The Cult Test
Questions 1 to 10
by A. Orange
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult_q0.html
• 1. The Guru is always right.
• 2. You are always wrong.
• 3. No Exit.
• 4. No Graduates.
• 5. Cult-speak.
• 6. Group-think, Suppression of Dissent, and Enforced Conformity in Thinking
• 7. Irrationality.
• 8. Suspension of disbelief.
• 9. Denigration of competing sects, cults, religions...
• 10. Personal attacks on critics.
• 11. Insistence that the cult is THE ONLY WAY.
• 12. The cult and its members are special.
• 13. Induction of guilt, and the use of guilt to manipulate cult members.
• 14. Unquestionable Dogma, Sacred Science, and Infallible Ideology.
• 15. Indoctrination of members.
• 16. Appeals to "holy" or "wise" authorities.
• 17. Instant Community.
• 18. Instant Intimacy.
• 19. Surrender To The Cult.
• 20. Giggly wonderfulness and starry-eyed faith.
• 21. Personal testimonies of earlier converts.
• 22. The cult is self-absorbed.
• 23. Dual Purposes, Hidden Agendas, and Ulterior Motives.
• 24. Aggressive Recruiting.
• 25. Deceptive Recruiting.
• 26. No Humor.
• 27. You Can't Tell The Truth.
• 28. Cloning — You become a clone of the cult leader or other elder cult members.
• 29. You must change your beliefs to conform to the group's beliefs.
• 30. The End Justifies The Means.
• 31. Dishonesty, Deceit, Denial, Falsification, and Rewriting History.
• 32. Different Levels of Truth.
• 33. Newcomers can't think right.
• 34. The Cult Implants Phobias.
• 35. The Cult is Money-Grubbing.
• 36. Confession Sessions.
• 37. A System of Punishments and Rewards.
• 38. An Impossible Superhuman Model of Perfection.
• 39. Mentoring.
• 40. Intrusiveness.
• 41. Disturbed Guru, Mentally Ill Leader.
• 42. Disturbed Members, Mentally Ill Followers.
• 43. Create a sense of powerlessness, covert fear, guilt, and dependency.
• 44. Dispensed existence
• 45. Ideology Over Experience, Observation, and Logic
• 46. Keep them unaware that there is an agenda to change them
• 47. Thought-Stopping Language. Thought-terminating clichés and slogans.
• 48. Mystical Manipulation
• 49. The guru or the group demands ultra-loyalty and total committment.
• 50. Demands for Total Faith and Total Trust
• 51. Members Get No Respect. They Get Abused.
• 52. Inconsistency. Contradictory Messages
• 53. Hierarchical, Authoritarian Power Structure, and Social Castes
• 54. Front groups, masquerading recruiters, hidden promoters, and disguised propagandists
• 55. Belief equals truth
• 56. Use of double-binds
• 57. The cult leader is not held accountable for his actions.
• 58. Everybody else needs the guru to boss him around, but nobody bosses the guru around.
• 59. The guru criticizes everybody else, but nobody criticizes the guru.
• 60. Dispensed truth and social definition of reality
• 61. The Guru Is Extra-Special.
• 62. Flexible, shifting morality
• 63. Separatism
• 64. Inability to tolerate criticism
• 65. A Charismatic Leader
• 66. Calls to Obliterate Self
• 67. Don't Trust Your Own Mind.
• 68. Don't Feel Your Own Feelings.
• 69. The cult takes over the individual's decision-making process.
• 70. You Owe The Group.
• 71. We Have The Panacea.
• 72. Progressive Indoctrination and Progressive Commitments
• 73. Magical, Mystical, Unexplainable Workings
• 74. Trance-Inducing Practices
• 75. New Identity — Redefinition of Self — Revision of Personal History
• 76. Membership Rivalry
• 77. True Believers
• 78. Scapegoating and Excommunication
• 79. Promised Powers or Knowledge
• 80. It's a con. You don't get the promised goodies.
• 81. Hypocrisy
• 82. Denial of the truth. Reversal of reality. Rationalization and Denial.
• 83. Seeing Through Tinted Lenses
• 84. You can't make it without the cult.
• 85. Enemy-making and Devaluing the Outsider
• 86. The cult wants to own you.
• 87. Channelling or other occult, unchallengeable, sources of information.
• 88. They Make You Dependent On The Group.
• 89. Demands For Compliance With The Group
• 90. Newcomers Need Fixing.
• 91. Use of the Cognitive Dissonance Technique.
• 92. Grandiose existence. Bombastic, Grandiose Claims.
• 93. Black And White Thinking
• 94. The use of heavy-duty mind control and rapid conversion techniques.
• 95. Threats of bodily harm or death to someone who leaves the cult.
• 96. Threats of bodily harm or death to someone who criticizes the cult.
• 97. Appropriation of all of the members' worldly wealth.
• 98. Making cult members work long hours for free.
• 99. Total immersion and total isolation.
• 100. Mass suicide.
I was really hoping for number 100 but alas unlike most of the others I doubt that one fits unless there's a fatwa.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Elite Power
America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the
Saturday, July 24, 2010
National Key smoke
BrookeOnline (brookeonline) wrote,
@ 2009-04-13 19:40:00
National disgraces itself: what constitution?
National disgraces itself. What about its own constitution?
Surely a new leader would not tamper with the National Party’s provisions and principles, rooted in grassroots’ expectations that the parliamentary wing of the party expresses the wish of its own members who put them there - and is not there to override them? This scenario has apparently been re-written by its new leader, discarding what doesn't suit him. Although, according to the National Party's own organisation rules, it is the specially-elected list ranking committees whose job it is to rank the list candidates, what actually happened pre-election was in direct contradiction of the party rules.
When the list-ranking process began, the sitting MPs were all exempted from being judged by the party members. That meant that all sitting MPs, by virtue of being MPs, were spared from being evaluated, compared to new candidates, no matter how lacklustre their performance in the House and in their electorates. While all the non-MP candidates were obliged to travel around at considerable personal expense, and in turn, focus on a damaging competition against one another, rather than against Labour, they did so believing that the rules would be adhered to.
However, when it came to ranking the candidates in each region, not only were the sitting MPs excused from justifying themselves - they were pre-emptively promised inclusion into the top 50 list placings. In fact, before regional voting took place, an instruction was read out advising that the regional MPs should be ranked in the order already provided by the National Party leader - a requirement completely against the rules of the party which stipulate that all candidates, inclusive of sitting MPs, are to be treated equally. It is understood that only one regional chair had the gumption to refuse to read out this directive to abandon the rules.
Apparently it got worse. The practice is for each region, depending upon the number of electorates, to choose the appropriate number of members who become part of the national list-ranking committee. Those numbers are agreed to by the members of the board, the leader and deputy leader. According to the rules, they then debate the merits of each candidate and then place them accordingly. However, a deal had apparently been done with the Auckland and Central North Island delegates with regard to the placing of the top 50 candidates to achieve not a democratic outcome but the “right” ethnic, gender and background mixture - which included placing the now Minister Stephen Joyce, doubling as campaign chair, into place number 16 - in what some might regard as a conflict of interest.
The beneficiaries of this list strategy were the Auckland contingent which was well-placed over all, followed by Central North Island. Both Wellington and Christchurch were the big losers. The result was a list largely owing its loyalty not to the National Party and the membership but, rather, surrounding John Key with those who owe him instead. None of this was seemingly achieved within party rules, which don't seem to have been even an inconvenience. One assessment is that the worst aspect of all is how the party president, the board and the list ranking committee just let it happen. Nobody seems to have stood up to defend the party's own rules, and by corollary, the party membership, for whom the rules are meant to be in place to protect their interests.
In effect, the list ranking process was utterly hijacked - with candidates told that leader John Key, reportedly strongly supported by deputy leader Bill English, was insisting on control over the first 50 rankings. The list ranking committee, in caving in, in essence then showed an equal disregard for the National Party constitution. What became obvious was that individuals were not being sought on the basis of their capabilities. Rather, the choice was to be along the politically correct lines of more women, and more from particular ethnic backgrounds - including one candidate who made a generous personal donation to the party; more youth: no-one, one suspects, who might challenge the particular philosophy or worldview of the present leadership. Even a very short time of involvement as a party member was no barrier to being selected against an equally, if not more capable candidate who’d worked a long time for the party.
Noteworthy was the fact that those electorates who were unable to select their own candidate (due to lack of membership) mostly did well in the list rankings. In other words, people who had the least involvement were the most highly rewarded. It was almost as if the leadership did not trust their own people, their own membership. And, most notably, leader John Key protected his MPs by exempting them from list scrutiny in direct contradiction to his own nomination and candidacy where he pitted himself against a sitting MP. There is a rich irony in Key himself having used these rules to his advantage to challenge and displace sitting member Brian Neeson, MP, to get into parliament - but then choosing to flout this party principle in order to shield his “loyal” parliamentary colleagues from the scrutiny of the wider party membership - once he became leader.
The result was highly intelligent. capable, hard-working candidates placed well below any hope of being elected - perhaps with their individual strengths seen as a handicap to a party whose leader is increasingly showing autocratic tendencies. Those who were regarded as more obedient and controllable, rather than those who represent a set of values no longer in vogue among the party hierarchy (and who might challenge its abandonment of its pledges to the country at large) seem to have won the day. Party president Judy Kirk also openly stated the party “was putting its money where its mouth was, by ensuring these candidates get into parliament.” However National is supposed to be a party of individual achievement and initiative. It talks of merit - yet panders to the ideology of so-called diversity and ethnic divisiveness. Its talk of change was never really questioned as it should have been - change to what? It is pertinent to ask how a corruption of values can lead to change worth having.
Having learned that the present Prime Minister apparently overrode the rules - as he wanted control over the top 50 selections - must have been extremely dispiriting for good candidates beginning to discover what was going on behind the scenes. Equally concerning is that they were told by party headquarters what they might or might not say in relation to the issues of the day; that their speeches were vetted; that they were expected to parrot poorly written handouts; and to pass everything they wished to say back to party headquarters to get it vetted. Candidates were also told that in terms of campaigning their hands were tied as to what collateral they were “allowed” and what type of hoardings they were permitted to use - i.e. once again, it was a question of the party versus the electorate. Furthermore, enormous constraints on personal publicity were imposed by head office stifling the opportunity for capable candidates to take advantage of issues.
In an August Morning Report item about the National Party list rankings, someone in the hierarchy said that the party was hopeful of getting as many as 60 into Parliament. How it expected those candidates who had been listed below 60 to be motivated was not explained. In effect, National Party headquarters was making it clear that they didn't want them. Moreover, the help and membership material that should have been provided for all candidates was apparently deliberately withheld from at least one candidate democratically chosen by the electorate membership - in an electorate which National would prefer one of their least performing, but oh-so-loyal MPs to hold in future.
How many New Zealanders at large know that party candidates were treated not as independent, intelligent adults able to argue for themselves on the issues of the day according to the party philosophy, but as simple or simpleminded yes-men and women expected to do as they were told? So much for democracy. It can be summed up that, unbeknownst to the public, their choice of government was between the corrupt and corrosive socialism of Labour - and the arguably also corrupt manipulations of a National Party hierarchy intent on getting its own way, not with the help, but disregarding the role, of its own membership.
It is not unreasonable to invoke this concept when not only were established constitutional party procedures simply overwritten, but when this in turn forced the next rung down of power to buckle under the pressure to look the other way - justified, presumably, for the sake of power at all costs. It may be little wonder that Prime Minister Key describes himself as a pragmatist, which he has well and truly recently demonstrated in what many of the public regard as his astonishing enthusiasm for the former leaders of the Labour Party. But it raises the question, too, of whether the National Party hierarchy shows as little respect for the electorate as did Labour itself.
Catch-22 as far the country is concerned, is that we may well have exchanged one self-willed autocratic Prime Minister for another. A democratic government is one which operates with the consent of the people. Prime Minister Key is rapidly establishing himself as prepared to operate against the will of the people - as, for example - with his high-handed refusal to take on board the fact that over 80% of the country rejected the Bradford-Clark arrogance of regarding their personal views on child raising - in their anti-smacking diktats - as superior to those of good conservative parents. Key’s stated intention to ignore majority opinion on this issue does not augur well for the politics of consensus.
National Party leaders have not traditionally been inclined to comment constantly on decisions individuals make, which are basically none of their business - as with the Prime Minister's intrusive comments in relation to the car hire firm owner who wanted to reclaim the towing costs for retrieving his firm’s car from the Tasman Glacier, after the tragedy which cost two young men in their lives. It was a very sad business, but the owner’s comment was fair - that by doing what they were asked not to do, and ignoring warnings - to some extent this tragedy was at least part of the individuals’ own making - they cost everybody involved. While the media worked themselves up to a near-hysterical self-righteous indictment of his position - and acknowledging it an appalling and tragic loss for the parents concerned - there was still no reason for the car hire owner to be expected to carry the costs for an accident he wasn't involved in. If John Key felt so strongly about this, then he could himself have paid the costs incurred - he was probably personally much better able to afford it than the business owner - times are very tough for small businesses. But why did he feel called upon to make an inappropriate pronouncement at all?
The government-announced review of the Foreshore and Seabed Act also produced a collective groan from the country and has raised questions about the prices National is paying for its too-generous involvement with the electorally-unpopular Maori Party, particularly insofar as this noose could have been avoided, with National and ACT having the numbers to govern on their own. Key’s relationship with Fiji coup leader Voreque Bainimarama seems also to have been guided by previous Prime Minister Helen Clark’s particular animosity to Bainimarama, which entailed aggressive, rather than constructive policy decisions - a singularly unproductive approach, particularly given China's attempts to gain influence and a strategic position among our Pacific neighbours - and given her lack of any real commitment to target far more grievous human rights issues among other countries with whom New Zealand maintains trading relationships.
The question of consensus politics too, has been absent in the Prime Minister's decision to reinstate knighthoods, although the country has long been uncomfortable with the awarding of these to the richly undeserving. The concept of special recognition for individuals exhibiting extraordinary courage, or demonstrating particular worth, has long been exchanged for political cronyism, backscratching, and favours bestowed. Few would begrudge recognition for the former. But when wealthy businessmen, retired judges and politicians expect these as of right - heaven forbid that we should surmise for a moment that a Sir John Key is envisaged down the line - then the public has had enough of the whole dubious system. They are an anachronism in a democracy - as has long been recognised in America. Feedback that the one well-supported piece of legislation that Labour passed was to get rid of the corrupted practice of bestowing knighthoods does not augur well for National. The solution for those who believe in equal status in a democracy is simple - to simply ignore the title and to interact with every individual on an equal footing. Consent withheld is consent not given.
In his inaugural speech Prime Minister John Key invoked the need for a renewal of individual freedom and responsibility. “My government” (not our government) “will be guided by the principle of individual freedom and belief (sic) in the capacity and right of individuals to shape and improve their own lives. It will not seek to involve itself in decisions that are best made by New Zealanders within their own homes in their own communities. The new government's vision is not to dictate the way in which New Zealanders should live their lives” However, his government is not off to a good start when actions of the Prime Minister can already be seen to demonstrably contradict these principles.
As Spectator commentator Bryan Forbes reminds us - "as much as the threat of terrorism, we should all fear the collapse of morality in public life.” This includes the collapse of political morality and policies of principle in favour of the politics of pragmatism - of vote-buying, of autocratic leadership in a style of which we have already had far too much in this country.
Forbes reminds us of the erosion of what we could once justly boast was our determination to preserve individual freedom - threatened now not only by the creeping intrusion of political correctness and Green bullying, but by a kind of collective inertia. Our inability now to elect leaders who have knowledge of and respect for the politics of principle over those of pragmatism - and who are pledged to govern with the consent, rather then in spite of the lack of consent of the electorate, does not augur well for the for the future of the country. Any Prime Minister who begins to run the country like his or her private fiefdom, making decisions no one has asked for, arguably belongs in some other political system - one foreign to a democracy.
@ 2009-04-13 19:40:00
National disgraces itself: what constitution?
National disgraces itself. What about its own constitution?
Surely a new leader would not tamper with the National Party’s provisions and principles, rooted in grassroots’ expectations that the parliamentary wing of the party expresses the wish of its own members who put them there - and is not there to override them? This scenario has apparently been re-written by its new leader, discarding what doesn't suit him. Although, according to the National Party's own organisation rules, it is the specially-elected list ranking committees whose job it is to rank the list candidates, what actually happened pre-election was in direct contradiction of the party rules.
When the list-ranking process began, the sitting MPs were all exempted from being judged by the party members. That meant that all sitting MPs, by virtue of being MPs, were spared from being evaluated, compared to new candidates, no matter how lacklustre their performance in the House and in their electorates. While all the non-MP candidates were obliged to travel around at considerable personal expense, and in turn, focus on a damaging competition against one another, rather than against Labour, they did so believing that the rules would be adhered to.
However, when it came to ranking the candidates in each region, not only were the sitting MPs excused from justifying themselves - they were pre-emptively promised inclusion into the top 50 list placings. In fact, before regional voting took place, an instruction was read out advising that the regional MPs should be ranked in the order already provided by the National Party leader - a requirement completely against the rules of the party which stipulate that all candidates, inclusive of sitting MPs, are to be treated equally. It is understood that only one regional chair had the gumption to refuse to read out this directive to abandon the rules.
Apparently it got worse. The practice is for each region, depending upon the number of electorates, to choose the appropriate number of members who become part of the national list-ranking committee. Those numbers are agreed to by the members of the board, the leader and deputy leader. According to the rules, they then debate the merits of each candidate and then place them accordingly. However, a deal had apparently been done with the Auckland and Central North Island delegates with regard to the placing of the top 50 candidates to achieve not a democratic outcome but the “right” ethnic, gender and background mixture - which included placing the now Minister Stephen Joyce, doubling as campaign chair, into place number 16 - in what some might regard as a conflict of interest.
The beneficiaries of this list strategy were the Auckland contingent which was well-placed over all, followed by Central North Island. Both Wellington and Christchurch were the big losers. The result was a list largely owing its loyalty not to the National Party and the membership but, rather, surrounding John Key with those who owe him instead. None of this was seemingly achieved within party rules, which don't seem to have been even an inconvenience. One assessment is that the worst aspect of all is how the party president, the board and the list ranking committee just let it happen. Nobody seems to have stood up to defend the party's own rules, and by corollary, the party membership, for whom the rules are meant to be in place to protect their interests.
In effect, the list ranking process was utterly hijacked - with candidates told that leader John Key, reportedly strongly supported by deputy leader Bill English, was insisting on control over the first 50 rankings. The list ranking committee, in caving in, in essence then showed an equal disregard for the National Party constitution. What became obvious was that individuals were not being sought on the basis of their capabilities. Rather, the choice was to be along the politically correct lines of more women, and more from particular ethnic backgrounds - including one candidate who made a generous personal donation to the party; more youth: no-one, one suspects, who might challenge the particular philosophy or worldview of the present leadership. Even a very short time of involvement as a party member was no barrier to being selected against an equally, if not more capable candidate who’d worked a long time for the party.
Noteworthy was the fact that those electorates who were unable to select their own candidate (due to lack of membership) mostly did well in the list rankings. In other words, people who had the least involvement were the most highly rewarded. It was almost as if the leadership did not trust their own people, their own membership. And, most notably, leader John Key protected his MPs by exempting them from list scrutiny in direct contradiction to his own nomination and candidacy where he pitted himself against a sitting MP. There is a rich irony in Key himself having used these rules to his advantage to challenge and displace sitting member Brian Neeson, MP, to get into parliament - but then choosing to flout this party principle in order to shield his “loyal” parliamentary colleagues from the scrutiny of the wider party membership - once he became leader.
The result was highly intelligent. capable, hard-working candidates placed well below any hope of being elected - perhaps with their individual strengths seen as a handicap to a party whose leader is increasingly showing autocratic tendencies. Those who were regarded as more obedient and controllable, rather than those who represent a set of values no longer in vogue among the party hierarchy (and who might challenge its abandonment of its pledges to the country at large) seem to have won the day. Party president Judy Kirk also openly stated the party “was putting its money where its mouth was, by ensuring these candidates get into parliament.” However National is supposed to be a party of individual achievement and initiative. It talks of merit - yet panders to the ideology of so-called diversity and ethnic divisiveness. Its talk of change was never really questioned as it should have been - change to what? It is pertinent to ask how a corruption of values can lead to change worth having.
Having learned that the present Prime Minister apparently overrode the rules - as he wanted control over the top 50 selections - must have been extremely dispiriting for good candidates beginning to discover what was going on behind the scenes. Equally concerning is that they were told by party headquarters what they might or might not say in relation to the issues of the day; that their speeches were vetted; that they were expected to parrot poorly written handouts; and to pass everything they wished to say back to party headquarters to get it vetted. Candidates were also told that in terms of campaigning their hands were tied as to what collateral they were “allowed” and what type of hoardings they were permitted to use - i.e. once again, it was a question of the party versus the electorate. Furthermore, enormous constraints on personal publicity were imposed by head office stifling the opportunity for capable candidates to take advantage of issues.
In an August Morning Report item about the National Party list rankings, someone in the hierarchy said that the party was hopeful of getting as many as 60 into Parliament. How it expected those candidates who had been listed below 60 to be motivated was not explained. In effect, National Party headquarters was making it clear that they didn't want them. Moreover, the help and membership material that should have been provided for all candidates was apparently deliberately withheld from at least one candidate democratically chosen by the electorate membership - in an electorate which National would prefer one of their least performing, but oh-so-loyal MPs to hold in future.
How many New Zealanders at large know that party candidates were treated not as independent, intelligent adults able to argue for themselves on the issues of the day according to the party philosophy, but as simple or simpleminded yes-men and women expected to do as they were told? So much for democracy. It can be summed up that, unbeknownst to the public, their choice of government was between the corrupt and corrosive socialism of Labour - and the arguably also corrupt manipulations of a National Party hierarchy intent on getting its own way, not with the help, but disregarding the role, of its own membership.
It is not unreasonable to invoke this concept when not only were established constitutional party procedures simply overwritten, but when this in turn forced the next rung down of power to buckle under the pressure to look the other way - justified, presumably, for the sake of power at all costs. It may be little wonder that Prime Minister Key describes himself as a pragmatist, which he has well and truly recently demonstrated in what many of the public regard as his astonishing enthusiasm for the former leaders of the Labour Party. But it raises the question, too, of whether the National Party hierarchy shows as little respect for the electorate as did Labour itself.
Catch-22 as far the country is concerned, is that we may well have exchanged one self-willed autocratic Prime Minister for another. A democratic government is one which operates with the consent of the people. Prime Minister Key is rapidly establishing himself as prepared to operate against the will of the people - as, for example - with his high-handed refusal to take on board the fact that over 80% of the country rejected the Bradford-Clark arrogance of regarding their personal views on child raising - in their anti-smacking diktats - as superior to those of good conservative parents. Key’s stated intention to ignore majority opinion on this issue does not augur well for the politics of consensus.
National Party leaders have not traditionally been inclined to comment constantly on decisions individuals make, which are basically none of their business - as with the Prime Minister's intrusive comments in relation to the car hire firm owner who wanted to reclaim the towing costs for retrieving his firm’s car from the Tasman Glacier, after the tragedy which cost two young men in their lives. It was a very sad business, but the owner’s comment was fair - that by doing what they were asked not to do, and ignoring warnings - to some extent this tragedy was at least part of the individuals’ own making - they cost everybody involved. While the media worked themselves up to a near-hysterical self-righteous indictment of his position - and acknowledging it an appalling and tragic loss for the parents concerned - there was still no reason for the car hire owner to be expected to carry the costs for an accident he wasn't involved in. If John Key felt so strongly about this, then he could himself have paid the costs incurred - he was probably personally much better able to afford it than the business owner - times are very tough for small businesses. But why did he feel called upon to make an inappropriate pronouncement at all?
The government-announced review of the Foreshore and Seabed Act also produced a collective groan from the country and has raised questions about the prices National is paying for its too-generous involvement with the electorally-unpopular Maori Party, particularly insofar as this noose could have been avoided, with National and ACT having the numbers to govern on their own. Key’s relationship with Fiji coup leader Voreque Bainimarama seems also to have been guided by previous Prime Minister Helen Clark’s particular animosity to Bainimarama, which entailed aggressive, rather than constructive policy decisions - a singularly unproductive approach, particularly given China's attempts to gain influence and a strategic position among our Pacific neighbours - and given her lack of any real commitment to target far more grievous human rights issues among other countries with whom New Zealand maintains trading relationships.
The question of consensus politics too, has been absent in the Prime Minister's decision to reinstate knighthoods, although the country has long been uncomfortable with the awarding of these to the richly undeserving. The concept of special recognition for individuals exhibiting extraordinary courage, or demonstrating particular worth, has long been exchanged for political cronyism, backscratching, and favours bestowed. Few would begrudge recognition for the former. But when wealthy businessmen, retired judges and politicians expect these as of right - heaven forbid that we should surmise for a moment that a Sir John Key is envisaged down the line - then the public has had enough of the whole dubious system. They are an anachronism in a democracy - as has long been recognised in America. Feedback that the one well-supported piece of legislation that Labour passed was to get rid of the corrupted practice of bestowing knighthoods does not augur well for National. The solution for those who believe in equal status in a democracy is simple - to simply ignore the title and to interact with every individual on an equal footing. Consent withheld is consent not given.
In his inaugural speech Prime Minister John Key invoked the need for a renewal of individual freedom and responsibility. “My government” (not our government) “will be guided by the principle of individual freedom and belief (sic) in the capacity and right of individuals to shape and improve their own lives. It will not seek to involve itself in decisions that are best made by New Zealanders within their own homes in their own communities. The new government's vision is not to dictate the way in which New Zealanders should live their lives” However, his government is not off to a good start when actions of the Prime Minister can already be seen to demonstrably contradict these principles.
As Spectator commentator Bryan Forbes reminds us - "as much as the threat of terrorism, we should all fear the collapse of morality in public life.” This includes the collapse of political morality and policies of principle in favour of the politics of pragmatism - of vote-buying, of autocratic leadership in a style of which we have already had far too much in this country.
Forbes reminds us of the erosion of what we could once justly boast was our determination to preserve individual freedom - threatened now not only by the creeping intrusion of political correctness and Green bullying, but by a kind of collective inertia. Our inability now to elect leaders who have knowledge of and respect for the politics of principle over those of pragmatism - and who are pledged to govern with the consent, rather then in spite of the lack of consent of the electorate, does not augur well for the for the future of the country. Any Prime Minister who begins to run the country like his or her private fiefdom, making decisions no one has asked for, arguably belongs in some other political system - one foreign to a democracy.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Stimulus = Deficits Green shoots?
So what happened to all those ‘green shoots,’ fellers? [update 3]
The recovery has stalled.
Obvious enough to anyone actually on the ground trying to do business, this news would be a surprise only to a mainstream economist, or to anyone who listens to one. Like NZIER’s Principal Economist Shamubeel Eaqub, for example, who is surprised to have to announce that, “The recovery may be stalling. The outlook is still fragile.”
No kidding.
But just imagine how all the mainstream economists must feel. Every economy in the world followed their advice and threw trillions of stimulus dollars against the wall, hoping that some of it would stick--and the result worldwide may be summarised in NZIER’s assessment of NZ’s last quarter: “The recovery may be stalling. The outlook is still fragile.”
So why are the mainstreamers (and those who take their advice) so surprised? Because, according to their lights, throwing out all those trillions to “increase aggregate demand” must have had some effect. And of course, they’re right, it did. It lit up some fireworks for a while, but at the cost of delaying any real recovery.
“The problems are not over [summarises Jim Rogers]. If you pump lots of money into an economy, it looks better but essentially it’s artificial. We are going to see more problems in the US over the next year or two.”
Nobel Prize winner and stimulus loon Paul Krugman reckons however that the problem is not too much stimulus, but too little. If we’re going to raise world demand properly, says this modern reincarnation of the Great Idiot Keynes, then Obama and The Fed (and, by extension, everyone else in the G-20 and beyond) needs to be thinking—not about austerity packages—but in terms of trillions of dollars more stimulus. If we’re going to successfully “raise demand,” then the world’s governments needs higher deficits, he says, not lower.
That he says this in the face of the near bankruptcy of several European governments for running the very deficits he applauds should tell you one thing about his favourite nostrum: that it’s really the height of irresponsibility.
But what it won’t tell you is why he wants governments to be so irresponsible.
The answer to that, however, is very simple. At least, I’ll try to make it simple. The reason he wants to boost government spending is because he thinks that will boost demand; and by boosting demand he thinks we can all boost GDP. It’s a simple idea, but it’s wrong as hell. (“If you pump lots of money into an economy, it looks better but essentially it’s artificial.”)
Let me explain why.
Imagine a very simplified economy consisting of only you and your one-hundred closest friends. An economy based on beer. (I told you it would be simple.) Twenty of you grow the hops and barley. The next twenty brew it into beer. The next twenty package it and sell it. The next twenty are your partners, who like to stay home and drink. And the next twenty work for the government, and they like to use their parliamentary credit cards to buy your beer out of the mini-bar.
So there’s your basic economy. 80 people devoted to making and drinking beer, and 20 devoted to getting the hell in their way. (Oh, did I mention that the first sixty get the pleasure of paying the credit card bill for the annoying bastards consuming the mini-bar?)
Now in the way of conventional economics, the formula for GDP has been cunningly contrived to measure only what the drinkers do, and not what the other sixty get up to. Here’s the formula for GDP (which has here been given the title of ‘Baloney.’)
C is Consumption, i.e., all the drinking done by all your twenty drinking partners.
G is Government, i.e., all the drinking done by all the twenty grey ones from the mini-bar.
And I … now that’s “Investment.” And that’s a bit trickier, because it’s not total investment but only nett investment. Essentially this figure measures the difference between the six-packs of beer we sixty producers pay out to get things done, and the six-packs of beer we get back when we do things for others. So (to oversimplify a great deal) if our profit is ten percent, then only the work of six of us are measured in the GDP/Baloney figure.
If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is—yet that’s how ridiculous the GDP delusion is. It doesn’t measure production, it measures consumption. Rather than measure economic activity, what it does is bury the bulk of economic activity (i.e., the production of those other fifty-five folk) under this contrived figure of I, and then it contrives to ignore all fifty-five. (As a measure of just how much it ignores, US GDP in 2006 was $13.4 trillion, whereas total business spending was $31 trillion, meaning businesses were spending $4.30 for every $1 spent on personal consumption. Policy-makers take note.)
It’s by this utterly contrived means then that alleged economists like Mr Krugman can talk about “raising GDP” through the “stimulus” of shopping subsidies (or as his mentor Keynes did, by the “stimulus” of building pyramids)—it’s because all that GDP really measures is what gets spent in the shops, and not hardly at all what goes on in the mines, factories and warehouses that makes all that spending possible.
And it’s the homage paid to this ridiculous economic equation that allows him to get away with it, and is so economically destructive--as you’ll see when we take another look at our simplified economy in recovery mode.
Let’s imagine our simplified consumers have all just had a party. A big blow-out. A boom. And now it’s the morning after. (What a bust.) There’s still hops a’pickin’ and still beer a-brewin’ in the vats, but your packaging and production cycle has got a bit out of whack, and the livers of your drinking partners are all feeling a bit tender. Demand has gone down (and they’re starting to beg for the invention of some basic pain-killers), but in a short time production will be back on track and things ticking along again.
Then along comes Mr Krugman, and all he sees is calamity! “Look!” he cries. “Your “C” is way down. And your GDP/Baloney/Spending figure is flat! We’ve got to boost demand!” And of course, he’s right. It is. But it wouldn’t be right simply to print drinking vouchers so the twenty parliamentarians can raise “G” at the mini-bar, while ignoring the sixty producers who were trying to get things back on track, and whose production would have to pay for it (but whose total production has been “netted out,” i.e., minimised, in that figure for “I”.
Because their spending has to be paid for. That demand must come from production. And if you start “stimulating” the economy simply by overstocking the mini-bar, without ever getting anything back for it, then you’ll wake up one day soon and find you’ve got no more six-packs set aside to pay for more hops and more barley. Which means no more beer at all.
And just because that bogus GDP equation allows alleged economists like Paul Krugman to ignore that, it doesn’t mean that you should.
Because as the great economist Ludwig Von Mises used to say, it’s not just the next generation who pays for deficits, it’s this one. And the way we pay is by having our resources diverted today from all the good productive activity that the GDP equation ignores, into all the unproductive consumption that it picks up.
Which helps explain why the Paul Krugmans of this world (and their sophistic, simplistic equations) have helped make the recovery less likely, rather than more.
So to end this wee post, here’s economist Bob Murphy’s tribute to his favourite Keynesian moron, Paul Krugman (sung very badly to the tune of The Buckinghams’s Susan).
UPDATE 1: More good, related reading at The Cobden Centre: “Short sharp shock –'the Irish Route' or Keynesian Malaise?”
UPDATE 2: I’ve rewritten an old Q&A (from January ‘09) to help explain the point:
Stimulus: Because all economies have performance issues
Q: What is the point of running deficits?
A: Because it’s demand that drives an economy, and we have to keep demand up to keep the economy going. So when consumer demand drops, the government has to pick up the slack. That’s it’s job.
Q: By borrowing?
A: By borrowing, by printing money, by any way you can do it.
Q: But aren’t most business-to-business payments paid for out of real savings, not faked up demand?
A: Well, yes…but we can try to fool them for a while.
Q: For how long?
A: Long enough. Another three years if we need to.
Q: Until we turn into Greece?
A: Um…
Q: So does borrowing or printing money bring any new resources into existence?
A: Well, no. In the first case it transfers existing resources, and in the second it just dilutes existing savings. But it does create new demand.
Q: But doesn’t your demand have to be paid for with real resources?
A: Well …
Q: So what you’re relying on is using your new bits of paper to redistribute existing resources in ways the original owners wouldn’t have otherwise agreed to.
A: They need to spend!!
Q: And at the same time you’re denuding the existing pool of real savings.
A: They need to stop saving and start spending!! We need to run deficits to make up for the money that savers have withdrawn from the economy by their hoarding.
Q: But how can you say savings are being hoarded when most business-to-business payments are paid for out of real savings?
A: Well…
Q: How is running deficits going to rebuild that shattered pool of real savings?
A: Um…
Q. Okay, let’s move on. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
A. It is money the government distributes to some taxpayers to boost demand, and stimulate economic activity.
Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.
Q. So the government is giving me back my own money?
A. Only a smidgen.
Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a High definition TV set or a new computer, thus stimulating the economy.
Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China?
A. Um.
Q: Well, how on earth does it stimulate the one whose taxpayers are paying to be stimulated?
A: It's all about the "multiplier."
Q: The "multiplier"?
A: Yes, the "multiplier." Every dollar the government "injects" into the economy creates an even larger increase in national output -- a multiple up to one-and-a-half times the original spend-up. The money the government is giving away goes to retailers, which then goes to producers, which then goes to other producers and so on. The net result of the spend-up, as the theory goes, will be new jobs and an overall increase in the nation's income.
Q: So the government is giving me back a smidgen of my own money, and this smidgen is multiplied several times to create a "stimulus?
A. You've got it.
Q: And it keeps prices up?
A: We hope so.
Q: But don't the prices that producers pay need to fall in a recession to get real production going again?
A: Well, yes.
Q: And it's not even backed by real demand, is it?
A: Well, no.
Q: So how long can such an artificial stimulus last, then?
A: Um, the theory is that it's only temporary at best.
Q: But you’ve been advocating running deficits and printing shopping subsidies to fix the economy now for nearly three years!
A: They haven’t been over-spending enough!!
Q: Well, what sort of stimulus would it have created if you hadn’t taken it off me, abd I'd been able to keep that money myself, and either spend it or save it?
A: Well . . .
Q: Or if producers had been able to keep their own money?
A: Um . . .
Q: So it would be fair to argue that "not only does the increase in government outlays not raise overall output by a positive multiple; but, on the contrary, [it actually] leads to the weakening in the process of wealth generation in general.”
A: But . . .
Q: And this is the whole theory? This is all you economists can come up with?
A: Well, that's about it, yes.
Q: So it's a bit like when "a carnival magician produces a quarter from behind a child's ear," isn't it. "The 'magic' of the multiplier is mere illusion."
A: Hush your mouth. People are listening.
Q: No answer?
A: Sorry, we're a bit busy right now shovelling money out the door.
* * * * Stimulus: Because all economies have performance issues * * * *
UPDATE 3: Economic historian Niall Ferguson talks “austerity” vs “stimulus” (and Paul Krugman)—making an important point about what so-called austerity really has to mean…
Labels: Economics, GDP Delusion, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Krugman, Stimulus
The recovery has stalled.
Obvious enough to anyone actually on the ground trying to do business, this news would be a surprise only to a mainstream economist, or to anyone who listens to one. Like NZIER’s Principal Economist Shamubeel Eaqub, for example, who is surprised to have to announce that, “The recovery may be stalling. The outlook is still fragile.”
No kidding.
But just imagine how all the mainstream economists must feel. Every economy in the world followed their advice and threw trillions of stimulus dollars against the wall, hoping that some of it would stick--and the result worldwide may be summarised in NZIER’s assessment of NZ’s last quarter: “The recovery may be stalling. The outlook is still fragile.”
So why are the mainstreamers (and those who take their advice) so surprised? Because, according to their lights, throwing out all those trillions to “increase aggregate demand” must have had some effect. And of course, they’re right, it did. It lit up some fireworks for a while, but at the cost of delaying any real recovery.
“The problems are not over [summarises Jim Rogers]. If you pump lots of money into an economy, it looks better but essentially it’s artificial. We are going to see more problems in the US over the next year or two.”
Nobel Prize winner and stimulus loon Paul Krugman reckons however that the problem is not too much stimulus, but too little. If we’re going to raise world demand properly, says this modern reincarnation of the Great Idiot Keynes, then Obama and The Fed (and, by extension, everyone else in the G-20 and beyond) needs to be thinking—not about austerity packages—but in terms of trillions of dollars more stimulus. If we’re going to successfully “raise demand,” then the world’s governments needs higher deficits, he says, not lower.
That he says this in the face of the near bankruptcy of several European governments for running the very deficits he applauds should tell you one thing about his favourite nostrum: that it’s really the height of irresponsibility.
But what it won’t tell you is why he wants governments to be so irresponsible.
The answer to that, however, is very simple. At least, I’ll try to make it simple. The reason he wants to boost government spending is because he thinks that will boost demand; and by boosting demand he thinks we can all boost GDP. It’s a simple idea, but it’s wrong as hell. (“If you pump lots of money into an economy, it looks better but essentially it’s artificial.”)
Let me explain why.
Imagine a very simplified economy consisting of only you and your one-hundred closest friends. An economy based on beer. (I told you it would be simple.) Twenty of you grow the hops and barley. The next twenty brew it into beer. The next twenty package it and sell it. The next twenty are your partners, who like to stay home and drink. And the next twenty work for the government, and they like to use their parliamentary credit cards to buy your beer out of the mini-bar.
So there’s your basic economy. 80 people devoted to making and drinking beer, and 20 devoted to getting the hell in their way. (Oh, did I mention that the first sixty get the pleasure of paying the credit card bill for the annoying bastards consuming the mini-bar?)
Now in the way of conventional economics, the formula for GDP has been cunningly contrived to measure only what the drinkers do, and not what the other sixty get up to. Here’s the formula for GDP (which has here been given the title of ‘Baloney.’)
C is Consumption, i.e., all the drinking done by all your twenty drinking partners.
G is Government, i.e., all the drinking done by all the twenty grey ones from the mini-bar.
And I … now that’s “Investment.” And that’s a bit trickier, because it’s not total investment but only nett investment. Essentially this figure measures the difference between the six-packs of beer we sixty producers pay out to get things done, and the six-packs of beer we get back when we do things for others. So (to oversimplify a great deal) if our profit is ten percent, then only the work of six of us are measured in the GDP/Baloney figure.
If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is—yet that’s how ridiculous the GDP delusion is. It doesn’t measure production, it measures consumption. Rather than measure economic activity, what it does is bury the bulk of economic activity (i.e., the production of those other fifty-five folk) under this contrived figure of I, and then it contrives to ignore all fifty-five. (As a measure of just how much it ignores, US GDP in 2006 was $13.4 trillion, whereas total business spending was $31 trillion, meaning businesses were spending $4.30 for every $1 spent on personal consumption. Policy-makers take note.)
It’s by this utterly contrived means then that alleged economists like Mr Krugman can talk about “raising GDP” through the “stimulus” of shopping subsidies (or as his mentor Keynes did, by the “stimulus” of building pyramids)—it’s because all that GDP really measures is what gets spent in the shops, and not hardly at all what goes on in the mines, factories and warehouses that makes all that spending possible.
And it’s the homage paid to this ridiculous economic equation that allows him to get away with it, and is so economically destructive--as you’ll see when we take another look at our simplified economy in recovery mode.
Let’s imagine our simplified consumers have all just had a party. A big blow-out. A boom. And now it’s the morning after. (What a bust.) There’s still hops a’pickin’ and still beer a-brewin’ in the vats, but your packaging and production cycle has got a bit out of whack, and the livers of your drinking partners are all feeling a bit tender. Demand has gone down (and they’re starting to beg for the invention of some basic pain-killers), but in a short time production will be back on track and things ticking along again.
Then along comes Mr Krugman, and all he sees is calamity! “Look!” he cries. “Your “C” is way down. And your GDP/Baloney/Spending figure is flat! We’ve got to boost demand!” And of course, he’s right. It is. But it wouldn’t be right simply to print drinking vouchers so the twenty parliamentarians can raise “G” at the mini-bar, while ignoring the sixty producers who were trying to get things back on track, and whose production would have to pay for it (but whose total production has been “netted out,” i.e., minimised, in that figure for “I”.
Because their spending has to be paid for. That demand must come from production. And if you start “stimulating” the economy simply by overstocking the mini-bar, without ever getting anything back for it, then you’ll wake up one day soon and find you’ve got no more six-packs set aside to pay for more hops and more barley. Which means no more beer at all.
And just because that bogus GDP equation allows alleged economists like Paul Krugman to ignore that, it doesn’t mean that you should.
Because as the great economist Ludwig Von Mises used to say, it’s not just the next generation who pays for deficits, it’s this one. And the way we pay is by having our resources diverted today from all the good productive activity that the GDP equation ignores, into all the unproductive consumption that it picks up.
Which helps explain why the Paul Krugmans of this world (and their sophistic, simplistic equations) have helped make the recovery less likely, rather than more.
So to end this wee post, here’s economist Bob Murphy’s tribute to his favourite Keynesian moron, Paul Krugman (sung very badly to the tune of The Buckinghams’s Susan).
UPDATE 1: More good, related reading at The Cobden Centre: “Short sharp shock –'the Irish Route' or Keynesian Malaise?”
UPDATE 2: I’ve rewritten an old Q&A (from January ‘09) to help explain the point:
Stimulus: Because all economies have performance issues
Q: What is the point of running deficits?
A: Because it’s demand that drives an economy, and we have to keep demand up to keep the economy going. So when consumer demand drops, the government has to pick up the slack. That’s it’s job.
Q: By borrowing?
A: By borrowing, by printing money, by any way you can do it.
Q: But aren’t most business-to-business payments paid for out of real savings, not faked up demand?
A: Well, yes…but we can try to fool them for a while.
Q: For how long?
A: Long enough. Another three years if we need to.
Q: Until we turn into Greece?
A: Um…
Q: So does borrowing or printing money bring any new resources into existence?
A: Well, no. In the first case it transfers existing resources, and in the second it just dilutes existing savings. But it does create new demand.
Q: But doesn’t your demand have to be paid for with real resources?
A: Well …
Q: So what you’re relying on is using your new bits of paper to redistribute existing resources in ways the original owners wouldn’t have otherwise agreed to.
A: They need to spend!!
Q: And at the same time you’re denuding the existing pool of real savings.
A: They need to stop saving and start spending!! We need to run deficits to make up for the money that savers have withdrawn from the economy by their hoarding.
Q: But how can you say savings are being hoarded when most business-to-business payments are paid for out of real savings?
A: Well…
Q: How is running deficits going to rebuild that shattered pool of real savings?
A: Um…
Q. Okay, let’s move on. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
A. It is money the government distributes to some taxpayers to boost demand, and stimulate economic activity.
Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.
Q. So the government is giving me back my own money?
A. Only a smidgen.
Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a High definition TV set or a new computer, thus stimulating the economy.
Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China?
A. Um.
Q: Well, how on earth does it stimulate the one whose taxpayers are paying to be stimulated?
A: It's all about the "multiplier."
Q: The "multiplier"?
A: Yes, the "multiplier." Every dollar the government "injects" into the economy creates an even larger increase in national output -- a multiple up to one-and-a-half times the original spend-up. The money the government is giving away goes to retailers, which then goes to producers, which then goes to other producers and so on. The net result of the spend-up, as the theory goes, will be new jobs and an overall increase in the nation's income.
Q: So the government is giving me back a smidgen of my own money, and this smidgen is multiplied several times to create a "stimulus?
A. You've got it.
Q: And it keeps prices up?
A: We hope so.
Q: But don't the prices that producers pay need to fall in a recession to get real production going again?
A: Well, yes.
Q: And it's not even backed by real demand, is it?
A: Well, no.
Q: So how long can such an artificial stimulus last, then?
A: Um, the theory is that it's only temporary at best.
Q: But you’ve been advocating running deficits and printing shopping subsidies to fix the economy now for nearly three years!
A: They haven’t been over-spending enough!!
Q: Well, what sort of stimulus would it have created if you hadn’t taken it off me, abd I'd been able to keep that money myself, and either spend it or save it?
A: Well . . .
Q: Or if producers had been able to keep their own money?
A: Um . . .
Q: So it would be fair to argue that "not only does the increase in government outlays not raise overall output by a positive multiple; but, on the contrary, [it actually] leads to the weakening in the process of wealth generation in general.”
A: But . . .
Q: And this is the whole theory? This is all you economists can come up with?
A: Well, that's about it, yes.
Q: So it's a bit like when "a carnival magician produces a quarter from behind a child's ear," isn't it. "The 'magic' of the multiplier is mere illusion."
A: Hush your mouth. People are listening.
Q: No answer?
A: Sorry, we're a bit busy right now shovelling money out the door.
* * * * Stimulus: Because all economies have performance issues * * * *
UPDATE 3: Economic historian Niall Ferguson talks “austerity” vs “stimulus” (and Paul Krugman)—making an important point about what so-called austerity really has to mean…
Labels: Economics, GDP Delusion, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Krugman, Stimulus
Thursday, June 17, 2010
School Indoctrination
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
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
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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