Bishop Hill Bengtsson and the left
May 15, 2014 Bureaucrats Climate: Sceptics As Judy Curry notes, the Bengtsson affair is going to be very damaging for the climatology profession. From the press reports today it seems clear that Bengtsson was threatened with ostracisation from the rest of the "community" because of his temerity in offering to provide scientific advice to GWPF. It seems that at least one climatologist demanded that his name be removed from a forthcoming joint paper with Bengtsson.
As a result, the word "McCarthyism" has been bandied about. The behaviour of climatologists does not carry an official stamp of course (although I can't say I've noticed any protests from Ed Davey either) but the effects look rather similar: you toe the line or you will be cut off. A senior scientist like Bengtsson could perhaps consider carrying on regardless - hard, but not impossible. For a younger scientist it would of course be the end of their career.
And all for what? Because he wanted to join the Academic Advisory Council of GWPF? And what is the problem with GWPF exactly? Over at Marcel Crok's blog the theory is advanced by commenter "Neven" that GWPF is a group of "old, white, male, free market fundamentalists". On the face of it, this idea is scarcely worth our time: a scan of the GWPF Board of Trustees shows that it includes Lord Donoughue (Labour) and Baroness Nicolson (LibDem); hardly the free-market jihadis of Neven's fevered imagination (and I believe that the word "baroness" is traditionally associated with people who are women).
But despite Neven's idea being silly, I think they really are the reason that so many scientists object to GWPF. To many in academia, being right-wing or (horrors) in favour of free markets is anathema - just listen to anything said on the subject by Paul Nurse. But Nigel Lawson is, in their minds, something else, being closely associated with the right-wing triumphs of the 1980s. In the academy such connections amount to being the devil incarnate, but on steroids. I think many academics just lose the plot entirely when they see his name in print. I was told the story of a sceptic who was having an exchange of emails on a largely unrelated matter with a prominent (non-climate) scientist; an FRS, no less. During the exchange, he mentioned that he had once been in contact with Lawson. The scientist in question said that if that was the case then their correspondence must cease forthwith and he cut off all contact. In similar style, one of Bergtsson's tormentors compared the GWPF to the Ku Klux Klan. It's that hateful, that crazy. And governments take advice from people with views like this.
Still in the comments at Marcel's site, Roddy Campbell muses on Neven's ideas:
I’ve rarely seen it so clearly expressed that those who object to the GWPF and other libertarian / liberal economics think tanks on climate and related issues – whether the physical science, the impacts science, the policy, the inter-geographical and inter-generational ethics, the importance of GDP versus other things, the economics, the discount rate, the ability to forecast the future, risk, precautionary principle – often / generally / usually / primarily object to wholly non-climate issues – their political grounding.
Neven seems to have a fundamental political objection to the GWPF, and any argument or expression of reason they might make. He believes that they are primarily in existence for the reason he gives – to defend laissez-faire capitalism, their status quo.
Interesting.
I’m musing on whether that is symmetrical, and I don’t think so – as a capitalist middle-aged white western male I have no such feeling towards WWF or Greenpeace or left-wing think tanks. I enjoy their thoughts and the debate.
Would I send Matt Ridley abusive comms if he became connected to such a body? Of course not – it would be really interesting to find out how he got on, and who converted who and on what issues.
There is a fundamental difference in my view. Right-wingers think that lefties are wrong. Well-meaning perhaps, but guilty only of a failure to think things through properly and of putting feeling good about themselves ahead of the good of others. So if Matt Ridley suddenly took a Marxist turn, I think Roddy would wonder about the possibility that age had got the better of him but wouldn't even think of ostracising him. The friendship would endure.
To a lefty, however, *most right wingers are evil (eeevillll!!!). And when you see an evil person it is of course quite natural to have nothing more to do with them or indeed with anyone who associates with them. Ostracisation is the correct thing, the moral thing to do. So here we see why universities - and indeed all public and third sector organisations - are so overwhelmingly left-wing: it is simply that *many left-wing people are free to ostracise and to blacklist those whose political views they disapprove of. I think this must be why so many charities set up by fervent right-wingers soon end up funding left-wing causes. It's not a conspiracy - it's just a reflection of the way *many left-wing people see right-wing people.
In private sector organisations the situation is rather different. Here there is a profit motive, which forces people to focus on an external objective - making customers happy and making profits. People of different political (or religious) views are forced to work together; what divides them becomes less important than the thing that unites them. If people end up being employed (or frozen out) because of their political beliefs, the business suffers a huge competitive disadvantage and is weeded out by the competition.
What I am saying is that we should not be surprised by what happened to Bengtsson. It is a reflection of the way people on the left behave. The unpleasant results are simply inevitable.
There's a corollary to all this. If scientists (and everything else that comes out of the university system) is overwhelmingly left-wing and, if we accept what I've written above, will always be so, where does this leave evidence-based policy? In a politicised subject such as climatology, I'd posit that it is left in tatters.
Updated 19.33, 15 May 2014 by Bishop Hill
* qualifications added
Reader Comments (94)
"As Judy Curry notes,"
(The link is to Climate Audit....)
That climatologist had better be prepared to answer to his/her employer why they put their politics before their science when they fancied a bit of bullying another scientist.
[BH adds: This is the public sector, nobody gives a monkey's. Also it's a university, so even if they did there are issues of academic freedom to consider]
"In private sector organisations the situation is rather different. Here there is a profit motive, which forces people to focus on an external objective - making customers happy and making profits."
This is an important distinction. You won't have a job long in the private sector if you aren't focussed on making your customers happy. Academia totally flips this around with goal being to keep yourself and even more important the grant providers happy. There is a very strong focus on how to maximise the grants coming into the institution which consumes a lot of the time.
I still don't understand what the right/left distinction really is. Are we saying left wing people don't buy something for as cheap as they can find on Amazon (ie the free market in action)
Andrew Montford wrote, "In private sector organisations the situation is rather different. Here there is a profit motive, which forces people to focus on an external objective - making customers happy and making profits."
Profit is an objective way of measuring success. Public sector organisations' success is objectively measured how?
This is rather a lot to squeeze out of one ignorant blog comment. Neven's reference to "old, white, male, free market fundamentalists" is simply parrotting the standard US liberal criticism of Republican party ideologists.
Your statements: “To a lefty, however, right wingers are evil” and “it is simply that left-wing people are free to ostracise and to blacklist those whose political views they disapprove of” are unwanted generalisations that simply mirror the prejudices of the kind of shallow lefty you are criticising. This is a pity, because the point you are making is a good one: that the structures of the social groups we work in influence our attitudes. This is a fundamental insight of sociology, largely due to one Karl Marx. Sociology is usually thought of as a lefty activity, but there is no reason a rightwing libertarian shouldn't practice it, once he gets over the idea that there is no such thing as society.
If you want an analysis of why some lefties are so unpleasantly priggish about conservatives, I'd suggest starting with the undeniable fact that the right, within living memory, was infested with people whose views on race, feminism and sexuality were absolutely unacceptable. They've mostly disappeared, at least from civilised circles, but the memory lingers. Add the undoubted failures of the left (I'm talking about Wilson and Blair, not Brezhnev and Mao) and you can see why some silly lefties like to pick an easy target. Neven attacks his straw man head-on. Sir Paul Nurse and the left-wing academic establishment are a bit different, and will require a more profound analysis than this.
Given the fallen nature of man, all of us are capable of evil. Nevertheless, what political groups promote jealousy, envy, lust, greed and violence (yes, greed here does not mean what most people who use the word think it means) while also seeking the power to enslave their fellow man? /rhetorical. Yes, the Political Left is evil.
I think you have a point. The hatred of Thatcher went far deeper than anger about policies.
BBC news, itself staffed by left wingers, displays plenty of examples of this venom and hatred when they cherry pick people to complain about benefit cuts.
Even the science programme, "The life scientific" has devoted a programme to an academic of the type we are discussing here.
Perhaps it would help matters if we massively reduced the number of people advancing their causes at the expense of the taxpayer.
Speed (May 15, 2014 at 5:30 PM)
It depends on the organisation. The success of socialised medical care is measured by life expectancy (higher in Europe than in in the USA) free education is measured by literacy and similar measures (better in Eastern Europe than in capitalist countries with a similar standard of living) and so on."And what is the problem with GWPF exactly?"
Is the "problem" no more than, "You are either with us or agin us"??
"Bengtsson could perhaps consider carrying on regardless - hard, but not impossible"
He is not an young man and stress at his age could have health problems as he mentioned himself.
Wow! You guys don't think there is a profit motive in Climate Science - funded almost entirely by the government? Here in the US, we have the incumbent administration publishing an assessment of the climate which asserts that there is a scientific basis for a whole raft of afflictions.
And we have a possible co-perpetrator of this assessment discovering that a collaborator of his on a paper has gone over to the enemy? And you don't think he's going to respond vigorously lest his bread is intercepted on its way to his table?
Of course it's political.. And GWPF is not political? (Political is OK with me so long as people don't try to pretend it isn't.)
Of course all the noise would be from the US. We're good at it. Wee signal in lots of noise. SNR ~= 0
I mostly subscribe to Nick Stokes' take on this thing, which succinctly is "We don't know enough to draw the inferences we're spinning out."
Think about this:
After the news of his new association gets loose, Bengtsson receives an email from someone he respects who suggests that he will lose credibility where he needs it most, among his peers, if he persists with the GWPF relationship.
The someone continues; "Although they do publish solid stuff from time to time, the also "sex" it up for public consumption - Lennart, something that certainly isn't your style - sort of spoils what they are trying to do."
So Bengtsson writes a note saying that he's been bombarded with all manner of verbal assault and concern and doesn't think he's up to the long-haul storm. He can't very well say that he's been advised by people he respects that GWPF isn't held in the regard he might have thought, can he?
Given what we actually know and certainly without intending to suggest that Bengtsson is being disingenuous here - yah, I know it looks like that's what I'm saying, but none of us really knows the guy - there could be other ways to see what is happening.
For a site where we all value the sort of "show me your facts" approach which would be fundamental to a scientific endeavour, it's hard to understand why so many people are beating up Nick for doing just that.
Schrodinger's Cat (May 15, 2014 at 5:43 PM)
Not necessarily. She lied her way to power by promising to bring down unemployment and inflation, then deliberately put the cost of living up with a huge VAT increase, and used the North Sea Oil windfall to encourage a 30% overvaluation of sterling, which destroyed the competitivity of British industry and drove unemployment up to 3 million, all to put pressure on the unions. Those are pretty good reasons to be angry.Of course, your average punk, unemployed carworker, or beggar in central London was unaware of these subtleties, and tended to blame the lady herself.
Geoff, are you hanging the whole of 20th century racism, sexism and that other thing on the right? Do you think trade unions didn't try to keep out women and blacks? I really will not do, it is revisionism. I'd risk guessing that for most of the population present attitudes are more to do with fashion and peer pressure than with a universal moral truth. Go along to get along and all that.
My observation is that leftist folks think they are not only correct, but they are good and therefore anybody with a contrary opinion must be not only wrong but wicked. Must secretly know the truth but deny it for selfish purposes. That's why we can't get on.
I think what we are seeing here is a ground-shifting challenge to an orthodoxy, overwhelmingly left-wing, overwhelmingly convinced that its is right, overwhelmingly convinced that it is confronted by a stale, worn-out right-wing/free-market establishment that requires only a further push or two to send it spinning into oblivion.
Since at least the late 60s, this is a view of the world that has triumphed across the West, Thatcher and Reagan aside (which is why they were so demonised).
Climate change/global warming seemed to provide the ultimate, unanswerable proof that this was indeed the only 'correct' way to view the activities of western societies: that their short-term pursuit of profit was poised to render the entire world uninhabitable.
Unfortunately, the wagon to which they so enthusiastically hitched themselves – and in the name of unanswerable science, to boot – has turned out to have wheels that don't turn, horses that won't pull, and seats that consistently collapse.
Predictably, a certain desperation is in the air. No less predictably, the faithful fall back on the default position of all left-wing movements: the silencing of opponents.
Long way to go yet. But the Bengtsson affair may yet prove the key turning point, when the righteous are revealed as the bigots they undoubtedly are.
50 years' ago, Carl Sagan assumed that a planet's surface emits net IR energy to its atmosphere at the same rate it would to a sink at absolute zero. This was to misinterpret 'Irradiance', what you get from a single S-B equation, with real net IR flux, the difference of two S-B equations.
His incorrect physics has been taught in Atmospheric Science ever since, including to Lindzen and Bengtsson. It's not a hoax. instead it's bad physics not taught in engineering and the hard sciences. The problem is that Sagan wasn't able to do the experiments on Venus to prove his point and everyone since has assumed he as right. Now we see the real data and these eminent successors are saying to themselves 'Something is wrong', but then the money stops......
I agree with you on many things Bishop, which is why I read this blog. But left-wingers are as a rule nastier humans than right-wingers? That's surely tosh.
michael hart
With respect, you seem to have by-passed the whole point. Whoever the (so far) anonymous scientist is who has demanded his name be removed from Bengtsson's paper, the most likely response from his employer is likely to be "good on you, mate!"
This is precisely the argument that Andrew and others (myself included) has been making for a long time. Almost the entire academic mindset, certainly in climate science, is that anyone who breaks ranks has "sold out" and is to be ostracised.
Note please, and especially, that Bengtsson's rationale for joining the GWPF Board was to offer them scientific advice. The climate science community don't want people like the GWPF to have good scientific advice? Is that what they're saying? Answer: that is exactly what they are saying. They don't really want anyone except their own private club to have scientific advice of any sort.
geoffchambers
Unacceptable to whom, precisely? Certainly not to the working miners of my youth that I grew up amongst.Now you know I don't like arguing with you but ...
Happy to work alongside blacks but not keen on drinking with them or having their daughter marry one.
Never happy to see their wives go out to work.
And as for their views on qu**rs and po*****s. Whoops!
It was and still is the bien-pensant pseudo-intellectual left that always found the forthrightness of the working classes just a touch distasteful and successfully set about remoulding their behaviour in its own image. The most recent example is, of course, gay marriage which was driven entirely from the "top". There was no grass roots movement for such a revolutionary change to the accepted social order.*
And if you don't believe me, try listening to any Tory or even Lib-Dem or more especially Farage try to get half a word in edgeways in any programme with one of the prissy left on the panel and see how long before you yell "STFU, woman, and let someone else have a say".
The difference has always been that "The Left" sees man as redeemable if only they can get their hands on him while "The Right" knows that man is fallible and you just have to work with the material you've got. So The Right shrug their shoulders and get on with doing what they believe to be best; The Left gets all uptight because they know what is best for everybody and if you can't see it their way you are evil.
QED, I'm afraid.
*Try listening to Alex Glasgow's My Daddy is a Left-wing Intellectual. He skewers them nicely!
If "his temerity in offering to provide scientific advice to GWPF" was the problem, where does that leave Nursey's offer to explain the "science" to the GWPF?
Also, if he was supposed to be at least lukewarm, would'nt the alarmist view it as having one of their own within GWPF? If, say, Matt Ridley was asked to advise Greenpeace we would probably take that as a positive sign.
Something still seems out of balance. From comments here, there does not seem to be any corroboration yet. There must be more to be disclosed.
An Idea for Josh.
KKK with green bed sheets and a burning hockey stick
strange fruit cakes
I think the Bish is right about some kind of asymettry between left and right but it's hard to pin down - and perhaps dangerous to our fragile unity to try! So this is meant as suggestive only. Ten days ago I happened in the early hours on 'Dave' on a repeat of this programme, originally made for BBC Two:
The infamous Road of Bones to Magadan - that even I had forgotten about. Magadan and Kolyma are names I would never forget. But compare with Auschwitz or Belsen. The right did those. The left did Kolyma. The fact it was never uncovered and mourned in the same way, with movie crews present - the Americans brought Hitchcock over to preserve a record of the horrors in 1945, did they not? - is I think one explanation for the easy moral superiority.
Byrne and Parsons were indeed out of their depth as they visited one tiny museum and heard about the ordinary people whose bones they had been driving over. Some worked to death as slaves just for making a joke about Comrade Stalin. Standup comedy was harder in those days. But how could they possibly communicate any of that on their return?
There are other, much more positive things in the roots of the left in places like Britain. But this is what came to me on reading this thread.
geoffchambers
"The success of socialised medical care is measured by life expectancy (higher in Europe than in in the USA)"
You have written swathes of nonsense today that seem to be solely the result of your rather teenage prejudices, but this one is pure ignorance.
The causes of lower life expectancy in the US are complex and subtle - for example higher infant mortality is the result of low birth weight babies which is the result of fertility treatments.
But then somebody who claims Thatcher "lied" about employment and inflation obviously has no interest in facts.
"If scientists (and everything else that comes out of the university system) is overwhelmingly left-wing and, if we accept what I've written above, will always be so, where does this leave evidence-based policy? In a politicised subject such as climatology, I'd posit that it is left in tatters."
There is no such thing as 'evidence-based policy' re climate/energy. The lunatics, as you say, are not just in charge of the asylum, they run everything. There's no solution without turning off the money spigot that keeps them going: Government. Wherever there is authority over others they will seize the levers of power and fund their lunatic schemes.
"I’m musing on whether that is symmetrical, and I don’t think so – as a capitalist middle-aged white western male I have no such feeling towards WWF or Greenpeace or left-wing think tanks. I enjoy their thoughts and the debate".
Oh dear, Bishop, would that I could be as open-minded as you. I rub along with most people, but draw the line at Greenpeace, WWF and FoE, if only because of their past disingenuous behaviour.
Academics are overwhelmingly 'left wing' because their inflated, sensitive egos are what motivated them to gain the required credentials in the pursuit of intellectual status in the first place.
Most people feel pretty chuffed to get a PhD. When your typical 'lefty' gets a PhD he thinks he's god. That's quite a motive to get one.
I use left wing/lefty here in a loose sense. The left/right divide is about psychology, not ideology.
"This is rather a lot to squeeze out of one ignorant blog comment. Neven's reference to "old, white, male, free market fundamentalists" is simply parrotting the standard US liberal criticism of Republican party ideologists."
Indeed. And it shows the critic to be an ageist, racist, sexist idealogue, which is where the Democrat party has been for a while. It's odd - I suspect that in 50 years time we're going to look back on this as we look back on the racist, sexist, etc. attitudes of 50 years ago.
"If you want an analysis of why some lefties are so unpleasantly priggish about conservatives, I'd suggest starting with the undeniable fact that the right, within living memory, was infested with people whose views on race, feminism and sexuality were absolutely unacceptable."
Which ones are you thinking of? There's a lot of historical revisionism about this point, and while I would tend to agree that pretty much *everyone* - both left and right - held what we would consider 'politically incorrect' views in the past about race and sex that would be verboten now, that the worst were often left-wing groups that have since been dubbed 'right wing' by certain academics. It's a relative term, of course, and it might fairly be argued that with respect to these academics they might well have been. The terminology shifts meaning regualrly to match the political fashions of the day.
"Of course, your average punk, unemployed carworker, or beggar in central London was unaware of these subtleties, and tended to blame the lady herself."
They hated her because she destroyed the unions just at the point where they had almost achieved victory, because she promoted individuals earning and keeping their own money over the politics of entitlement and redistribution (what they called 'greed'), and because by selling off council houses to the poor she sabotaged the dependency of the left's base of the permanent poor on State support. Also because unemployment rocketed, and she was less than sympathetic about it. They hated not only the consequences of her policies, but also the fact of their increased popularity - she put ideas into common political discourse that had previously been anathema to the left. She was not much more popular on the traditional right, either, who regarded 'yuppies' and the new rich as vulgar - an encroachment of the lower classes into their previously exclusive, refined cultural preserve. Ironically enough, it was the right who destroyed her in the end.
But arguments about Maggie commonly become even more vitriolic as arguments about climate change, so perhaps it's best not to go there.
"But compare with Auschwitz or Belsen. The right did those."
You mean the left, I think? Or is this another topic best left alone?
Right wing capitalism has been every bit as nasty in its time as the stories say and it needs leftyness to reign it in every now and then but handing the power over to those who want to engineer a better future is worse. People just don’t have the natural fairness and hard work in them that that structure demands. Maybe one day? Mutual greed is the best we’ve got right now. Moreover, people know it. I’ve mentioned before a BBC programme that wondered were all the British red crusaders were who should have surged forward in the wake of the financial crisis. Trying to pay their mortgages and thanking their stars that they weren’t Greece, Spain or Ireland. If the revolution wasn’t spawned by the crash, it’s not coming back any time soon.
And that’s where warmists need to grow up. Their ever hopeful theory that the common man is going to demand action on AGW isn’t going to happen. If they ever want things to change then the Lord Lawsons and Koch Brothers of this world are exactly the sort of people they will have to mobilise. Throwing insults about and acting like mining union shop stewards is 180º in the wrong direction. Do they care? Apparently not because the name calling is more fun than negotiating.
Mike Jackson has it accurate on the difference in attitudes between left and right wing thinking. Left has always been about more govt so they can live your life better for you in all its facets. AGW is simply a convenient horse to ride to get there.
In respect of the shaming of Bengtsson, this is exactly the thread that ran through much of the Climategate emails. advancement of "the Cause" was the hallowed goal and if you wavered in devotion, or message, the group think collective came down hard on you. They circled the wagons to partly prevent outsiders getting in but certainly to stop insiders from getting out.
The apologists said that this was taken out of context and the behaviour wasn't what it seemed.
So what excuse will they use this time?
geofchambers wrote, "The success of socialised medical care is measured by life expectancy (higher in Europe than in in the USA) ... "
Avik Roy wrote in Forbes, "Life expectancy is an appealingly simplistic, but deeply flawed, way to think about the quality of a country’s health-care system ... what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries [homicide, automobile accidents etc.] from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-americans-poor-life-expectancy/
With respect to free education, there is no such thing as free education -- there is always a cost which is often not paid by the recipient. In the United States, many not-for-profit public schools manage to stumble along spending huge sums of money without providing a very good education. For them it's the motions, not the result that counts. When outsiders try to impose accountability by testing students, the insiders (teachers, administrators) complain that "teaching to the test" is a burden and not fair.
In any case, literacy is a mighty low bar. Where I live (United States), the best education providers generally charge a high price for their services and many of these (technically) non-profit institutions have sizeable endowments freely donated by grateful recipients of a high quality education. A profit by another name.
MJ, the same possibility had certainly occurred to me. But as Nick Stokes might point out, you can't prove that.
I also part company with Andrew when he says "What I am saying is that we should not be surprised by what happened to Bengtsson. It is a reflection of the way people on the left behave."
I am not surprised either. But it is only a reflection of the way some people on the left behave. I still think that this pernicious anti-carbon dioxide meme will not be quickly despatched to where it belongs as quickly as it deserves without enlisting the understanding of people from both left and right. That is the main reason why I comment here.
Angela Merkel is a leftist? David Cameron? Zarkozy?? And all of them are "warmist".
Who are the less "warmist"? The chinese "commies" or Putin or the Hindu Govertments...
Andrew, you are criticising someone for stereotyping, and then stereotyping yourself.
And I really dont follow the argument about why unis are leftwing.
Do they feel it necessary to behave like this because they fear losing to people whose politics they hate, or are they just afflicted with dreadful manners?
But McCarthy himself was the perfect example that also the right can ostracise the evil (eeeeevil!!) left.
Good stuff up there by Nullius (6:58 PM). The left attracts some who want to help the poor, and environmentalism attracts some who want to help reduce pollution and do other good things for the natural world. So it is easy to see how decent people can be involved in either or both (there is now considerable overlap since some of the left, e.g. British Labour Party, seem to have abandoned the poor in favour of 'the environment'). But the problem, and the poison, arises because both 'movements' attract vicious, authoritarian sociopaths. All the big names in the man-made horrors of the 20th century were left-wingers. All of them: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao. Many minor ones too, including Mussolini and Castro, as well as sundry dictators in South America, Africa, and Asia. The left-wing 'intelligentsia' in, for example, the UK has also included some nasty people and nasty thinking. So, the thesis developed above by the Bish has considerable merit. The experience of Bengtsson fits my model of what hate-driven eco-zealots of the left can do. It is, to borrow a phrase from the UK Met Office, consistent with profoundly left-wing attitudes to those who dare differ from them in thought, word, or deed. It really is the 'that hateful' model being confirmed.
Who is this climate scientist? His or her identity should be uncovered so that the person concerned can be named and shamed, and given a fast of the same medicine that Bengtsson received. Wouldn't it be nice to see Delingpole and Mark Steyn have a go at the culprit?
Geoff Chambers, in Australia it was the Labor Party and the unions who championed the White Australia policy. It was the unions who wanted, and enforced, that women quit their jobs when they got married (because they were "taking jobs from men").
In the US, it was the Democrats who championed segregation in the South.
While the right wing side of politics has its own list of sins, it is simply untrue to claim that the Left has a stranglehold on moral virtue.
The problem is, the True Believers seem to be happy to trash things of real value in the interests of their faith. I fell out with a close friend of 40+ years when she found out that I was a CAGW sceptic. I would never in a million years have cut her off because we disagreed about something like this.
Bengtsson has been the target of the same sort of unthinking self-righteousness. And to those who criticise him for lack of fortitude, ponder this. He is a very old man, and elderly people (unless they are Steve McIntyre, who is an outlier) tend to lose their self-confidence in dealing with hostile or pushy people. Furthermore, not everyone has the temperament to handle hostile or pushy people in the first place. It's not a reflection on them - it's just who they are.
We may never know exactly what transpired here, except that the poor old bugger decided that he didn't want to spend his remaining years in the crucible of the climate wars. I certainly don't blame him for that.
I have read - but not verified - that 96% of contributions from the Ivy League schools went to Obama campaign. That's where the next generation of US leaders is being educated. The Club of Rome mentality prevails. We are witnessing the first fruit of this beautiful unity.
I don't see this as Right vs Left in general, even if it's obviously a right vs left right now for an accident of history. Likewise it isn't Islam bloodier than Christianity or Atheism in general, even if that's happening in our days.
I see it as Democracy vs Fascism/Totalitarianism.
A prominent Italian leftist met a friend of his and fellow member of Parliament a few years after WWII. His friend had been a fascist and still represented those nostalgic of 20 years of dictatorship. The leftist told his friend, "See? You're sitting here debating and voting for and against bills, and you are free . That's because my side won the war. If your side had won, I would be in jail. And that's all the difference".
The fascists of the Right lost everything 69 years ago with Mussolini, Hitler and the Japanese generals killing 80 million people. No such a loss for the fascists of the Left, aka Stalinists and USSR apologists in general. They're still around infesting social discourse, thereby assisted by the communal nature of leftist thought, that prevents the Democratic people on the left from completely dissociating themselves from the extremism.
Totalitarianism as the name suggests takes everything...that's why so many warmists show inhumanity to fellow humans. And behave as a bloodless mafia ready to kill research lives.
Geoff Chambers: Geoff I believe you might have this one wrong mate. I've been both left and right in my time, mostly left, but I now believe that Mrs Thatcher had it right. Bit of a loony for sure, but we'd had nigh on 30 years of union dominated workforces effing up the British economy, while the Germans, Japanese and French leap frogged us. She was the only one man enough to face the bastards down, because they no more represented decent British working class people and their aspirations than Stalin did the Soviet people. In fact we've seen the "left" in action, happy to allow mass, uncontrolled, immigration to gain votes (Blair), and who is most impacted negatively by mass, uncontrolled immigration? the British working classes, whose jobs are at risk? whose children are vying for social housing with immigrants? and whose grand-children will have to attend schools whose resources are spent dealing with children who can't speak English? The Labour party has never given a monkey's F for the working classes, they just use them and their blind loyalty to keep them in power. Miliband et al, have no empathy with working class people (of all creeds and colours) they simply use them to get voted into power so they can do "good things" with other people's money.
There is a world wide movement, it calls itself various names, but I'll use the name "progressives". Their loyalty is to the "progressive" movement, they eschew national pride, as passe, and are embarrassed by patriotism and tradition. They see themselves as kind and good people, and anyone who doesn't share their belief system as unkind and evil. They yearn to get power over us so they can do "good" things for us. They are, amongst other things, environmentalists, anxious to save the world for future generations, naturally. So if a DDT compound that can save, literally, millions of human lives is found to be slightly threatening to birds lives they are quite prepared to let millions of humans die. If there is a solution to vitamin A deficiency, but it is genetically modified, they will, and do everything in their power to stop its production and distribution, the result is two million people go blind per year half of them children, half of whom die within a year. But they're "good" and evil capitalist bastards who want to keep these children alive so they can make money from selling them goods and services are "bad".
For these people the global warming scare is the big opportunity to get their "progressive" left wing agenda foisted upon the rest of us without having the irksome task of persuading the hoi polloi through an election that they need to do it.;
That's what this thing is all about Geoff.
Omnologus, I agree. Left/Right is not a useful tool for analysing what is going on here. Indeed, those who want to control everything and everyone just gravitate to whoever is winning at the time. As it happens, the Left are currently winning the culture wars in the West (which includes CAGW), so that's where the authoritarians tend to cluster.
omnologos: fascists are always of the left. Mussolini used to be a socialist. Hitler was a proud national-socialist to the very end. Stalin was a communist. I have not studied the World War II Japan, but I doubt that a left-right symbolism applies there.
One of the basic problems of present day climate science is the unwillingness or inability of most establishment scientists to accept the blindingly obvious in the record ie at its simplest ,the present high – the MWP and the Roman maximum separated by the LIA and the Dark Ages .I suppose doing the obvious would not produce many academic papers that the IPCC could use to support its political agenda or generate much grant money or academic positions and the great boondoggle conferences of the whole IPCC circus.- to say nothing of in the UK Knighthoods Lordships -Government jobs etc etc see.
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/05/climate-forecasting-basics-for-britains.html
The entire vast UN and Government sponsored AGW behemoth with its endless labyrinthine conferences and gigantic schemes for UN global control over the World and National economies is a prime example of the disasters Eisenhower warned against in 1961 he said :
"In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite. "
Politicians were willing to forgo the trouble of thinking for themselves and forming their own commonsense views on climate so long as their paid scientists gave them scary forecasts to use to grab power and control over economic activity. This sinister symbiotic relationship enabled politicians to reward themselves ,their political friends and corporate sponsors while at the same time feeling righteous about "saving the world" Thus, with the enthusiastic assistance of the eco-left anti -capitalist movement and a supine or agenda driven MSM the CAGW delusion took over much of the Western world as a quasi religion which will not easily fade away even though, as the AR5 science section shows, it has no connection to reality.
I'm with Lefty Denier at 6:12, when he says:
"I agree with you on many things Bishop, which is why I read this blog. But left-wingers are as a rule nastier humans than right-wingers? That's surely tosh."
In the US, the hatred that comes from right wing talk shows has caused lots of people who listen to such BS to become arrogant and nasty. On a personal level, many of my friends are pretty liberal, but they do shun people who think other than they do on climate change. And -- back to the right wing -- I've also known some extremely talented and positive people who actually go to church and tend to be conservative. If I lived somewhere else than where I do, perhaps I would know more such people.
Political nastiness is getting worse and worse in the US, but it is on both sides.
Curious George - the trouble with your analysis is that it ignores human history. It is as though nothing happened before 1900.
Left/Right analysis - how would you apply it to the Roman Empire, or the Ancient Greeks, or Napoleon? You are just superimposing a model on the facts to get the "right" answer.
Now, where have we seen that before?
Very good post by the Bishop. The attack on Bengtsson seems quite politically inept cuz it draws attention to the GWPF and the thuggish tactics of the climate science thugs. The vast majority of Americans have never heard of the GWPF but they know that it is shameful to bully, scare, and intimidate a kindly old (nearly 80), white haired man just cuz the bullies have a technical disagreement with him. It is impressive that the climate science thugs fear the GWPF so much, I guess I should be paying more attention to the GWPF.
The left is great at capturing institutions using these bully boy tactics but it makes those institutions much less appealing to a normal citizen and it destroys the credibility of the captured institution as politics erodes the original mission of the institution.
Vincent Courtillot, a French geophysicist known for championing the idea that volcanic activity was responsible for many of the mass extinction events in the Earth's history, has become interested in climate change in recent years and made an interesting remark about McCarthyism (although he did not call it that) during a lecture that is available on Youtube.
Prof. Dr. Vincent Courtillot Präsentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG_7zK8ODGA
The lecture in English even though the title is in German. See the bit just 5 minutes into the lecture where Courtillot mentions that he is one of a small group of 5 scientists re-examining temperature data to see if the data support the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. Courtillot states the group does not include any students because if it did those students would never get a job. He then adds that he is not joking but is perfectly serious.
The reaction to Bengtsson joining the GWPF suggests that Courtillot was probably completely correct when he implied that postgraduate students could say goodbye to a career in science if they approached the evidence for man-made climate change with scepticism.
The experiences of Courtillot and Bengtsson also tell us everything we need to know about how the alarmists think scientific research should be conducted.
Geoff Chambers: "She lied her way to power by promising to bring down unemployment and inflation, then deliberately put the cost of living up with a huge VAT increase, and used the North Sea Oil windfall to encourage a 30% overvaluation of sterling....etc etc etc"
Of course, the alternative was more of Callaghan and the unions. And had we not had NS Oil??? C'mon, we were getting out of deep (socialist) sh*te (again) and it needed leadership. I may not have liked the lady personally but she was what was needed.
Then again, we now find ourselves on the same sceptic side of AGW/CC. That's a much bigger rock to climb and will take a lot more than a Thatcher to see off. I just hope we find one. And so do you, I guess.
May 15, 2014 at 5:37 PM | geoffchambers
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Sssshhhh. Don't mention the Fabians and Eugenics. Far worse than any right wing fancy. Odd that the Labour Party has twice been subverted by North London "intellectuals".
Not necessarily. She lied her way to power by promising to bring down unemployment and inflation, then deliberately put the cost of living up with a huge VAT increase, and used the North Sea Oil windfall to encourage a 30% overvaluation of sterling, which destroyed the competitivity of British industry and drove unemployment up to 3 million, all to put pressure on the unions. Those are pretty good reasons to be angry.
Of course, your average punk, unemployed carworker, or beggar in central London was unaware of these subtleties, and tended to blame the lady herself.
May 15, 2014 at 5:57 PM | geoffchambers
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And yet she was popular enough to be elected three times. And the views of those who voted for her are as valid of those who now revile her. That's how democracy works. I did back in the day. Now it seems to me she delivered the country a kick up the arse it was long overdue.
I think now, my problem with the Left is that they claim moral superiority over the rest of us. They know best what is best for all of us. This, of course, is what has also been assumed by the One True Believers
.
Indeed, Jeremy.
Whenever anyone comes along wanting to "transform society" or to "transform the economy" - run for the hills!
They are up to no good.
The airbrushing of the history of eugenics from the history of the Left after WW11 is one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever.
The residues remain, though. They hate Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, and support campaigns like BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel. In Australia, this included groups of chanting protesters intimidating customers entering a chain of Jewish-owned coffee shops. Nothing like Germany in the 1930s, right?
They are the same people who are pressuring universities to divest themselves of shareholdings in evil companies such as those in the fossil fuel industry.