Wednesday, June 16, 2010 "Not PC"
Socialist Studies at Avondale College
Guest post by Paul Van Dinther
If you thought that socialist brainwashing only happens in American schools, think again. It happens right here today under our very noses. Avondale College, for example, where my 14-year-old son attends and is subjected to "Social Science" class—more accurately called "Socialist Studies." If you want single-sided socialist indoctrination, this appears to be the place to come.
My son has grown up in a family with a healthy level of scepticism towards whatever the media dishes up, and my own critical views towards global warming feature regularly at the dining table. A few weeks ago, however, he messaged me that the class was being required to watch Al Gore’s thoroughly discredited film Inconvenient Truth as a lead-up to an assignment on the Kyoto Protocol. (And by “thoroughly discredited,” I mean to a High Court standard.)
My son's critical mind kicked in immediately, and he asked if they would also show The Great Global Warming Swindle as a counterbalance to Gore’s propaganda, but his request was dismissed, except to say it might, may, could, perhaps be shown after the assignment was handed in. Maybe. Several other students voiced equally critical comments about the single-sided view on global warming being presented, which was promptly silenced by a 3 page handout full of highly technical counter-arguments against global warming scepticism. These pages were handed out without either comment or discussion. We now wait with bated breath to see how his assignment will be marked.
But they are not done yet. Today again, another message. This time the class is being shown the controversial and equally one-sided The Story of Stuff—a twenty-minute polemic against capitalism of which Michael Moore would be embarrassed. Already thoroughly exposed, and even banned in at least one State of the US, it is still still apparently suitable to be shown in New Zealand’s compulsory Socialist Studies classrooms, without any opposing views being allowed. Once again a single-sided view is presented.
I don't mind having long-established views challenged, as it only serves to test our own, but this is not a fair fight. This is not learning or education, it is indoctrination pure and simple. Kids in schools are highly impressionable, and this uncritical barrage of indoctrination from those whose wisdom our children are supposed to respect is so overwhelming, and so slanted, that it looks like nothing so much as taking advantage of those that teachers have within their control. One from which only impressionable young kids with careful parent guidance will be able (we hope) to emerge with their thinking matter intact.
It is a type of child abuse of the mind. And the worst of it is, I actually am forced to pay for the brain damage being inflicted.
Labels: Al Gore, Education, Global Warming
posted by PC at 2:57 PM
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
ETS : Dr Nick Smith
“Our National Interests and the ETS”Hon Dr Nick Smith
Minister for Climate Change Issues
Introduction
I have been fortunate to have held many portfolios during my 20 year Parliamentary career but none get close to the complexity and difficulty posed by climate change and the ETS. Few issues spark as much passion or divergence of views as climate change. There is debate over the science, the economics and over the international politics of who should do what and when. It’s not something you can explain in a 30 second sound bite.
Today, I want to set out why it’s in New Zealand’s interests on 1 July for your Government to be introducing the transport, electricity and industrial sectors into our moderated emissions trading scheme. It was inevitable that implementing the next phase of the ETS on 1 July would come with its share of contention. This is the same challenge faced by every country in the world that has, or is, putting a price on emissions.
The Science
First, can I give you the Government’s view on the science. We don’t claim a consensus or a perfect scientific understanding of the earth’s climate system. But we are satisfied that enough is known to be of concern and that action is justified to curb our growth in emissions. This is about sound risk management. New
Zealanders expect governments to prudently manage risk of phenomena like earthquakes. We all pay EQC levies even though we may not need the billions that have been collected. We see managing the risk of climate change in a similar context.
The global problem is that mankind is burning fossil fuels and clearing forests atincreasing rates, and this is changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. CO2 levels are up 35% on pre-industrial levels already. As developing countries industrialise, these levels are set to be double by 2050 and double again by 2100.
To put our fossil fuel emissions in perspective, every New Zealander emits an average nine tonnes per person per year. Nine tonnes of CO2 is three times the volume of this auditorium. That’s each year, and is for every one of us. And the science tells us that the CO2 will be around in the atmosphere for thousands of years. It would be a brave person who would say we can carry on indefinitely doing this and expect it to have no effect on the atmosphere or climate. The considered science tells us it’s a problem.
The International Politics
The international politics of this issue is as hard as the science. Two stark facts dominate the global debate. 80% of the increase to date has been caused by developed countries that make up only 20% of the population. This is why there is such a rigid position from developing countries that we must move first to curb our emissions.
They say: “You caused the problem, you’re wealthier, you need to take the lead”. It’s on this basis that Kyoto was stitched together. But there is an equally compelling statistic on the future. More than 80% of the increase in emissions this century will come from developing countries. That’s why countries such as China, India and Brazil are pivotal to the post-Kyoto framework.
The Global Research Alliance
That’s also why the Global Research Alliance on agricultural emissions initiated by New Zealand is so important. It is a tribute to the work of the Prime Minister, Tim Groser and David Carter that so many countries have come on board.
This is an area where it makes sense for New Zealand to take a global leadership role on climate change. There are multi-billion dollar research budgets going into alternative transport, electricity and industrial technologies, but far too little in the agriculture emissions space. There is a massive problem as to how the world is going to feed an additional three billion people by 2050 without further increases in greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Apart from Labour, the Global Research Alliance enjoys broad public and political support.
The Domestic Politics
The ETS is more challenging. People question the merits of a market tool and their eyes glaze over at the notion of trading in something as nebulous as carbon credits. Others are unconvinced that we should do anything unless the rest of the world is also acting, and are particularly nervous following the political problems in Australia of them making progress. We have Labour and the Greens arguing our ETS is too soft, too slow, and too generous to business. ACT has an intriguing take on the ETS.
ACT has championed the cause of the Kyoto forest owners. They argue that carbon credits are a “property right”, “belonging to those who planted them” and must not be “confiscated”. That’s fair enough, but paying these out is set to cost about $1.6 billion over the Kyoto period until 2013. It’s odd then for ACT to argue the carbon debits that rest with emitters under Kyoto through to 2013 don’t belong to them and must be paid for entirely by the taxpayer.
This is the ‘socialise your losses, capitalise your gains’ ETS. It is a recipe for a Greek-style fiscal tragedy.
New Zealand‘s Interests
The question we must answer in proceeding with the ETS on 1 July is why it makes sense for New Zealand. There are good strategic reasons for an ETS as a small trading nation that has branded itself as clean and green. Just read The Economist’s editorial in March highlighting the risk of a backlash over our “100%Pure” brand and our significant increase in emissions. We must be aware of the power of well-heeled consumers who are our most profitable customers. The food miles argument is the forerunner to a bigger debate. Doing our bit now to curb emissions growth puts us in the right space long term to protect our brandand market access.
The world is set on a path to constraining emissions. At some point we are going to have to adapt to this. The sooner New Zealand starts that process, the easier the transition will be. And the most efficient way to make that transition is through an ETS.
Renewable Energy
Take the electricity sector. It’s been the source of our greatest percentage increase in emissions – up 120% since 1990. New power plants have a life of at least 30 or 40 years. It’s in New Zealand’s interests that we invest in renewables in preference to new thermal generation, and the ETS is the best tool to deliver this. Labour failed abysmally in this area. Two thirds of the new generation capacity built during the last decade was gas and diesel, and the use of coal more than doubled. The ETS is shifting investments. More than three-quarters of the new consents lodged since we became Government are for renewable wind, geothermal, hydro and marine generation projects.
Forestry Incentives
The price signals are equally crucial for the forest sector. New Zealand lost 30,000 hectares of trees in Labour’s last four years in office, more than in any period since records began in the 1930s. Their confusing and shifting policies on the ETS contributed to this. Again, like electricity these are long-term investments that need certainty. In 2009, the deforestation stopped and there was a small gain in forest area of 500 hectares. Forester’s intentions indicate increased plantings of 4700 hectares this year, 5700 hectares next year, and still more of 7700 hectares in 2012. This confidence will be lost if we blink on the ETS, yet these plantings are crucial to New Zealand’s long-term climate change targets.
Honouring Our Commitments
Proceeding with the ETS is also about honouring our word to voters, to investors and to the international community. We campaigned quite explicitly on a policy of proceeding with a moderated ETS in 2010. We’ve halved the cost to businesses and consumers. We’ve slowed the pace, deferring sector entry dates. We’ve removed the disincentives for businesses to grow and ensured that small and medium businesses are not discriminated against in the allocations to trade exposed businesses. We’ve put regular reviews in the law in 2011 and regularly thereafter so we can reassess our approach relative to international progress and the latest science.
It’s also important we honour our word to foresters. Both National and Labour Government’s exhorted them to plant trees with the promise they would receive the benefit of the carbon credits.
New Zealand’s emissions are up 23% on 1990 levels and the only reason we
don’t face a whopping great Kyoto deficit is these plantings. Investment confidence requires we honour our word.
The ETS is also crucial to meeting our Kyoto target. Without the scheme, we would exceed it by 11 million tonnes. As a small trading nation, we more than most rely on countries honouring their international commitments. Regardless of whether you like Kyoto or not, it is in New Zealand’s interests that we honour those commitments.
Alternative to an ETS
We could meet our Kyoto commitments with other policies. You could regulate and tell citizens what sort of light bulbs they must use, how much water they can have in their shower, what sort of cars they can buy and tell business what sort of power plants they must build. An ETS encourages emissions reductions without reverting to a Nanny State.
ETS Is Not A Tax
An ETS is also quite different from a carbon tax which would generate billions of dollars in revenue for the Government. The ETS involves payments from polluters to those who reduce emissions mainly foresters. The difference is highlighted by the fact that post-1989 foresters will receive $1600 million in carbon credits in the Kyoto period to 2013 whereas the cost to business and consumers will be $900 million – leaving about $700 million during the Kyoto period to be met by the Government. Far from the ETS scheme being a tax in disguise it will actually cost the Government money.
Australian’s Still Face Kyoto Costs
Recent events in Australia where they have not been able to get their ETS through their Senate has people wrongly assuming there will be no cost for Australian businesses and consumers. The Rudd Government has committed another $5.1 billion to clean energy initiatives. This money, of course, has to come out of the pocket of Australian consumers and businesses. They are also taking a regulatory approach that requires all power companies to invest heavily in converting to renewable electricity. The cost per unit of power of these requirements is actually greater than the cost of the New Zealand ETS.
The crucial point here is that countries face a Kyoto cost either as taxpayers or as emitters, and all of the economic advice is that it is more efficient and cost effective to put the cost on those who can do something about how much they emit.
New Zealand Is Not Leading The World
A common complaint with our policy is that the ETS is now leading the world. This is completely untrue. 29 of the 38 countries with Kyoto commitments have an ETS. That’s more than three quarters – the bulk who are in the EU. The EU scheme covers 43% of their emissions, as compared to 23% of ours. Theirs has been imposing costs on businesses and consumers since 2005 – ours starts in 2010. It’s worth noting that the EU’s per capita emissions are about half ours and are 9% below 1990 levels as compared to our 23% increase. The truth is we are closer to leading the developed world in increasing our emissions than in reducing them.
Progress internationally on climate change is continuing to advance. President Obama stated on Friday his ambition to have the Senate pass their cap and trade scheme, already approved in the House, by years end. Already in the US there are state schemes operating. The 10 north-eastern states are already part of a cap and trade scheme, and a further 13 have schemes at various stages of development. Four Canadian provinces have similar schemes. Korea has a scheme in place. Japan too has announced plans to make progress on the same sort of approach.
The claim of New Zealand leading the world would be true if we were insisting on implementing an all gases, all sectors scheme on 1 July. We’re not. The scheme only provides for a half-obligation. Our plans to move to a full obligation in 2013 and to include additional sectors are conditional on progress being made
internationally.
We’ve got reviews of the ETS in our legislation scheduled for 2011 and regularly thereafter. A key test will be in ensuring New Zealand does not carry an unfair burden of the cost of constraining emissions and that our approach takes the least cost way of meeting our international obligations.
National Has Halved ETS Costs
Our Government has halved the costs to businesses and consumers of Labour’s ETS, with an increase of about 3.5 cents a litre on fuel and 5% on the price of power. These cost impacts need to be kept in context. The cost to an average dairy farm of the fuel, power and processing impacts of the ETS is 0.5% of returns. The ETS will impose less cost on the average farmer than a 0.1% increase in interest rates.
Opportunities To Offset ETS Costs
The obvious way a farmer could offset the cost of the ETS for the average farm is to plant on unproductive areas of the farm in forest. An area of only 6 hectares would offset the 1 July 2010 electricity and power costs of the ETS.
There are many new technologies available to reduce on farm energy costs. For example, the installation of heat pump technology in the dairy shed can deliver more than $2000 a year in savings in electricity. Studies of irrigation also show thousands of dollars of savings from modest efficiency improvements in systems.
We’ve got a big job ahead over the next two months in communicating to households not just the cost of the ETS, but the opportunities to make energy efficiencies and savings. For instance just correcting the tyre pressure on the average car can save $130 per year. Changing driving habits for the average motorist can save $300 a year.
The Government is helping to offset the ETS cost for a household by providing an $1800 home insulation grant and a $1000 grant for solar hot water systems. These would each save an average household $400 a year in energy costs, greatly exceeding the ETS costs of a $165 per home.
Business Needs Steady, Consistent Approach
One of the reasons our emissions growth compares so poorly to other countries is that for two decades public policy has been all over the paddock. We in National proposed a carbon tax in 1994, but then switched to work on an ETS in 1999. Labour proposed a carbon tax in 2004, and then switched to a very ambitious ETS in 2006. We campaigned and have delivered on a much more moderate and realistic ETS. It’s no surprise Business New Zealand and the newspaper editorials from Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin are saying stay the course. Businesses and the economy need a steady and consistent approach, and that’s what your Government is delivering.
Conclusion
We Kiwis value our clean green brand and want to be part of the solution, and not the problem, on climate change. We don’t want to lead the world in emissions growth anymore than leading the world in emissions cuts. We know we need to be planting more trees. We know we should be building more renewable power stations. And we know we should be investing more in energy efficiency. Doing nothing is not an option. Our very moderate ETS is the sensible way for a National government to make progress.
ENDS
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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Australia dealys ETS, Select Committee deliberates in NZ
ETS ball and chain on ag – AbacusBio
ETS better than carbon tax
Emissions Trading Scheme
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under environment, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
9 Responses to “It’s time to accept the ETS and make it work for us”
Cadwallader says:
May 26, 2010 at 7:17 am
Sorry I still think the ETS is a pointless rort and Nick Smith a snake oil salesman!
pdm says:
May 26, 2010 at 7:38 am
HP – while I would not go as far as Cadwallader in respect of Nick Smith I agree with him that the ETS is an unnecessary imposition on taxpayers who will be hit on two counts:
1. Increased costs.
2. Increased draw off by beneficiaries to compensate for the ETS.
singularian says:
May 26, 2010 at 7:43 am
Agree with Cadwallader.
No proof whatsoever that C02 is linked in ANY way to CAGW, or for that matter to temp rise aside from the known physics – ie: 0.15 – 0.3 degree rise per doubling.
The thousands of other forcings, both positive and negative, affecting climate are just starting to be understood.
National will lose my vote forever if they allow this legislation to come into law. It’s a tax grab and already we see power companies, for instance, using it as an excuse for raising prices even though a large part of NZs’ power comes from hydro.
National is picking a big fight with many of their, soon to be, former supporters over this issue. They are fools to continue the charade.
Adolf Fiinkensein says:
May 26, 2010 at 8:09 am
The thought of $8 per kg has addled your brain.
The ETS is based upon junk science which itself is based upon dubious estimates and ignores hard data. Politically there is absolutely no longer any need for the charade as the socialist trade blockers of Europe slide into economic chaos.
I remind you CO2 is THE primary feedstock of our food chain and of your business – and you want to tax it? You’re mad.
This Key TS will be the downfall of the best PM the country has seen in fifty years.
It’s time for some realpolitik here. This king hit hit on ordinary NZers’ wallets will open the door to a ‘new’ Labour movement which will tip out Goff and Messrs Key and Smith. It will happen so fast you won’t even see it coming.
Pointer2 says:
May 26, 2010 at 8:11 am
@Singularian The ETS is already law, it was put through last year and comes in to force in a few weeks. It’s way better than the original as drawn up under the previous Government; it’s way better than paying massive open-ended subsidies, funded by taxpayers, as the Aussies have ended up doing; and it’s way better than doing nothing. Get over it.
Cadwallader says:
May 26, 2010 at 9:11 am
Further, my grandfather always said that you can make money from genuine products and genuine services… carbon credits do not fall into either category. Finkenstein is right: It is a charade which was germinated by junk science and devious politico-scientists!
I cannot believe that Key is being so stupid. He is providing political fodder to Ph’Off and the former MP for Tauranga!
I am reminded of the Poms revolt on the Poll Tax 30 odd years ago. Now is the hour?
Gravedodger says:
May 26, 2010 at 10:02 am
I am in agreement with adolf and cadwallader here HP.
Your loyalty is nothing more than the way the National Party works and that is admirable.
I don’t see an opening for the gnome of Tauranga I see an empty parking lot for him and his populist politics that could make the greypower gold mine look like a posthole.Far too many who will never vote labour will in ignorance of the obvious that WRP will go with the socialists, vote with him or abstain, either way it will hurt the Nats
The apparent intransigence of the government that is perceived by so many long term National party supporters in the face of the backtracking, indifference and outright refusal to engage by such a large chunk of our trading partners is seen to be up there and beyond anything that helengrad perpetrated on our people.
Nick Smith is possibly the very worst person to be fronting what so many thinking people see as idiocy and no quantity of spin or explanation will alter the mindset of those former supporters.
IMHO the ETS dwarfs the EFA, the removal of sec 59, the purchase of Kiwi Rail, the general perception of nanny state and the idealogical movement of the nation to the social aspiration of our late unlamented leader. This is basic cost of production,cost of living, creation of a trading regime/rort, loss of competitiveness that makes people on the middle rungs of the economic ladder feel exposed and or betrayed.
A twelve month delay would at least give time to reconsider,give time to prove the need and viability of this step and give some possibility to the perception that the government listens.
You HP would know politics is all about perception and here Nick Smith, Tim Grosser and John Key are perceived to be not listening.
singularian says:
May 26, 2010 at 10:52 am
Pointer – you’re welcome to your opinion. Which Aussie subsidies are you talking about?
All I can say is – I have never, in my 45 years, been directly involved in politics (except for fronting the signage for the blogmobile last election). This issue is going to force my direct involvement and, from my reading of the general mood, the involvement of a lot of other people too.
National are shooting themselves in both feet by pushing through this crap and it will come back to haunt them.
By the by – I’ll be the one at the protests with the ‘wake up morans’ sign
barry says:
May 26, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Sorry HP. One can abide by the law, while at the same time getting it changed.
Not only is there no proof at all that CO2 is the cause of all the worlds evils, at a recent conference in the US, it was apparent that real evidence was being put together to show that earths climate was mostly changed (long term) by solar effects. These are made up of the suns actual output, the earths orbit and a few other minor (but significant) energy sources.
The trouble with the ETS, is that as politicians are putting it in place, they will require an actual ice age before they admit that it may have been the wrong thing to do – and in the mean time other action to address climate change (be it warmer or colder) has been left on the shelf while we pay to chase what is becoming an aparent illusion.
Minister for Climate Change Issues
Introduction
I have been fortunate to have held many portfolios during my 20 year Parliamentary career but none get close to the complexity and difficulty posed by climate change and the ETS. Few issues spark as much passion or divergence of views as climate change. There is debate over the science, the economics and over the international politics of who should do what and when. It’s not something you can explain in a 30 second sound bite.
Today, I want to set out why it’s in New Zealand’s interests on 1 July for your Government to be introducing the transport, electricity and industrial sectors into our moderated emissions trading scheme. It was inevitable that implementing the next phase of the ETS on 1 July would come with its share of contention. This is the same challenge faced by every country in the world that has, or is, putting a price on emissions.
The Science
First, can I give you the Government’s view on the science. We don’t claim a consensus or a perfect scientific understanding of the earth’s climate system. But we are satisfied that enough is known to be of concern and that action is justified to curb our growth in emissions. This is about sound risk management. New
Zealanders expect governments to prudently manage risk of phenomena like earthquakes. We all pay EQC levies even though we may not need the billions that have been collected. We see managing the risk of climate change in a similar context.
The global problem is that mankind is burning fossil fuels and clearing forests atincreasing rates, and this is changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. CO2 levels are up 35% on pre-industrial levels already. As developing countries industrialise, these levels are set to be double by 2050 and double again by 2100.
To put our fossil fuel emissions in perspective, every New Zealander emits an average nine tonnes per person per year. Nine tonnes of CO2 is three times the volume of this auditorium. That’s each year, and is for every one of us. And the science tells us that the CO2 will be around in the atmosphere for thousands of years. It would be a brave person who would say we can carry on indefinitely doing this and expect it to have no effect on the atmosphere or climate. The considered science tells us it’s a problem.
The International Politics
The international politics of this issue is as hard as the science. Two stark facts dominate the global debate. 80% of the increase to date has been caused by developed countries that make up only 20% of the population. This is why there is such a rigid position from developing countries that we must move first to curb our emissions.
They say: “You caused the problem, you’re wealthier, you need to take the lead”. It’s on this basis that Kyoto was stitched together. But there is an equally compelling statistic on the future. More than 80% of the increase in emissions this century will come from developing countries. That’s why countries such as China, India and Brazil are pivotal to the post-Kyoto framework.
The Global Research Alliance
That’s also why the Global Research Alliance on agricultural emissions initiated by New Zealand is so important. It is a tribute to the work of the Prime Minister, Tim Groser and David Carter that so many countries have come on board.
This is an area where it makes sense for New Zealand to take a global leadership role on climate change. There are multi-billion dollar research budgets going into alternative transport, electricity and industrial technologies, but far too little in the agriculture emissions space. There is a massive problem as to how the world is going to feed an additional three billion people by 2050 without further increases in greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Apart from Labour, the Global Research Alliance enjoys broad public and political support.
The Domestic Politics
The ETS is more challenging. People question the merits of a market tool and their eyes glaze over at the notion of trading in something as nebulous as carbon credits. Others are unconvinced that we should do anything unless the rest of the world is also acting, and are particularly nervous following the political problems in Australia of them making progress. We have Labour and the Greens arguing our ETS is too soft, too slow, and too generous to business. ACT has an intriguing take on the ETS.
ACT has championed the cause of the Kyoto forest owners. They argue that carbon credits are a “property right”, “belonging to those who planted them” and must not be “confiscated”. That’s fair enough, but paying these out is set to cost about $1.6 billion over the Kyoto period until 2013. It’s odd then for ACT to argue the carbon debits that rest with emitters under Kyoto through to 2013 don’t belong to them and must be paid for entirely by the taxpayer.
This is the ‘socialise your losses, capitalise your gains’ ETS. It is a recipe for a Greek-style fiscal tragedy.
New Zealand‘s Interests
The question we must answer in proceeding with the ETS on 1 July is why it makes sense for New Zealand. There are good strategic reasons for an ETS as a small trading nation that has branded itself as clean and green. Just read The Economist’s editorial in March highlighting the risk of a backlash over our “100%Pure” brand and our significant increase in emissions. We must be aware of the power of well-heeled consumers who are our most profitable customers. The food miles argument is the forerunner to a bigger debate. Doing our bit now to curb emissions growth puts us in the right space long term to protect our brandand market access.
The world is set on a path to constraining emissions. At some point we are going to have to adapt to this. The sooner New Zealand starts that process, the easier the transition will be. And the most efficient way to make that transition is through an ETS.
Renewable Energy
Take the electricity sector. It’s been the source of our greatest percentage increase in emissions – up 120% since 1990. New power plants have a life of at least 30 or 40 years. It’s in New Zealand’s interests that we invest in renewables in preference to new thermal generation, and the ETS is the best tool to deliver this. Labour failed abysmally in this area. Two thirds of the new generation capacity built during the last decade was gas and diesel, and the use of coal more than doubled. The ETS is shifting investments. More than three-quarters of the new consents lodged since we became Government are for renewable wind, geothermal, hydro and marine generation projects.
Forestry Incentives
The price signals are equally crucial for the forest sector. New Zealand lost 30,000 hectares of trees in Labour’s last four years in office, more than in any period since records began in the 1930s. Their confusing and shifting policies on the ETS contributed to this. Again, like electricity these are long-term investments that need certainty. In 2009, the deforestation stopped and there was a small gain in forest area of 500 hectares. Forester’s intentions indicate increased plantings of 4700 hectares this year, 5700 hectares next year, and still more of 7700 hectares in 2012. This confidence will be lost if we blink on the ETS, yet these plantings are crucial to New Zealand’s long-term climate change targets.
Honouring Our Commitments
Proceeding with the ETS is also about honouring our word to voters, to investors and to the international community. We campaigned quite explicitly on a policy of proceeding with a moderated ETS in 2010. We’ve halved the cost to businesses and consumers. We’ve slowed the pace, deferring sector entry dates. We’ve removed the disincentives for businesses to grow and ensured that small and medium businesses are not discriminated against in the allocations to trade exposed businesses. We’ve put regular reviews in the law in 2011 and regularly thereafter so we can reassess our approach relative to international progress and the latest science.
It’s also important we honour our word to foresters. Both National and Labour Government’s exhorted them to plant trees with the promise they would receive the benefit of the carbon credits.
New Zealand’s emissions are up 23% on 1990 levels and the only reason we
don’t face a whopping great Kyoto deficit is these plantings. Investment confidence requires we honour our word.
The ETS is also crucial to meeting our Kyoto target. Without the scheme, we would exceed it by 11 million tonnes. As a small trading nation, we more than most rely on countries honouring their international commitments. Regardless of whether you like Kyoto or not, it is in New Zealand’s interests that we honour those commitments.
Alternative to an ETS
We could meet our Kyoto commitments with other policies. You could regulate and tell citizens what sort of light bulbs they must use, how much water they can have in their shower, what sort of cars they can buy and tell business what sort of power plants they must build. An ETS encourages emissions reductions without reverting to a Nanny State.
ETS Is Not A Tax
An ETS is also quite different from a carbon tax which would generate billions of dollars in revenue for the Government. The ETS involves payments from polluters to those who reduce emissions mainly foresters. The difference is highlighted by the fact that post-1989 foresters will receive $1600 million in carbon credits in the Kyoto period to 2013 whereas the cost to business and consumers will be $900 million – leaving about $700 million during the Kyoto period to be met by the Government. Far from the ETS scheme being a tax in disguise it will actually cost the Government money.
Australian’s Still Face Kyoto Costs
Recent events in Australia where they have not been able to get their ETS through their Senate has people wrongly assuming there will be no cost for Australian businesses and consumers. The Rudd Government has committed another $5.1 billion to clean energy initiatives. This money, of course, has to come out of the pocket of Australian consumers and businesses. They are also taking a regulatory approach that requires all power companies to invest heavily in converting to renewable electricity. The cost per unit of power of these requirements is actually greater than the cost of the New Zealand ETS.
The crucial point here is that countries face a Kyoto cost either as taxpayers or as emitters, and all of the economic advice is that it is more efficient and cost effective to put the cost on those who can do something about how much they emit.
New Zealand Is Not Leading The World
A common complaint with our policy is that the ETS is now leading the world. This is completely untrue. 29 of the 38 countries with Kyoto commitments have an ETS. That’s more than three quarters – the bulk who are in the EU. The EU scheme covers 43% of their emissions, as compared to 23% of ours. Theirs has been imposing costs on businesses and consumers since 2005 – ours starts in 2010. It’s worth noting that the EU’s per capita emissions are about half ours and are 9% below 1990 levels as compared to our 23% increase. The truth is we are closer to leading the developed world in increasing our emissions than in reducing them.
Progress internationally on climate change is continuing to advance. President Obama stated on Friday his ambition to have the Senate pass their cap and trade scheme, already approved in the House, by years end. Already in the US there are state schemes operating. The 10 north-eastern states are already part of a cap and trade scheme, and a further 13 have schemes at various stages of development. Four Canadian provinces have similar schemes. Korea has a scheme in place. Japan too has announced plans to make progress on the same sort of approach.
The claim of New Zealand leading the world would be true if we were insisting on implementing an all gases, all sectors scheme on 1 July. We’re not. The scheme only provides for a half-obligation. Our plans to move to a full obligation in 2013 and to include additional sectors are conditional on progress being made
internationally.
We’ve got reviews of the ETS in our legislation scheduled for 2011 and regularly thereafter. A key test will be in ensuring New Zealand does not carry an unfair burden of the cost of constraining emissions and that our approach takes the least cost way of meeting our international obligations.
National Has Halved ETS Costs
Our Government has halved the costs to businesses and consumers of Labour’s ETS, with an increase of about 3.5 cents a litre on fuel and 5% on the price of power. These cost impacts need to be kept in context. The cost to an average dairy farm of the fuel, power and processing impacts of the ETS is 0.5% of returns. The ETS will impose less cost on the average farmer than a 0.1% increase in interest rates.
Opportunities To Offset ETS Costs
The obvious way a farmer could offset the cost of the ETS for the average farm is to plant on unproductive areas of the farm in forest. An area of only 6 hectares would offset the 1 July 2010 electricity and power costs of the ETS.
There are many new technologies available to reduce on farm energy costs. For example, the installation of heat pump technology in the dairy shed can deliver more than $2000 a year in savings in electricity. Studies of irrigation also show thousands of dollars of savings from modest efficiency improvements in systems.
We’ve got a big job ahead over the next two months in communicating to households not just the cost of the ETS, but the opportunities to make energy efficiencies and savings. For instance just correcting the tyre pressure on the average car can save $130 per year. Changing driving habits for the average motorist can save $300 a year.
The Government is helping to offset the ETS cost for a household by providing an $1800 home insulation grant and a $1000 grant for solar hot water systems. These would each save an average household $400 a year in energy costs, greatly exceeding the ETS costs of a $165 per home.
Business Needs Steady, Consistent Approach
One of the reasons our emissions growth compares so poorly to other countries is that for two decades public policy has been all over the paddock. We in National proposed a carbon tax in 1994, but then switched to work on an ETS in 1999. Labour proposed a carbon tax in 2004, and then switched to a very ambitious ETS in 2006. We campaigned and have delivered on a much more moderate and realistic ETS. It’s no surprise Business New Zealand and the newspaper editorials from Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin are saying stay the course. Businesses and the economy need a steady and consistent approach, and that’s what your Government is delivering.
Conclusion
We Kiwis value our clean green brand and want to be part of the solution, and not the problem, on climate change. We don’t want to lead the world in emissions growth anymore than leading the world in emissions cuts. We know we need to be planting more trees. We know we should be building more renewable power stations. And we know we should be investing more in energy efficiency. Doing nothing is not an option. Our very moderate ETS is the sensible way for a National government to make progress.
ENDS
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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Australia dealys ETS, Select Committee deliberates in NZ
ETS ball and chain on ag – AbacusBio
ETS better than carbon tax
Emissions Trading Scheme
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under environment, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
9 Responses to “It’s time to accept the ETS and make it work for us”
Cadwallader says:
May 26, 2010 at 7:17 am
Sorry I still think the ETS is a pointless rort and Nick Smith a snake oil salesman!
pdm says:
May 26, 2010 at 7:38 am
HP – while I would not go as far as Cadwallader in respect of Nick Smith I agree with him that the ETS is an unnecessary imposition on taxpayers who will be hit on two counts:
1. Increased costs.
2. Increased draw off by beneficiaries to compensate for the ETS.
singularian says:
May 26, 2010 at 7:43 am
Agree with Cadwallader.
No proof whatsoever that C02 is linked in ANY way to CAGW, or for that matter to temp rise aside from the known physics – ie: 0.15 – 0.3 degree rise per doubling.
The thousands of other forcings, both positive and negative, affecting climate are just starting to be understood.
National will lose my vote forever if they allow this legislation to come into law. It’s a tax grab and already we see power companies, for instance, using it as an excuse for raising prices even though a large part of NZs’ power comes from hydro.
National is picking a big fight with many of their, soon to be, former supporters over this issue. They are fools to continue the charade.
Adolf Fiinkensein says:
May 26, 2010 at 8:09 am
The thought of $8 per kg has addled your brain.
The ETS is based upon junk science which itself is based upon dubious estimates and ignores hard data. Politically there is absolutely no longer any need for the charade as the socialist trade blockers of Europe slide into economic chaos.
I remind you CO2 is THE primary feedstock of our food chain and of your business – and you want to tax it? You’re mad.
This Key TS will be the downfall of the best PM the country has seen in fifty years.
It’s time for some realpolitik here. This king hit hit on ordinary NZers’ wallets will open the door to a ‘new’ Labour movement which will tip out Goff and Messrs Key and Smith. It will happen so fast you won’t even see it coming.
Pointer2 says:
May 26, 2010 at 8:11 am
@Singularian The ETS is already law, it was put through last year and comes in to force in a few weeks. It’s way better than the original as drawn up under the previous Government; it’s way better than paying massive open-ended subsidies, funded by taxpayers, as the Aussies have ended up doing; and it’s way better than doing nothing. Get over it.
Cadwallader says:
May 26, 2010 at 9:11 am
Further, my grandfather always said that you can make money from genuine products and genuine services… carbon credits do not fall into either category. Finkenstein is right: It is a charade which was germinated by junk science and devious politico-scientists!
I cannot believe that Key is being so stupid. He is providing political fodder to Ph’Off and the former MP for Tauranga!
I am reminded of the Poms revolt on the Poll Tax 30 odd years ago. Now is the hour?
Gravedodger says:
May 26, 2010 at 10:02 am
I am in agreement with adolf and cadwallader here HP.
Your loyalty is nothing more than the way the National Party works and that is admirable.
I don’t see an opening for the gnome of Tauranga I see an empty parking lot for him and his populist politics that could make the greypower gold mine look like a posthole.Far too many who will never vote labour will in ignorance of the obvious that WRP will go with the socialists, vote with him or abstain, either way it will hurt the Nats
The apparent intransigence of the government that is perceived by so many long term National party supporters in the face of the backtracking, indifference and outright refusal to engage by such a large chunk of our trading partners is seen to be up there and beyond anything that helengrad perpetrated on our people.
Nick Smith is possibly the very worst person to be fronting what so many thinking people see as idiocy and no quantity of spin or explanation will alter the mindset of those former supporters.
IMHO the ETS dwarfs the EFA, the removal of sec 59, the purchase of Kiwi Rail, the general perception of nanny state and the idealogical movement of the nation to the social aspiration of our late unlamented leader. This is basic cost of production,cost of living, creation of a trading regime/rort, loss of competitiveness that makes people on the middle rungs of the economic ladder feel exposed and or betrayed.
A twelve month delay would at least give time to reconsider,give time to prove the need and viability of this step and give some possibility to the perception that the government listens.
You HP would know politics is all about perception and here Nick Smith, Tim Grosser and John Key are perceived to be not listening.
singularian says:
May 26, 2010 at 10:52 am
Pointer – you’re welcome to your opinion. Which Aussie subsidies are you talking about?
All I can say is – I have never, in my 45 years, been directly involved in politics (except for fronting the signage for the blogmobile last election). This issue is going to force my direct involvement and, from my reading of the general mood, the involvement of a lot of other people too.
National are shooting themselves in both feet by pushing through this crap and it will come back to haunt them.
By the by – I’ll be the one at the protests with the ‘wake up morans’ sign
barry says:
May 26, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Sorry HP. One can abide by the law, while at the same time getting it changed.
Not only is there no proof at all that CO2 is the cause of all the worlds evils, at a recent conference in the US, it was apparent that real evidence was being put together to show that earths climate was mostly changed (long term) by solar effects. These are made up of the suns actual output, the earths orbit and a few other minor (but significant) energy sources.
The trouble with the ETS, is that as politicians are putting it in place, they will require an actual ice age before they admit that it may have been the wrong thing to do – and in the mean time other action to address climate change (be it warmer or colder) has been left on the shelf while we pay to chase what is becoming an aparent illusion.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Creation / Fiat
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
"For a believing Muslim, to create is a rash and dangerous act."
So wrote Daniel Boorstin, author of the powerful three volumes titled The Discoverers, The Seekers and The Creators. The title of this post comes from the end of one of The Creators’ short chapters. In a few pages Boorstin sought the heart of the difference between Islamic and Judeo-Christian culture. At the risk of mutilating the chapter in question, here are some choice excerpts:
(Boorstin, 1992, pp.63-69.)
Dune-Rune blog
Posted by Traeh at 4:05 AM
"For a believing Muslim, to create is a rash and dangerous act."
So wrote Daniel Boorstin, author of the powerful three volumes titled The Discoverers, The Seekers and The Creators. The title of this post comes from the end of one of The Creators’ short chapters. In a few pages Boorstin sought the heart of the difference between Islamic and Judeo-Christian culture. At the risk of mutilating the chapter in question, here are some choice excerpts:
…the Muslim God, though a kind of Creator, had a character quite different from the God of the Hebrews and the Christians...In the Koran the role of the Creator is transformed. The familiar words of Genesis record that God spent six days on the Creation.
[Genesis 2:2] 'And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day...'
In the Koran God never rests, for he can never be tired.
[Koran, Chapter 50, verse] 38: We created the heavens and the earth and all between them in Six Days. Nor did any sense of weariness touch Us.'
It is no wonder that the Koranic God was not wearied. For He created not by making but by ordering, not by work but by command. The creation of anything occurs when He decrees it into being.
[Koran, Chapter 2, verse] 117: To Him is due the primal origin of the heavens and the earth; when He decreeth a matter, He saith to it: "Be," and it is.'
Again and again the Koran describes God's fiat...
There are some similar expressions in Genesis of God creating by fiat...But there is a vast difference in emphasis between the acts of Creation in the Bible and in the Koran. And between the character of the Hebrew-Christian God the Maker, and the Muslim God of Fiat...
The Muslim Creator-God is notable not only, nor even mainly, for His work in the Beginning, but as an orderer, a commander, of life and death in our present. The Judeo-Christian God is awesome for the uniqueness of His work in the Beginning. Then He may intervene by divine providence...
After...the six days of fiat, the God of the Koran, having no reason to rest, simply mounted the throne of authority. From there he continued to rule by decree over life and death and every earthly act.
The relation of the Muslim God to his creature man, then, is quite unbiblical. The uniqueness of the biblical Creator-God was in his powers of making; the uniqueness of man and woman too would be in their power to imitate their God and after their fashion to exercise the power of creation. After God created the species in the Beginning, he blessed them to be fruitful and multiply...
Why did God create man? The God of the Bible would judge man by his fulfillment of his godlike image. Not so in Islam.
[Koran, Chapter 51, verse] 56: I have only created jinns and men, that they may serve Me. I created the jinn and humankind only that they might worship me.'...
The People of the Koran prefer to call themselves Muslims, from 'Islam,' the Arabic word for submission or obedience. The Koran repeatedly reminds us that Allah's creatures are also his 'servants' or 'slaves'. What clearer warning against reaching for the new? For a believing Muslim, to create is a rash and dangerous act.
(Boorstin, 1992, pp.63-69.)
Dune-Rune blog
Posted by Traeh at 4:05 AM
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Trade craft of propaganda: Climate Change
Calders Updates ; Tradecraft of propaganda
Climate Change: News and Comments
The tradecraft of propaganda
Hearing about a story concerning my father in The Independent, London (2 June), I’ve now seen that the professor of journalism at the University of Kent, Tim Luckhurst, describes him as a “war hero”. That’s for Ritchie Calder’s candid newspaper reports of the chaotic responses to the bombing blitz on London, 1940-41. The article is here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/dispatches-from-the-blitz-why-peter-ritchie-calder-was-a-true-war-hero-1989929.html
As Luckhurst says, he faced accusations of “giving comfort to the enemy”. Yes, as a child I heard him telling my mother at the door that he’d be “home by eight if I’m not in Brixton Prison”. But although Luckhurst mentions a later involvement in propaganda, he doesn’t explain that the government silenced Calder’s troublesome reportage of the air raids by shanghai-ing him into the top-secret Political Warfare Executive, formed in August 1941.
A pass giving Ritchie Calder access to the plans for the D-Day landings. (P.I.D., Political Intelligence Department, was a cover-name for the Political Warfare Executive.) National Library of Scotland.
My aim in this blog is to stick to science and shun the politics. My Dad was more politically minded and finished up as a Labour peer. But I share his readiness to defy officialdom and, when the facts serve, to cock a snook at bigwigs of any kind.
What Ritchie Calder told me about wartime propaganda against the Nazis has helped me to understand how a few scientists and politicians have persuaded governments and the docile media about a danger from man-made global warming that goes far beyond the real facts.
While not exactly scientific, the tradecraft of propaganda can be considered technical, so I’ve decided to post here the text of a talk I gave on the subject in London 18 months ago. It’s lightly edited to remove one comment about an individual and to correct one historical over-simplification, but I’ve not bothered to update remarks corresponding to the time of delivery of the talk.[On 8 June, I've added some pictures, which I didn't use in the talk, to break up the long-winded text.]
Global warming is just propaganda
Talk by Nigel Calder, Savile Club, London, 9 Dec. 2008
© Nigel Calder 2008
Let me start by mentioning two members of your club, my brother Allan here tonight, and our late father, Ritchie Calder. When Allan was six weeks old a damaged German bomber was about to crash in Surrey. It jettisoned its bombs and one hit our family home. There was a kerfuffle in London when it turned out that the German pilot had in his pocket a British propaganda leaflet produced by our Dad. Had there been a breach of security? Had his house been targeted? No, of course not. It was just a grisly coincidence.
Ritchie Calder was an ace science reporter, whose scoops included the splitting of the atom and the structure of DNA. But during the Second World War he was director of plans and campaigns in the Political Warfare Executive of the Foreign Office. In plain words, he was making propaganda. He later told me quite a lot about the wartime tradecraft. And now it dismays me to see the very same techniques being used to propagate the myth that we are in the grip of relentless global warming driven by manmade emissions of carbon dioxide.
Like my Dad before me, I’m a science writer. And I’m a a trained sceptic. As a physics student at Cambridge I was told to mistrust what the professors told me. If the top experts had everything done and dusted, there would be no big discoveries remaining to be made. Luckily the top experts are usually wrong. Surprising discoveries keep coming along. Science thrives
And I was also groomed as a sceptic as an apprentice journalist. I was told that all governments lie and that anyone who comes to you with a story has an axe to grind. If you want the real stories, you must go out and look for them for yourself.
So I’ve had 50 years of fun, hunting down the young men and women making the biggest scientific discoveries. The game was to put them on international television long before they won their Nobel Prizes. When telling the public about new wonders of Nature, I often got a lot of flak from the top experts of the time. For example, I was rebuked for reporting that there are big black holes in the sky, that continents drift around the world, that wobbles in the Earth’s orbit set the rhythm of the ice ages, and that the dinosaurs perished when an asteroid or comet hit the Earth. There were always top experts despising the discoveries, all of which are now accepted as correct.
The dust usually settled on those spats within a few years. But about 12 years ago I reported a new wonder of Nature concerning climate change, which is still rejected by the top experts. So instead of moving on to fascinating new subjects (of which there are plenty) I’ve had to keep hammering away about the same climate story. Try as I may to stick to the science, and steer clear of the politics, there’s no avoiding a propaganda battle. It has corrupted the science to a degree not seen since the Soviet Bloc made the political decision that Western genetics was wrong, and went ahead and ruined their agriculture.
A discovery that’s not politically correct
My story was about a discovery in the physics of the weather. To find anything comparable you have to go back to the 18th Century. That was when the postmaster of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin by name, flew a kite in a thunderstorm. He proved that lightning is just a big electric spark. To be precise, he described how to do the experiment, and let the French try it first. They lived to tell the tale, so Franklin repeated it for himself. A very prudent postmaster.
In 1996, in Copenhagen, the climate physicist Henrik Svensmark made another discovery just as amazing. He found that the everyday clouds we see in the sky take their orders from the Sun and the stars. I wrote a book about it, called The Manic Sun. Nobody paid much attention, but the scientific evidence went on piling up and last year Henrik and I together published a second book called The Chilling Stars. A second edition, updated, came out this year, and the discovery has also featured in a few TV programmes.
In a nutshell, atomic particles coming from exploded stars, called cosmic rays, help to make invisible specks floating in the air, on which water vapour condenses to make cloud droplets. When the Sun is most active, magnetically speaking, it repels many of the cosmic rays and there are fewer clouds. During the 20th Century the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength. With fewer cosmic rays, and with fewer low clouds blocking the sunshine, the world warmed up.
The other disputed discoveries that I mentioned were controversial only among scientists. This new wonder of Nature is not politically correct. A bunch of computer model-makers, using a much more speculative theory, want to say that the global warming is our fault, due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases put into the air by human activity. And they’ve persuaded many politicians that it’s going to get much worse unless we mend our ways.
During the 20th Century, the world’s average temperature rose by less than one degree Celsius. That’s not at all remarkable compared with other changes of climate over the previous centuries and millennia, and there are two explanations on offer. Despite anything you may hear to the contrary, the cosmic-ray story is fully supported by the evidence of observations and experiments.
The manmade global warming story has no such support. Quite the opposite. The very mechanism for the supposed greenhouse warming, reinforced by that extra CO2, requires tropical air temperatures to rise faster at high altitudes (6 miles above the ground) than they do lower down. Weather balloons routinely carry thermometers to those heights and beyond. They have shown no such trend over recent decades.
The glory of science is that in the end the correct story prevails. When my friend Henrik Svensmark’s does, I don’t suppose Al Gore will give back his Nobel peace prize. But what I do foresee is a hundred PhDs in political history and scientific history, as people try to understand how science and public policy got into such a mess. And a large part of their task will be to disentangle the science and the propaganda. Which brings me back to Ritchie Calder, and my comparisons with the wartime propaganda of the 1940s.
Dirty tricks in the US Senate
I mentioned leaflets. Billions of them were scattered on German cities and on the front lines. One of the best of these paper weapons, so my Dad told me, was a pamphlet written by a doctor explaining to German troops how to fake illnesses so they’d not have to fight. Rule number one: pretend to be desperate to get back into action. Rule number two: report the symptoms as explained in the booklet, but pretend you’ve no idea what disease they might represent. It was so effective that the Germans translated the pamphlet into English and redirected it at British and American troops.
Although the malingerers’ handbook told no direct lies, it fell in the category of ungentlemanly behaviour, which was Foreign Office parlance for dirty tricks. Now you might not think a fine fellow like our Nobel peace prize winner Al Gore would ever resort to dirty tricks. Well think again.
An early event in the politicization of climate science was a US Senate hearing organised by Al Gore in 1988. It was for his Svengali, or Savonarola if you prefer, Dr James Hansen of NASA. On US public television last year, a colleague of Gore’s confessed what happened. I quote from the transcript.of Senator Timothy Wirth.
We called the weather bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. … So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. … What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows – I will admit that, right – so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot. … The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving his remarkable testimony.
That was when Hansen claimed, 20 years ago mark you, that global warming was already large enough to ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.
Exaggerations and false trails
Churchill's famous gesture, the right way round. Wikimedia
A well-known ploy in propaganda is to seize on small facts and exaggerate them mightily. During the war, the finest example was V for Victory. Word came via a listening station that someone in occupied Belgium was chalking V on public walls. Being Flemish, the graffiti artist meant V for Vrijheid or freedom. But London cleverly announced that in occupied Europe people were writing V for Victory everywhere. So people tuning in secretly to the BBC went out and did just that, to infuriate the Germans and hearten their neighbours.
Da da da daaah – the morse code for V, in Beethoven’s Fifth – became the signature tune for BBC broadcasts to occupied Europe. The only real problem was coaching Churchill to hold his hand the right way round when he made the V sign.
Pathetic polar bears? Daily Mail
For a small fact blown up out of all proportion by the global warmers, here’s the most remarkable case. Some years ago, a small family of polar bears was caught out in a violent storm, when swimming. They drowned. That could have happened a hundred or a thousand years ago. But no, we’re told a Walt-Disney-like tale, that bears are drowning because the Arctic ice is melting. Total rubbish, because the polar bears are terrific swimmers. And they’re thriving. Their numbers are growing, not shrinking.
But I must admit, poor little drowning bear cubs make dazzling propaganda, of a kind to which schoolchildren in particular are vulnerable. In that connection an English high court ruled that Al Gore’s sob story about the polar bears, in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, was groundless. It was one of nine misleading claims that the judge said must be pointed out to all teachers showing that film in school. Yet people still wring their hands about the polar bears, don’t they?
On the cover of Al Gore’s DVD, the hurricane Katrina, which battered New Orleans in 2005, comes out of a chimney stack. That takes my mind back to the wartime device of laying false trails. In 1944 the German’s launched flying bombs against London, V1s. Nasty things. Pup-pup-pup-pup – silence – 15 seconds later, bang. They were well aimed, with dreadful and demoralising hits on central London. But the British reported that Middlesex [north-west of London] was suffering particularly badly, so that the Germans would believe they were overshooting the capital. The V1 battery commanders shortened the range. It was a shame about Maidstone, but many of the missiles fell in open country in Kent.
A modern false trail concerns the trajectories of hurricanes supposedly targeted on the USA. Prompted by global warming scientists, a typical claim by ABC News in the aftermath of Katrina said “Major storms have increased in intensity and duration by a whopping 50 % just since the 1970s.” That’s simply untrue, but all the media were saying similar things.
In 2008, after a careful study of all hurricanes since 1900, Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center in Miami declared: “There is nothing in the US hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts.” Taking account of the changing value of the dollar, Landsea and his colleagues found, for example, that the 1926 Miami hurricane was twice as costly as Katrina. Putting aside climate change, any impression that things are getting worse can be explained by better tracking of storms and more seaside real estate. Physically there’s been no increase in the frequency or violence of the storms. Although Landsea made his reassuring declaration in a press release from NOAA, the US weather bureau, and although Reuters picked up the story, it was reported in only one major newspaper (USA Today).
Airbrushing scientific and climatic history
In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith’s job was to keep revising official history so that Big Brother would always appear omniscient and wise. That was based of course on what was common practice in the dictatorships of Europe. But in 1941, when the Soviet Union suddenly became our gallant ally against Hitler, British propaganda itself had to airbrush history. The role of cuddly Uncle Joe Stalin in the invasion of Poland in 1939, which precipitated the Second World War, could not be mentioned any more.
And now the history of climate science has been airbrushed too. You’re not supposed to remember that in the 1960s and 1970s the top climate experts were predicting global cooling. A little ice age, or even a big ice age. They’ll try to tell you that this was just a scare got up by the media, but again that’s simply untrue. An advantage of old age is to have lived through various climate changes and the theories about them. For example, I was present in Rome in 1961 when UN agencies convened a conference of climate scientists, who discussed the dreadful effects that the all-too evident global cooling was going to have on world food supplies.
It’s not just the history of climate science that gets airbrushed, but the history of the climate itself. Most of the cathedrals of Europe were built in a time of great prosperity called the Medieval Warm Period, when French wine producers were lamenting the competition from the English vineyards. All around the world, temperatures were at least as warm as today or even a degree or two higher. But that was before the industrial revolution, and manmade carbon dioxide was insignificant.
“We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,” the global warmers said. That’s a direct quote from an email sent in 1995 to a climate scientist at the University of Oklahoma. Supporters of the manmade warming hypothesis got busy with masses of data on past climates and in 1998 they came up with a revised temperature graph for the past 1000 years. Because of its shape, it’s called the Hockey Stick. It showed temperatures pretty flat until the past 150 years, when they suddenly shot up steeply till now. The Medieval Warm Period had vanished. Dispassionate experts showed that the Hockey Stick was a statistical mishmash and not to be trusted, but the global warmers still display it like a totem at every opportunity.
Hushing up unfavourable news
When facts and opinions are at odds you have to be careful what you say, and coordinate your stories. For example, during the war you couldn’t complain about the wickedness of U-boats sinking allied merchant ships, because our heroes in British and American submarines were busy decimating the merchant fleets of Italy and Japan.
My friend Henrik Svensmark was having coffee in Rome one day, at a meeting on climate change organized by the Vatican. At the next table there was a group of global-warming scientists from various institutes. They didn’t notice Henrik sitting there or they’d have treated him like an enemy spy. As it was, he listened in amazement as they carefully adjusted what each of them should say in the meeting, to avoid any hint of a contradiction.
This wasn’t normal scientific behaviour. Usually a scientist wants to push his own hypothesis and present his evidence, wherever it leads. Mismatches of theories and data drive the jet engines of science, propelling it towards surer knowledge. What happened in the Vatican coffee bar wasn’t science, it was the coordination and fine-tuning of propaganda, aimed at persuading the Pope’s advisers that manmade global warming was confirmed as a terrible threat.
Sh! Loss of the battleship Barham. Wikimedia.
Hushing up unfavourable news was routine in the Second World War. In November 1941 the British battleship Barham was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. She blew up with loss of more than 800 men. But the Germans didn’t know that, so the news was censored. When the next of kin were eventually told some weeks later, they were ordered to keep it secret. But a medium, Helen Duncan, claimed to have heard the news from a dead sailor. She became the last person in England to be imprisoned for witchcraft. I’m not kidding.
Sh! US Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea in "healthy" Antarctic ice, 2008. USAP.
For a modern parallel, take the news about the polar sea ice. Last year [2007] you were told – shock, horror! — that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent since satellite measurements began. How that news was trumpeted on television and radio and in all the newspapers! What went completely unreported was that simultaneously, at the other end of the world, Antarctic sea ice was at a record high. Although the big freeze in Antarctica was again plainly announced in a press release from the US weather bureau, NOAA, not a single newspaper in North America or Europe carried this news unfavourable to the global warming brigade.
The collusion of my fellow journalists in this protracted deception is disturbing but not surprising, I’m afraid. Unfortunately only 1% of the huge number of articles on global warming in the posh London newspapers deviate from the official line of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s not my reckoning. It comes from environmental researchers, at Oxford University if you please, who complain about the more balanced reporting in the not-so-posh papers, with a deviancy rate of 23%. They say it has “skewed public understanding of human contributions to climate change”. In other words, kindly abandon the journalistic principle that different points of views should be heard on controversial matters, or else a lot of dreadful people out there (you or me) may not truly believe that climate change is their fault.
Some American journalists boast openly about their bias. Ross Gelbspan, former editor of The Boston Globe, said “Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming, they have a responsibility not to report what these scientists say.” Charles Alexander, science editor of Time magazine said, “I would freely admit that we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy.”
Gagging the opposition
In wartime most newspapers here were pretty passive. It was patriotic, as they saw it, to toe the official line. But the Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror were critical of the conduct of the war, so their editors were simply conscripted into the army. When Ritchie Calder reported the opening stages of the Blitz on London, in the Daily Herald, he complained about bureaucratic muddles that often left survivors uncared for, without food, water or medical attention. That counted as giving comfort to the enemy. The government shut him up by shanghai-ing him into Political Warfare.
Gagging the opposition isn’t possible in peacetime, is it? You’d be surprised. I know two American solar physicists who have been warned that they’ll lose their university jobs if they go on publicly claiming that the Sun drives climate change. When Danish TV broadcast a film sceptical about the manmade global warming story, a senior government official in Copenhagen told the producer that he’d never work for Danish television again. Here, the botanist David Bellamy, well known as an environmental broadcaster, was simply dropped from the airwaves by the BBC when he rashly mentioned his doubts about global warming.
Evidently uneasy about the attitude, the BBC newscaster Jeremy Paxman wrote in 2007, “People who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that global warming is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago.” The BBC Trust tried to intervene. In a hard-hitting report on “safeguarding impartiality”, it singled out climate change as an area of special concern. “Dissenters,” it said, “cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who should not be given a platform by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view.”
And glory be, when that report came out, the BBC granted a few dreadful people like Henrik Svensmark and me, two minutes here, three minutes there, to explain why we dissented from the manmade global warming story. But that lasted only a week, before the normal partiality returned.
Channel 4 was braver. It broadcast a film with the scandalizing title The Great Global Warming Swindle. Dozens of global warming scientists promptly weighed in with detailed complaints to the regulator Ofcom, running to about 200 pages. All they could extract from Ofcom were minor rebukes to Channel 4 about unfair treatment of three of the complainants. On a personal point, Ofcom rejected a claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (no less) that Nigel Calder had told lies in the Swindle film.
Remember I mentioned the high court judge who identified nine misleading claims in Al Gore’s movie? Well, after a year of forensic scrutiny, Ofcom concluded that the Swindle film did not seriously mislead viewers, and affirmed that such challenging programmes should indeed be made.
It’s notable that when lawyers look coolly at the evidence, they can be more objective than some people who call themselves scientists. And not just lawyers – hardnosed fighting men too. The US Joint Forces Command has just reported on the national security implications of climate change. There’s outrage among the global warmers because the report says, “In many respects, scientific conclusions about the causes and potential effects of global warming are contradictory.”
The scientific establishment in Denmark has always tried to silence Henrik Svensmark by starving him of public research funds. When the independent Carlsberg Foundation gave him a research grant, a senior civil servant wrote to the foundation demanding that the grant be withdrawn. And Henrik had to wait four years to gather enough money to build and operate quite modest equipment for a key experiment that revealed the chemical way in which cosmic rays help to make clouds.
With his team’s successful results written up in a scientific paper, journal after journal turned it down until, after another 16 wasted months, it was finally accepted by the Proceedings of the Royal Society – so it was by no means a silly paper. Henrik wrote a follow-up article for a magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society, but the editor found herself still being criticized 18 months later for publishing such politically incorrect stuff.
Luckily Henrik has the broad shoulders and cheerful disposition of a Viking warrior. He needs them. Just a couple of days ago, he gave a talk about cosmic rays and climate at Oslo’s natural history museum. Before he even arrived, the director of Norway’s climate centre demanded that the director of the natural history museum should resign, for his gaffe in inviting Henrik to speak.
If the Svensmark hypothesis were stupid, people would just forget about it. Instead, over the years, the personal attacks on Henrik have become shriller and shriller. To me that’s a sure sign that his discoveries are beginning to bite. He has the global warming fraternity worried now. And as I’ll explain, Mother Nature is giving them big problems too.
“Lie big, and stick to it”
Adolf Hitler, poor chap, lost a testicle during the Somme battle in the First World War. As a result one of the great British morale boosters in the Second World War was the marching tune Colonel Bogey. Every serviceman and all but the primmest of civilians knew the words that went with it, written by an anonymous propagandist of some genius. The words were considered too ripe to be sung in the opening sequence of the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, so we had only the tune of Colonel Bogey. But, ladies and gentlemen, if you happen to know the words, please join in.
As Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels was my Dad’s chief wartime opponent. Among many meditations on his tradecraft, Goebbels wrote, “The English follow the principle that when you lie, you should lie big, and stick to it.” And of course Goebbels did the same himself – most wickedly in the case of the Jews.
One of the biggest wartime lies from the British side was about setting the English Channel on fire. By chance, a bomber raid on the barges gathered in French ports for the invasion of England caught a battalion of German troops who were there only to learn about the barges. Some of them finished up in French civilian hospitals with dreadful burns from the incendiary bombs.
So British agents in France were instructed to spread the rumour that the German army had tried to invade England but had been repelled with massive casualties. The British spread fire on the sea, in the Byzantine manner. They had reinvented Greek fire, but the weapon was so secret that the BBC wasn’t allowed to report the victory. The rumour was widely credited, among French civilians and German troops. Many people believed that big lie right till the end of the war.
Some attempts at big lies from the global warming camp are almost too footling to bother about. “The science of climate change is settled,” they say. If you know anything at all about science, that’s as daft as saying that poetry is settled or music is settled. For goodness sake, the theory of gravity isn’t settled, 300 years after Newton.
Just a shade more subtle is the claim that only a few ignorant scientists question the global warming scare. If so, why were they so annoyed about all those experts in The Great Global Warming Swindle? Participants in the film included the professor of meteorology at MIT, the founding director of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, the founding director of the US weather satellite service, and two physicists who won a medal from NASA for measuring Earth’s temperature from space. Other eminent sceptics, by the way, include the present director of Russia’s Global Climate Institute and the former heads of both the Australian and the Dutch climate centres. The Dutchman, Henk Tennekes, famously said, “Kyoto is onzin”. Kyoto is rubbish.
Yet another variant of this feeble lie is that “2500 scientists agree that humans are causing a climate crisis”. These are folk listed as reviewers in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Look at the list closely and you’ll find that not many of them are climate scientists. There are economists, ecologists, geomorphologists, medical doctors etc. etc. Included in the list are many people who disagreed with the report and whose comments were ignored.
What’s more, 2440 of the 2500 reviewers were never asked to agree that humans are responsible for climate change. Only 62 experts vetted the chapter where the key claim is made that “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” Most of those 62 were chums of the scientists who wrote the chapter. Several of the others were highly critical of the chapter, but their names still appear among the famous 2500.
So none of these rather desperate claims, about the overwhelming authority of global warming science, begins to compare as propaganda with setting the English Channel on fire. Lie big and stick to it, like Goebbels said? Well the lie that tops my list, in global warming propaganda, is suitably breathtaking in its audacity. It says that because of all that manmade CO2 the world is getting hotter and hotter, and faster and faster.
We’ve come to a parting of the ways. Until a few years ago, it was customary for us, the sceptics, to say we didn’t dispute the fact of global warming, during the 20th Century. We just had other explanations for it, with natural drivers of climate that were more important than human activity. Both sides agreed that one natural driver, an exceptional warming of the East Pacific, caused a brief peak in the global temperature in 1998, which could be left out of the argument. But a few years ago, on German television, I caused hilarity and outrage by suggesting that global warming had stopped. Perhaps I was a little premature, but now it looks as if I was right.
The latest data on global temperatures up to November 2008 confirm that 2008 has been much cooler than 2007. It’s fair enough to argue about whether the Earth’s temperature has stopped rising, or merely paused, or gone into reverse. But the key fact is that, despite all that extra CO2 that’s appeared in the air in the past 20 years, the world this year [2008] is no warmer than it was in 1988, when the US Senators played tricks with the air conditioning and Dr Hansen sounded the alarm about global warming.
There’s now panic among the global warming scientists. They want to blame the lack of warming on natural factors affecting ocean temperatures. It’s funny how they’re always glad to let nature explain a cooling trend, while dismissing any suggestion that previous warming trends could have been natural too.
Be ready for a cooling
Earlier this year, in the updated edition of The Chilling Stars, Henrik Svensmark and I said we were advising our friends to enjoy the global warming while it lasted. At present we have an alarming lack of dark sunspots, which are a symptom of the Sun’s magnetism. If Henrik’s theory is right, the world will now get cooler. I fear that the scientific argument may have to be settled that way, rather than by rational discussion of the rival theories. It’s a pity, because global cooling will be bad news for the world’s food supplies, just as the experts were warning, back in the 1960s.
If there are any yachtsmen here, I’m sorry about the atrocious summer of 2008. When I listened to the shipping forecasts telling monotonously of gales in Shannon, Rockall and Malin, I remembered how, in 1588, the Spanish Armada lost two dozen ships wrecked in late summer storms on the Irish coast – more than they had lost in the Channel fights. As England’s Armada Medal put it, “God blew and they were scattered.” With hindsight, that was another occasion when the Sun was turning lazy, cooling was setting in, and the price of wheat was going to treble in 50 years.
And any skiers among you will have been aware of all the doom-mongers predicting hard times for your sport. For example in 2003 The Independent in London proclaimed that “Many of Europe’s most popular skiing resorts face extinction because global warming is making snowfall increasingly unreliable.” This year, with generous snow falling in Europe and North America, in below normal temperatures, resorts started their ski season early in the expectation of bumper trade. The other day, Cortina had five feet of snow in 48 hours – enough to last the Dolomites for the entire ski season.
Finally, any gamblers here? Back in the summer, Ladbrokes were offering odds of 7-1 for bets on a white Christmas in London. You’re too late, I’m afraid, because tough-minded bookmakers have not yet succumbed to the global warming propaganda. They’ve shortened the odds to 3-1.
© Nigel Calder 2008
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The tradecraft of propaganda
Hearing about a story concerning my father in The Independent, London (2 June), I’ve now seen that the professor of journalism at the University of Kent, Tim Luckhurst, describes him as a “war hero”. That’s for Ritchie Calder’s candid newspaper reports of the chaotic responses to the bombing blitz on London, 1940-41. The article is here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/dispatches-from-the-blitz-why-peter-ritchie-calder-was-a-true-war-hero-1989929.html
As Luckhurst says, he faced accusations of “giving comfort to the enemy”. Yes, as a child I heard him telling my mother at the door that he’d be “home by eight if I’m not in Brixton Prison”. But although Luckhurst mentions a later involvement in propaganda, he doesn’t explain that the government silenced Calder’s troublesome reportage of the air raids by shanghai-ing him into the top-secret Political Warfare Executive, formed in August 1941.
A pass giving Ritchie Calder access to the plans for the D-Day landings. (P.I.D., Political Intelligence Department, was a cover-name for the Political Warfare Executive.) National Library of Scotland.
My aim in this blog is to stick to science and shun the politics. My Dad was more politically minded and finished up as a Labour peer. But I share his readiness to defy officialdom and, when the facts serve, to cock a snook at bigwigs of any kind.
What Ritchie Calder told me about wartime propaganda against the Nazis has helped me to understand how a few scientists and politicians have persuaded governments and the docile media about a danger from man-made global warming that goes far beyond the real facts.
While not exactly scientific, the tradecraft of propaganda can be considered technical, so I’ve decided to post here the text of a talk I gave on the subject in London 18 months ago. It’s lightly edited to remove one comment about an individual and to correct one historical over-simplification, but I’ve not bothered to update remarks corresponding to the time of delivery of the talk.[On 8 June, I've added some pictures, which I didn't use in the talk, to break up the long-winded text.]
Global warming is just propaganda
Talk by Nigel Calder, Savile Club, London, 9 Dec. 2008
© Nigel Calder 2008
Let me start by mentioning two members of your club, my brother Allan here tonight, and our late father, Ritchie Calder. When Allan was six weeks old a damaged German bomber was about to crash in Surrey. It jettisoned its bombs and one hit our family home. There was a kerfuffle in London when it turned out that the German pilot had in his pocket a British propaganda leaflet produced by our Dad. Had there been a breach of security? Had his house been targeted? No, of course not. It was just a grisly coincidence.
Ritchie Calder was an ace science reporter, whose scoops included the splitting of the atom and the structure of DNA. But during the Second World War he was director of plans and campaigns in the Political Warfare Executive of the Foreign Office. In plain words, he was making propaganda. He later told me quite a lot about the wartime tradecraft. And now it dismays me to see the very same techniques being used to propagate the myth that we are in the grip of relentless global warming driven by manmade emissions of carbon dioxide.
Like my Dad before me, I’m a science writer. And I’m a a trained sceptic. As a physics student at Cambridge I was told to mistrust what the professors told me. If the top experts had everything done and dusted, there would be no big discoveries remaining to be made. Luckily the top experts are usually wrong. Surprising discoveries keep coming along. Science thrives
And I was also groomed as a sceptic as an apprentice journalist. I was told that all governments lie and that anyone who comes to you with a story has an axe to grind. If you want the real stories, you must go out and look for them for yourself.
So I’ve had 50 years of fun, hunting down the young men and women making the biggest scientific discoveries. The game was to put them on international television long before they won their Nobel Prizes. When telling the public about new wonders of Nature, I often got a lot of flak from the top experts of the time. For example, I was rebuked for reporting that there are big black holes in the sky, that continents drift around the world, that wobbles in the Earth’s orbit set the rhythm of the ice ages, and that the dinosaurs perished when an asteroid or comet hit the Earth. There were always top experts despising the discoveries, all of which are now accepted as correct.
The dust usually settled on those spats within a few years. But about 12 years ago I reported a new wonder of Nature concerning climate change, which is still rejected by the top experts. So instead of moving on to fascinating new subjects (of which there are plenty) I’ve had to keep hammering away about the same climate story. Try as I may to stick to the science, and steer clear of the politics, there’s no avoiding a propaganda battle. It has corrupted the science to a degree not seen since the Soviet Bloc made the political decision that Western genetics was wrong, and went ahead and ruined their agriculture.
A discovery that’s not politically correct
My story was about a discovery in the physics of the weather. To find anything comparable you have to go back to the 18th Century. That was when the postmaster of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin by name, flew a kite in a thunderstorm. He proved that lightning is just a big electric spark. To be precise, he described how to do the experiment, and let the French try it first. They lived to tell the tale, so Franklin repeated it for himself. A very prudent postmaster.
In 1996, in Copenhagen, the climate physicist Henrik Svensmark made another discovery just as amazing. He found that the everyday clouds we see in the sky take their orders from the Sun and the stars. I wrote a book about it, called The Manic Sun. Nobody paid much attention, but the scientific evidence went on piling up and last year Henrik and I together published a second book called The Chilling Stars. A second edition, updated, came out this year, and the discovery has also featured in a few TV programmes.
In a nutshell, atomic particles coming from exploded stars, called cosmic rays, help to make invisible specks floating in the air, on which water vapour condenses to make cloud droplets. When the Sun is most active, magnetically speaking, it repels many of the cosmic rays and there are fewer clouds. During the 20th Century the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength. With fewer cosmic rays, and with fewer low clouds blocking the sunshine, the world warmed up.
The other disputed discoveries that I mentioned were controversial only among scientists. This new wonder of Nature is not politically correct. A bunch of computer model-makers, using a much more speculative theory, want to say that the global warming is our fault, due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases put into the air by human activity. And they’ve persuaded many politicians that it’s going to get much worse unless we mend our ways.
During the 20th Century, the world’s average temperature rose by less than one degree Celsius. That’s not at all remarkable compared with other changes of climate over the previous centuries and millennia, and there are two explanations on offer. Despite anything you may hear to the contrary, the cosmic-ray story is fully supported by the evidence of observations and experiments.
The manmade global warming story has no such support. Quite the opposite. The very mechanism for the supposed greenhouse warming, reinforced by that extra CO2, requires tropical air temperatures to rise faster at high altitudes (6 miles above the ground) than they do lower down. Weather balloons routinely carry thermometers to those heights and beyond. They have shown no such trend over recent decades.
The glory of science is that in the end the correct story prevails. When my friend Henrik Svensmark’s does, I don’t suppose Al Gore will give back his Nobel peace prize. But what I do foresee is a hundred PhDs in political history and scientific history, as people try to understand how science and public policy got into such a mess. And a large part of their task will be to disentangle the science and the propaganda. Which brings me back to Ritchie Calder, and my comparisons with the wartime propaganda of the 1940s.
Dirty tricks in the US Senate
I mentioned leaflets. Billions of them were scattered on German cities and on the front lines. One of the best of these paper weapons, so my Dad told me, was a pamphlet written by a doctor explaining to German troops how to fake illnesses so they’d not have to fight. Rule number one: pretend to be desperate to get back into action. Rule number two: report the symptoms as explained in the booklet, but pretend you’ve no idea what disease they might represent. It was so effective that the Germans translated the pamphlet into English and redirected it at British and American troops.
Although the malingerers’ handbook told no direct lies, it fell in the category of ungentlemanly behaviour, which was Foreign Office parlance for dirty tricks. Now you might not think a fine fellow like our Nobel peace prize winner Al Gore would ever resort to dirty tricks. Well think again.
An early event in the politicization of climate science was a US Senate hearing organised by Al Gore in 1988. It was for his Svengali, or Savonarola if you prefer, Dr James Hansen of NASA. On US public television last year, a colleague of Gore’s confessed what happened. I quote from the transcript.of Senator Timothy Wirth.
We called the weather bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. … So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. … What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows – I will admit that, right – so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot. … The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving his remarkable testimony.
That was when Hansen claimed, 20 years ago mark you, that global warming was already large enough to ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.
Exaggerations and false trails
Churchill's famous gesture, the right way round. Wikimedia
A well-known ploy in propaganda is to seize on small facts and exaggerate them mightily. During the war, the finest example was V for Victory. Word came via a listening station that someone in occupied Belgium was chalking V on public walls. Being Flemish, the graffiti artist meant V for Vrijheid or freedom. But London cleverly announced that in occupied Europe people were writing V for Victory everywhere. So people tuning in secretly to the BBC went out and did just that, to infuriate the Germans and hearten their neighbours.
Da da da daaah – the morse code for V, in Beethoven’s Fifth – became the signature tune for BBC broadcasts to occupied Europe. The only real problem was coaching Churchill to hold his hand the right way round when he made the V sign.
Pathetic polar bears? Daily Mail
For a small fact blown up out of all proportion by the global warmers, here’s the most remarkable case. Some years ago, a small family of polar bears was caught out in a violent storm, when swimming. They drowned. That could have happened a hundred or a thousand years ago. But no, we’re told a Walt-Disney-like tale, that bears are drowning because the Arctic ice is melting. Total rubbish, because the polar bears are terrific swimmers. And they’re thriving. Their numbers are growing, not shrinking.
But I must admit, poor little drowning bear cubs make dazzling propaganda, of a kind to which schoolchildren in particular are vulnerable. In that connection an English high court ruled that Al Gore’s sob story about the polar bears, in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, was groundless. It was one of nine misleading claims that the judge said must be pointed out to all teachers showing that film in school. Yet people still wring their hands about the polar bears, don’t they?
On the cover of Al Gore’s DVD, the hurricane Katrina, which battered New Orleans in 2005, comes out of a chimney stack. That takes my mind back to the wartime device of laying false trails. In 1944 the German’s launched flying bombs against London, V1s. Nasty things. Pup-pup-pup-pup – silence – 15 seconds later, bang. They were well aimed, with dreadful and demoralising hits on central London. But the British reported that Middlesex [north-west of London] was suffering particularly badly, so that the Germans would believe they were overshooting the capital. The V1 battery commanders shortened the range. It was a shame about Maidstone, but many of the missiles fell in open country in Kent.
A modern false trail concerns the trajectories of hurricanes supposedly targeted on the USA. Prompted by global warming scientists, a typical claim by ABC News in the aftermath of Katrina said “Major storms have increased in intensity and duration by a whopping 50 % just since the 1970s.” That’s simply untrue, but all the media were saying similar things.
In 2008, after a careful study of all hurricanes since 1900, Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center in Miami declared: “There is nothing in the US hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts.” Taking account of the changing value of the dollar, Landsea and his colleagues found, for example, that the 1926 Miami hurricane was twice as costly as Katrina. Putting aside climate change, any impression that things are getting worse can be explained by better tracking of storms and more seaside real estate. Physically there’s been no increase in the frequency or violence of the storms. Although Landsea made his reassuring declaration in a press release from NOAA, the US weather bureau, and although Reuters picked up the story, it was reported in only one major newspaper (USA Today).
Airbrushing scientific and climatic history
In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith’s job was to keep revising official history so that Big Brother would always appear omniscient and wise. That was based of course on what was common practice in the dictatorships of Europe. But in 1941, when the Soviet Union suddenly became our gallant ally against Hitler, British propaganda itself had to airbrush history. The role of cuddly Uncle Joe Stalin in the invasion of Poland in 1939, which precipitated the Second World War, could not be mentioned any more.
And now the history of climate science has been airbrushed too. You’re not supposed to remember that in the 1960s and 1970s the top climate experts were predicting global cooling. A little ice age, or even a big ice age. They’ll try to tell you that this was just a scare got up by the media, but again that’s simply untrue. An advantage of old age is to have lived through various climate changes and the theories about them. For example, I was present in Rome in 1961 when UN agencies convened a conference of climate scientists, who discussed the dreadful effects that the all-too evident global cooling was going to have on world food supplies.
It’s not just the history of climate science that gets airbrushed, but the history of the climate itself. Most of the cathedrals of Europe were built in a time of great prosperity called the Medieval Warm Period, when French wine producers were lamenting the competition from the English vineyards. All around the world, temperatures were at least as warm as today or even a degree or two higher. But that was before the industrial revolution, and manmade carbon dioxide was insignificant.
“We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,” the global warmers said. That’s a direct quote from an email sent in 1995 to a climate scientist at the University of Oklahoma. Supporters of the manmade warming hypothesis got busy with masses of data on past climates and in 1998 they came up with a revised temperature graph for the past 1000 years. Because of its shape, it’s called the Hockey Stick. It showed temperatures pretty flat until the past 150 years, when they suddenly shot up steeply till now. The Medieval Warm Period had vanished. Dispassionate experts showed that the Hockey Stick was a statistical mishmash and not to be trusted, but the global warmers still display it like a totem at every opportunity.
Hushing up unfavourable news
When facts and opinions are at odds you have to be careful what you say, and coordinate your stories. For example, during the war you couldn’t complain about the wickedness of U-boats sinking allied merchant ships, because our heroes in British and American submarines were busy decimating the merchant fleets of Italy and Japan.
My friend Henrik Svensmark was having coffee in Rome one day, at a meeting on climate change organized by the Vatican. At the next table there was a group of global-warming scientists from various institutes. They didn’t notice Henrik sitting there or they’d have treated him like an enemy spy. As it was, he listened in amazement as they carefully adjusted what each of them should say in the meeting, to avoid any hint of a contradiction.
This wasn’t normal scientific behaviour. Usually a scientist wants to push his own hypothesis and present his evidence, wherever it leads. Mismatches of theories and data drive the jet engines of science, propelling it towards surer knowledge. What happened in the Vatican coffee bar wasn’t science, it was the coordination and fine-tuning of propaganda, aimed at persuading the Pope’s advisers that manmade global warming was confirmed as a terrible threat.
Sh! Loss of the battleship Barham. Wikimedia.
Hushing up unfavourable news was routine in the Second World War. In November 1941 the British battleship Barham was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. She blew up with loss of more than 800 men. But the Germans didn’t know that, so the news was censored. When the next of kin were eventually told some weeks later, they were ordered to keep it secret. But a medium, Helen Duncan, claimed to have heard the news from a dead sailor. She became the last person in England to be imprisoned for witchcraft. I’m not kidding.
Sh! US Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea in "healthy" Antarctic ice, 2008. USAP.
For a modern parallel, take the news about the polar sea ice. Last year [2007] you were told – shock, horror! — that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent since satellite measurements began. How that news was trumpeted on television and radio and in all the newspapers! What went completely unreported was that simultaneously, at the other end of the world, Antarctic sea ice was at a record high. Although the big freeze in Antarctica was again plainly announced in a press release from the US weather bureau, NOAA, not a single newspaper in North America or Europe carried this news unfavourable to the global warming brigade.
The collusion of my fellow journalists in this protracted deception is disturbing but not surprising, I’m afraid. Unfortunately only 1% of the huge number of articles on global warming in the posh London newspapers deviate from the official line of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s not my reckoning. It comes from environmental researchers, at Oxford University if you please, who complain about the more balanced reporting in the not-so-posh papers, with a deviancy rate of 23%. They say it has “skewed public understanding of human contributions to climate change”. In other words, kindly abandon the journalistic principle that different points of views should be heard on controversial matters, or else a lot of dreadful people out there (you or me) may not truly believe that climate change is their fault.
Some American journalists boast openly about their bias. Ross Gelbspan, former editor of The Boston Globe, said “Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming, they have a responsibility not to report what these scientists say.” Charles Alexander, science editor of Time magazine said, “I would freely admit that we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy.”
Gagging the opposition
In wartime most newspapers here were pretty passive. It was patriotic, as they saw it, to toe the official line. But the Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror were critical of the conduct of the war, so their editors were simply conscripted into the army. When Ritchie Calder reported the opening stages of the Blitz on London, in the Daily Herald, he complained about bureaucratic muddles that often left survivors uncared for, without food, water or medical attention. That counted as giving comfort to the enemy. The government shut him up by shanghai-ing him into Political Warfare.
Gagging the opposition isn’t possible in peacetime, is it? You’d be surprised. I know two American solar physicists who have been warned that they’ll lose their university jobs if they go on publicly claiming that the Sun drives climate change. When Danish TV broadcast a film sceptical about the manmade global warming story, a senior government official in Copenhagen told the producer that he’d never work for Danish television again. Here, the botanist David Bellamy, well known as an environmental broadcaster, was simply dropped from the airwaves by the BBC when he rashly mentioned his doubts about global warming.
Evidently uneasy about the attitude, the BBC newscaster Jeremy Paxman wrote in 2007, “People who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that global warming is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago.” The BBC Trust tried to intervene. In a hard-hitting report on “safeguarding impartiality”, it singled out climate change as an area of special concern. “Dissenters,” it said, “cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who should not be given a platform by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view.”
And glory be, when that report came out, the BBC granted a few dreadful people like Henrik Svensmark and me, two minutes here, three minutes there, to explain why we dissented from the manmade global warming story. But that lasted only a week, before the normal partiality returned.
Channel 4 was braver. It broadcast a film with the scandalizing title The Great Global Warming Swindle. Dozens of global warming scientists promptly weighed in with detailed complaints to the regulator Ofcom, running to about 200 pages. All they could extract from Ofcom were minor rebukes to Channel 4 about unfair treatment of three of the complainants. On a personal point, Ofcom rejected a claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (no less) that Nigel Calder had told lies in the Swindle film.
Remember I mentioned the high court judge who identified nine misleading claims in Al Gore’s movie? Well, after a year of forensic scrutiny, Ofcom concluded that the Swindle film did not seriously mislead viewers, and affirmed that such challenging programmes should indeed be made.
It’s notable that when lawyers look coolly at the evidence, they can be more objective than some people who call themselves scientists. And not just lawyers – hardnosed fighting men too. The US Joint Forces Command has just reported on the national security implications of climate change. There’s outrage among the global warmers because the report says, “In many respects, scientific conclusions about the causes and potential effects of global warming are contradictory.”
The scientific establishment in Denmark has always tried to silence Henrik Svensmark by starving him of public research funds. When the independent Carlsberg Foundation gave him a research grant, a senior civil servant wrote to the foundation demanding that the grant be withdrawn. And Henrik had to wait four years to gather enough money to build and operate quite modest equipment for a key experiment that revealed the chemical way in which cosmic rays help to make clouds.
With his team’s successful results written up in a scientific paper, journal after journal turned it down until, after another 16 wasted months, it was finally accepted by the Proceedings of the Royal Society – so it was by no means a silly paper. Henrik wrote a follow-up article for a magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society, but the editor found herself still being criticized 18 months later for publishing such politically incorrect stuff.
Luckily Henrik has the broad shoulders and cheerful disposition of a Viking warrior. He needs them. Just a couple of days ago, he gave a talk about cosmic rays and climate at Oslo’s natural history museum. Before he even arrived, the director of Norway’s climate centre demanded that the director of the natural history museum should resign, for his gaffe in inviting Henrik to speak.
If the Svensmark hypothesis were stupid, people would just forget about it. Instead, over the years, the personal attacks on Henrik have become shriller and shriller. To me that’s a sure sign that his discoveries are beginning to bite. He has the global warming fraternity worried now. And as I’ll explain, Mother Nature is giving them big problems too.
“Lie big, and stick to it”
Adolf Hitler, poor chap, lost a testicle during the Somme battle in the First World War. As a result one of the great British morale boosters in the Second World War was the marching tune Colonel Bogey. Every serviceman and all but the primmest of civilians knew the words that went with it, written by an anonymous propagandist of some genius. The words were considered too ripe to be sung in the opening sequence of the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, so we had only the tune of Colonel Bogey. But, ladies and gentlemen, if you happen to know the words, please join in.
Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler is fairly similar,
But Goebbels has no balls at all.
As Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels was my Dad’s chief wartime opponent. Among many meditations on his tradecraft, Goebbels wrote, “The English follow the principle that when you lie, you should lie big, and stick to it.” And of course Goebbels did the same himself – most wickedly in the case of the Jews.
One of the biggest wartime lies from the British side was about setting the English Channel on fire. By chance, a bomber raid on the barges gathered in French ports for the invasion of England caught a battalion of German troops who were there only to learn about the barges. Some of them finished up in French civilian hospitals with dreadful burns from the incendiary bombs.
So British agents in France were instructed to spread the rumour that the German army had tried to invade England but had been repelled with massive casualties. The British spread fire on the sea, in the Byzantine manner. They had reinvented Greek fire, but the weapon was so secret that the BBC wasn’t allowed to report the victory. The rumour was widely credited, among French civilians and German troops. Many people believed that big lie right till the end of the war.
Some attempts at big lies from the global warming camp are almost too footling to bother about. “The science of climate change is settled,” they say. If you know anything at all about science, that’s as daft as saying that poetry is settled or music is settled. For goodness sake, the theory of gravity isn’t settled, 300 years after Newton.
Just a shade more subtle is the claim that only a few ignorant scientists question the global warming scare. If so, why were they so annoyed about all those experts in The Great Global Warming Swindle? Participants in the film included the professor of meteorology at MIT, the founding director of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, the founding director of the US weather satellite service, and two physicists who won a medal from NASA for measuring Earth’s temperature from space. Other eminent sceptics, by the way, include the present director of Russia’s Global Climate Institute and the former heads of both the Australian and the Dutch climate centres. The Dutchman, Henk Tennekes, famously said, “Kyoto is onzin”. Kyoto is rubbish.
Yet another variant of this feeble lie is that “2500 scientists agree that humans are causing a climate crisis”. These are folk listed as reviewers in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Look at the list closely and you’ll find that not many of them are climate scientists. There are economists, ecologists, geomorphologists, medical doctors etc. etc. Included in the list are many people who disagreed with the report and whose comments were ignored.
What’s more, 2440 of the 2500 reviewers were never asked to agree that humans are responsible for climate change. Only 62 experts vetted the chapter where the key claim is made that “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” Most of those 62 were chums of the scientists who wrote the chapter. Several of the others were highly critical of the chapter, but their names still appear among the famous 2500.
So none of these rather desperate claims, about the overwhelming authority of global warming science, begins to compare as propaganda with setting the English Channel on fire. Lie big and stick to it, like Goebbels said? Well the lie that tops my list, in global warming propaganda, is suitably breathtaking in its audacity. It says that because of all that manmade CO2 the world is getting hotter and hotter, and faster and faster.
We’ve come to a parting of the ways. Until a few years ago, it was customary for us, the sceptics, to say we didn’t dispute the fact of global warming, during the 20th Century. We just had other explanations for it, with natural drivers of climate that were more important than human activity. Both sides agreed that one natural driver, an exceptional warming of the East Pacific, caused a brief peak in the global temperature in 1998, which could be left out of the argument. But a few years ago, on German television, I caused hilarity and outrage by suggesting that global warming had stopped. Perhaps I was a little premature, but now it looks as if I was right.
The latest data on global temperatures up to November 2008 confirm that 2008 has been much cooler than 2007. It’s fair enough to argue about whether the Earth’s temperature has stopped rising, or merely paused, or gone into reverse. But the key fact is that, despite all that extra CO2 that’s appeared in the air in the past 20 years, the world this year [2008] is no warmer than it was in 1988, when the US Senators played tricks with the air conditioning and Dr Hansen sounded the alarm about global warming.
There’s now panic among the global warming scientists. They want to blame the lack of warming on natural factors affecting ocean temperatures. It’s funny how they’re always glad to let nature explain a cooling trend, while dismissing any suggestion that previous warming trends could have been natural too.
Be ready for a cooling
Earlier this year, in the updated edition of The Chilling Stars, Henrik Svensmark and I said we were advising our friends to enjoy the global warming while it lasted. At present we have an alarming lack of dark sunspots, which are a symptom of the Sun’s magnetism. If Henrik’s theory is right, the world will now get cooler. I fear that the scientific argument may have to be settled that way, rather than by rational discussion of the rival theories. It’s a pity, because global cooling will be bad news for the world’s food supplies, just as the experts were warning, back in the 1960s.
If there are any yachtsmen here, I’m sorry about the atrocious summer of 2008. When I listened to the shipping forecasts telling monotonously of gales in Shannon, Rockall and Malin, I remembered how, in 1588, the Spanish Armada lost two dozen ships wrecked in late summer storms on the Irish coast – more than they had lost in the Channel fights. As England’s Armada Medal put it, “God blew and they were scattered.” With hindsight, that was another occasion when the Sun was turning lazy, cooling was setting in, and the price of wheat was going to treble in 50 years.
And any skiers among you will have been aware of all the doom-mongers predicting hard times for your sport. For example in 2003 The Independent in London proclaimed that “Many of Europe’s most popular skiing resorts face extinction because global warming is making snowfall increasingly unreliable.” This year, with generous snow falling in Europe and North America, in below normal temperatures, resorts started their ski season early in the expectation of bumper trade. The other day, Cortina had five feet of snow in 48 hours – enough to last the Dolomites for the entire ski season.
Finally, any gamblers here? Back in the summer, Ladbrokes were offering odds of 7-1 for bets on a white Christmas in London. You’re too late, I’m afraid, because tough-minded bookmakers have not yet succumbed to the global warming propaganda. They’ve shortened the odds to 3-1.
© Nigel Calder 2008
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"Green" who doubts '"The Science'"
9 June 2010
Meet the green who doubts ‘The Science’
The author of Chill explains why he’s sceptical about manmade global warming — and why greens are so intolerant.
Peter Taylor spiked
The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 – and then, feeling that the remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the science.
In my book on biodiversity, "Beyond Conservation", I had mentioned in one of the chapters that perhaps the man-made global warming theory was not all it was being cracked up to be. The changes we are seeing now, I wrote, suggested that some other processes were at work. I then took time out, visited the science libraries, and checked the original science upon which today’s models are based.
I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions.
The role of water vapour in planetary warming is also open to questioning. While it is presented as being a heat amplifier, in fact because it can turn into cloud it could actually regulate temperature instead. As it turned out, at the very beginning of the UN discussions, Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and a leading expert appointed to the committee because of his meteorological expertise, was saying precisely that: the amplification effect asserted cannot be relied upon to increase warming because the vapour could turn into cloud. This needed to be proved before basing assumptions on it. But Lindzen was overruled. Despite still being a key part of the IPPC process, he is now vilified by the press and by the environmental movement. So even on the most basic science of the atmospherics, there is doubt.
Or take oceanography. Most of the heat of the planet is not contained in the atmosphere; it is in the oceans. And what happens in the oceans is absolutely vital to the dynamics of heat moving around the planet. So while of course it is possible to warm up the planet to an additional extent as a result of human activity, if the planet then lets more heat out than it would normally do, then it will balance out. That is to say, you have only to produce less cloud over the oceans and the oceans will release heat to space. Like CO2 itself, the atmosphere doesn’t actually hold heat – it simply delays its transmission to space.
The real dynamic of the planet is to do with clouds, yet this area of science – oceanography and cloud cover – is incredibly uncertain. When I first looked at the basic science, the findings were surprising. Over the global warming period – which I limit to the past 50 or so years – the globe didn’t warm at all between 1950 and 1980, even though carbon dioxide emissions were going through the roof due to the postwar expansion of industry; global temperatures stayed pretty much flat.
The real global warming took off in the 1980s and 90s, through to about 2005. (In the last 10 years it’s actually plateaued.) That period of 25 years, from around 1980 to 2005, coincided with changes in the ocean and cloud cover – that is, there was less cloud and more sunlight getting through to the ocean. And this can be seen in the satellite data on the kind of energy that’s coming through (short-wave energy, which is the only energy that heats water – infra-red energy coming from CO2 cannot heat water). So when you look at the real-world data, the warming of that entire period seems to be due to additional sunlight reaching the oceans.
In 2007, I put out a report on this, in the hope of getting feedback before I published my book, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. Since then, top scientists at NASA have agreed that this period of warming over the past 25 years is entirely due to the short-wave radiation from sunlight, with the ocean transferring that heat to the land.
So the crucial question is: has the cloud thinning been due to carbon dioxide? Or is it part of a cycle? If you ask some of the top people at NASA – that is, the people who interpret all the satellite data – they will say it’s 50-50. So you could say the greenhouse effect has warmed the oceans and the warmer oceans have thinned the clouds. But that is still just a hypothesis, it is not a proven scientific fact. That means you could assert with equal validity that thinning clouds have warmed the oceans, which has led to global warming – meaning the effect of carbon dioxide is minimal.
There is a fairly easy way of deciding between the two viewpoints: you look at the history of climate to find out whether there has been warming and cooling in the past, before carbon dioxide became such an issue. And of course there have been cycles of warming and cooling, with the longest of the cycles lasting about a thousand years and the shortest cycle – El Nino – about four-to-eight years.
So, right now, we are at the peak of a thousand-year cycle. We also had a peak for all the other cycles between 1995 and 2005. Given that these cycles have peaked, temperature-wise, before, one can look at what happened back then. A thousand years ago, for instance, the Vikings were growing crops on Greenland, which assumes that the summer ice would have been more limited than it is now. The Arctic melted down a thousand years ago, just as it did 2,000 years ago. What’s astonishing is that you can see all of that in the ice-core record in Greenland. And in each cycle of a thousand years, the peak is getting lower. So overall the planet is actually cooling, from a peak about 8,000 years ago.
Now the only way in which you can get cycles of warming and cooling on such a scale is through the oceans. And the only way that can happen is in relation to cloud cover. So the crucial question then is, how do the oceans vary their cloud cover? What creates these cycles? There is a major scientific controversy over how the sun’s magnetic field influences the different types of energy that reach the planet, and how they, in turn, influence cloud cover. There are several different scientific teams working on it, including one from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). What this shows is that it is still an unresolved question. Nobody knows what the mechanisms are.
So why is the UN saying what it is saying? Well, if you actually look at the wording of what this so-called consensus of scientists has produced, then you will see that they believe that ‘global warming is not due to known natural causes acting alone’. This is clever wording. It means that the door is open to an unknown mechanism driving the warming. So although it is well known that the warming is naturally driven, the mechanism is not.
Why would the UN suppress all of this debate happening within its working groups? The problem is that the secretariat within the UN tasked with processing this debate is already committed – financially – to focusing upon carbon dioxide as the climate-change driver. It is very hard for them to backtrack.
It is only recently that the scientific world has bought into this consensus. In 2001, America, Russia and China did not accept the UN’s analysis. But by 2004, America had signed up to it. And this was all down to a certain team in the US which produced an analysis that ironed out the past cycles of warming and cooling. Although it has since been discredited, this report had a tremendous effect in bringing scientific institutions around to the idea of man-made global warming.
So behind the appearance of consensus and settled science, there is now this tremendous battle going on. The dissenting scientists are described by certain journalists and environmentalists as ‘denialists’ and ‘sceptics’ funded by the oil industry. This is simply not the case. There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming. Nobody is seriously saying that carbon dioxide has no effect whatsoever, but the defenders of the faith, as it were, set up a straw man. ‘These people’, they say, ‘think carbon dioxide has no effect’. Only a lunatic fringe thinks that.
The critical scientists are simply saying that carbon dioxide’s effect is small, at most 20 per cent. This means that even a 50 per cent reduction by 2050 in manmade greenhouse gas emissions would only reduce the driving force of climate change by 10 per cent. That’s because the natural driving force will determine the climate. As I argue in Chill, if you look at all the past cycles, the temperature declines after a peak. And this decline will bring with it wholly different problems – ones which, so far, we are woefully underprepared for.
What’s really disconcerting for me is that I am a longstanding environmentalist. As part of environmental groups I’ve helped to prevent nuclear waste from being dumped in the ocean, I’ve helped change emergency planning for nuclear reactors, and I’ve also helped develop biodiversity strategy. I’m as green as you can get. But what I am faced with now is environmental groups and major NGOs – Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – which have allied themselves with the state. They talk about so-called denialists allying themselves with ‘Big Oil’, but they have fallen into the arms of big government. They’ve allied with disreputable prime ministers; they’ve allied with chief policy advisers who have never got anything right in their lives; they’ve allied themselves with scientific institutions that have never led on any of these environmental issues.
If you write something, as I have done with Chill, which is a rational, critical appraisal of the whole situation, you would at least expect to have some dialogue. But there has been nothing. I haven’t had a single invitation to speak to any of these groups. Even universities have been reticent. I have been invited to speak at Leeds University, which has quite a strong climate community, and the Energy Institute. But the environmental community has been absolutely silent towards me. I would challenge them to bring all of their experts to the table and hammer it out.
We’re seeing the dangerous development here of a very intolerant political ideology. It is a very strange political and scientific situation, in which vast sums of money are underwriting a bureaucracy of climate accountants and auditors, and in which academic funding is easier to obtain if you put man-made climate change at the top of your research proposal. I have never seen anything like it in the 40 years of my scientific and environmental career.
Peter Taylor was talking to Tim Black.
Peter Taylor is author of Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
Meet the green who doubts ‘The Science’
The author of Chill explains why he’s sceptical about manmade global warming — and why greens are so intolerant.
Peter Taylor spiked
The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 – and then, feeling that the remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the science.
In my book on biodiversity, "Beyond Conservation", I had mentioned in one of the chapters that perhaps the man-made global warming theory was not all it was being cracked up to be. The changes we are seeing now, I wrote, suggested that some other processes were at work. I then took time out, visited the science libraries, and checked the original science upon which today’s models are based.
I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions.
The role of water vapour in planetary warming is also open to questioning. While it is presented as being a heat amplifier, in fact because it can turn into cloud it could actually regulate temperature instead. As it turned out, at the very beginning of the UN discussions, Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and a leading expert appointed to the committee because of his meteorological expertise, was saying precisely that: the amplification effect asserted cannot be relied upon to increase warming because the vapour could turn into cloud. This needed to be proved before basing assumptions on it. But Lindzen was overruled. Despite still being a key part of the IPPC process, he is now vilified by the press and by the environmental movement. So even on the most basic science of the atmospherics, there is doubt.
Or take oceanography. Most of the heat of the planet is not contained in the atmosphere; it is in the oceans. And what happens in the oceans is absolutely vital to the dynamics of heat moving around the planet. So while of course it is possible to warm up the planet to an additional extent as a result of human activity, if the planet then lets more heat out than it would normally do, then it will balance out. That is to say, you have only to produce less cloud over the oceans and the oceans will release heat to space. Like CO2 itself, the atmosphere doesn’t actually hold heat – it simply delays its transmission to space.
The real dynamic of the planet is to do with clouds, yet this area of science – oceanography and cloud cover – is incredibly uncertain. When I first looked at the basic science, the findings were surprising. Over the global warming period – which I limit to the past 50 or so years – the globe didn’t warm at all between 1950 and 1980, even though carbon dioxide emissions were going through the roof due to the postwar expansion of industry; global temperatures stayed pretty much flat.
The real global warming took off in the 1980s and 90s, through to about 2005. (In the last 10 years it’s actually plateaued.) That period of 25 years, from around 1980 to 2005, coincided with changes in the ocean and cloud cover – that is, there was less cloud and more sunlight getting through to the ocean. And this can be seen in the satellite data on the kind of energy that’s coming through (short-wave energy, which is the only energy that heats water – infra-red energy coming from CO2 cannot heat water). So when you look at the real-world data, the warming of that entire period seems to be due to additional sunlight reaching the oceans.
In 2007, I put out a report on this, in the hope of getting feedback before I published my book, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. Since then, top scientists at NASA have agreed that this period of warming over the past 25 years is entirely due to the short-wave radiation from sunlight, with the ocean transferring that heat to the land.
So the crucial question is: has the cloud thinning been due to carbon dioxide? Or is it part of a cycle? If you ask some of the top people at NASA – that is, the people who interpret all the satellite data – they will say it’s 50-50. So you could say the greenhouse effect has warmed the oceans and the warmer oceans have thinned the clouds. But that is still just a hypothesis, it is not a proven scientific fact. That means you could assert with equal validity that thinning clouds have warmed the oceans, which has led to global warming – meaning the effect of carbon dioxide is minimal.
There is a fairly easy way of deciding between the two viewpoints: you look at the history of climate to find out whether there has been warming and cooling in the past, before carbon dioxide became such an issue. And of course there have been cycles of warming and cooling, with the longest of the cycles lasting about a thousand years and the shortest cycle – El Nino – about four-to-eight years.
So, right now, we are at the peak of a thousand-year cycle. We also had a peak for all the other cycles between 1995 and 2005. Given that these cycles have peaked, temperature-wise, before, one can look at what happened back then. A thousand years ago, for instance, the Vikings were growing crops on Greenland, which assumes that the summer ice would have been more limited than it is now. The Arctic melted down a thousand years ago, just as it did 2,000 years ago. What’s astonishing is that you can see all of that in the ice-core record in Greenland. And in each cycle of a thousand years, the peak is getting lower. So overall the planet is actually cooling, from a peak about 8,000 years ago.
Now the only way in which you can get cycles of warming and cooling on such a scale is through the oceans. And the only way that can happen is in relation to cloud cover. So the crucial question then is, how do the oceans vary their cloud cover? What creates these cycles? There is a major scientific controversy over how the sun’s magnetic field influences the different types of energy that reach the planet, and how they, in turn, influence cloud cover. There are several different scientific teams working on it, including one from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). What this shows is that it is still an unresolved question. Nobody knows what the mechanisms are.
So why is the UN saying what it is saying? Well, if you actually look at the wording of what this so-called consensus of scientists has produced, then you will see that they believe that ‘global warming is not due to known natural causes acting alone’. This is clever wording. It means that the door is open to an unknown mechanism driving the warming. So although it is well known that the warming is naturally driven, the mechanism is not.
Why would the UN suppress all of this debate happening within its working groups? The problem is that the secretariat within the UN tasked with processing this debate is already committed – financially – to focusing upon carbon dioxide as the climate-change driver. It is very hard for them to backtrack.
It is only recently that the scientific world has bought into this consensus. In 2001, America, Russia and China did not accept the UN’s analysis. But by 2004, America had signed up to it. And this was all down to a certain team in the US which produced an analysis that ironed out the past cycles of warming and cooling. Although it has since been discredited, this report had a tremendous effect in bringing scientific institutions around to the idea of man-made global warming.
So behind the appearance of consensus and settled science, there is now this tremendous battle going on. The dissenting scientists are described by certain journalists and environmentalists as ‘denialists’ and ‘sceptics’ funded by the oil industry. This is simply not the case. There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming. Nobody is seriously saying that carbon dioxide has no effect whatsoever, but the defenders of the faith, as it were, set up a straw man. ‘These people’, they say, ‘think carbon dioxide has no effect’. Only a lunatic fringe thinks that.
The critical scientists are simply saying that carbon dioxide’s effect is small, at most 20 per cent. This means that even a 50 per cent reduction by 2050 in manmade greenhouse gas emissions would only reduce the driving force of climate change by 10 per cent. That’s because the natural driving force will determine the climate. As I argue in Chill, if you look at all the past cycles, the temperature declines after a peak. And this decline will bring with it wholly different problems – ones which, so far, we are woefully underprepared for.
What’s really disconcerting for me is that I am a longstanding environmentalist. As part of environmental groups I’ve helped to prevent nuclear waste from being dumped in the ocean, I’ve helped change emergency planning for nuclear reactors, and I’ve also helped develop biodiversity strategy. I’m as green as you can get. But what I am faced with now is environmental groups and major NGOs – Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – which have allied themselves with the state. They talk about so-called denialists allying themselves with ‘Big Oil’, but they have fallen into the arms of big government. They’ve allied with disreputable prime ministers; they’ve allied with chief policy advisers who have never got anything right in their lives; they’ve allied themselves with scientific institutions that have never led on any of these environmental issues.
If you write something, as I have done with Chill, which is a rational, critical appraisal of the whole situation, you would at least expect to have some dialogue. But there has been nothing. I haven’t had a single invitation to speak to any of these groups. Even universities have been reticent. I have been invited to speak at Leeds University, which has quite a strong climate community, and the Energy Institute. But the environmental community has been absolutely silent towards me. I would challenge them to bring all of their experts to the table and hammer it out.
We’re seeing the dangerous development here of a very intolerant political ideology. It is a very strange political and scientific situation, in which vast sums of money are underwriting a bureaucracy of climate accountants and auditors, and in which academic funding is easier to obtain if you put man-made climate change at the top of your research proposal. I have never seen anything like it in the 40 years of my scientific and environmental career.
Peter Taylor was talking to Tim Black.
Peter Taylor is author of Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
Why is secularism incompatible with Islam?
Why is secularism incompatible with Islam? By Yusuf Al-Qaradawi
Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society. For Muslim societies, the acceptance of secularism means something totally different. As Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah), the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari’ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions. It is indeed a false claim that Shari’ah is not proper to the requirements of the present age. The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of the humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: “Say! Do you know better than Allah?” (Qur’an, 2:140)
For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright apostasy. The silence of the masses in the Muslim world about this deviation has been a major transgression and a clear-cut instance of disobedience which have produces a sense of guilt, remorse, and inward resentment, all of which have generated discontent, insecurity, and hatred among committed Muslims because such deviation lacks legality. Secularism is (only) compatible with the Western concept of God which maintains that after God had created the world, He left it to look after itself. In this sense, God’s relationship with the world is like that of a watchmaker with a watch: he makes it then leaves it to function without any need for him. This (baseless) concept is inherited from Greek philosophy, especially that of Aristotle who argued that God neither controls nor knows anything about this world.
This concept is totally different from that of Muslims. We Muslims believe that Allah is the sole Creator and Sustainer of the Worlds. One Who “…takes account of every single thing.” (Qur’an, 72:28); that He is All-Powerful and All-Knowing; that His Mercy and Bounties encompass everyone and suffice for all. In that capacity, Allah revealed His divine guidance to humanity, made certain things permissible and others prohibited, commanded people observe His injunctions and to judge according to them. If they do not do so, then they commit Kufr, aggression, and transgression.
– Translated from ‘Al-Hulul Al-Mustawradah wa Kayfa Jaat `Ala Ummatina’ (How the Imported Solutions Disastrously Affected Our Ummah), pp. 113-4.
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=2010061175024
Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society. For Muslim societies, the acceptance of secularism means something totally different. As Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah), the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari’ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions. It is indeed a false claim that Shari’ah is not proper to the requirements of the present age. The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of the humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: “Say! Do you know better than Allah?” (Qur’an, 2:140)
For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright apostasy. The silence of the masses in the Muslim world about this deviation has been a major transgression and a clear-cut instance of disobedience which have produces a sense of guilt, remorse, and inward resentment, all of which have generated discontent, insecurity, and hatred among committed Muslims because such deviation lacks legality. Secularism is (only) compatible with the Western concept of God which maintains that after God had created the world, He left it to look after itself. In this sense, God’s relationship with the world is like that of a watchmaker with a watch: he makes it then leaves it to function without any need for him. This (baseless) concept is inherited from Greek philosophy, especially that of Aristotle who argued that God neither controls nor knows anything about this world.
This concept is totally different from that of Muslims. We Muslims believe that Allah is the sole Creator and Sustainer of the Worlds. One Who “…takes account of every single thing.” (Qur’an, 72:28); that He is All-Powerful and All-Knowing; that His Mercy and Bounties encompass everyone and suffice for all. In that capacity, Allah revealed His divine guidance to humanity, made certain things permissible and others prohibited, commanded people observe His injunctions and to judge according to them. If they do not do so, then they commit Kufr, aggression, and transgression.
– Translated from ‘Al-Hulul Al-Mustawradah wa Kayfa Jaat `Ala Ummatina’ (How the Imported Solutions Disastrously Affected Our Ummah), pp. 113-4.
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=2010061175024
Thursday, June 10, 2010
To War on Ideology, Terror ? ?
Ipso Facto replied to comment from duh_swami | June 9, 2010 1:20 PM | Reply
You can not and should not go to war against an ideology, and it does not matter if the truth of the ideology is founded in religious belief or in secular or atheistic belief such as Marxism-Leninism was.
If you make war against an ideology you make war against the very foundation of democracy itself because the cornerstone of any true democracy is the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
What you can fight and should fight is the empirical manifestation of an abstract ideology that pose a concrete threat to your country and/or democracy ifself.
You can not declare war against an ideology only against a speficic country og concrete group of people who may or may not have declared war on the US. You can not find one example in the history of the US, or other democracies for that matter, where war has been declared against an ideology and not a specific national state or group of states or groups of non-state actors.
Also you can not declare "war on terror" because terror is a means to an end - a strategy to get control over people internally - state terror - or externally as a war strategy. All political systems including democracy (in the past) have used terror in order to achieve a political objective. "War on terror" is a meaningless phrase that may be convenient for purely propaganda or political purposes.
You can however declare war on Afghanistan with the objective of regime change, and you can make war on Al Qaeda (now a non-state actor) and its speficically named affiliates and collaborators, defined as "terror organisations", because they believe in an ideology that legitimize or rather demands the use of terror and unrestricted warfare against all enemies of Islam if Islam is percieved "attacked".
An ideology may be almost totally eradicated if your war objective of unconditional surrender of the enemy is achieved, as it was in WWII against the Axis powers, but even today Nazism (or neo-Nazism) as an ideology exist in the heads of some people. They are now fringe groups and pose no special danger to any nation or to world peace.
In a democracy ideologies should be fought in the political process through free and open discussion based on rational arguments in the defense of democracy and the values and principles that make democracy possible. Democracy may loose the discussion against fascist and supremacist ideologies as it happened in Germany in 1933. You can never eliminated that risk completely without restricting the rights and liberties the democracy rest upon and the consequences could easily be that the society is turned into a fascist dictatorship.
It is a very delicate balancing act and that is what makes the ideological fight against islamofacism so extremely difficult.
"But if they choose to go to war with an ideology, they certainly will, and have...That the leadership of the US refuses to see the true nature of Islamic ideology, and why a war should be waged against it, only helps the enemy, and puts the citizens at greater risk...A change in leadership is coming..."
You can not and should not go to war against an ideology, and it does not matter if the truth of the ideology is founded in religious belief or in secular or atheistic belief such as Marxism-Leninism was.
If you make war against an ideology you make war against the very foundation of democracy itself because the cornerstone of any true democracy is the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
What you can fight and should fight is the empirical manifestation of an abstract ideology that pose a concrete threat to your country and/or democracy ifself.
You can not declare war against an ideology only against a speficic country og concrete group of people who may or may not have declared war on the US. You can not find one example in the history of the US, or other democracies for that matter, where war has been declared against an ideology and not a specific national state or group of states or groups of non-state actors.
Also you can not declare "war on terror" because terror is a means to an end - a strategy to get control over people internally - state terror - or externally as a war strategy. All political systems including democracy (in the past) have used terror in order to achieve a political objective. "War on terror" is a meaningless phrase that may be convenient for purely propaganda or political purposes.
You can however declare war on Afghanistan with the objective of regime change, and you can make war on Al Qaeda (now a non-state actor) and its speficically named affiliates and collaborators, defined as "terror organisations", because they believe in an ideology that legitimize or rather demands the use of terror and unrestricted warfare against all enemies of Islam if Islam is percieved "attacked".
An ideology may be almost totally eradicated if your war objective of unconditional surrender of the enemy is achieved, as it was in WWII against the Axis powers, but even today Nazism (or neo-Nazism) as an ideology exist in the heads of some people. They are now fringe groups and pose no special danger to any nation or to world peace.
In a democracy ideologies should be fought in the political process through free and open discussion based on rational arguments in the defense of democracy and the values and principles that make democracy possible. Democracy may loose the discussion against fascist and supremacist ideologies as it happened in Germany in 1933. You can never eliminated that risk completely without restricting the rights and liberties the democracy rest upon and the consequences could easily be that the society is turned into a fascist dictatorship.
It is a very delicate balancing act and that is what makes the ideological fight against islamofacism so extremely difficult.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Apostasy
Making the World Safe for Apostasy by Baron Bodissey
Even if he is not strictly speaking a Muslim, President Barack Hussein Obama has an Islamic background and is a famous sympathizer with Islam. He received an Islamic education as a child in Indonesia, and seems to identify with Muslims when implementing what passes for his foreign policy.
Modern American policy towards Islam — especially that subset of Islam which avowedly intends to destroy the United States and the rest of the West in the name of Allah — went though several stages of development. It began as avoidance under Bill Clinton, escalated to denial under George “The Religion of Peace” Bush, and has now reached its full flower under the Obama administration. If the country continues on its present course, it is headed for full Islamization and cultural dhimmitude.
We have reached a point where nobody in public life who values his career prospects dares to mention the word “Islam” in connection with terrorism or mob violence. “Jihad” has officially been ruled out of the lexicon by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The word “terrorism” itself is discouraged, because too many people have come to associate it in their minds with Islam, for some strange reason.
We are so far down the rabbit hole that returning to a state of denial would be an improvement.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In her book The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West examines the cultural infantilization which has allowed the West to become such easy prey for Islamic expansionism. A suicidal policy of mass immigration driven by the ideology of Multiculturalism leverages the demographic advantage of Muslims, but to guarantee an Islamic ascendancy we had to abandon “discrimination” and all the other virtues that formerly guided Western Civilization.
Ms. West was writing in 2007, before the Husseinization of America, but everything she said in her book is even more relevant today than it was back then. In her final chapter she gets to the heart of the matter:
I’m old enough to remember when you could just walk into Dulles Airport and ride the escalator up to the observation deck to watch the planes take off and land. No one had to pass through metal detectors or have his bags searched. Departing passengers were advised to get to the terminal twenty minutes — twenty minutes! — before their flights were due to board.
I suppose we can credit the new security regimen for the lack of successful terrorist attacks since 9-11 — even though the Lap Bomber and the Shoe Bomber demonstrate that luck and alert civilians have also played an important part. But nobody should confuse the current situation with victory. A victory would have consisted of reducing half the Middle East and South Asia to rubble, and then installing compliant dictators of our own choosing in the half that remained. I can guarantee you that if we had chosen such a path, taking a plane out of Dulles would not be the grueling ordeal that it is today.
We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it wasn’t just the jihad that brought about our current debased state of fearfulness. Cuban terrorists — remember them? — started the hijacking fad back in the seventies. By the time the mujahideen deployed their forces on the information battlespace, it had already been softened up by the Marxists, cultural and otherwise.
Our collective fear and cowardice took decades to mature, and we are now living with the predictable results, as Ms. West so lucidly describes:
Diana West has put her finger on the essence of the problem. The taboo against discussing the nature of the Islamic threat is part and parcel of the universal childishness of modern American society. We don’t want to look at the heart of the problem because what we might see is too awful to contemplate. It’s scary and icky and would force us to make choices that almost none of us are ready to face.
So we’re putting it off. We say, “Eeewwww! Gross!” and push it away from ourselves. We wait for Daddy to come home and make it all go away.
But the grown-ups aren’t going to take care of it. There aren’t any grown-ups left anymore, at least not within the cloistered precincts of those who make and implement public policy in Western countries. The kids are running the show.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that instead of the limp-wristed milquetoasts who man our present governments, the real grown-ups — people like Diana West and Mark Steyn and Col. Allen West and Bat Ye’or — were in charge of dealing with the Islamic threat. What would they do differently?
To start with, they wouldn’t rule out any terminology or body of description when studying the enemy. They’d examine the stated doctrines of those who are trying to kill us, and would take them at their word.
By doing so they would learn that our enemies publicly state that they make war on us in the name of Allah, in order to impose Islamic law on the entire world. They do this because their scripture requires it — it is written down quite clearly in the Koran, the hadith, and the sunna — and all four major schools of Sunni Islamic law, as well as Shi’ite doctrine, describe violent jihad as a duty for all Muslims.
They would come to realize that Islam is not just a religion — and perhaps not even primarily a religion — but a specific totalitarian political doctrine with violence at its core.
A reasonable investigation would reveal that the command to subjugate the infidel through violence is not “extremist”. It’s not a “fringe doctrine”. Islam has not been “perverted” or “hijacked” by those who practice violent jihad. Violence lies at the very core of Islamic doctrine, and Islam itself has told us that repeatedly, if only we would listen.
I’ve been blogging the Counterjihad for almost six years now, and during that time I’ve been watching for evidence that Islam has the capacity to reform itself. I long to see a demonstration that there really is an alternative to “extremism”. I’ve been patiently drumming my fingers, waiting for the “moderate Muslim” to appear and take charge.
And, throughout those six years, whenever I thought I’d found a “moderate”, it always turned out to be some brave soul who was raised as a Muslim but no longer believes in Islam. Virtually every “moderate” is an apostate in all but name.
It’s a hard fact to face, but anyone who truly believes in what is written in the Koran either fights jihad in the name of Allah, or supports those who do.
This is the crux of the problem, but it also offers a solution: the way to encourage “moderate” Islam is to create a space in which people can abandon their belief without risking their lives. Millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — of Muslims are ready to leave Islam, but they are justifiably afraid for their lives if they do so.
We need to make the world safe for apostasy.
But first we have to man up. It takes guts to say the forbidden words:
“The problem is Islam.”
There! That wasn’t so bad, was it? Don’t you feel better now?
It is incumbent upon us to look at the situation clearly and realistically, even if it leads to grim and alarming conclusions about the nature of what is facing us. Several decades of dire consequences lie ahead, no matter what we do.
Whether we decide to hide under the bed and whimper, or grab a shotgun and confront him, the intruder is already in the house.
It’s time to start acting like grown-ups.
Even if he is not strictly speaking a Muslim, President Barack Hussein Obama has an Islamic background and is a famous sympathizer with Islam. He received an Islamic education as a child in Indonesia, and seems to identify with Muslims when implementing what passes for his foreign policy.
Modern American policy towards Islam — especially that subset of Islam which avowedly intends to destroy the United States and the rest of the West in the name of Allah — went though several stages of development. It began as avoidance under Bill Clinton, escalated to denial under George “The Religion of Peace” Bush, and has now reached its full flower under the Obama administration. If the country continues on its present course, it is headed for full Islamization and cultural dhimmitude.
We have reached a point where nobody in public life who values his career prospects dares to mention the word “Islam” in connection with terrorism or mob violence. “Jihad” has officially been ruled out of the lexicon by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The word “terrorism” itself is discouraged, because too many people have come to associate it in their minds with Islam, for some strange reason.
We are so far down the rabbit hole that returning to a state of denial would be an improvement.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In her book The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West examines the cultural infantilization which has allowed the West to become such easy prey for Islamic expansionism. A suicidal policy of mass immigration driven by the ideology of Multiculturalism leverages the demographic advantage of Muslims, but to guarantee an Islamic ascendancy we had to abandon “discrimination” and all the other virtues that formerly guided Western Civilization.
Ms. West was writing in 2007, before the Husseinization of America, but everything she said in her book is even more relevant today than it was back then. In her final chapter she gets to the heart of the matter:
In retrospect — namely, post-9/11 — it seems odd that these terrorists have always been called “Arab terrorists,” or “Arab Palestinian terrorists,” and have never been labeled according to the animating inspiration of their religion as “Muslim” terrorists. Such coyness has buried a relevant part of the story: the Islamic context. Just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it was Muslim terrorism that had come to Europe, and, as a result, Jews were worshipping, if they dared, at their own fearsome risk.
And not just Jews. By now, the same fearsome risk extends to whole populations, in houses of worship and the public square alike. After reading Bat Ye’or, I realized that the now-familiar strategies of fearsome-risk management — guns around the synagogue, for example — represents a significant capitulation. The security ring around the synagogue — or the airport ticket counter, the house of parliament, or the Winter Olympics — is a line of siege, not a line of counter-attack. The threat of violence has become the status quo, and, as such, is incapable of sparking outrage, and is certainly not a casus belli. Guns at the synagogue door — or St Peter’s Basilica, or the Louvre — symbolize a cultural acquiescence to the infringement of freedom caused by the introduction — better, the incursion — of Islam into Western society. Thus, dhimmitude — institutional concessions on the part of non-Muslim populations to Islam — has arrived in the West.
And it’s here in the U.S. of A., as well. Brandishing automatic weapons, police and soldiers patrol our cities, our buses, our banks, our institutions, our subways, our trains, our stadiums, our airports to prevent specifically Islamic violence. This, lest we forget, is a situation unparalleled — unimagined — in our history. Official Washington has become an armed camp. No longer does traffic stream down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House; the historic street is now a cement-dump-lined “plaza” blocked off by retractable security stumps. The Capitol, meanwhile, sits behind a hamster-cage Rube Goldberg might have designed, its grand staircases blocked, and metal posts — called “bollards,” I recently learned — bristling down the sidewalks. The fact is, we are living in a state of siege. After 9/11, the United States embarked on an open-ended war against Islamic terrorism, with varying degrees of foreign cooperation. But even as we fight abroad, we simultaneously assume the status of victims at home, surrendering our bags and purses for security searches, erecting aesthetics-destroying metal detectors, transforming our ennobling vistas and public halls into militarized zones under 24-hour-surveillance. This is necessary, we understand, for public safety: But is it the new “normal”? Or do we ever get Pennsylvania Avenue back? Do we ever get to make that mad dash down the airport concourse onto a plane just pushing off from the gate again? (This was an odd, if recurring point of pride of a family friend who used to time his drive from Kennebunkport, Maine, to Logan Airport with perilous precision). Don’t hold your breath; these homeland defenses sprouting up across the country look and feel like they’re here for good.
In this seemingly permanent climate of fear, then, ignoring genuine heroes — our exemplars of such adult virtues as bravery and sacrifice, honor and duty — is more than a cultural matter of infantile vanity. It is a security risk. “By our focus on victimization,” Crossland writes, “we have adopted our enemies’ standard of measure, and are handing them a victory.” It’s a psychological victory, of course, not a strategic one; but this, above all, is a psychological war.
As a people, then, we begin to make choices predicated on our new siege mentality, choices that a free people — free from fear, and, I would add, free from dhimmitude — would never make.
I’m old enough to remember when you could just walk into Dulles Airport and ride the escalator up to the observation deck to watch the planes take off and land. No one had to pass through metal detectors or have his bags searched. Departing passengers were advised to get to the terminal twenty minutes — twenty minutes! — before their flights were due to board.
I suppose we can credit the new security regimen for the lack of successful terrorist attacks since 9-11 — even though the Lap Bomber and the Shoe Bomber demonstrate that luck and alert civilians have also played an important part. But nobody should confuse the current situation with victory. A victory would have consisted of reducing half the Middle East and South Asia to rubble, and then installing compliant dictators of our own choosing in the half that remained. I can guarantee you that if we had chosen such a path, taking a plane out of Dulles would not be the grueling ordeal that it is today.
We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it wasn’t just the jihad that brought about our current debased state of fearfulness. Cuban terrorists — remember them? — started the hijacking fad back in the seventies. By the time the mujahideen deployed their forces on the information battlespace, it had already been softened up by the Marxists, cultural and otherwise.
Our collective fear and cowardice took decades to mature, and we are now living with the predictable results, as Ms. West so lucidly describes:
Standing around Logan Airport last summer with some time to kill, I watched crowds of travelers winnow down to single file in order to pass through a phalanx of metal detectors, dutifully unstrapping wristwatches, dropping off keychains, and removing their shoes. They were, of course, cooperating with airport “screeners” charged with determining whether any of them had secretly bought a ticket to paradise — not the Pearly Gates one, but the 72 Virgins kind — and not some earthbound destination. I wondered whether these low-level indignities would get passengers home safe and sound, or whether they would require body bags, burn masks and prosthetics to reach their final destination. It was shortly after the London Underground bombings (7/7, 7/25), and it seemed like an open question. As this final line of defense against murder-in-the-skies deployed, I wondered when the arsenal would also include those high-tech scopes and scanners we read about that are designed to identify retinas and fingerprints; and I thought how strange it was that even as we devise new ways to see inside ourselves to our most elemental components, we also prevent ourselves from looking full face at the danger to our way of life posed by Islam.
Notice I said “Islam.” I didn’t say “Islamists.” Or “Islamofascists.” Or “fundamentalist extremists.” Or “Wahhabism.” Except for Wahhabism — an overly narrow term for the jihadism that permeates all schools of Islam, not just this infamous Saudi one — I think I’ve tried out all the other terms in various columns since 9/11, but I’ve come to find them artificial and confusing, and maybe purposefully so. In their amorphous imprecision, they allow us to give a wide berth to a great problem: the gross incompatibility of Islam — the religious force that shrinks freedom even as it “moderately” tolerates, or “extremistly” advances jihad — with the West. Worse than its imprecision, however, is the evident childishness that inspires this lexicon, as though padding “Islam” with extraneous syllables (“ism,” “ist” “ofascist”) is a shield against PC scorn of “judgmentalism”; or that exempting plain “Islam” by criticizing fanciful “Islamism” or “Islamofascism” puts a safety lock on Muslim rage — which, as per the Danish cartoon experience, we know explodes at any critique. Such mongrel terms, however, keep our understanding of Islam at bay.
Diana West has put her finger on the essence of the problem. The taboo against discussing the nature of the Islamic threat is part and parcel of the universal childishness of modern American society. We don’t want to look at the heart of the problem because what we might see is too awful to contemplate. It’s scary and icky and would force us to make choices that almost none of us are ready to face.
So we’re putting it off. We say, “Eeewwww! Gross!” and push it away from ourselves. We wait for Daddy to come home and make it all go away.
But the grown-ups aren’t going to take care of it. There aren’t any grown-ups left anymore, at least not within the cloistered precincts of those who make and implement public policy in Western countries. The kids are running the show.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that instead of the limp-wristed milquetoasts who man our present governments, the real grown-ups — people like Diana West and Mark Steyn and Col. Allen West and Bat Ye’or — were in charge of dealing with the Islamic threat. What would they do differently?
To start with, they wouldn’t rule out any terminology or body of description when studying the enemy. They’d examine the stated doctrines of those who are trying to kill us, and would take them at their word.
By doing so they would learn that our enemies publicly state that they make war on us in the name of Allah, in order to impose Islamic law on the entire world. They do this because their scripture requires it — it is written down quite clearly in the Koran, the hadith, and the sunna — and all four major schools of Sunni Islamic law, as well as Shi’ite doctrine, describe violent jihad as a duty for all Muslims.
They would come to realize that Islam is not just a religion — and perhaps not even primarily a religion — but a specific totalitarian political doctrine with violence at its core.
A reasonable investigation would reveal that the command to subjugate the infidel through violence is not “extremist”. It’s not a “fringe doctrine”. Islam has not been “perverted” or “hijacked” by those who practice violent jihad. Violence lies at the very core of Islamic doctrine, and Islam itself has told us that repeatedly, if only we would listen.
I’ve been blogging the Counterjihad for almost six years now, and during that time I’ve been watching for evidence that Islam has the capacity to reform itself. I long to see a demonstration that there really is an alternative to “extremism”. I’ve been patiently drumming my fingers, waiting for the “moderate Muslim” to appear and take charge.
And, throughout those six years, whenever I thought I’d found a “moderate”, it always turned out to be some brave soul who was raised as a Muslim but no longer believes in Islam. Virtually every “moderate” is an apostate in all but name.
It’s a hard fact to face, but anyone who truly believes in what is written in the Koran either fights jihad in the name of Allah, or supports those who do.
This is the crux of the problem, but it also offers a solution: the way to encourage “moderate” Islam is to create a space in which people can abandon their belief without risking their lives. Millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — of Muslims are ready to leave Islam, but they are justifiably afraid for their lives if they do so.
We need to make the world safe for apostasy.
But first we have to man up. It takes guts to say the forbidden words:
“The problem is Islam.”
There! That wasn’t so bad, was it? Don’t you feel better now?
It is incumbent upon us to look at the situation clearly and realistically, even if it leads to grim and alarming conclusions about the nature of what is facing us. Several decades of dire consequences lie ahead, no matter what we do.
Whether we decide to hide under the bed and whimper, or grab a shotgun and confront him, the intruder is already in the house.
It’s time to start acting like grown-ups.
Radical Fundamentalist Islam ?? or Islam???
Kris K (2394) Says:
June 4th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Is Radical Fundamentalist Islam the problem, or is the problem actually the system of Islam itself?
As someone here who basically holds the view that it is not merely Radical Islam, but the very system if Islam itself which is the problem regarding Islamic terrorism; and the global threat it presents – it is refreshing to find an author who holds a similar view to myself, and puts his case with clarity and factual basis:
[I have added emphasis to highlight my point of view]
The Grand Jihad: A word from the author
Andrew McCarthy is the former Assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted the Blind Sheikh and his friends for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After he secured convictions, he recounted what he had learned along the way in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. When it comes to the subject of civilian trials for unlawful enemy combatants and of the Islamist war against the United States, McCarthy is like Walt Whitman: He is the man, he suffer’d, he was there. I find myself returning to this book regularly.
And McCarthy has stayed on the case. In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, published last week, McCarthy follows up with a closely argued account of Islamist designs on, and inroads in, the United States.
In a sense, the book provides a counterpart to David Horowitz’s The Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, whose argument McCarthy cites below. Whereas Horowitz’s book focused on the Left, McCarthy focuses on the Islamists, elaborating on events that have occurred and lessons we have learned since Horowitz’s book was published in 2004.
Among these events are a few in our own backyard, including the election of Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison in 2006, a man who embodies the alliance between Islam and the Left. McCarthy rightly calls Ellison “CAIR’s congressman.” McCarthy also discusses the case of the flying imams — a case he calls “the sabotage campaign in action”– arising from an incident at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after an imams’ conference at which Ellison had spoken. McCarthy also devotes an entire chapter to “The Enclave of Minnesota.”
I’ve been after Andy to provide us something on his new book for readers of Power Line from the time I heard he was writing the book. He has graciously responded with this hard-hitting account of his hard-hitting book:
********
As a faithful Power Line reader, I am as thrilled as I am grateful to be able to say a few words here about my new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
What is surprising, and dismaying, is that the book’s message should come as news to anyone, as if there were real question about whether such a grand jihad exists. Though our opinion elites and their media allies remain desperate to suppress the story, the proof of an Islamist conspiracy to destroy the West is stark and undeniable, and the instances of Islamists being aided and abetted by Leftists are too numerous for serious people to deny the alliance – not merger but alliance – between the two.
As demonstrated at the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trials in Texas, internal Muslim Brotherhood memoranda are unabashed in describing Islamists as engaged in a “civilizational” war against the West. In America, the Brothers attest that theirs is a “grand jihad” to destroy the United States – mainly from within, mainly by “sabotage.”
I use the term Islamist advisedly. In the book’s second chapter, I’ve tried to take on the excruciating question of whether the existential challenge we face is Islam itself. On this, besides views I’ve developed over the last 17 years, I read widely and consulted learned people on both sides of this question, several of whom I’m fortunate to call friends. When I was finally done writing the chapter, and rereading it for the zillionth time, I thought maybe I should rewrite it, to make it shorter and just get to the bottom line. But I decided to leave it as is. If it seems throughout as though I am having an argument with myself, it is because I am, and the argument is anything but settled.
The problem is that those who say Islam is the problem have the better case. I was first struck by this sad fact during our terrorism trial in 1995, when I had to get ready to cross-examine the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman. Though he ended up opting not to testify, I still had to prepare. Back then I thought that if what we were saying as a government were true – if these terrorists were lying about Islam and perverting its doctrine in order to justify mass-murder attacks – then surely I should be able to locate three or four places where the Blind Sheikh had misstated the Koran and the other species of Muslim scripture. I searched high and low, but there were none.
To be sure, Islamic scriptures say a lot of things, and some of them are admirable. Good faith contentions can surely be made that passages terrorists cite need to be considered in conjunction with other passages they omit. (That’s a weak argument, by the way, but not a risible one.) But the point is that where the Blind Sheikh cited scripture, he did it quite accurately. Moreover, he is not, as we’d like to have it, a lunatic; he is a renowned doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Egypt – the seat of Sunni learning and one of the oldest and most respected academic institutions in the world. His construction of Islam, however frightening, was literal and cogent.
Islam is not a religion of peace and Islamic doctrine is not moderate. There is, for those willing to pierce political correctness and grapple with fact, an undeniable connection between Islamic doctrine’s commands to violence and domination, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the often savage acts and the civilizational campaign carried out by Muslims against the West. For that reason, Islam is very problematic. There is, however, the other side of the coin: there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who, quite clearly, are moderate, tolerant people. These Muslims either reject terrorism (at least in the form of sneak attacks that kill civilians in the U.S.) or they don’t see terrorism as having anything to do with them. Thus, people who don’t want to grapple with Islamic doctrine point to these tolerant, moderate Muslim individuals and demand that we deduce that Islam, too, must be moderate and tolerant – regardless of what its scriptures say.
But this “Islam is as Muslims do” approach is no more a rationale for giving Islam a pass than it would be for condemning Islam based on the actions of the terrorists. More importantly, to convince the people who need convincing – namely, Muslims, not Western intellectuals – there must be a cogent, persuasive construction of Islamic doctrine that can compete effectively with the ideology that fuels the terrorist attacks and the broader plot to destroy the West from within. The latter ideology is an instinctive turn-off to Westerners because it is supremacist, totalitarian, and violent. Yet, it happens to be an ideology drawn faithfully and logically from scripture – which is why it is endorsed by so many influential clerics and shariah authorities who have spent their lives in Islamic study.
As I point out in The Grand Jihad, it is fair enough to conclude that peculiarities of al Qaeda ideology are favored by only a fringe of the world’s Muslims. Here, I refer to the claim that it is legitimate to kill even other Muslims who reject the terror network’s strict interpretation of Islam. Now, I find even that fringe distressing. After all, 10 percent of 1.4 billion Muslims is a lot of people.
Here, though, is the truly distressing part. In 2007, the University of Maryland joined with the pollster World Public Opinion to survey Muslim views in nations across the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia – i.e., both Arab and non-Arab Muslims. They found that about two-thirds (65.5 percent) endorsed the requirement of “a strict application of sharia law in every Islamic country.” About the same number wanted to see all Muslim countries unified under a single caliphate, a position shared even by half of Muslims in Indonesia – where one of the most moderate brands of Islam in the world is practiced. These findings match up with other disturbing figures – like the 93 percent of young Palestinians (and 75 percent of all Palestinians) who deny Israel’s right to exist, and the 40 percent of British Muslims who would like to see sharia become the law of England.[cont]
If these statistics regarding Muslims and their worldview, hopes and aims don’t concern you, then you haven’t been listening … or worse; you’re dead from the neck up. And that the liberal left are largely complicit with the aims and intents of Islam reveals just what treacherous traitors they are to Western democracy and freedom.
June 4th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Is Radical Fundamentalist Islam the problem, or is the problem actually the system of Islam itself?
As someone here who basically holds the view that it is not merely Radical Islam, but the very system if Islam itself which is the problem regarding Islamic terrorism; and the global threat it presents – it is refreshing to find an author who holds a similar view to myself, and puts his case with clarity and factual basis:
[I have added emphasis to highlight my point of view]
The Grand Jihad: A word from the author
Andrew McCarthy is the former Assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted the Blind Sheikh and his friends for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After he secured convictions, he recounted what he had learned along the way in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. When it comes to the subject of civilian trials for unlawful enemy combatants and of the Islamist war against the United States, McCarthy is like Walt Whitman: He is the man, he suffer’d, he was there. I find myself returning to this book regularly.
And McCarthy has stayed on the case. In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, published last week, McCarthy follows up with a closely argued account of Islamist designs on, and inroads in, the United States.
In a sense, the book provides a counterpart to David Horowitz’s The Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, whose argument McCarthy cites below. Whereas Horowitz’s book focused on the Left, McCarthy focuses on the Islamists, elaborating on events that have occurred and lessons we have learned since Horowitz’s book was published in 2004.
Among these events are a few in our own backyard, including the election of Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison in 2006, a man who embodies the alliance between Islam and the Left. McCarthy rightly calls Ellison “CAIR’s congressman.” McCarthy also discusses the case of the flying imams — a case he calls “the sabotage campaign in action”– arising from an incident at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after an imams’ conference at which Ellison had spoken. McCarthy also devotes an entire chapter to “The Enclave of Minnesota.”
I’ve been after Andy to provide us something on his new book for readers of Power Line from the time I heard he was writing the book. He has graciously responded with this hard-hitting account of his hard-hitting book:
********
As a faithful Power Line reader, I am as thrilled as I am grateful to be able to say a few words here about my new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
What is surprising, and dismaying, is that the book’s message should come as news to anyone, as if there were real question about whether such a grand jihad exists. Though our opinion elites and their media allies remain desperate to suppress the story, the proof of an Islamist conspiracy to destroy the West is stark and undeniable, and the instances of Islamists being aided and abetted by Leftists are too numerous for serious people to deny the alliance – not merger but alliance – between the two.
As demonstrated at the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trials in Texas, internal Muslim Brotherhood memoranda are unabashed in describing Islamists as engaged in a “civilizational” war against the West. In America, the Brothers attest that theirs is a “grand jihad” to destroy the United States – mainly from within, mainly by “sabotage.”
I use the term Islamist advisedly. In the book’s second chapter, I’ve tried to take on the excruciating question of whether the existential challenge we face is Islam itself. On this, besides views I’ve developed over the last 17 years, I read widely and consulted learned people on both sides of this question, several of whom I’m fortunate to call friends. When I was finally done writing the chapter, and rereading it for the zillionth time, I thought maybe I should rewrite it, to make it shorter and just get to the bottom line. But I decided to leave it as is. If it seems throughout as though I am having an argument with myself, it is because I am, and the argument is anything but settled.
The problem is that those who say Islam is the problem have the better case. I was first struck by this sad fact during our terrorism trial in 1995, when I had to get ready to cross-examine the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman. Though he ended up opting not to testify, I still had to prepare. Back then I thought that if what we were saying as a government were true – if these terrorists were lying about Islam and perverting its doctrine in order to justify mass-murder attacks – then surely I should be able to locate three or four places where the Blind Sheikh had misstated the Koran and the other species of Muslim scripture. I searched high and low, but there were none.
To be sure, Islamic scriptures say a lot of things, and some of them are admirable. Good faith contentions can surely be made that passages terrorists cite need to be considered in conjunction with other passages they omit. (That’s a weak argument, by the way, but not a risible one.) But the point is that where the Blind Sheikh cited scripture, he did it quite accurately. Moreover, he is not, as we’d like to have it, a lunatic; he is a renowned doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Egypt – the seat of Sunni learning and one of the oldest and most respected academic institutions in the world. His construction of Islam, however frightening, was literal and cogent.
Islam is not a religion of peace and Islamic doctrine is not moderate. There is, for those willing to pierce political correctness and grapple with fact, an undeniable connection between Islamic doctrine’s commands to violence and domination, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the often savage acts and the civilizational campaign carried out by Muslims against the West. For that reason, Islam is very problematic. There is, however, the other side of the coin: there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who, quite clearly, are moderate, tolerant people. These Muslims either reject terrorism (at least in the form of sneak attacks that kill civilians in the U.S.) or they don’t see terrorism as having anything to do with them. Thus, people who don’t want to grapple with Islamic doctrine point to these tolerant, moderate Muslim individuals and demand that we deduce that Islam, too, must be moderate and tolerant – regardless of what its scriptures say.
But this “Islam is as Muslims do” approach is no more a rationale for giving Islam a pass than it would be for condemning Islam based on the actions of the terrorists. More importantly, to convince the people who need convincing – namely, Muslims, not Western intellectuals – there must be a cogent, persuasive construction of Islamic doctrine that can compete effectively with the ideology that fuels the terrorist attacks and the broader plot to destroy the West from within. The latter ideology is an instinctive turn-off to Westerners because it is supremacist, totalitarian, and violent. Yet, it happens to be an ideology drawn faithfully and logically from scripture – which is why it is endorsed by so many influential clerics and shariah authorities who have spent their lives in Islamic study.
As I point out in The Grand Jihad, it is fair enough to conclude that peculiarities of al Qaeda ideology are favored by only a fringe of the world’s Muslims. Here, I refer to the claim that it is legitimate to kill even other Muslims who reject the terror network’s strict interpretation of Islam. Now, I find even that fringe distressing. After all, 10 percent of 1.4 billion Muslims is a lot of people.
Here, though, is the truly distressing part. In 2007, the University of Maryland joined with the pollster World Public Opinion to survey Muslim views in nations across the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia – i.e., both Arab and non-Arab Muslims. They found that about two-thirds (65.5 percent) endorsed the requirement of “a strict application of sharia law in every Islamic country.” About the same number wanted to see all Muslim countries unified under a single caliphate, a position shared even by half of Muslims in Indonesia – where one of the most moderate brands of Islam in the world is practiced. These findings match up with other disturbing figures – like the 93 percent of young Palestinians (and 75 percent of all Palestinians) who deny Israel’s right to exist, and the 40 percent of British Muslims who would like to see sharia become the law of England.[cont]
If these statistics regarding Muslims and their worldview, hopes and aims don’t concern you, then you haven’t been listening … or worse; you’re dead from the neck up. And that the liberal left are largely complicit with the aims and intents of Islam reveals just what treacherous traitors they are to Western democracy and freedom.
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