist.

The full range of differences is given by the mnemonic gocase:

• g for general intelligence
• o for openness
• c for conscientiousness
• a for agreeability
• s for stability
• e for extraversion

Each of this characteristics is fully independent of the other. A person can be thoroughly open, say, and highly disagreeable; highly conscientious, but psychologically unstable. For example, I am rather more open than closed to new ideas and hence should be a liberal, but score lower on the agreeability scale, so I don’t particularly want to keep quiet at the dinner party regarding say, the usefulness of Canada’s gun registration. So I can come across as an argumentative conservative while passing the joint, so to speak.

And you have your own balance of quirks that makes you who you are. It may well be that people who are conservative react more emotionally than people who call themselves liberals, and “liberals” (a most misleading term) may have greater capacity for dealing with ambiguous information. This is the thrust of one of Mooney’s guest columnists, Andrea Kuszewski.

“So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.”

Here is where the conflation of openness with scientific method comes in.

The conservative is the one being accused of emotional attachment to wrong ideas, in the case of resistance to man-caused global warming.

Yet the case for or against man’s role in global warming is patently not about facts at all. It is a religious narrative. Conservatives can smell religion at a hundred yards. Liberals, to make as silly a case as Mooney’s, are less aware that they are gripped by a gnostic religious narrative.

Man is bad. He is destroying the planet. Something should be done. And we have the knowledge, intelligence and commitment to save the planet from those nasty people who are enjoying themselves as Gaia expires.

One of the most impressive features of any discussion with a warmist is their passionate belief that those who oppose them must be evil. They have perfect knowledge – it is undisputable. Hence those who oppose them must be either ignorant, and needing education, or knowledgable, and therefore consciously bad.

So don’t talk to me of liberals’ greater capacity for handling ambiguity and lessened emotional reaction to policy. If that is so, I have not met one in a long life in politics. They are passionately anti-factual on any issue of concern to them, because their (largely unconscious) religious narrative determines what is factual.

Grey Goose sends me the following from the left coast:

The links between green thinking an exterminationism are always much closer than most people think. Try this little charmer from Mother Nature Network. Our hero’s invasions kill 40 million people. Result: a greener planet.

What all of these events share in common is the widespread return of forests after a period of massive depopulation, but the longevity of the Mongol invasion made it stand out as having the biggest impact on the world’s climate.

“We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn’t enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil,” explained Pongratz. “But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion … there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon.”

The 700 million tons of carbon absorbed as a result of the Mongol invasions roughly equals the amount of carbon global society now produces annually from gasoline.

For a saner view of Genghis Khan’s achievements, see “Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world“, by Jack Weatherford. The real story is that, having created a free trade zone from Vietnam north and west through China to Russia, Iran, and Iraq, and having freed global trade from bandits and customs duties, the world became open before it became clean. Hence a plague in China could spread through the Crimea to Genoa by caravan and ship. The Black Death, which raged from about 1340 to 1400, is estimated to have killed 75 million people world-wide, and between half and a third of the population of Europe. Proportionately this was far worse in effect than even the deliberate killings inflicted by Stalin and Hitler in eastern Europe in World War 2. Trade and commerce are great, as long as sanitation and disease control prevail. When people cohabit with rats and lice, global trade brings global plagues.

Now there is a theme for Naomi Klein: The Plague Doctrine.

You can do yourself an enormous favour. Read Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”. Here is meat and potatoes for your mind, with a fine wine to wash it down. Ridley is the British science writer, author of such illuminating works as Genome and The Origins of Virtue, among others. This time he has gone well beyond his previous range, to great success.

This books achieves two things:

1. It looks athe entire history of our species from wandering bands on the plains of Africa until now as the progressive expansion of trade, as the cause of specialization of production, the elaboration of virtue, the improvement of the species, and the growth of wealth, and

2. a complete debunking of the constant pessimism that pervades society at the moment, and which has pervaded society since conversation was first recorded, according to Ridley: cancer, pesticides, AIDS, global warming, global cooling, genomic engineering, global famine, nuclear war: the list goes on and on of fashionable twaddle about inevitable catastrophes unless we de-industrialize, go back tothe land, and integrate ourselves with nature: the kind of stuff Prince Charles goes on about; the kind of society we existed in after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, called the Dark Ages.

I canot resist his  quote from John Stuart Mill, which prefaces his chapter “Turning Points: Pessimism after 1900″:

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

David Suzuki? Al Gore? Paul Ehrlich? Thomas Malthus?

Though I enjoyed his attack on the doomsayers at the end of the book, it is grounded in an interesting take on human social evolution, the core of his argument.

Ridley argues that changing habits, generation by generation, were made possible by exchange,

“the swapping of things and services between individuals. This gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capacious brain….In this way exchange enouraged specialization, which further increased the number of different habits the species could have, while shrinking the number of things each individual knew how to make.Consumption could grow more diversified, while production could grow more specialized.”

He sees farming, and the burning of fossil fuels especialy, as the further release of energy for the benefit of mankind. His excoriation of starving the poor to grow ”green” fuels rivals anything Jonathan Swift could have written about fashionable nonsense.

Ridley’s book is based on very extensive reading of everything important: Adam Smith, Hayek, information theorists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, historians, and economists. His vast erudition is painlessly laid out in a compelling narrative.

Buy this book. Read it. Then buy ten copies and give it to anyone, including leftists especially, who might possibly read it. It will comfirm and strengthen you in all your beliefs that things are in fact improving (Islam notwithstanding) and that the doomists are a tired and broken record, perpetually wrong, whose only contribution is bleating and obstruction.

This is a great work and deserves the broadest possible readership.

I like old James Lovelock, all 90 years of him. The founder of Gaia theory has been waging a lonely battle to win acceptance for what to most of us seems obvious, when you allow yourself to think about it. The Gaia theory says that the planet is a living system. Life on earth – the community of living organisms – does its best to maintain an equilibrium.

Take the atmosphere as an example. Gaia theory argues that life maintains oxygen in a dynamic process at 21% by volume of the atmosphere . Add even 1% more oxygen and fires might start too easily. Or consider methane, which is maintained at 1.5 parts per million over the last  million of years. Yet methane oxidizes so that 67% of it disappears every ten years. For methane to be kept so exactly constant, as ice core samples show, argues for processes which work towards an exquisite equilibrium. Life is doing something to maintain conditions suitable for life: that is the nub of Gaia theory.

Locvelock has many opponents.

• To the geologists the Gaia hypothesis is superfluous. The processes of geochemistry are sufficient to explain the equlibria.
• To the computer modelling crowd, the ones one foist anthropogenic global warming on us, Lovelock does not use computers and relies on actual physical measurements. This is way too empirical for their tastes.
• Gaia theory is all too purposeful for Dawkins and the othodox Darwinists, in that the randomness of the mutations is somehow threatened if the mutations work towards overall purposes, such as planetary stability.

So why do I like Lovelock? I like him for the same reason I like George Orwell. They both share a belief the prevailing error of their ages. In Orwell’s case, it was a belief that the market was finished and that a planned society was both better and historically inevitable. In Lovelock’s case it is eco-doomism of a certain plausible kind.  Their errors have had a paradoxical result. By allowing them to share the prevailing errors of their respective political epochs, each has been granted access into the intellectual  and social milieux of a variety of phonies, poseurs, and fanatics. If they had not shared those assumptions, at least in part, they would have stood aside from the main currents of their ages, such as Friedrich Hayek or Bjorn Lomborg, and have found themselves arguing from the outside inward. But by sharing just enough of the prevailing assumptions of their times, they have been allowed entry into worlds where you and I would be barred.

Thus it was Orwell the man of the left who skewered the idea of socialist revolution in Animal Farm, and who depicted the inner feeling of totalitarianism  in 1984. If he had not shared enough of the assumptions of the Left to get close to them, indeed to go fight the fascists in Spain, he would never have seen the Soviets executing the anarchist POUM militia in the Spanish civil war. He would never have shared enough of the socialist ideal to take seriously the betrayal of that ideal by Stalin and his regime. To a capitalist free trade liberal (hence conservative)  such as myself, the fact that socialists are envious little swine , and that communists are trying with all their might to become  social insects and to force you to join this experiment, so that you no longer think but just obey scent glands or something, is merely an observed fact.

So it was in that spirit that I at first perused and then devoured Lovelock’s  “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning”. The more I read the more I wanted to have the fellow over for a drink.

• he has no use for “greens”; he thinks they vastly underestimate the problem of global warming;
• he has no use for the computer modellers; they fail to make observations of fact and can predict nothing;
• he thinks capitalism will adapt to green ideology by promoting vastly wasteful and stupid windmills and other green energy systems;
• He praises Nigel Lawson, the former British finance minister,  and his other geochemist scientific critics;
• He thinks it is folly for Britain not to rely extensively on the safe  energy of nuclear reactors;
• Most reasearch into the chemical dangers of this or that are spurious; our instruments are so sensitive that they can measure concentrations millions of times lower than that which can cause damage;
• The IPCC has failed to account even for the current climate, let alone the future one;
• the basis of his belief that global warming is happening is that sea levels are rising. All the atmospheric science is basically piffle, in his view.

“The sea level rises for two reasons only: from ice on land that melts and from the expansion of the ocean as it warms”. He has a chart at page 27 showing that the sea level has risen 8 centimeters from 1970 to 2007.

There are many rasons why a skpetic of man-caused global warming would want to read Lovelock. He is fair. He is honest. He has been proven right about many things. He thinks broadly, writes well, and though he may be wrong, he is possibly quite right. As regards the Gaia hypothesis, I suspect it will thrive long after Dawkin’s selfish gene metaphor has been consigned to the pile of reductionist twaddle. Regardless, Lovelock reveals himself the kind of person you would want over for a bottle of wine and maybe  to share a steak. The conversation would be frank, fascinating, and erudite, and he would be open to contrary thinking.

Gaia has once again shown she is able to adjust to changing conditions and look after herself without help from Algore or the UN  IPCC Chicken-Littles, with all of their Doomsday forecasts of the consequences of AGW.

Many low-lying islands in the Pacific are growing in size to counter the effects of rising sea levels, according to new research.

Scientists have feared that many of the small islands throughout the South Pacific will eventually disappear under rising sea levels caused by climate change.

But two researchers who measured 27 islands where local sea levels have risen 4.8 inches over the past 60 years, found just four had diminished in size.

The study found that the coral islands are able to respond to changes in weather patterns and climate, with coral debris eroded from encircling reefs pushed up onto the islands’ coasts by winds and waves.

more

File this under you-can’t-make-this-up.

‘Titanic’ director Cameron joins effort to plug Gulf spill

Is it possible that a ‘Star Trek’ director would have better luck?

Update:  Gulf spill headline.

Effort to contain Gulf oil stalls with stuck saw

It would be best to call the director of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.

I ought to have seen Joanne Nova’s Climate Money before now. If you haven’t, you too can cite it in the unlikely  event of being invited to Geoffrey Simpson’s for dinner. In short, government billions for AGW; millions somewhere for skeptics.

James Delingpole, that right-wing vicious attack dog – God I love him – has come out with something similar.

Forget prorogation, which is a temporary blip in the microcosm of Canadian politics.   Remember Copenhagen. Do you? Do you know how big a victory we won?

The scale and speed of the collapse of the AGW scare ought to inspire us with trust that truth will prevail. It is doing so before our eyes.
 

The rats are leaving the ship. Andrew Weaver, one of Canada’s leading scientific bedwetters on the subject, has declared the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri,  tainted

“Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.

 ”There’s been some dangerous crossing of that line,” said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week.

 ”Some might argue we need a change in some of the upper leadership of the IPCC, who are perceived as becoming advocates,” he told Canwest News Service. “I think that is a very legitimate question.”

To those more familiar with the story, Andrew Weaver has been foremost among those who have crossed the line into advocacy. But let that rest.

• Himalayan glacier melting has been shown to be speculation based ona telephone call to a glaciologist working for one of Pachauri’s organizations.
• Missing weather stations have been shown to have been selectively removed, not maintained or not reported (for whatever reasons) from places that are more remote, or at higher elevations, than the weather stations kept open. The result is selective favouring of those weather stations exposed to more urban heat, and a great reduction in sample size, and hence the reliability, of temperature records.
• The IPCC itself is under severe, and heeded, criticism for its methods and behaviour.

“Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.”

 Some stories play out over decades. Global warming is one of them. Considering the amount of government funding which sustains it, it has proven remarkably fragile in the face of the email leaks of climategate. Considering also the massive buy-in of the MSM and ordinary people to its simple tale of global sin  through CO2 emissions and global redemption through carbon offsets, it is amazing how quickly intelligent people do not discuss it anymore.

If you are still skeptical as to whether sanity has prevailed, then read this: and this: The bedwetters are declaring it a disatrous year for global warming “science”.

Remember: whether the earth is warming or cooling is a matter of science; what we might need to do about that is a matter of policy, if we can affect the outcome at all. There is plentiful evidence that we are not causing, and cannot cause, much of an impact through CO2 emissions. There is absolute proof that we can cause environmental catastrophes without blinking an eye: deforestation, overfishing, overgrazing, and so forth. So while truth has prevailed against lies, hubris and folly, on this major issue, the latter three have plenty more force in them yet, and always will.

Study shows: greens are pious hypocrites.

The more you assign yourself moral superiority because you shop “green”, the more inclined you are to cheat in a number of different ways.
“Co-authors Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, professors at the university’s Rotman School of Business, set up tests for a sample of university students, which asked them to purchase a basket of goods at either a hypothetical organic shop or a typical grocery store. Those who bought more green items were found in separate tests to be significantly less likely than their conventional counterparts to share money with an anonymous recipient and more likely to cheat on and lie about the results of a simple quiz.”

We have all noticed this about lefties and fundamentalists: their self-attribution of a vast reservoir of moral superiority, so that they can be ruder, nastier, more arrogant, less tolerant, than their sinning conservative or less fundamentalist neighbours.

“Grant us, mother Gaia, the grace to be more ecologically conscious and concerned, and to pardon us our sins against our fellow humans, for thy Name’s sake”.

The tendency to assign oneself moral superiority is universal. The greens are only the latest manifestation.

While fusspot Grit MP Dr.™ Carolyn Bennett yearns to get the government into the regulation of sex toys, entrepreneurs figure out how to go sustainable sexily in the free market.

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, makes an interesting case for the precautionary principle today. That is, if we believed there were a 1% chance that Al Qaeda had nukes, we would act as if they had nukes. Same with global warming. If there were a 1% chance we were causing it, we should act as if it were true. “A low probability, high-impact event.”

Friedman’s argument is as follows:

“We know that our planet is enveloped in a blanket of greenhouse gases that keep the Earth at a comfortable temperature. As we pump more carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases into that blanket from cars, buildings, agriculture, forests and industry, more heat gets trapped.

“What we don’t know, because the climate system is so complex, is what other factors might over time compensate for that man-driven warming, or how rapidly temperatures might rise, melt more ice and raise sea levels. It’s all a game of odds. We’ve never been here before. We just know two things: one, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere stays there for many years, so it is “irreversible” in real-time (barring some feat of geo-engineering); and two, that CO2 buildup has the potential to unleash “catastrophic” warming. Read the rest…

Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com may be the only mainstream journalist covering the only real climate story – fortunately, he is excellent.

Nothing like a little betrayal for that second morning hangover.