We are all suspects now.

Via the New Scientist:

IT WAS a dramatic declaration: glaciers across much of the Himalayas may be gone by 2035. When New Scientist heard this comment from a leading Indian glaciologist, we reported it. That was in 1999. The claim later appeared in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report – and it turns out that our article is the primary published source.

The science deserves to be taken more seriously than this.

So here I am,  back online in our new High Wycombe home, just in time for this revolt against reason:

Following the ‘climategate scandal’, Mr Blair said the science may not be “as certain as its proponents allege”.

But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be “grossly irresponsible” not to.

If I understand Blair correctly, he is following up his recent assertion of the form ‘we were right to go to war, irrespective of the facts’ with an assertion that ‘we should intervene heavily in the operation of society, irrespective of the facts’. This is sheer ideology: why not extend this philosophy to every social problem? I suspect he would answer, “Why not indeed?”

I am put in mind of my favourite philosopher, Karl Popper, who lived through mankind’s greatest period of social planning, with all the misery it entailed:

I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.

And:

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.

Not forgetting:

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

Popper began of course, like Hayek, as a socialist. He simply came to his senses when he saw what it entailed.

A week or so ago, my wife and I had lunch in High Wycombe’s noodle bar. I struck up a conversation with the young waiter – I forget how it began – and found myself answering his complaint that he didn’t know what politics was about with, “It’s about whether we should have a planned or a free society.” He answered, “I know what I want, but I don’t know who will give it to me.” I explained that a vote for me is a vote for a free society, which lifted his spirits.

What a pass we have come to if the young think there is no hope for a free society. What would our grandparents say, after all they went through?

Via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | What happened to global warming?:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

What indeed?

This morning, I woke early and finished The Great European Rip-off: How the Corrupt, Wasteful EU is Taking Control of Our Lives.  I then discovered this article in the Telegraph:

The global financial crisis has inflicted such damage to free market principles that it risks undermining the core function of Brussels and triggering the disintegration of the European Union, according to the EU’s most revered economic figure.

…

Former Italian premier Massimo D’Alema said the EU’s modernisation drive sketched at Lisbon in 2000 was fantasy. “We are prisoners of our rhetoric,” he said. “It is an illusion to think that once crisis is over we will return to where we were. The US and China will emerge stronger: we will be left ever further behind. Within 15 years not a single country in the EU will qualify for the G7, except perhaps Germany.”

via EU faces ‘existential’ danger from economic crisis – Telegraph.

In this context, it is vitally important to form a strictly pragmatic view of the EU and whether it will help or hinder our recovery.

Craig and Elliott wrestle courageously to deliver just that in The Great European Rip-off, though the title rather gives away their conclusions. It seems to me any objective review of the EU would conclude that it is an exorbitantly expensive threat to our prosperity and freedom.
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Karl Popper is without doubt my favourite character in political philosophy. He was rational, believing knowledge and truth to be objective, but aware of the boundaries of reason. A scientist but concerned with the mechanisms of society. By humanitarian inclination a social democrat — when that meant “Marxist” — but by reason a liberal: a believer in freedom.

In the course of things, I rediscovered these quotations by Popper, which seem apt today, as we hastily seek solutions to our present difficulties:

I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.

Perhaps one from his time, when the foolish utopian experiment communism was still alive in the world:

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

And defining ‘tyranny’:

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy”, and the other “tyranny”.

On the role of intellectuals:

Why do I think that we, the intellectuals, are able to help? Simply because we, the intellectuals, have done the most terrible harm for thousands of years. Mass murder in the name of an idea, a doctrine, a theory, a religion — that is all our doing, our invention: the invention of the intellectuals. If only we would stop setting man against man — often with the best intentions — much would be gained. Nobody can say that it is impossible for us to stop doing this.

On historicism, but more generally applicable to positivism in economics: trying to produce specific outcomes when ultimately you can only do so by manipulating the actions of individual men and women:

We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

On freedom and tolerance:

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

So let us be tolerant then, but only up to the point our open society is threatened, and let us also be reasonable:

There are many difficulties impeding the rapid spread of reasonableness. One of the main difficulties is that it always takes two to make a discussion reasonable. Each of the parties must be ready to learn from the other. You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.

And also, thinking of the sacrifices we are invited to make today for the future — I think particularly of the world’s desperately poor, who need inexpensive energy¹:

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.

We might reflect on whether we are still permitted to apply our intelligence in every area:

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

And whether we are succumbing to the temptation to rely on the government for our security at the expense of our freedom:

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.

Most schemes of social organisation have been explored and lived through, but one thing is certain: those who follow us will have different ideas and preferences which we cannot know in advance. We must allow room for our successors to develop these ideas and preferences, that is:

We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom.

1. And we are not far behind. [↩]

This week, The Spectator writes Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick:

James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book.

…

‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.

And as it happens, I just finished Nigel Lawson’s An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. From the Afterword:

Much has happened over the year that has elapsed since this book was first published, and all of it has served only to reinforce its main thesis. That thesis, in a nutshell, was and remains the proposition that, even if the current majority view of the science of global warming is correct, the policy response we are told we must urgently adopt, of drastic curbs on global carbon dioxide emissions, makes no sense: it is both economically damaging and politically unattainable.

Lawson explains that, far from denying the science, he thinks it prudent to act as if it were correct, planning for adaptation. He does, however, touch on the science, showing that:

• The science is neither certain nor settled.
• Global warming is not happening right now.
• Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Now, I am not ready to take a position on climate science, nor to condemn climate alarmism as the new anti-capitalistic religion (as Lawson does), but it seems that a person concerned with the prosperity and well-being of humanity should take a critically rational look at the science and the suggested policy response. Lawson refers to a survey of climate scientists, two thirds of whom agreed that anthropogenic global warming is supported by the science, in which only 8% thought ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ was ‘the most pressing issue facing humanity today’. Whether we should accept the present policy response must therefore be a question worthy of debate, even among mainstream climate scientists.

For a critique of the science, I suggest Jo Nova’s The Skeptics Handbook and The Manhattan Declaration. For alternative perspectives on the associated environmental question of resource depletion, I recommend these videos on the arithmetic of growth and this essay on Oil and the Doomers’ Dire Predictions. You may also enjoy this Climate Quiz.

If we are serious about human progress, about promoting prosperity for the world’s poor, we must be rational. Reason shows that the route to social progress is unhampered cooperation between independent, interdependent people. It would be better if governments got out of the way, if poor nations industrialized and if we anticipated spontaneous adaptation if and when necessary.

BRUSSELS, April 27 (Reuters) – Europe’s beekeeping industry could be wiped out in less than a decade as bees fall victim to disease, insecticides and intensive farming, international beekeeping body Apimondia said on Monday.

“With this level of mortality, European beekeepers can only survive another 8 to 10 years,” Gilles Ratia, president of Apimondia, told Reuters.

“We have had big problems in southwest France for many years, but also now in Italy and Germany.”

Last year, about 30 percent of Europe’s 13.6 million hives died, according to Apimondia figures. Losses reached 50 percent in Slovenia and as high as 80 percent in southwest Germany.

With 35 percent of European food crops relying on bees to pollinate them, it poses a big threat for farmers, said Ratia.

via Death knell sounds for Europe’s beekeepers | Reuters .

For two centuries, since the Age of the Enlightenment, we assumed that whatever the advance of science, whatever the economic development, whatever the increase in human numbers, the world would go on much the same. That was progress. And that was what we wanted.

Now we know that this is no longer true.

We have become more and more aware of the growing imbalance between our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order of which we are part.

In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man’s activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.

We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs

Margaret Thatcher, via Speech at 2nd World Climate Conference | Margaret Thatcher Foundation, following links from Iain Dale.

Surprised? And the left complain that the Conservatives only just discovered the environment: ridiculous.

Via FT.com / UK – Hoon approves third Heathrow runway, further evidence that New Labour politicians are comfortable holding entirely incompatible ideas in their heads:

Geoff Hoon gave an official stamp of approval on Thursday to £9bn plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport, despite a hard-fought campaign against the project by environmentalists and opposition MPs.

The UK transport secretary will face a bitter backlash from more than 50 Labour backbenchers, who fear that the project flies in the face of the government’s supposed green agenda and could cost the party votes in west London.

Peter Lilley MP at the BBC reveals a hidden bombshell of environmental expense and political sophistry:

The UK’s Climate Change Bill, which commits future governments to cut CO2 emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050, is about to receive Royal Assent but at what cost? Peter Lilley MP asks why ministers failed to mention that the legislation could cost each family in the UK up to £10,000.

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