Bishop Hill The view from millionaire's row
Jun 30, 2011 Climate: WG2 Dr James Martin, the super-rich philanthropist, has piped up from his private island in the Caribbean to tell us that our lifestyles are going to ruin the planet.
...the dangers from future climate change are ratcheting up year after year. The world’s media have become increasingly full of images of collapsing ice shelves, stranded polar bears, raging hurricanes, lands stricken by drought, fires sweeping across southern Australia and deserts spreading. The ice caps are melting in both the Arctic and Antarctic. But all this is only an overture to trouble on a much grander scale. The runaway transformation of the Earth’s climate may become the worst crisis of human history.
Now that's funny, because I read just this morning that Antarctic Sea ice is at an all-time high. Melting means something different when you are a multimillionaire it seems.
Reader Comments (39)
A fool and his money are soon parted.
This was a bubble folks, encompassing much greater Seas than the South Sea.
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Except that ...
Ice shelves collapse all the time.
Polar bears are only stranded if you use the right camera angle.
Hurricanes certainly rage but activity is at or close to an all-time low.
Lands have always been stricken by drought. Australia for example is mostly desert and did you see the American mid-west in the 30s?
Fires sweeping across Australia. Like they always do except that idiot greenie policies make them worse.
Deserts expanding. Except that the Sahara is contracting.
And I can tell you there's something else the media is "increasingly full of"?
Similar to the other clown, Branson. His son appeared on British TV to tell us all to change or perish. Not to worry though, they will be on their own little isle de caraïbe.
Welcome to the Nurse-Bradley-Hari-Jones-Boulton institute for the perversion of ethical standards, funded by James Martin.
Loved the bit where the journalist asked to arrange a meeting with Martin when he was on one of his many trips to the UK. Instead, Martin made the journalist trek out to to his private island, burning up jet fuel, gasoline and whatever for the aircraft, the cars and the boats. I'm not against any of these things in principle, it's just the stench of hypocrisy that gets me.
He says "Detailed computer calculations make it clear that dangerous climate change can be prevented only if action is taken quickly. " and cites Lord Rees and Crispin Tickell among others. As an ex IBMer he will surely be aware of the old adage "Garbage in, Garbage out".
Perhaps you should send him a complementary copy of The Hockey Stick Illusion". It could even get you an invitation to lunch to discuss it.
Easy to see why this guy is a millionaire. Damn, he can see the future! That's what it takes if you want to be rich. You have to see the future. I know he's right. I can see it too. Over there. Behind that tree. See it? Wait, it's moving... now, over there by that bush... damn thing moves like a rabbit.. there it is, over in that nook in the garden wall, see it? Lordy, looking at the future makes you dizzy. Wish there was a way to slow it down.
Surely we need to buildmile-thick concrete shelters over our cities, and 500-metre high sea walls all around our coastline, to save us from the risk of asteroid impact?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8607418/Britain-in-list-of-countries-most-at-risk-if-an-asteroid-strikes.html
It's the precautionary principle again. Some boffin says something might happen so we must all spend trillions now in case he's being honest this time rather than effective.
There is on obvious difference between this and CAGW, of course - we know catastrophic asteroid strikes have happened in the past whereas there's never been catastrophic CO2.
Funny how its everyone else that has to change, has he started changing his lifestyle, I soemhow doubt it.
My bank account details are available if he wants to lead by example ;) .
I wonder how far that nice island of his is above sea level.
How can he claim to be a philanthropist when he is clearly singing from the misanthropist hymn sheet?
I live in Northern Ireland and for years I have studied astronomy and science, I have many qualifications and have worked in the real world and sometimes had to work for a wage that would just about keep a roof over my head, especially when I was younger and needed the experience in electrical engineering, I would work hard all week for £15 extra on top of a training allowance of £20 for years. while doing my electrical apprenticeship I also acquired My horticulture C&G and volunteered after work and weekends for an environmental group the CVNI, Planting thousands of trees, clearing rivers and generally traveling around looking after our environment.
I also went to collage in Dublin and spent a full year there studying my real passion robotics/computing/programing etc..
After college I set up a computer maintenance and networking business, basically repairing computers, building websites, installing robot lighting & pa systems, Ive wrote various programs for business, installed and maintained their networks.
But now I understand more and more about the science behind earths climate and environment and I'm understanding more and more about those who use it as political device for their own benefit in the political and financial arenas.
I have read thousands of articles and viewed hundreds of charts and have heard many claims but when I read about super-rich philanthropist with no less than their own private island "piping" up about how my life style is going to ruin the planet, I really do take offense, their ignorant comments that show clear signs of megalomania always leave me feeling extremely angry and insulted.
Some can only imagine the life style these [Expletive] Morons have and for them to have the disgusting disrespect and contempt for us who live an honest life is outrageous.
(Excuse me while a fetch a towel to wipe Dr James Martins spit from my face)
"By 2030, Scotland may have the climate that Cornwall had"
However there is a pertinent Bertrand Russel quote given in the correspondence/letters section:
"Belief systems provide a program which relieves the necessity of thought"
It's the sheer bloody hypocrisy of these people that gets me. When I am president, AGW believers/cultists will not be allowed to use anything derived from fossil fuels.
Anything. At. All.
I have met James Martin on a couple of occasions having worked for many years with JM Associates on Information Engineering and he's no fool, but I don't think he has much expertise in this area.
AFAIK, his Doctorate is honorary - most people don't use the title in that situation.
I thought the 1000 polar bears shot each year by natives etc was the Polar Bears biggest problem.
Who knew it was a CO2 problem.
Martin writes: "There are many climate deniers, some of them in high places. "
I write; "There are many climate "liers", most of them in high places"
Further to "By 2030, Scotland may have the climate that Cornwall had"
And pigs may fly by 2030 given the progresses in genomics, so applying the Porcautionary Principle,
I suggest we will need some modified A-A batteries - presumably located in Scotland.
The unpalatable truth is that we will have to give up cooked breakfasts, if we are to avoid an interspecies war.
Poor old Oxford with the King/Brown Smithson and now the Martin - both pretending to be academic but actually just branches of political activism as their missions make clear. And Oxford Today peddling these views is just a third rate Guardian demanding money with menaces from the taxpayer for the old place for whatever the latest fad is. But then there is Prof J Jones demonstrating the old independence of Oxford. May that return.
He's obviously put his money into carbon credits and windmills. He's bigging up the price of carbon before sellng his investments.
@oldtimer
As an ex-IBMer myself, I'd like to point out that Crispin Tickell was only ever a non-exec director of IBM UK. He did not actually work for the company as an employee.
Please make the distinction clear in your mind. There were a lot of very talented, very intelligent and practical people at IBM when I was there. But they also deliberately had a few mavericks to add spice.
We've had quite a few rather different views from Oxford recently. Dinner table discussions in the city of perspiring dreams must be interesting.
I expect the ice is melting in his G&T.
To be fair, it's only a modest-sized private island... ;)
The printed edition was on the mat when I got home. Oh, what an awful magazine Oxford Today has become, and what a dreadful state my old University of Oxford is getting into, being bankrolled by millionaires and billionaires as an agent for Malthusian social change. The letters that get published say it all, for example here is an extract from one by Stephen Conn, which is enough to make one vomit:
"President Bush launched an immense 'war on terror' at the loss of a mere few thousand lives in a terrorist attack. We should value human lives less sacredly, and what Oxford thinkers should launch is a 'war against over-population' "
Wiping out 'a mere few thousand lives' is chickenfeed; these Oxford alumni want to see billions stamped out. Some really effective 'final solution'.
The same thinking runs through Martin's piece as well, he's just much cleverer at packaging and re-branding genocide as 'environmental concern'. But the Nazis were also clever at propaganda, they spoke about those whom they wanted quietly euthanized as 'useless mouths', those millions who were not card-carrying Nazis and simply consumed resources but were not elite enough to make a contribution to the Reich. One of the letters in Oxford today is actually complaining that a piece on Hitler's war in the magazine "seems to confuse the terms 'Nazi' and 'German army' ", which, the writer says "embarrases and shames me" because "not all members of the German army were Nazis". Maybe not, but the German army WAS a genocidal organ of the Nazi party, and can very properly be termed a Nazi army. Methinks the lady doth protest too much when wanting to redeem the German army from the bad connotations of the word 'Nazi'. Let's have eugenics, and genocide, and euthanasia, but let's not associate them with the crimes of Nazism as that might taint them and impede their take up. Again, the selection of stuff that is printed in Oxford Today is astonishing, and when one realizes that this magazine goes out free of charge to every single member of the university, many of whom are in positions of great influence, it is extremely disturbing.
Martin's article is gross propaganda, really; one just has to package things in a more sophisticated way for the Oxford alumni. In essense, it reads just the same as what Jeremy Grantham writes for his well-heeled audience. But you can see what these guys are thinking - as Martin himself says
"I am increasingly finding that at elite dinner parties there is already discussion of who the survivors will be". Those who don't go to elite dinner parties won't have any choice in the matter.
The fact that he chooses to live in the Caribbean would seem to indicate that he foe one rather prefers the warmer climate afforded by such latitudes - kinda ironic realy.
The fact that global media and communications mean that freak weather in isolated places is more measurable than ever before has been well documented. Besides I was under the impression that the Sahara, for one, is actually Greening rather than spreading.
Before I read this post I purchased two lucky-dip tickets for this Friday's EuroMillions which offers a £130m payout.
Now I'm a bit depressed. It's not the £4 stake, I stumped up, that put me down in the dumps. It's the growing sense of dread that I may soon be a multi-millionaire!
No more money shortage issues for sure but at what cost?
Would I turn into a Dr M. or worse a MBP?
I just might and, at my time of life, it's a bit late to learn how to pass through the eye of a needle.
Please pray for me that I may wake up on Saturday morning as poor as I did yesterday and with a normal amount of hypocrisy!
Dr. Martin wrote [from link]:-
"Russia may muddle through with a massive consumption of vodka."
Reading through Martin's rose tinted hallucinatory visions, which though - are all predicated on a false premise. One could surmise, that he too, has been 'muddling through' on the vodka, still according to the good Doc' - Patagonia will be nice soon..................... ?
J4R - not saying we should build a sea wall to protect us from an asteroid impact, but I will defend the precautionary principal where appropriate - e.g. http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/world/Village-unscathed-by-tsunami-.6767952.jp
If only the Japanese nuclear industry and earth scientists had been a little more realistic about the chances of a 10m tsunami, which in that part of the world are not uncommon. The 6.5m sea wall at Fukushima was clearly inadequate to protect the backup pumps and fuel tanks, and the consequences of this incompetence are not inconsiderable.
Jimmy Haigh - sorry - I didn't get to the Blackie until just after 9 but you had moved on elsewhere. Will try again next year.
"rising" and "falling" mean something different when you are BBC's Richard Black, it seems. that pesky old cold weather...
30 June: BBC: Richard Black: Climate policies 'need new tools', advisers say
The UK's greenhouse gas emissions are not falling fast enough to meet government targets, say advisers.
Emissions rose by 3% during 2010, says the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
This was due to extra energy demand in cold weather...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13946816
On a point of geography, Bermuda is not in the Caribbean, it is an Atlantic island.
Jul 1, 2011 at 2:48 AM | lapogus
I'll be back next year - probably for longer than the couple of days I had this time.
I hope people do take the time to read the excellent article in the Orange County Register you linked to. It is very informative. This other article I found also makes the point about Antarctic sea ice and puts it into context.
This links don't seem to have been included. Here they are:
(1) http://www.ocregister.com/news/sea-306217-climate-temperatures.html
(2) http://www.grist.org/article/antarctic-ice-is-growing
@ Iapogus If only the Japanese nuclear industry and earth scientists had been a little more realistic about the chances of a 10m tsunami, which in that part of the world are not uncommon.
....it would have cost more money but made no difference.
How many deaths were there as a result of a nuclear accident? None. How many deaths were there as a result of buildings collapsing, utilities failing, etc? All of them.
Thus the villains are the people who built those, not the people whose nuclear plant didn't kill anyone. The analogy to CAGW catastrophism is exact. Rather than peeing away squillions on a sure-to-fail attempt at lowering the sea level by 1mm over 100 years, or whatever, it makes more sense, saves more lives and costs less money to provide everyone with clean water, free vaccines, and fuel made, via Fischer-Tropsch pyrolysis, out of surplus Greenpeace employees (i.e. all of them).
"Now that's funny, because I read just this morning that Antarctic Sea ice is at an all-time high."
I have a layperson's poster of this issue here.
I did the same thing for sea level here.
@ Stirling English
I was referring to Dr James Martin as the ex-IBMer, where he was an employee before branching out on his own lucrative career. It is all described in one of the links. I was unaware that Crispin Tickell had any non-exec connection with IBM. I am aware that IBM employs and employed many talented people - I had many dealings with them in days long gone by.
Mark X. That OC Register article has interesting details, but it's main contention is hogwash. Didn't you see the quotes claiming that the warming trend that started in the '70s is accelerating?
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Bingo Kim! The OC Register article shows the real state of the science. You and others here blindly dismiss everything except the one sentence toward the end on Antarctic sea ice that seems to say what you want to believe. The second link explains clearly explains that Martin is likely correct that the Antarctic as a whole is losing ice volume. You didn't notice that Antarctic sea ice is not the same as Antarctic ice. That's because of the blinders you are wearing. Sadly you probably are not able to take them off. But maybe some open minded person happening along here will read this and gain some insight into the psychology of denial.
ScientistForTruth :
I'm glad to see that our host seems to have stopped enforcing the Godwin rule. Discussion of the views of people like Martin (or the ghastly Warnock) is dramatically inhibited if relevant historical analogies and precedents are ruled verboten.