Guilty men

Guido Fawkes, the UK's biggest blog, has written something about a new pamphlet entitled "Guilty Men". Although Guido's piece is mainly about Euroscepticism, in the red text he uses to emphasise his take home points at the end of his pieces, is this sentence about global warming:

Though this isn’t referred to in the text, it occurs to Guido that many of the same guilty men are currently making the same kind of hysterical claims about global warming.

Comments

[RB]

And of course Huhne is the best example. He expended much effort telling us back then that it was folly not to join the euro - that we would rue the day if we did not since the eurozone would leave us behind. He did so in his inimitable way, usually by sneering at the intellectual capacity of those who didn't agree with him.

Look where we are now. Not a hint of a squeak of humility from Huhne about the euro - he was wrong, completely, for years.

And now hear him on climate change.

[PFM]

I would dearly love the CPS to prosecute this vile man Huhne. He deserves to be banged up. This, of course, would not preclude him from cabinet duties, as there are onr or two proven crooks in there anyway - Mzzz Spelperson for one.

[Rick Bradford]

Contrast this with the way that particle physicists are conducting themselves:

Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the Guardian: "We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never a discovery until other people confirm it.

"When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn't think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors.

"If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out."

The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with their own experiments.

The key is humility, which is entirely lacking in political (and much of climate change) circles.

[Nicholas Hallam]

Guido's or rather Oborne's List:

Andrew Rawnsley, Chris Patten, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke, Charles Kennedy, Danny Alexander, Niall FitzGerald, Adair Turner and David Simon.

Many or all of these may be supporters of AGW, but I would not place them in the vanguard. I think it works better the other way round: many of those most hostile to Economic and Monetary Union are also unimpressed by the case for AGW: eg. Booker, Monckton, Lawson, North, Delingpole

[matthu]

I had independently confirmed this myself yesterday when pesadia (in unthreaded) drew our attention to the parallels between the Telegraph article on The Great Euro Swindle

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/8780075/The-great-euro-swindle.html

and climate change:

The paper waged a vendetta against those who warned that the euro would not work.

[ the Guardian and The Independent do the same against climate change deniers ]

BBC broadcasters tended to present the pro-euro position itself as centre ground, thus defining even moderately Eurosceptic voices as extreme.

[ BBC does the same on climate change ]

Eurosceptics were too rarely given time to state their reasons for favouring sterling.

[ BBC does not report anti-consensus argument on climate change any more ]

"The whole ethos of the BBC and all the staff was that Eurosceptics were xenophobes."

[ Climate change deniers are broadly likened to Nazis and flat-earthers. Peter Sissons has catalogued how any challenge to the 'fact' of climate change is treated as heresy. ]

The problem is that the BBC cannot be trusted not to become part of a partisan propaganda operation: just look at the membership of the BBC Trust. Both its chairman, Lord Patten, and the vice-chairman, Diane Coyle, took a heavily partisan position in the euro debate.

[Patten tours around telling business leaders the greatest challenge we face is climate change. ]

The facts concerning Lord Patten are well known, but we have unearthed very troubling evidence of bias concerning Ms Coyle as economics writer for the Independent 10 years ago

[ Diane Coyle has written a book where she describes how climate change threatens major global disruption ]

By the mid-1990s a small clique of large corporations were firmly in control, and they had the director general they wanted in Adair (now Lord) Turner ... claimed an overwhelming majority of British businessmen backed the single currency – a vital propaganda tool for pro-euro campaigners.

[Lord Adair Turner is Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change ]

[Matt Ridley]

Peter Jay's foreword, as extracted in the Times, includes these two paragraphs.

A pathology of mind, a kind of group dementia, progressively blinded much of the elite, who should have known better, to the nature of the betrayal they were perpetrating. They were, in most cases, able and sincere. They just did not understand what they were doing.

Those who after 1950 worked to deliver their country into the hands of a foreign power were not individually wicked or vile, but there was something diabolical about the combined arrogance and dirty tricks deployed by the Europhile establishment against anyone who refused to profess the new faith. It was, my father Douglas told me, an exact rerun of the appeasement period in the 1930s when dissent was greeted with suffocating ostracism and personal calumny.

[Barry Woods]

As he deleted my comment awhile ago, never made it past moderation.. I have no time for Guido Fawkes

[lapogus]

Matthu - Yes, I read the Telegraph article after Pesadia kindly linked to it, the parallels are indeed remarkable.

[Viv Evans]

Guido's remark hits the spot - isn't it clear by now that most of our despicable 'green' policies come from Brussels?
So why should we be surprised that the Europhiles are also cAGW-philes? And why should we be surprised that our climate 'scientists' try to make their science look to support EU 'green policies'? After all, that's where the money for their fundings, and for a large number of AGW-pushing NGOs come from ...

[Robinson]

Yes I read Guido the other day and that paragraph stood out. I believe Mr Staines hasn't really been too bothered by AGW before, having a "whatever" kind-of attitude. But now the political implications are starting to bite (30% increase in bills to cover Green initiatives for example, and a general hatred of Chris Huhne), he's becoming more strident in tone. I can see this happening across the board actually. There has been a subtle shift in the Zeitgeist.

[Robinson]

By the way, if you want to buy Guilty Men (only a tenner), it's here.

Centre for Policy Studies

Peter Obourne is probably one of the best essayists around at the moment.

[Rhoda]

Barry, what the h.. do you have to do to get a comment rejected at Guido's?

[Redbone]

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

This is how science is done. Compare that with AGW and the hoax is crystal clear.

Source - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

[golf charley]

Barry Woods, nobody likes taxmen, but they brought down Al Capone.

The political backlash against AGW, particularly as world economies are on their knees is starting. Australia, Canada, USA and now hopefully the UK aswell, could all swing violently against the greens within 18 months, irrespective of any revelations from Mann

[Peter Stroud]

As usual Guido is right. However the CAGW myth is also preached by some Tory Eurosceptics.

[Barry Woods]

Oh ... I've been totally coninced energy policy will bring about. The end of the cagw delusion,for some time.. ie keeping the lights on, engineering reality vs green wishful thinking.

!s for guido i merely pointed out his, example of no snow predictions byViner, was old news, and been talked about for over a year on sceptical blogs..

Presumably that was too much for his ego to contend with

[Petrodini]

I (think) I have just heard on the BBC news that certain scientists think they have discovered particles that appear to travel faster than the speed of light.
They are now (according to the news report), asking other scientists to check their findings and see if they have made any mistakes in their observations.
Shame the Global Warming Brigade have not had the same approach eh?…

[Hoi Polloi]

Many or all of these may be supporters of AGW, but I would not place them in the vanguard.

These are opportunistic politician. They're parasites who live on other life systems and ideas.

[stun]

OT

Barry, moderation on Guido's site is automated i,e, irrespective of your views. The algorithms are bizarre, for example modding out any occurrence of 'pea' in any word such that the word 'appear' will cause the post not to get through. Other banned words are either of Guido's real names (Paul Staines), bankrupt (he was at one stage), drive (he was banned) and price (no idea why). Comically, the most offensive word for a woman's genitalia is automatically converted to 'Huhne' by the site's modbot.

[ben]

Rick Bradford: Yes, I had the very same thought. The contrast with climate science is striking: the implied rigour, overt desire for truth. the language, the openness to replication and testing by others. I imagine physics is vastly more difficult than climate science but physicists daily thank god/gaia/juju that their field has none of the politicisation of climate science.

[3x2]

(matthu Sep 23, 2011 at 9:19 AM)

Spooky. On the bright side the Telegraph won't need to change much when it gets around to reporting the great climate swindle.