The temple of science denial
I listened to the treatment of anthropogenic global warming on the BBC Today programme this morning with utter disbelief. First they had on the Climate Change Secretary (sic) Ed Miliband, who backed up Gordon Brown’s embarrassingly ignorant and fatuous sneer at ‘behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics’ by stating:
The overwhelming consensus of scientists across the world is that climate change is real and is man-made and is happening. The people who do somehow want to suggest that the science is in doubt are profoundly irresponsible.
...We know that carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest level in the atmosphere in 600,000 years – nobody doubts that. We also know from the physicists that the CO2 effect when CO2 is emitted is it traps the heat in the earth's atmosphere and then warms the planet. That is very clear and not in dispute.
This is not an observation or people just running models. This is a clear scientific effect people are talking about. In those circumstances I think it's right for us to say: ‘Look, we are not scientists, but we should represent to you fairly the science, and it's because the scientific view is so clear and overwhelming on this we must fairly represent that.’
This was just yet more anti-scientific ignorance and ideological propaganda. There is no such ‘overwhelming consensus’ of scientists; more than 700 of the most distinguished climate-related scientists are on record expressing deep scepticism of AGW. Is Miliband saying therefore that these eminent scientists are themselves ‘profoundly irresponsible’? Does Miliband even know they exist?
As for high carbon dioxide levels, the issue is not as Miliband stated; it is whether these levels are causing the earth’s atmosphere to heat up to an extraordinary and lethal extent. And that is a matter of very profound dispute among scientists -- not least because the composition of the climate is an immensely complex process which cannot possibly be reduced to a simple ‘what goes in comes out’ formula of the kind that Miliband so idiotically expresses.
There was no informed scientist in this interview to put the zealot Miliband on the spot and expose his ignorant absurdity. At least though Today’s presenter John Humphrys did his best in trying to challenge him. But no balance at allwas forthcoming in the subsequent item --billed as the first of three in-depth reports on the state of the scientific evidence of global warming – by Tom Fielden. This told us that global warming started with the industrial revolution, that it was proved that global warming was happening and humans were responsible and that the scientific debate was effectively settled.
Yet there was not one voice questioning these absurd or unproven assertions. Not one balancing voice to point out that the climate had warmed and cooled throughout history, that there was no evidence at all that the rise in the last century was anything out of the ordinary, that historically it had been warmer in the past, that there were hundreds of scientists who were saying that the theory was absurd or unproven or a scam – or that the global climate, totally contrary to everything the warmists have claimed, has been cooling for the past decade. It is the warmists who are the true 'denialists' -- since they deny the evidence of science and history that tells us that the climate has always changed and that there is no credible evidence that what is now happening is anything out of the ordinary. Yet there was not one voice to say so.
Fielden also said that underlying these claims lay data from the Hadley Centre. Yes, the very same Hadley Centre which has been exposed as helping distort and manipulate the scientific evidence in order to shore up the AGW theory which is now crashing around the warmists’ ears. Yet Fielden made no mention whatsoever of this scandal which has left the Hadley Centre’s credibility in pieces – and with it the credibility of the entire IPCC process at the heart of which sits the data that the Hadley Centre has provided.
Even by the standards of the group-think at the BBC, such a wholesale negation of the most fundamental rules of objective reporting is simply astounding. Is this not a breach of the BBC’s Charter? How long is the pathetic BBC Trust going to be a party to this travesty?
Daily Mail, 7 December 2009
It’s Groundhog Day all over again in the Labour Party. Gordon Brown has decided that the battle-ground for the next General Election will be that perennial Left-wing hate-fest, class war.
In the past few days we’ve had a taster with a series of attacks on the Tories as public school-educated toffs who are determined to feather their nests and those of their wealthy friends.
The Prime Minister suggested last week that the Tory policy of raising the inheritance tax threshold had been dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton.
Zac Goldsmith, the millionaire environmentalist and Tory parliamentary candidate, also got it in the neck for his non-domiciled tax status. And Labour sources briefed that such attacks would be kept up until the election.
Many might wonder at such a tactic. After all, it went badly pear-shaped in Labour’s absurd by-election campaign last year at Crewe and Nantwich, when party activists mocked the ultimately victorious Tory candidate as a toff even though he was a local man well known in the area.
Most can see this for what it is — a hollow, nasty tactic born of desperation by failed politicians with no answer to their critics and who try instead to cover their tracks with unwarranted smears and insults.
But although this will backfire with some voters, it nevertheless has traction with others. As recession bites, there is an extremely powerful current of resentment against fat cats of all stripes.
And there is no doubt that some voters see the Tories as privileged, out-of-touch types.
Labour’s attack on Old Etonians, however, is particularly absurd since several in the Labour establishment are just as grand or wealthy.
Harriet Harman, the niece of the Earl of Longford, was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School; despite his affected glottal stops, Ed Balls was educated privately at Nottingham High School; Alistair Darling went to the fee-paying Loretto School in East Lothian.
And not forgetting Baron Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy, who hobnobs with oligarchs and who once said he was ’seriously relaxed about people getting filthy rich’.
Moreover, Labour should itself be on the back foot over this issue because for the past decade it has been pursuing the most vicious war against the middle class.
It is the middle class that has borne the brunt of the punitive Labour tax burden — while the ‘filthy rich’ have done very nicely out of Labour, who from the start have ruthlessly sucked up to them.
It is the middle class whose virtues of thrift and responsibility are under siege. It is not in the main the mega-rich who are hurt by inheritance tax so much as all those hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who have invested for their children’s future in property which has risen hugely in value — and then find they are being punished for trying to look after the next generation.
It is the middle class whose children are discriminated against by the rigging of university admissions against candidates from high-achieving schools.
It is middle-class aspirations for their children which have been attacked by the war of attrition waged against grammar and independent schools.
It is the middle class whose ethic of professionalism — whether in medicine, education, the law or other disciplines — has been under sustained attack by government interference in order to snuff out the independence of mind and spirit which is one of the principal sources of middle-class robustness.
What Cameron should be doing is going in hard on all this and positioning himself as the champion of Britain’s beleaguered middle class.
He should be pointing a finger at Gordon Brown and the rest of them and saying that it is they, not the Conservative party, who are being divisive and unjust and vindictive by systematically penalising an entire class of citizens.
He has not, however, done so. Instead, his response has been weak and defensive. Yesterday, he said that Brown was ‘petty’ and ’spiteful’ to harp on about his Eton background and he was not the slightest bit embarrassed about his schooling.
But the problem is that he gives every impression he is hideously embarrassed by his party and its ‘toff’ reputation. The entire Cameron modernising project is motivated by such shame about this image that the party has been turned inside out to conceal or destroy what such people are supposed to represent.
Hence, for example, the recent absurd suggestion that parliamentary candidates with double-barrelled names, such as Annunziata Rees-Mogg, should change their names to something suitably proletarian — like Nancy Mogg — in order to conceal their upper-crust background.
On policy, the obsession with proving that the Tories are now even more hostile to ‘privilege’ than Labour is being taken to destructive lengths.
Take, for example, the grammar schools. The campaign against them is a quintessential demonstration of Labour class war. Yet the Tories have themselves set their faces totally against academic selection — the essence of a meritocratic and thus fair society not based on social class.
Or take the 50p tax rate. In practice, this will produce even less revenue for the Exchequer and will drive out of the country many of those who produce the most wealth for the economy. But because of their terror of being branded as aiding the privileged, the Tories have refused to commit themselves to getting rid of it.
In other words, the Cameroons have done precisely the opposite of what they should be doing — and all because, extraordinary as it may seem, the way they think about their party in fact chimes with Labour’s taunts.
It used to be the Left which had a monopoly on the politics of guilt, with well-heeled ‘champagne socialists’ trying to atone for the sins of their money and breeding by taking it out on everyone else. But now, the Tories are on exactly the same guilt trip.
Indeed, it is arguably even worse since whereas Labour guilt is at root vicarious, on account of the wickedness of global capitalism which meant society had to be destroyed and reconstructed, the Tories feel guilty merely on account of being Tories. So it is the Conservative party that has to be destroyed and reconstructed — as a pale shadow of Labour.
As a result, when class war is waged against them the Tories are paralysed like rabbits caught in the headlights. But they cannot win voters to their cause if they are so badly on the back foot.
People pick up very quickly on the fact that the Tories are ashamed of their party. Voters can see the attempted makeover is wholly opportunistic. They conclude therefore that Cameron stands for nothing and is merely a chameleon who will say anything to gain power.
Why should they believe in the Conservative party when the Tories so patently — and painfully –don’t believe in themselves?
It is this innate moral cowardice, rather than having been to Eton, which so repels people. That’s why the image of Cameron cycling to work while his chauffeur-driven car followed behind with his briefcase has done such lasting and lethal damage.
There is a political fate even more deadly than being called a privileged toff. It is being judged as not being true to yourself.
Class war could play to the Tories’ great advantage — but only if they can get over their decade-long nervous breakdown, stop apologising and come out fighting.
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