first published as weblog one hundred and forty one on Sunday 21st May 2006
A few weeks ago I got an email from a colleague on the left that went like this. ‘I don't get it. Are you guys saying there's no Global Warming? You think it's all created by fear-mongers in universities? Are you nuts? That's the right-wing line. It's real and it will have…as it already has had…many unintended consequences, most of them disastrous. Along with peak oil, collapse of the dollar and new diseases it will usher in the downfall of Western civilization and maybe worse.’ This is what I should have replied…one always thinks of these things some time afterwards.
What I am saying is that nobody understands climate and that the Precautionary Principle is being misapplied by environmentalists to justify ignorant meddling in a very complicated and very poorly understood process. If the left were to embrace the Precautionary Principle properly they would not be stampeded into meddling around trying to implement half-baked solutions cooked up from contaminated hypotheses like the Greenhouse Carbon Dioxide Theory. Instead we would be working day and night to understand how our planet’s climate works and the short-, medium- and long-term impacts of any meddling we might think was worth doing.
NASA did not rush off to the moon two weeks after Kennedy announced a lunar landing as an American National Goal. They took ten years making sure they knew what to do so they could get there safely and bring their astronauts back home again. Governments and corporations meddling around in today’s state of knowledge on climate is as likely to make matters worse as improve things. And in complex systems things often get worse before getting better.
Then there is the attempt to dismiss my opinions by calling them right wing. There is a set of right-wing views on climate that appears to be similar to mine but there is rather more to it. The right-wing slur for instance is a left wing way of avoiding facing up to uncomfortable truths. There is no scientific consensus on the causes of global warming for instance. If there is any consensus it is that scientific consensus is an oxymoron because Science doesn’t work this way. But that is something else. More important is to clarify terms when discussing left and right.
For today think of left and right this way. The left believes everybody is equal. The right believes society needs leaders. A right-wing society works from the top down. A left-wing society works from the bottom up. That’s the theory…then there are the consequences. Authority, leaders and led, us and them is right-wing. Socialism as equal money, one man one vote…wyfman and karlman…and the freedom to do what you like is left-wing.
Both ends of the political spectrum talk of democracy and freedom. But for the right democracy means one dollar one vote…the democracy of the market place…while freedom means being free to be poor. So there are plenty of mind games to contend with. Then there are other ideas like the Rule of Law. For the right-wing this means the powerful use the police to get the powerless to do what they are told. For the left this means equality under the law for rich and poor alike…except that the right have expanded it beyond real persons to judicial persons like corporations.
In the global warming context this right-wing slur is deployed to close down debate and avoid discussion just as anti-Semitic is used to silence anybody who questions Israel. The right is quite skilled at putting such slurs in the mouths of useful idiots on the left. Divide and rule is the name of this game…and agents provocateurs the means employed.
Galbraith once remarked that there were two types of forecasters: those who don't know and those who don't know they don't know. But follow the money and it is clear there is a third category…those who don’t care. Between them these three categories hog 99% of the funding leaving very little over for honest scientists intent on searching for the truth about our planet’s climate. These are either muzzled or neutralised. Others write their headlines and mis-summarise their conclusions and recommendations. Their sound scientific reporting is turned into dodgy dossiers.
Nearly everything published about Global Warming should be labelled: WARNING: Forecasts are produced by Computer Models. The left should be wary of any global warming hypothesis and approach computer forecasts with scepticism...particularly those seeming to emanate from left-wing environmentalists pleading the case of the poor and assuring you they will be overwhelmed by tsunamis and rising sea levels unless The World Community Acts Now.
At the end of the day there is only good science and bad science. Regrettably since the demise of Edward Goldsmith’s scientific journal The Ecologist discriminating between the two is not easy. As a result the Carbonistas have been getting away with rather too many lies and half-truths.
Much of what the left labels right wing is disinformation put out by the right…and their public relations firms to dupe the useful idiots on the left into shooting themselves in the foot with their Doom & Gloom & Climate Change. Have you noticed how Global Warming and Abrupt Climate Change…the specifics keep shifting as the bad science is exposed…knocks everything else off the global justice agenda while Nuclear Power, World Government and Piped Energy sneak in through the back door? Think about it…like Machiavelli…and ask yourself ‘Who? Whom?’