Bishop Hill The inner Duce
Jan 5, 2016 Climate: other Greens 
My review of Liberal Fascism the other day provoked a very long comments thread and lots of strong views. I was therefore interested to see this article by Joel Kotkin - a Democrat, albeit a conservative one.
Today climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for example, helping Jerry Brown find his inner Duce. But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them and like it, or be labeled a racist.
Reader Comments (111)
"He knows that the Democrats...are actually corrupt, criminal and catastrophic, but he still votes for them."
Likely because he sees the alternative as rather more 'corrupt, criminal and catastrophic' - and with good reason.
geoff chambers
The radio ban on the BIsh is not complete - he is occasionally to be heard on BBC Scotland.
At the extreme edges of totalitarianism, coming from the left or right, it is difficult to detect much difference. who knows if the Dear Leader of North Korea is of the left or right?
Moreover, in North Korea does it make the slightest difference to the millions of poor bastards living in a made real, dystopian hell that only mankind is fond of fashioning. God must weep in his heaven or is he pleased? North Korea (Saudi Arabia for that matter) its insanity "we're going nowhere but we've got a plan and it involves torture, murder and starving our own population"... and deliberate debasement, inhumanity is at once unconscionable as it is inexplicably unfathomable.
Our very own 'dear leaders' tell us jam for all tomorrow and that, our wonderful system is so much better than those of for example; the PRC or North Korea but it seems to me, in the land of the free - Brussels version that, our votes are as worthless as are our North Korean cousins.
The 'STATE' or government is not a very useful tool.
Government; it is indirect, unfeeling, unsympathetic, remote, impervious to human emotion, unwieldy, unfocused, a blunt instrument and as it grows too big........ GOVERNMENT becomes endlessly unaccountable. For a cornucopia of reasons too many to mention in this, massive corporations love, want, encourage, desire, demand and bring about - big government but for the little businessman and the ordinary citizen - big government only brings with it, pain and no answers and if you let it be eventually, all sorts of horrible monsters sliver out of the walls and from its closets.
In Brussels and via its proxies in the LiblabCON proxy council in Westminster..................
On and on, we are told nigh on everyday that, we are now part of a great mass of humanity 500 million souls! Gloria in excelsis politburo! and THAT...................... the benefits are immeasurable as, they are to our perpetual betterment and advantage, ad nausea! BUT the more we are told this, the more that: I and many others don't believe it.
DAILY.
We have to unpick a blizzard of egregious lies flying at us 24/7. From obesity statistics, flu epidemics, smoking causes bluebottles to grow three heads whatever. To all sorts of lies and untruths and crappy statistics. Incessantly, we are told that the NHS cannot afford you because you are ALL getting on! What they wont tell you about, is how the NHS is strapped because of institutionalized and monumental waste, a massive top heavy bureaucracy and an endless pressure on resources through mass immigration where: so many who NOW use the health system but who have never paid a penny into it. Then the PFI where hospitals were built by the big construction corporations (Balfour Beatty et al) and leased back to the taxpayer oops er .........Government for a vast mark up. All of which is, financial stupidity on stilts but MacMental (Gordon Brown) thought, was a great idea.
What is the choice though, but why do we expect miracles from flawed idiots like Gordon Brown and Cameron? But then, if you delegate responsibility and then did not oversee, do not monitor those you enable to do and act on your behalf, is it any surprise?
The global warming scam, is just another stick to bash the people, to which the original quote from Kotkin alludes, it's about the exercise of power, for no other reason and of course the mere fact that a lot of money men stood to make a killing and or the water melons will take us all back to the dark ages - in all senses of the word...........
AND make no mistake for any reasons and all reasons and none - we are on the road to
perditionPyongyang.What will be done?
We will remain powerless until big government is dismantled and smashed to smithereens, and re acquaint the people with the levers of power, in that, only small is workable and small is always more beautiful, local democracy, local taxes and all officials directly accountable to their local population ie - their neighbours notwithstanding - absolute sovereignty brought back to Britain.
The problem is, the problems arise when good men do nothing. And of democracy? Well it - Democracy is bloody hard work and needs working at - until your brain hurts and fingers bleed and then.............. you keep on at it. There is no easy answer but we all need a go at it and the jury service method is probably the only way to do it. That is, unless you yearn for Pyongyang?
If Andrew transgendered, he'd be on the BBC in a flash...
I have finally caught up with Colin Firth and ultimate Eco Fascist baddy lisping Samual L Jackson in the The Kingsmen on Sky Movies which was a lot more entertaining than The Force Awakens than the overrated ,disappointing new reboot remake Star Wars movie.Thankfully not quite as bad as the Pequals.
What's in a name (calling)
"Climate Change Denier" that's a badge of honour
But " Eco Fascist "ouch
Why because there is some inconvieiant truth in it.
Thing about Climate Change Skeptics is we have never gassed any Jews and don't believe in enforced sterization and contrary to David Attenborough and Jeremy Corbyn we don't believe Humanity is a Plaque on the Planet.
What a Climate Skeptic believes is everybody to have continued access to cheap Oil Gas and Coal and have continued prosperity.If you think that man made CO2 is raising up the temperature then you prove it.
Adolf did ban Fox Hunting in Germany in the 1930s and he was into Eco ism.
Thats the problem with Nazism .recreate the Garden of Eden but then have to decide what sort of people gets to live in it.
Why do you keep saying this? Has AM actually been banned, and - if so - when? Unless I'm mistaken, he's been on the BBC in the last month or so, and has certainly been on the BBC quite regularly in the last couple of years.
Geoff, you say Goldberg's thesis is over the top. The book just arrived yesterday and I've only read the blurb but it (or rather, Tom Wolfe) says its main thesis relates to how (Russian) Communism 'spun' the adherents of Italian Fascism and German National socialism as 'fascists' (as though they were not).
This strikes me as true. This was from an age of political cobweb-spinning, where Marxist ideology was untested and freshly minted, and people believed in all sorts of 'systems' very fervently. These beliefs included hairsplitting-level differences between systems (like communism vs fascism), which look absurd from the vantage of history today but were clearly sufficient enough for people to get their counterparts from other systems killed off.
"Humanity is a Plaque on the Planet"
A blue one on a wall in Islington?
There's nothing racist in considering muslim illegal immigrants, rapist and ne'er do wells good for nothing?
When they leave the safety of Turkey on boats with young children without life belts, these muslims parents are just endangering their children's lives and should not be welcome anywhere.
For those who support or otherwise mass immigration of muslim's, there are a million in Germany who soon will have the right to live in the uk. When you count their families you are eventually looking at five million worshippers of the religion of peace.
Jan 6, 2016 at 12:32 PM | Unregistered Commenter...and Then There's Physics
They don't like Lord Lawson tho', do they Ken? And as you very well know, any hint of scepticism on the BBC about the forthcoming heat death of the world results in wailing, gnashing of teeth, recriminations, reindoctrination*, you name it. Maybe you can't see the wood for the trees?
*viz the frankly side-splitting reaction to letting Quentin Letts lose.
lose = loose. Ow.
Jeremy,
Thanks for the reply. However, I still have no idea if AM is banned from the BBC or not.
Re: the food police. The assumption seems to be that the only thing that matters is how long you live and that somehow we should force the foolish people to live longer. The excuse is that their illness costs the taxpayer. But in a materialistic society where pleasure seems to be in fact the main value, why should not someone go to excess with smoke and drink (I do neither)? Why not eat as much candy as you can? Why do these people care? I think it is a weird new puritanism, absent a diety.
Jeremy,
Thanks for the reply. However, I still have no idea if AM is banned from the BBC or not.
Jan 6, 2016 at 2:23 PM |...and Then There's Physics
=========================================================
Give a dog a bone, eh? What's your point, Ken?
Jeremy,
I don't have a point. I'm trying to establish if the claim made on this thread that AM is banned from the BBC is true, or not. Even though you've responded to me twice, I still don't know the answer. Was the original question too difficult?
The figures are out on 2015 temps. The Pause continues.
ATTP
Apologies. You're right. My statement was inaccurate shorthand for the fact that the occasional presence in the media of sceptics is greeted with the kind of outraged protest usually reserved for paedophiles and supporters of Islamic State. This kind of mob-censorship explains a lot of the excessive comment here about ecofascism etc.
shub, Jamspid
I just don't see the point in examining Hitler's weird obsessions or teasing out the links between all the different political movements which have arisen in the past 250 years or so.
What would be useful is a typology of social movements, ideas, class structures, cultural characteristics, which are associated with Greenery and climate hysteria. This kind of patient taxonomic work is what the BH boys do very well when it comes to identifying variables associated with climate change, but when it comes to sociology they go all funny.
I don't hold out much hope for Goldberg because the American view of what constitutes liberalism is so odd, given the fact that the concept of socialism has been more or less outlawed in the US, so that a mainstream social democrat like Obama gets identified as anything from a Marxist to a capitalist lackey and no-one is any the wiser.
Kotkin on the other hand seems to be on to something with his concept of a clerisy, which seems to echo ideas of Thomas Sowell (did he invent the “opiniocracy”?) and Christopher Lasch on the Culture of Narcissism.
The key factor identifying the group from which environmentalism springs is tertiary education, I think. Mid-century, the university-educated accounted for 2-5% of the population, tightly identified with a social professional upper middle class. Now we're 20-30%, a social class differentiated from the majority less by wealth or status than by taste and opinions. “Liberal” in the US sense; free from the old middle class hangups about race, sex, money and religion; anxious to show one's humanity, but bored by the problems of the developing world, and equally anxious to distinguish oneself from the uneducated chavs: - what better way to assert one's intellectual and moral superiority than by embracing the suffering planet? This is what links Richard Branson and the out of work anti-fracking activist. This is why Branson looks and sounds like an out of work anti-fracking activist.
Okay, thanks for clarifying.
@and Then There's Physics, Jan 6, 2016 at 5:35 PM
Geoff's use of "Banned" is an accurate description of the BBC's "Not welcome, do not contact, invite or air their views without prior board/trust approval" policy on many including Lords Lawson and Ridley, The Bish, J Delingpole, C Booker, R North, P Hitchens, P Lilley.
Carbon dioxide radiation cannot raise the maximum temperature for the day. Warming is assumed to be caused by radiation from carbon dioxide supposedly slowing surface cooling and then, because of that supposed slowing, the minimum temperature for the day is supposedly warmer. But it's not: it may take a few minutes (or just a few seconds) longer in the night to get down to the minimum temperature, but that's all. The minimum temperature is determined by all the thermal energy stored in the troposphere, and over 98% of that is in nitrogen, oxygen and argon molecules.
Radiation can only slow that component of cooling which is itself by radiation, and that is only about a third of all surface cooling. Other cooling processes may well accelerate to compensate. Furthermore, the minimum temperature for the night is determined primarily by the supporting temperature in all the air molecules colliding with surface molecules, and carbon dioxide only comprises 0.04% of those. IR-active molecules lower the temperature gradient, so that the thermal plot rotates downwards at the surface end. That is why more moist regions in my study had lower mean daily minimum and maximum temperatures than drier regions at similar latitude and altitude. So-called greenhouse gases lower the mean surface temperature, and the reasons (based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics) are here.
For a bunch of Ayn Rand toe lickers like the Bish to think that others favor the strong man theory of government, just makes Eli's day
Eli, the US President believes his climate science adviser, that the Arctic sea ice is vanishing.
Does that make you proud?
Sorry, golfcharlie-
Tempertures above freezing at 85 North in January are not doing John Holdren's West Wing street cred any harm .
@ Craig Loehle: “…why should not someone go to excess with smoke and drink …”.
======================================
That sounds fair enough, as long as they are functioning adults and are fully aware of the risks of their behaviour. There would be few adults unaware of the risks but as Mill notes in On Liberty the society does have the right even duty, particularly under a universal health system I think, to express disapproval or caution as in advertising healthy diets or cautions on labels.
Easy for biased alarmists like Russel to ignore the recent cold weather record isn't it?
"Newly analysed Nasa satellite data from east Antarctica shows Earth has set a new record for coldest temperature ever recorded: -94.7C (-135.8F). It happened in August 2010 when it hit -94.7C (-135.8F). Then on 31 July of this year, it came close again: -92.9C (-135.3F)."*
*http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/coldest-temperature-recorded-earth-antarctica-guinness-book
As for Eli, fresh from wrongly declaring Mann's hokey-stick to be global he now seems to think that Ayn Rand who said [man's] "highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness, and that he must not force other people, nor accept their right to force him, that each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest."** is somehow an authoritarian.
**http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19280545
Well I guess if warmists can argue that it's ok to use proxies upside down or obtain their climate sensitivities by multiplication rather than division then it seems that topsy-turvy thinking is the 'new normal' for them. It chimes well with the odd notion that warming is always bad despite Arrhenius, Callander and every historian in every history book ever written declaring the exact opposite.
Such strong men, these Holdrens.
============
Eli Rabbett
Your “bunch of Ayn Rand toe lickers” gave me a chuckle. In five minutes on Wiki I learned that she got her university education thanks to the Bolshevik revolution, her first published work was a book on Pola Negri. she was an amphetamine addict, and enrolled for Medicare when she got lung cancer. It made me almost warm to the humourless old ratbag.
But Randiness – the belief in rule by a technocratic élite – is nowadays found on the environmentalist left, for example in Ark II published by Paul Ehrlich and Denis Pirages in 1974, which recommended world politics to be directed by an international team of scientists issuing five yearly reports. Remind you of anything?
Kim
Holdren gets a mention in the Ehrlich book I just quoted to Eli above. He's one of two climate scientists quoted as forecasting climate catastrophe. The other one (since deceased) feared catastrophic global cooling, while Holdren believed temperatures would rise 10°F due to the Urban Heat Island effect. Ehrlich is a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Geoff C.
That "other one" gets a mention in a Craig Bohren interview here:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2006-08-07-global-warming-truth_x.htm
"I can't help noting that some of the prominent global warmers of today were global coolers of not so long ago. In particular, Steven Schneider, now at Stanford, previously at NCAR, about 30 years ago was sounding the alarm about an imminent ice age. The culprit then was particles belched into the atmosphere by human activities. No matter how the climate changes he can correctly say that he predicted it. No one in the atmospheric science community has been more successful at getting publicity. NCAR used to send my department clippings from newspaper and magazine articles in which NCAR researchers were named. We'd get thick wads of clippings, almost all of which were devoted to Schneider. Perhaps global warming is bad for the rest of us, but for Schneider and others it has been a godsend."
........
"Skeptics about global warming are often painted as hirelings of the oil and automotive industries. Such claims irritate me. I have never earned a nickel as a consequence of my skepticism. Indeed, I have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by it. First, you have to understand how a large research university operates. The professors are expected to obtain research grants, and in the atmospheric sciences these grants come mostly from government agencies. In the atmospheric sciences it is difficult to get grants unless you can somehow tie your work to global warming, that is to say, to scare science. Because of my reputation, I immodestly believe that I could have jumped onto the global warming bandwagon. But I refused to do so because I would have found this repugnant."
Has anyone worked out what the point, or purpose of Eli's remark was? Apart from making vvussell appear credible?
No doubt Eli and vvussell will get withdrawal symptons, when Obama is no longer around to suck up to.
Wow, tall order. Good luck with that.
Even though I try to ignore vvussell's comments (after he made an utter fool of himself refusing/failing to answer McIntyre's simple question a few articles ago ), I simply could not help myself reading his one-liner above.
Aaaand down even further goes his credibility, using some warm hours in the Arctic as support for the Mann made GW scare. Funnily enough at the same time implying that the White House people agree with this un-scientificness ;-). Really unworthy of an apparently well respected Harvard scientist.
Hilarious and very sad at the same time.
Back to ignoring the man is my only remedy to stop the laughter in my head.
golf charlie
Eli Rabbett's argument is that because the Bish is a rightwing libertarian, therefore he must agree with Ayn Rand, therefore he is in contradiction when he accuses lefties of being authoritarian, or something.
I get this all the time on threads at the Conversation, where warmists say stuff like “How can you say that when Tol/Lomborg/Monckton says something different?” They see science, and rational discussion generally, as a team sport in some Great Game where they're in the lead 97 – 3 and they can't understand why we don't retire hurt and accept our relegation. That's why they really hate threads like this where we discuss, argue, propose ideas, knock them down.. Maybe it reminds them of something disturbing they once came across in their youth – democracy, or debate or something.
JamesG
It wasn't Schneider, it was Reid Bryson. I wrote it up at
https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/origins-of-environmentalism-2/
geoff,
Hilarious, isn't it, when they say things like: "so-called contrarians can't even agree with each other, frequently pursuing hypotheses in contradiction to their fellow contrarians! Even in contradiction to their own papers!"
It bespeaks a deep scientific illiteracy.
To the pre-scientific mind, it still hasn't occurred that we have every right to *posit* or *hypothesise* or *suppose* that X without necessarily *committing* to X, believing it, promoting it or (later) being morally culpable when X turns out to be wrong.
Or, as the pre-scientific mind would see it, "...when you turn out to be wrong."
There's no point even reminding them to "play the hypothesis, not the man."
To pre-scientists, the hypothesis IS the man.
"Lindzen seems to have made a career of being the wrongest, longest," says Nuccitell, slowly shaking his head in patronising sadness. Such a great intellect, thinks Dana: ...wasted. Frittered away in the pursuit of one idea after another, ideas that have even been known to fail to survive his OWN analysis... let alone the test of time."
How many Guardian readers can tell that Nuccitelli is inadvertently describing Lindzen as an excellent scientist? And that Nuccitelli's delusional idea of How Science Works is the reason most climate scientists have never discovered anything they didn't already know? And that Nuccitelli is unfit to examine Lindzen's prostate?
From the comments section, and from the fact that the Guardian still employs him, I'd say: precious few.
wijnand,
Sorry, but that's been a meaningless indictment ever since they hired Naomi Oreskes to teach the pseudohistory and misosophy of ecneics to America's future leaders and call it HPS 101.Brad Keyes
Thanks for that classic Nuccitelli on Lindzen. Here's a similar exchange I had with one Geoff Harris at the Conversation.
geoffchambers, thank you for explaining the loss of credibility being experienced by Eli. I guess it explains why climate science without Lewandowsky and other failed shrinks, is nothing.
It would be rational of most people to expect climate scientists to come up with evidence to support their CO2 climate theory by now. Unfortunately 'rational' and 'logical' do not appear to be thought processes understood by 97% of climate scientists.
By his own comparisons, Eli Rabett represents a failed Svengali or Rasputin. Must be why he regards Holdren in such esteem for corrupting the US President, the US economy, trade, business and foreign policy.
ATTP cowardly bigotry of name calling on skeptics is as tasteful and effective as an old southern racist looking for the opportunity to call people "ni!!er" or "ni!!er lover" for failing to toe his racist line.
If ATTP actually had an argument to present he would.
He has proven over the years to lack one.
Geoff Chambers is immensely droll.
If being attacked by name in Naomi Orseke's book, and publishing in Reason The American Spectator, Taki's Magazine and <National Review doesn't make me right wing libertarian, what will?
The problem with wijnand's demand for an answer to McIntyre's " When did you stop beating your wife for the third time ?" question is that McIntyre's view of my beliefs is a delusional rhtorical construct-- my article speaks for itself in making fun of the apocalyptic world view .
the 3 things that have recently reinforced my view that climate forcing is a thermodynamically foregone conclusion , and hence a serious long term policy problem, are :
A. Otto, F.E.L. Otto, O. Boucher, J. Church, G. Hegerl, P.M. Forster, N.P. Gillett, J. Gregory, G.C. Johnson, R. Knutti, N. Lewis, U. Lohmann, J. Marotzke, G. Myhre, D. Shindell, B. Stevens, and M.R. Allen,
Energy budget constraints on climate response
Nature Geoscience, vol. 6, pp. 415-416, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1836K.
D.T. Shindell,
Inhomogeneous forcing and transient climate sensitivity
Nature Climate Change, vol. 4, pp. 274-277, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2136
Marvel, G.A. Schmidt, R.L. Miller, and L.S. Nazarenko,
Implications for climate sensitivity from the response to individual forcings
Nature Climate Change, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2888
Finally, I invite Chambers & Keyes to explain how if so eloquent a guy as Dick Lindzen ( whom I've known personally since 1984) is right, and the several hundred other climate scientists in the NAS and at MIT ,are wrong, he has so completely failed to persuade them?
vvussell, good funding prints thousands of papers in climate science.
Which is three orders of magnitude more than golf charlie has read;
Speaking of Reason , this just out from my right wing libertarian colleague Ron Bailey:
https://reason.com/blog/2016/01/07/hottest-december-in-satellite-record-glo
russell,
"Finally, I invite Chambers & Keyes to explain how if so eloquent a guy as Dick Lindzen ( whom I've known personally since 1984) is right, and the several hundred other climate scientists in the NAS and at MIT ,are wrong, he has so completely failed to persuade them?"
-- 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' -- Upton Sinclair
Stan, Lindzen and his fellow NAS members do not recieve salaries. They pay dues.
IMHO , his peers skepticism reflects their compelling scientific arguments having long ago persuaded him to abandon the 'Iris effect' .
geoff, you say an American like Goldberg cannot meaningfully parse differences between socialists, communists and fascists. But that is exactly his point. There are no meaningful differences.
russell, you have no clue about science. Science is prediction, followed by confirmation. Climate science cannot do this because it takes decades to reject a(ny) hypothesis. The science of climate change at the sub-Celsius scale of resolution is science of the gods, not human beings. The 'conviction' or a lack thereof of a bunch of colleagues is meaningless to those who hypothesize in climate.
Russell,
Steve's question was a transparently clear eyed and innocuous question which you managed to distort and drag out for about a month. There was no wife beating implied in it, and your responses, while entertaining, did not build confidence in you.
Thank you for finally offering something approaching a clear position. "So the world is not coming to apocalypse, but it is a serious situation" seems to sum it up. Was that worth the sturm and drang? So you are a lukewarmer and don't support the apocalyptic claptrap so popular in the Academy and public square. Nice to see. so why the hate on for us proles who are far more in agreement with you than you seem to be comfortable admitting?
Being attacked by Oreskes is something of an honor, although her mass casualty approach to dodging honest discussion seems likely to devalue the honor somewhat. And the reliance on argument by consensus regarding Lindzen is beneath you.
This should not be like pulling teeth or a scene from the Revenant.
Bottom line, if your position is finally deciphered, is that the world is not ending in a climate crisis, we should be suspicious of those proclaiming climate apocalypse, but you hate skeptics.
Because, Hunter, the credulity of incompetant skeptics erodes the credibility of thoughtful tories the world around .
vvussell, when should we accept your credibility from, before or after you changed your mind?
I did believe in climate science once, but changed my mind over a period of time as I realised nothing forecast was coming true, and well established historical facts were being deemed wrong, by climate scientists.
You were well ahead of most climate scientists in realising climate science was not being particularly honest. You must have been clever once, but now you can't remember why.
vvussell 9:34, "......thoughtful tories" . Most Greens and climate scientists thought Tim Yeo was a clever, insightful and thoughtful tory.
vvussell, please tell us that your spelling of 'incompetent' was ironic...
In com pet-ant
adj
Given to breaking wind and bleat ing about typos.
It's a recent invention , like CAGW
shub,
that's a great point. Feynman may have got the scientific method down to 60 seconds, but climatology doesn't have a whole minute to waste! Not with the planet at stake.
If science goes something like...
Guess; predict; experiment; compare (falsify/provisionally confirm prediction); revise guess accordingly.
...then The Science™ goes something like:
Guess; predict; profit.
The Prediction Is The Product.
It's no longer a means to an end; a prediction is no longer a criterion for the survival of your hypothesis, it's the golden egg your hypothesis lays, over and over and over.
I'll apologize for tarring an entire field with such a glitteringly simplistic caricature if someone can tell me what hypothesis will be abandoned in 2035 if the Himalayan glaciers still exist.
Anyone.