Bishop Hill Dear old George
Sep 19, 2013 Climate: Models Dear old George Monbiot has reentered the climate fray - I somehow missed this at the start of the week. It seems like an eternity since he last graced us with his presence, but readers looking for amusement will be pleased to hear that his gratingly sanctimonious style has altered not a bit in the interim.
George's ire has been piqued by the temerity of David Davies, the Tory MP who led the motion against the Climate Change Act in the House of Commons last week. George, in common with the Labour MPs who spoke that day, spends a lot of time ranting about conspiracy theorists, while signally avoiding the fact that the only people who ever mention conspiracies are those, like him, who are obsessed with the idea of fossil-fuel-funded denialist devil-men (Or is green lizards controlling our brains? It's hard to keep up sometimes).
Anyway, George, linking to the AR4 summary for policymakers, tells us that the evidence that the warming at the end of the twentieth century was manmade is "impressive". I think this means that, like his rhetoric, George's understanding of the science has moved on not a jot since 2007.
I think he needs to Google terms like "pause" and "natural variation" and "OMG how do we explain this away?"
Reader Comments (72)
kellydown
I would imagine it is largely due to it being unproven, with no scientific evidence!!
Robin Guenier Re: Private Eye
True there has been the very odd piece in the "Old Sparky" column which takes a pot shot at wind farms and subsidies. I get the feeling that some columnists are indulged in being off-message on various subjects, but the rest of the mag, presumably more in line with Hislop's thinking, is relentlessly CAGW. The last few issues have seen obsessively anti-fracking articles reaching an absurd number. I doubt they ever had the density of anti-Robert Maxwell articles in a year than they have had anti-Cuadrilla pieces over the last couple of mionths.
"the kiddies of SS"
Is that why they like the uniform?
Re Private Eye, I get the impression that 'Old Sparky' is grabbing the topic more by the throat lately and, of course, where govt. corruption is exposed, even Hislop has to take notice. As with Cameron, unfortunately, the wife is the power behind the throne...
George opines that, "with a heavy heart, I find myself going in again".
A lightening wallet, more like.
Comrade geoffchambers
Thanks for reminding. That article was the last Monbiot piece I looked at. Here is how it begins:
That is exactly when I stopped reading him and I've never been back. Really, that was an assault on my intelligence. He fancies himself to be an illusionist of sorts like Mandrake the Magician. A gaze into the eye, a clap of fingers, an abracadabra, and voila!, credibility restored. With some assistance from a 'severe weather specialist' and the Climate Doomsday Cult Special Psychological Operations Squad, truth be told.
Honestly, I have never read Monbiot after that and I never will again. I am counting on you to report if he says anything of substance.
Is it true that GM is related to Nigel Lawson?
'Campaign Against Climate Change'....
I thought we were all agreed that the climate was changing all the time - or is Moonbat not 'delighted' that there's been no change for 16/17 years..?
Surely he should be, by definition...!
Does anyone remember those "George is watching you" posters which went up about 5 or 6 years ago? I vividly remember one on the Holloway Road, nearby to where I then lived. They featured his enormous threatening spectacles. I guess at the time he was set to be the high priest of Global Warming in the UK.
The campaign didn't last long. I wondered at the time who was paying for it. I also thought that either someone had not read "1984" or had seriously misunderstood it.
They know that they don't have to follow George. They don't have to follow anyone. They are all individuals...
Apologies if anyone sees this twice. It is funny.
Monbiot’s metamorphosis - Brendan O'Neil
George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and predictor of the world’s end, has undergone a metamorphosis of Kafkaesque proportions in recent years. Never mind poor Gregor Samsa, who awoke one morning to find himself transmogrified into a monstrous insect; Monbiot has made an even more remarkable cross-species leap. Some time during the past five years he went to bed an hysteric, the closest thing Britain had to a nutty Nostradamus, and awoke to find himself labelled a man of reason, a ‘defender of truth’ no less, who is praised on the dust-jacket of his latest book for possessing a ‘dazzling command of science’ (only by Naomi Klein, admittedly, but still).
How has this happened? How is it that Monbiot, who still writes the same old apocalyptic nonsense (think Book of Revelations but without the hot pokers or sex), can now pose – more than that, be hailed – as a scientific visionary? His metamorphosis from green-tinted despiser of all things modern to man with a dazzling command of science reveals a great deal about the politics of environmentalism, and how it has added a gloss of ‘scientific fact’ to long-standing middle-class prejudices against mass modern society.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5479/
More Monbiot funnies
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/monbiot/other.xhtml
Spoof monbiot on twitter.
I Monbiot @ecofst
Thanks all for some priceless links.
John Mason is a Welsh geologist and former neighbour of George, who comments at the Guardian as JohntheRock. He turned up in the SkepticalScience Treehouse Files boasting abut his close contact with the Moonbat - a sort of Boswell to George’s Johnson. One night they both got plastered and started musing about how to organise a triage when things get bad and they would have to choose who gets a place in the lifeboat.sHx (Sep 20, 2013 at 12:14 PM) quotes George as saying:
The Rapid Response Team is John Abraham, who plays Laurel to Nuccitelli’s Hardy at Guardian Environment when the science gets too hard for the regular environmental correspondents (i.e. about twice a week), plus Scott “big knickers” Mandia. Abraham, who teaches engineering in some religious institution, got his big break when George sang the praises of his 80 minute audio ramble supposedly refuting Monckton, in which he spoke of having “consulted several expert polar bears”.
Sep 20, 2013 at 1:03 PM | John
Is that a leading question?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3600613/
The skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg in his 2007 book, " Cool it " quotes George Monbiot writing in 2006, " If our governments decide that climate change is an issue as urgent as the international crisis in 1941 - in my view a reasonable comparison - they could turn the economy around on a sixpence. Planning objections would be ignored, incentives and regulations would be used to make companies move as swiftly as General Motors and Ford responded to the war.
Wind farms, power lines and nuclear power stations - if this is what we want - could all be built in much less than a decade "
Well I agree with George Monbiot about the need to build more nuclear power stations but maybe his ardor for wind farms would blow cold if he read the , " Limitations of ' renewable ' energy " by Leo Smith MA ( electrical sciences ) .
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf
sHx yesn GM does have a habit of coming out with such 'stories ' oddly he can never back them up with evidenced .
If you want classic Monbat find the blog he wrote for CIF a piece of research on bee's , only for its author to turn up below the line and take GM to bits as clearly never having read it or simply not understanding it , bluster, followed by denial followed by below the line deleting to cover his face.
Or the all time classic , 'people who fly are like paedophiles', written shortly before Monbat went on a North American book selling tour , oddly Monbat never told us if that meant he has like a paedophiles and repeating Monbat's own words on this subject WILL GET you post deleted at least .
geoffchambers
Comrade, you'll make a great NKVD archivist when the revolution comes.
KNR
Thanks. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Just don't overdo it. Copyright issues.
Monbiot is a total irrelevance. As is that worthless rag he writes in.
The title of Monbiot's piece is
Monbiot assumes that the catastrophic global warming hypothesis is a truth that can be easily verified by some simple physics. Anyone who has studied the subject will quickly realise that is not the case. It is far from a closed question that can be determined by experiment and/or existing data. It is instead a prediction about the future for which (if the hypothesis is true) will only be shown by faint signals in the existing data, in amongst possibly stronger signals from natural variability. By comparing with a proposition that is easy to demonstrate by a variety of means(the earth is an imperfect sphere), Monbiot side-steps the need to consider the real scientific issues in establishing the case for global warming.
Do you think the Hattians killed their Priests, just before they scattered?
"Between the 13th and 11th centuries BCE, most Greek Bronze Age Palatial centers were destroyed and/orabandoned. The following centuries were typi
fi
ed by low population levels. Data from oxygen-isotopespeleothems, stable carbon isotopes, alkenone-derived sea surface temperatures, and changes in warm-species dinocysts and formanifera in the Mediterranean indicate that the Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze Age. A sharp increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures preceded the collapse of Palatial centers, a sharp decrease occurred during their abandonment. Mediterranean Sea surface temperatures cooled rapidly during the Late Bronze Age, limiting freshwater flux into the atmosphere and thus reducing precipitation over land. These climatic changes could have affected Palatial centers that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural productivity. Declines in agricultural production would have made higher-density populations in Palatial centers unsustainable. The Greek Dark Ages that followed occurred during prolonged arid conditions that lasted until the Roman Warm Period"
http://www.academia.edu/1411970/The_Influence_of_Climatic_Change_on_the_Late_Bronze_Age_Collapse_and_the_Greek_Dark_Ages
Monbiot was on the risible 'Bremner's One Question Quiz' on Radio 4 today. I tuned in not knowing he was on and managed to withstand approximately one minute of his nonsense.
This answers the question as to why the head of BBC comedy was at the infamous 28gate meeting. As with all the best propaganda, the message has to be pushed out via all means.
Handed a copy of the Guardian, he was told "Just read this, it's all in there"
Sep 20, 2013 at 6:15 AM | Unregistered CommenterAsmilwho
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Michael Buerke, I believe?