Be seeing you!

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.

A young homeless woman asked me to buy a Big Issue just outside the conference area and then asked me, “If you get in, what are you going to do about poverty in this county? The Government seems very keen to get in with everyone else, but what are you going to do in this country?”

Happily, I was able to answer, but that’s not the point of the post.

She looked unblinkingly at me and said, “I’m a victim of the State”, before explaining some of her life. Abused by her mother – along with her 15 siblings – she was placed into care, where her ADHT was met with beatings. Made homeless at age 17, she was soon in prison for shoplifting to eat, which she saw as “fair enough” as she was “bang to rights”. She’s less keen on the occasions when she has been convicted, she claims, essentially because she wouldn’t grass someone up.

In prison, she got off drugs – though she still has DVTs from injecting – and started a course in counseling, which she is now 3 units from completing. While inside, she worked for The Samaritans and she would now like to attend college, complete the course and help others. She has qualifications in hairdressing and Indian head massage.

Of course, without a fixed address, she can’t get the job or achieve the stability that would enable her to see this through. She is constantly moved on and harassed by the State, but not helped to settle down and help others.

Now aged 27, this young woman has learned to deal with her mother’s physical abuse in childhood, but the State has just decided to prosecute the woman, so she has been asked to relive every detail in court. Is it any wonder she looks 47?

She told me other anecdotes, with obvious sincerity, but I haven’t the heart to write them down.

So there she is on the street, in the rain trying to round up £17.50 for a hostel room for the night, from people who seem unable to see her, while avoiding the teeming army of people ready to move her on. She is articulate, interested, interesting, willing, able and very nearly qualified to help others out of their mess, but she is stuck in her own. She needs opportunity.

This is a self-proclaimed “victim of the State”. This is Britain in 2008. Someone ask me again why I am going into politics.

There’s a homeless man I see every day, who sleeps in a subway. He’s pleasant and harmless. He used to be a promising chef apparently. People choose to give him money: he never asks. He keeps himself smart and clean, thanks to a nearby centre that opens in the week, during the day. He’s handing out Christmas cards to people who have helped him this year.

He was arrested this week for begging. He spent the night in the cells as bail was not granted. He claimed this was fine by him: a warm dry night with hot food and drink and he didn’t have to walk to court in the morning. The judge fined him £20 but dismissed it in recognition of the night in jail. He was straight back where he started, doing no harm, although now he is a trainee Big Issue seller.

He alleges that the following night, certain uniformed individuals approached him and offered that if he disappeared that night, they wouldn’t bother him for a year. Apparently that night was the night the homeless count was to be taken.

This seems to me quite evil. It’s bad enough that people get trapped on the street, without others fiddling the statistics. What happens when the area’s 500 (say) homeless find their centre is closed because it was funded for 50?