The earth's climate is changing. That's a fact. Incontrovertible. Accepted by just about everyone.
It has been changing for the 4.54 billion years that the earth has been in existence and I can exclusively reveal, here, to you, that it will continue to change for the next however long it is until the sun becomes a red giant and incinerates the earth. About another 12 billion years or so. That's a long time, some people might even have paid off their student loans by then.
Has man had an impact on the earth's environment? Of course. We have made the place tidy, habitable, able to produce enough food to feed the growing population. And increasing industrialisation and use of fossil fuels means that we are emitting growing quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.
(Update: I have been criticised by some readers for using the term 'tidy' (above), as if it demeans the general stance of this piece (invariably by opponents). But there is almost no blade of grass in the UK that hasn't been shaped, managed or influenced by human activity over the centuries. Whether by agriculture, hunting, fishing leisure or development. The 'wild and natural countryside' you might visit from time to time is not really 'natural' or untouched by human hand, but what we have arrived at over time. And it is beautiful. And productive and serves the purpose we need it to. 'Tidy' is just short-hand for man's influence on the planet. Just wanted to make that clear.
And, so the theory goes, this CO2 is causing the planet to warm which will, in turn, cause the glaciers and ice-caps to melt, raise sea levels to the point where many low-lying islands will become submerged and leave many parts of the world uninhabitable because of drought. Extreme weather events will become more frequent, polar bears will die out, tens of millions of people will be displaced because of man-made global warming. As Mr Blair said, 'Global Warming is the single biggest issue facing mankind today.'
So reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, reducing CO2 emissions and creating a 'sustainable' (note that word) world (where our use of resources does not make the lives of those who follow us worse) is not only desirable but vital to man's very survival.
Big, scary stuff I think you'll agree?
It was what Al Gore's film An inconvenient truth was all about, and it won him a Nobel prize. But then again Obomber won a Nobel Peace prize too. And Gore's film was prevented from being shown in UK schools because of the massively flawed nature of the science it portrayed.
But, today, the IPCC has issued its AR5 report to global acclaim (seemingly) and, unsurprisingly, since it has long had a policy that 'the science is settled', the BBC has been painting the report's findings as incontrovertible fact. So that's it then. It's real, it's here, we should be very afraid. We should sell our cars, never travel by air again and happily give the government all our money - indeed we should borrow more if we can so that we can give even more - to spend on wind farms and solar panels (even though at the UK's latitude they are ineffective for most of the year).
I think there are a couple of background issues that are worth noting at this point before I get on to a more substantive look at what we face.
The first is to note that scientists secure funding for their research from a wide variety of sources and that major issues like a threat to the population come very high on the global funding list. As recently as 40 years' ago, many of the same scientists and certainly many of the same organisations were demanding increased funding into their climate research because of the potentially disastrous consequences of our changing climate as you can see here.
The only difference is that the 'biggest issue facing our planet today' in 1973, was the almost certain prospect of a coming ice age.
The second concerns the United Nations: With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effective ending of the Cold War, (and before the emergence of international terrorism and a seemingly global conflict being drawn on religious lines at the moment), the UN found itself in something of an existential quandary. It was in danger of losing its relevance, it's position on the world stage, indeed its very existence. It needed to come up with a new mandate and new way of justifying its existence.
It came up with Agenda 21, a vision for a single world government in the 21st Century, and in order to try to achieve this goal, it needed to focus on an issue that affected every country in the world and indeed the whole planet. Climate change was perhaps a logical topic as a possible means of securing global take-up of a single issue as a prelude to the ultimate creation of a single world government and this was cloaked in the term 'sustainability' and launched in Kyoto in 1989. I have blogged about Agenda 21 and it's current embodiment ICLIE here.
Now putting forward a claim that climate was changing but it always had done and everything was going to be fine, was probably not very likely to get many countries around the world fired up about the issue and therefore make much progress towards this single world government. But telling developing countries that they could get massive subsidies from developed countries on the back of a potential global climate disaster, that our way of life in the west was under threat, and that governments around the world could generate much higher levels of taxation from their citizens in the name of saving the planet.. well unsurprisingly that got people's attention. And their support and commitment. Scientists around the globe must also have pricked up their ears too. But it wasn't about finding out what was really going on in our climate, but finding ways to prove that this disaster was imminent and that the only way we could fix it.. etc etc.
The third issue is about that seemingly unbridgeable defense of these scientists: the 'Peer review'. 'Peer reviewed' science is, we are told, effectively fact as far as scientists are concerned. If the findings of a particular paper are peer reviewed it means that the world's experts are in agreement: and obviously since you are a mere pleb, you will have to believe them. The trouble is that by 'Peer' what they really mean is 'mate'. Sending your theory about global warming to another scientist who derives their income from the funding available in the climate science sector, means that they are hardly likely to disagree. Particularly since you will be 'peer reviewing' their equally lucrative findings in a few weeks' time.
The term 'sustainability' is (by design) almost impossible to disagree with. It's a bit like saying do you agree that we want the sun to come up again tomorrow morning? According to the UN: 'Sustainability calls for a decent standard of living for everyone today without compromising the needs of future generations.'
One would have to be pretty cold-hearted and selfish not to agree with that sentiment. But Sustainability is now spreading it's claws beyond climate change and into many other aspects of our lives including development and planning, use of resources, land ownership, food production, even our access to the countryside, as part of the Agenda 21 erm, agenda. It now seems to be much more about control and the delivery of this single world government (that none of us has had the chance to know about or understand, much less vote for) than making effective use of scarce resources.
So, just some background which might cause you to think a bit more about whether Climate Change (you may have noticed that 'Global Warming' seems now to have been dropped in favour of this term now that the planet is no longer warming) is actually being caused by human activity or is part of a natural cycle that is largely governed by the activity of the sun.
I want to avoid the 'janet and john' or 'tit for tat' approach in this blog. You will have read stories about melting glaciers, melting ice-caps, sea-level rises, an increased frequency of extreme weather events around the world. My theory (I simply cannot understand how these things are happening if this theory is not somewhat accurate), is that somehow the MSM (Main Stream Media) including, in particular the BBC, have somehow been duped, forced or persuaded into buying in to AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) and no longer seem willing to contemplate any kind of debate or examination or scepticism on the subject. Governments too seem to have bought in, hook, line and sinker. I find that really strange and in many ways, highly sinister.
I can point you to other stories about growing glaciers, record levels of arctic and antarctic ice, extreme weather events being less frequent than in the past. You can use google as well as I can and so, presumably, can journalists, but they don't seem to want to.
One credible (in my opinion) piece was run some time ago and can be listened to here. It's quite long but one of the eminent scientists in the broadcast likened climate science to a jigsaw. One where we don't yet have the corner pieces, let alone the straight edges, let alone the full picture. And yet the world is being forced to set it's energy policy, a policy that is costing everyone massively in terms of green taxes, on the basis of this peer reviewed, politically motivated 'science'.
The IPCC has been found to have falsified data. To have refused to release data to interested parties, indeed even FOI requests were rebutted before the raw data was leaked to the world and found not actually to stack up as far as the conclusions that were put forward. The University of East Anglia was found to have falsified data and documentation and to have deliberately misled the wider world. The Met office (which is one of the key players in this global climate change 'industry') published its data on the fact that the planet has not been warming for at least 16 years on Christmas Day last year. Without any fanfare - a cynic might think they were trying to bury the information. Especially so since three consecutive days of sunshine seems regularly to be latched onto by the Met Office as an incontrovertible sign of global warming. (maybe I exaggerate a little but you know what I mean).
This is a take on the science and the data being put forward and how credible it is - here.
And here's a recent report on the poor Polar bear whose habitat is being irrevocably destroyed by AGW. So they say. Here.
OK so I lied a bit about the 'tit for tat' stuff. But you need to know some of this in order to have an informed view on the biggest issue facing mankind. And I agree that it is becoming the biggest issue - not because of the threat to the planet, but because of the treat to our freedoms (Agenda 21 and a single world government), the threat to our financial wellbeing (green taxes) and the threat to our way of life that adopting these proposed (and I would say unnecessary) changes will make.
OK almost there now, sorry this has been such a long piece but it's a big and complex and important subject I think. I don't believe that we can really control the atmosphere or temperature on the planet. Climate was changing before we arrived and will go on changing when we are long gone. The planet has a way of adapting, of finding equilibrium. Increased levels of CO2 means more plant growth, more consumption of CO2 and, therefore, over a long period, balance.
Many credible organisations are now starting to contemplate the prospect that the world is set to go into a period of cooling as the sun's activity slows (sunspots etc) in the cyclic way that it always has. Even NASA has put out some data on this possibility. Here.
OK, you'll have deduced by now that I am a sceptic. I hope the above might make you think about this a bit more before just accepting what the majority of the MSM tells you. My advice, as with just about all things that you're told these days, from surveys to claims about health benefits, is to follow the money and judge for yourself how credible are the claims being made. Is what you're being told being done for your benefit or for some commercial gain. I think that AGW is massively about commercial gain rather than about genuinely saving the planet. You might disagree - it's a free world. Maybe.
Couple of final points that are perhaps a bit more parochial but nonetheless crucial in shaping our activity in the future.
Firstly a rise in CO2. Is that undeniably a bad thing? I blogged here about my thoughts on a miniscule rise in CO2 and its potential to change the climate. But this is also highly relevant in my opinion. A rise in CO2 can also be directly related to an increase in life expectancy. Is the IPCC trying to kill people? here.
The other thing is the cost of trying to control the climate. As I say, I really don't think it can be done, and that it is massively arrogant to think that we can - Canuteesque in many ways. But the cost of trying to do so is 50 times greater than would be the cost of adapting to climate change. It is simply not worth it financially. Details here.
OK, finally, to be entirely parochial about this, what has Kyoto achieved? Is the world buying in to the sustainability and AGW agenda? Is everyone on board with this? Because, if they're not, it's impossible to address the rising CO2 emissions that we are as a world, creating. So obviously the world's biggest emitter - the USA - must be on board right? Wrong. The US never signed up to Kyoto and has since, despite Obama's pro climate action rhetoric, actually moved away from controlling emissions, although, ironically (not that they'd understand the term) their fracking revolution is actually reducing CO2 emissions.
But then of course China (which will overtake the US as the world's biggest emitter by 2020) must be on board then. Erm no. And it's building a coal-fired power station a week right now. India? No. Canada? Was on board but has since ditched Kyoto as 'bunk'. Germany then? Well yes, sort of. But having tried to move away from carbon-based energy and invested massively in wind energy (yeah right) it is now importing nuclear power from France like it's going out of fashion and has returned to building new coal fired power stations. Australia signed up, indeed went as far as any other country towards the green agenda, with carbon taxes etc. But they have just kicked out their government, largely on the basis of the AGW scam, and are now reverting to a non-Kyoto stance.
And that leaves poor old Blighty. We signed up to Kyoto and expected everyone else to follow. Mr Miliband steered through the UK's Climate Change act in 2008. Committing us to reduce our CO2 emissions by 80% by 2030. By law. Unilaterally.
The thing is, the UK emits about 1.6% of global CO2. That's less than China's current year on year increase. So if we reduced our output by 100% - and spent billions in the process, increased domestic energy bills by hundreds of pounds a year (which is already happening), forced energy intensive industries out of the country (which, again, is already happening), our efforts would be rendered insignificant already by China's increases.
So it's a problem that in my view is incredibly unlikely to actually exist, and that we are trying to solve, unilaterally and at massive cost, but in a way which has no earthly chance of being effective or making any difference at all to saving the planet.
But we're all paying for it. Thanks to Mr Miliband, Mr Davey (the fuckwit Lib Dem energy Minister), Mr Cameron and the mainstream media including in particular, the BBC.
Happy?
Couple of updates: My take on the current state of the rip-off UK energy sector - here.
And what is Green Energy? Defined, here.
Thanks for reading. Keep warm if you can as the earth cools.
It has been changing for the 4.54 billion years that the earth has been in existence and I can exclusively reveal, here, to you, that it will continue to change for the next however long it is until the sun becomes a red giant and incinerates the earth. About another 12 billion years or so. That's a long time, some people might even have paid off their student loans by then.
Has man had an impact on the earth's environment? Of course. We have made the place tidy, habitable, able to produce enough food to feed the growing population. And increasing industrialisation and use of fossil fuels means that we are emitting growing quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.
(Update: I have been criticised by some readers for using the term 'tidy' (above), as if it demeans the general stance of this piece (invariably by opponents). But there is almost no blade of grass in the UK that hasn't been shaped, managed or influenced by human activity over the centuries. Whether by agriculture, hunting, fishing leisure or development. The 'wild and natural countryside' you might visit from time to time is not really 'natural' or untouched by human hand, but what we have arrived at over time. And it is beautiful. And productive and serves the purpose we need it to. 'Tidy' is just short-hand for man's influence on the planet. Just wanted to make that clear.
And, so the theory goes, this CO2 is causing the planet to warm which will, in turn, cause the glaciers and ice-caps to melt, raise sea levels to the point where many low-lying islands will become submerged and leave many parts of the world uninhabitable because of drought. Extreme weather events will become more frequent, polar bears will die out, tens of millions of people will be displaced because of man-made global warming. As Mr Blair said, 'Global Warming is the single biggest issue facing mankind today.'
So reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, reducing CO2 emissions and creating a 'sustainable' (note that word) world (where our use of resources does not make the lives of those who follow us worse) is not only desirable but vital to man's very survival.
Big, scary stuff I think you'll agree?
It was what Al Gore's film An inconvenient truth was all about, and it won him a Nobel prize. But then again Obomber won a Nobel Peace prize too. And Gore's film was prevented from being shown in UK schools because of the massively flawed nature of the science it portrayed.
But, today, the IPCC has issued its AR5 report to global acclaim (seemingly) and, unsurprisingly, since it has long had a policy that 'the science is settled', the BBC has been painting the report's findings as incontrovertible fact. So that's it then. It's real, it's here, we should be very afraid. We should sell our cars, never travel by air again and happily give the government all our money - indeed we should borrow more if we can so that we can give even more - to spend on wind farms and solar panels (even though at the UK's latitude they are ineffective for most of the year).
I think there are a couple of background issues that are worth noting at this point before I get on to a more substantive look at what we face.
The first is to note that scientists secure funding for their research from a wide variety of sources and that major issues like a threat to the population come very high on the global funding list. As recently as 40 years' ago, many of the same scientists and certainly many of the same organisations were demanding increased funding into their climate research because of the potentially disastrous consequences of our changing climate as you can see here.
The only difference is that the 'biggest issue facing our planet today' in 1973, was the almost certain prospect of a coming ice age.
The second concerns the United Nations: With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effective ending of the Cold War, (and before the emergence of international terrorism and a seemingly global conflict being drawn on religious lines at the moment), the UN found itself in something of an existential quandary. It was in danger of losing its relevance, it's position on the world stage, indeed its very existence. It needed to come up with a new mandate and new way of justifying its existence.
It came up with Agenda 21, a vision for a single world government in the 21st Century, and in order to try to achieve this goal, it needed to focus on an issue that affected every country in the world and indeed the whole planet. Climate change was perhaps a logical topic as a possible means of securing global take-up of a single issue as a prelude to the ultimate creation of a single world government and this was cloaked in the term 'sustainability' and launched in Kyoto in 1989. I have blogged about Agenda 21 and it's current embodiment ICLIE here.
Now putting forward a claim that climate was changing but it always had done and everything was going to be fine, was probably not very likely to get many countries around the world fired up about the issue and therefore make much progress towards this single world government. But telling developing countries that they could get massive subsidies from developed countries on the back of a potential global climate disaster, that our way of life in the west was under threat, and that governments around the world could generate much higher levels of taxation from their citizens in the name of saving the planet.. well unsurprisingly that got people's attention. And their support and commitment. Scientists around the globe must also have pricked up their ears too. But it wasn't about finding out what was really going on in our climate, but finding ways to prove that this disaster was imminent and that the only way we could fix it.. etc etc.
The third issue is about that seemingly unbridgeable defense of these scientists: the 'Peer review'. 'Peer reviewed' science is, we are told, effectively fact as far as scientists are concerned. If the findings of a particular paper are peer reviewed it means that the world's experts are in agreement: and obviously since you are a mere pleb, you will have to believe them. The trouble is that by 'Peer' what they really mean is 'mate'. Sending your theory about global warming to another scientist who derives their income from the funding available in the climate science sector, means that they are hardly likely to disagree. Particularly since you will be 'peer reviewing' their equally lucrative findings in a few weeks' time.
The term 'sustainability' is (by design) almost impossible to disagree with. It's a bit like saying do you agree that we want the sun to come up again tomorrow morning? According to the UN: 'Sustainability calls for a decent standard of living for everyone today without compromising the needs of future generations.'
One would have to be pretty cold-hearted and selfish not to agree with that sentiment. But Sustainability is now spreading it's claws beyond climate change and into many other aspects of our lives including development and planning, use of resources, land ownership, food production, even our access to the countryside, as part of the Agenda 21 erm, agenda. It now seems to be much more about control and the delivery of this single world government (that none of us has had the chance to know about or understand, much less vote for) than making effective use of scarce resources.
So, just some background which might cause you to think a bit more about whether Climate Change (you may have noticed that 'Global Warming' seems now to have been dropped in favour of this term now that the planet is no longer warming) is actually being caused by human activity or is part of a natural cycle that is largely governed by the activity of the sun.
I want to avoid the 'janet and john' or 'tit for tat' approach in this blog. You will have read stories about melting glaciers, melting ice-caps, sea-level rises, an increased frequency of extreme weather events around the world. My theory (I simply cannot understand how these things are happening if this theory is not somewhat accurate), is that somehow the MSM (Main Stream Media) including, in particular the BBC, have somehow been duped, forced or persuaded into buying in to AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) and no longer seem willing to contemplate any kind of debate or examination or scepticism on the subject. Governments too seem to have bought in, hook, line and sinker. I find that really strange and in many ways, highly sinister.
I can point you to other stories about growing glaciers, record levels of arctic and antarctic ice, extreme weather events being less frequent than in the past. You can use google as well as I can and so, presumably, can journalists, but they don't seem to want to.
One credible (in my opinion) piece was run some time ago and can be listened to here. It's quite long but one of the eminent scientists in the broadcast likened climate science to a jigsaw. One where we don't yet have the corner pieces, let alone the straight edges, let alone the full picture. And yet the world is being forced to set it's energy policy, a policy that is costing everyone massively in terms of green taxes, on the basis of this peer reviewed, politically motivated 'science'.
The IPCC has been found to have falsified data. To have refused to release data to interested parties, indeed even FOI requests were rebutted before the raw data was leaked to the world and found not actually to stack up as far as the conclusions that were put forward. The University of East Anglia was found to have falsified data and documentation and to have deliberately misled the wider world. The Met office (which is one of the key players in this global climate change 'industry') published its data on the fact that the planet has not been warming for at least 16 years on Christmas Day last year. Without any fanfare - a cynic might think they were trying to bury the information. Especially so since three consecutive days of sunshine seems regularly to be latched onto by the Met Office as an incontrovertible sign of global warming. (maybe I exaggerate a little but you know what I mean).
This is a take on the science and the data being put forward and how credible it is - here.
And here's a recent report on the poor Polar bear whose habitat is being irrevocably destroyed by AGW. So they say. Here.
OK so I lied a bit about the 'tit for tat' stuff. But you need to know some of this in order to have an informed view on the biggest issue facing mankind. And I agree that it is becoming the biggest issue - not because of the threat to the planet, but because of the treat to our freedoms (Agenda 21 and a single world government), the threat to our financial wellbeing (green taxes) and the threat to our way of life that adopting these proposed (and I would say unnecessary) changes will make.
OK almost there now, sorry this has been such a long piece but it's a big and complex and important subject I think. I don't believe that we can really control the atmosphere or temperature on the planet. Climate was changing before we arrived and will go on changing when we are long gone. The planet has a way of adapting, of finding equilibrium. Increased levels of CO2 means more plant growth, more consumption of CO2 and, therefore, over a long period, balance.
Many credible organisations are now starting to contemplate the prospect that the world is set to go into a period of cooling as the sun's activity slows (sunspots etc) in the cyclic way that it always has. Even NASA has put out some data on this possibility. Here.
OK, you'll have deduced by now that I am a sceptic. I hope the above might make you think about this a bit more before just accepting what the majority of the MSM tells you. My advice, as with just about all things that you're told these days, from surveys to claims about health benefits, is to follow the money and judge for yourself how credible are the claims being made. Is what you're being told being done for your benefit or for some commercial gain. I think that AGW is massively about commercial gain rather than about genuinely saving the planet. You might disagree - it's a free world. Maybe.
Couple of final points that are perhaps a bit more parochial but nonetheless crucial in shaping our activity in the future.
Firstly a rise in CO2. Is that undeniably a bad thing? I blogged here about my thoughts on a miniscule rise in CO2 and its potential to change the climate. But this is also highly relevant in my opinion. A rise in CO2 can also be directly related to an increase in life expectancy. Is the IPCC trying to kill people? here.
The other thing is the cost of trying to control the climate. As I say, I really don't think it can be done, and that it is massively arrogant to think that we can - Canuteesque in many ways. But the cost of trying to do so is 50 times greater than would be the cost of adapting to climate change. It is simply not worth it financially. Details here.
OK, finally, to be entirely parochial about this, what has Kyoto achieved? Is the world buying in to the sustainability and AGW agenda? Is everyone on board with this? Because, if they're not, it's impossible to address the rising CO2 emissions that we are as a world, creating. So obviously the world's biggest emitter - the USA - must be on board right? Wrong. The US never signed up to Kyoto and has since, despite Obama's pro climate action rhetoric, actually moved away from controlling emissions, although, ironically (not that they'd understand the term) their fracking revolution is actually reducing CO2 emissions.
But then of course China (which will overtake the US as the world's biggest emitter by 2020) must be on board then. Erm no. And it's building a coal-fired power station a week right now. India? No. Canada? Was on board but has since ditched Kyoto as 'bunk'. Germany then? Well yes, sort of. But having tried to move away from carbon-based energy and invested massively in wind energy (yeah right) it is now importing nuclear power from France like it's going out of fashion and has returned to building new coal fired power stations. Australia signed up, indeed went as far as any other country towards the green agenda, with carbon taxes etc. But they have just kicked out their government, largely on the basis of the AGW scam, and are now reverting to a non-Kyoto stance.
And that leaves poor old Blighty. We signed up to Kyoto and expected everyone else to follow. Mr Miliband steered through the UK's Climate Change act in 2008. Committing us to reduce our CO2 emissions by 80% by 2030. By law. Unilaterally.
The thing is, the UK emits about 1.6% of global CO2. That's less than China's current year on year increase. So if we reduced our output by 100% - and spent billions in the process, increased domestic energy bills by hundreds of pounds a year (which is already happening), forced energy intensive industries out of the country (which, again, is already happening), our efforts would be rendered insignificant already by China's increases.
So it's a problem that in my view is incredibly unlikely to actually exist, and that we are trying to solve, unilaterally and at massive cost, but in a way which has no earthly chance of being effective or making any difference at all to saving the planet.
But we're all paying for it. Thanks to Mr Miliband, Mr Davey (the fuckwit Lib Dem energy Minister), Mr Cameron and the mainstream media including in particular, the BBC.
Happy?
Couple of updates: My take on the current state of the rip-off UK energy sector - here.
And what is Green Energy? Defined, here.
Thanks for reading. Keep warm if you can as the earth cools.
only recently found your blog posts Mark, link from JoNova i think ?
ReplyDeleteto many good blogs to get thru' in limited time but thought you deserved a thank you for your input/time (Agenda 21 needs to be brought into the sunlight ASAP, but will not hold my breathe on this happening)
anyway, thanks for keeping the good work going with limited resoures & input (your posts deserve a better response but as you are aware time is limited :-)
Thank you, I appreciate your kind words.
Delete