In need of pity

Thursday, February 05, 2009

In need of pity

It was in late January that Booker picked up on the ongoing saga of the "incredible warming Antarctic", the warmists' answer to the previous obstinacy of that region to conform with the creed that requires that we should all fry unless we reduce our carbon emissions.

Notwithstanding that the original figures were, shall we say, the mother of all inventions, extrapolating limited data from a few ground stations to provide "data infill" of the areas not covered, it now appears that even those data were flawed.

Courtesy of Watts up with that and diverse posts on Steve McIntyre's Cimate Audit, there unravels a tale so convoluted as to defy easy description. But it all points to the single observation – that the temperature data on which the original warmist claims were based rely on unreliable sensors. They are not worth the snow they were buried in.

The broader point, however, is that while the findings from the Watts/McIntyre duo – with their expert readers - are hugely entertaining and provide yet more evidence that the warmists are a bunch of charlatans, they will make no difference at all to the warmist creed and will have no affect whatsoever on the body politic.

The problem is that while the warmists jibber about the science being "settled", this is not about science. We are talking here about the scare dynamic, a social phenomenon which obeys its own rules, where science takes the back seat. It provides merely a patina of authenticity to confirm that which the warmists hold, with or without the science.

Such is the nature of the dynamic that the belief comes first and the "science" is then cherry-picked (and distorted) to provide the evidence to support the belief. And, in the nature of things, any "inconvenient truths" are automatically discarded. Watts and McIntyre fall into that category.

Thus, we get one of the High Priests of the belief system UN Sec Gen Ban Ki-moon, preening himself in New Delhi today at the start of a three-day conference on – you guessed it – "sustainable development".

Oblivious to the shaky foundation on which his belief system is based – and entirely uncaring – he trots out the same old mantras, telling us that that "failure to tackle climate change will lead to major economic upheaval".

"Deserts are spreading. Water scarcity is increasing. Tropical forests are shrinking. Our once prolific fisheries are in danger of collapse," he intones. "Failure to combat climate change will increase poverty and hardship. It will destabilise economies, breed insecurity in many countries and undermine our goals for sustainable development."

All this, of course, is bullshit. Credo in unum deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae ..., he might just as well have chanted, only his "god" is global warming, the god above all gods to which the whole of mankind must be subservient.

The problem is, of course, that you cannot deal with other peoples' belief systems by rational argument – or by other means. The Romans tried those, as did many after them, and look where that got them.

Oddly enough, the death of religion is not persecution – faith is strongest where there are attempts to suppress it - but indifference… and scorn. Few faiths survive both, and the latter is perhaps in this case more powerful. We should not resent the warmists, or fight them. We should pity them, in the same way one would the village idiot, for the delusions in which they are trapped, hoping that one day they are cured of their afflictions.

The nightmare is, of course, the damage these people are doing while in the grip of their delusions, which they inflict on all of us. But the derision of the crowd will eventually get through. These people need our pity. We should not stint in giving it to them.

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Unravelling

An intriguing article in The Financial Times pulls together some of the recent events, under the label "protectionism" and concludes that we are looking at "economic nationalism".

Examples it gives are the strikes against the use of foreign workers in the UK; French carmakers told to buy domestic components and not close factories in France; and a minister in Spain urging consumers to buy Spanish. It also notes that many of the banks which have been bailed out by their national governments are now under considerable pressure to lend to local enterprises rather than play the international market.

The piece is rather convoluted but what stands out is a comments that some of the financial integration that EU policymakers laboured to promote during the good times has already been rolled back by the current crisis.

One such is the splitting up along national lines of Fortis, the Belgo-Dutch finance group. Bank bail-outs have had similar effect, such as with France offering to inject €21bn into the country's six largest banks to ensure they were not at a competitive disadvantage to UK or US rivals.

Then we get Nicolas Véron of the Bruegel think-tank in Brussels saying that, "There is a very strong law of unintended consequences taking place after all the bank bail-outs. We will see more and more activist government policies that distinguish economic activities according to the nationality of the actors." It should be a big concern to everybody, he adds. 

To put the icing on the cake, we then hear from Daniel Gros of the Centre for European Policy Studies. He says: "The consequences of such protectionism are likely to test Europe economically, politically and legally … Unravelling the integration of the banking market will cause a lot of damage."

"Unravelling" is a word I love to hear. The "colleagues" are getting a tad worried. In highly technical ways, that are far from clear, step by step, the "project" is being dragged backwards. The "British jobs for British workers" strikes were just a start.

For decades, the colleagues have been telling us that the process of integration is "inevitable" – unstoppable even. But the fact is that, when the chips are down, self-interest comes to the fore. Call it "economic nationalism" if you like. A better name for it is simply nationalism. It is the only thing that works, and it looks like its coming back into fashion.

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