Listeners to BBC World Service’s Science in Action program got a nasty surprise last week. In the midst of a discussion about the large snake fossil, a scientist dropped this bombshell:

“The Planet has heated and cooled repeatedly throughout its history. What we’re doing is the rate at which we’re heating the planet is many orders of magnitude faster than any natural process – and is moving too fast for natural systems to respond.”

Hearing this, I did what any normal person would do: grab all the bags of frozen peas I could find in the ice compartment of my refridgerator, and hunker down behind the sofa to wait for Thermageddon.

Hours passed. My life flashed before my eyes a few times, and a few times more. But then I noticed that the house was still there, and so was the neighbourhood. And so was I!

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The Nobel Prize winning chairman of the UN’s climate change committee, Rajendra K Pachauri, has said the the world’s largest developing economies will be exempt from international pressure to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
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Imagine an unpopular, impotent, and fragile UK Government, trying to make political capital out of a looming crisis. To avoid being embarrassed by criticism of its shallow policies, it appoints an independent panel of experts, to which it defers controversial decisions. Now imagine that the panel proposes measures from which its members and their associates will directly benefit.

It couldn’t happen here, you may think. Scandal and resignations would surely follow. Who could possibly allow vested interests to profit from the legislation they are instrumental in creating?

This week, an independent panel of experts called the Climate Change Committee (CCC) published the details of its recent advice to Parliament that the UK should reduce its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

There’s no doubt there’s money to be made from this new legislation, which was passed last week. A recent conference, given the title ‘Cashing in on Carbon’ was, in its own words, “aimed squarely at investment banks, investors and major compliance buyers and is focused on how they can profit today from an increasingly diverse range of carbon-related investment opportunities”.

…Read more at The Register.

Australians could face ‘pay as you dump’ charges as part of a Toilet Tax. It’s all in the name of “sustainability” – and part of a growing eco-movement to replace flushing conveniences with smelly and unhealthy inconvenience.

Water use experts Mike Young and Jim McColl, of Adelaide University and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, respectively, presented new proposals to South Australia state parliament last week. The two renewed their call to create a market in sewerage, with the pricing element controlling scarcity. Such ideas aren’t new, but they’ve been given a boost in recent years by a parallel movement.

Sanitation saves lives, but UN-funded quangos which were once dedicated to improving human health now have mixed priorities. Take this example from the “Sustainable Sanitation Alliance”:

“In order to be sustainable, a sanitation system has to be not only economically viable, socially acceptable, and technically and institutionally appropriate, it should also protect the environment and the natural resources.”

The quango concludes, somewhat ruefully, that “there is probably no system which is absolutely sustainable”.

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The government’s climate minister in the House of Lords dropped a clanger on Monday evening, when he claimed that the polar ice caps were melting at a record rate.

“It is indisputable that polar ice caps are melting – we can see that with our own eyes,” Lord Hunt, Minister of State of the Department of Energy, told the house. Hunt described himself as a climate “agnostic” – but he was swiftly corrected by Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Chancellor.

“My Lords, that is not true of the past year; The noble Lord’s predecessors were seriously misinformed by his officials, and I suspect that he will be too,” Lawson replied. Twisting the knife he continued: “That is a real problem for him, and I feel for him.

“The fact is that in the Antarctic, where most of the ice is, the ice is thickening and has been for some time. In the Arctic this year there has been a greater extension of ice than ever before.”

The Lords were debating the Climate Change Bill once again – which the Commons voted through on an unusually snowy October evening recently. That Bill was passed by our elected representatives by 463 votes to 3. Would the unelected upper chamber – which has a reputation for rejecting and amendment hasty legislation – be show greater scrutiny?

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Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday – the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922. The Mother of Parliaments was discussing the Mother of All Bills for the last time, in a marathon six hour session.
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An aristocracy is a form of government by an elite that considers itself to possess greater virtues than the hoi polloi, giving it the right to rule in its own interests. Aristocrats were referred to as ‘the nobility’, or ‘nobs’. These days we prefer decisions to be made democratically – the idea being that we can judge for ourselves which ideas serve our interests, thank you very much, ma’am.

But in recent years, politicians have sought legitimacy for their positions from outside of the democratic process. A new aristocracy is emerging from the emptiness of UK politics – and it’s considerably more virtuous than thou.

…Read more at The Register.

CERN boffins are confident that fusion, the holy grail of cheap, safe power will be economical and usable within thirty years. It’s a finger in the air sort of estimate, based on projects from the Age of Scientific Optimism, such as the Los Alamos and Apollo moon landing projects.
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Britons should be subjected to random carbon spotchecks and intensive surveillance of their diets, transport and waste disposal habits, says the Government’s architecture and design quango in a new report today.

The word “monitoring” occurs 19 times in the 32-page publication by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). If the proposals in the report What Makes An Eco Town?are implemented few aspects of life will go unrecorded.

CABE says the strict monitoring is needed to ensure the carbon footprint of the eco-town dwellers remains at one-third of the British average, which is the requirement for what’s called “one-planet living”, the quango says.

Examples of monitoring include “the ecological footprint of the diet of 100 randomly selected residents”, and the number of shops selling local produce. Waste disposal and transportion habits will also be scrutinized.
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The man dubbed the “King of Climate Porn” achieved notoriety at the turn of the decade as the architect of the Foot and Mouth holocaust – which unnecessarily slaughtered seven million animals, and cost the country billions of pounds. But King astonished observers by saying something sensible last week – and he promises to do so again tonight.

Speaking at the British Association’s Science Week, King will say that the Greenies’ anti-science superstitions are causing unnecessary suffering in Africa. King blames “anti-poverty” campaigners, aid agencies and environmental activists for keeping modern farming techniques and bio-technology out of Africa. King tells the Times today:

“The suffering within [Africa], I believe, is largely driven by attitudes developed in the West which are somewhat anti-science, anti-technology – attitudes that lead towards organic farming, for example, attitudes that lead against the use of genetic technology for crops that could deal with increased salinity in the water, that can deal with flooding for rice crops, that can deal with drought resistance.”

King wonders why recent productivity revolutions in agriculture, which have been such a success in Asia and India, have not been implemented in Africa on the same scale. He concludes that the blame lies not with Africans, but with Western “do-gooders” who prefer Africans to remain picturesque and dirt poor.

An example he cites is the attempts of eco-campaigners Friends of the Earth to keep drought-resistant crops out of Africa.

He has a point.

“Where once there were ambitions for people in the third world to enjoy Western standards of living, now the voice of the voiceless instead celebrates the primitive lifestyles that the world’s poorest people suffer,” wrote Ben Pile and Stuart Blackman recently in a scathing critique of the charity Oxfam, called Backwards to the future.

Indeed, and the same middle-class superstitions that endeavour to keep Wi-Fi out of schools are used to justify keeping biotechnology out of Africa.

For example, Friends of the Earth continues to argue that modern seed technologies should not be used to make agriculture easier and more productive for poor farmers – even when this causes more ecological damage than the new technology. FoE’s most recent campaign against biotech means that subsistence farmers must continue to use seeds that require more fertiliser than GM varieties, and which need environmentally-destructive tilling.

Whatever it is that motivates these self-styled “Greens”, it isn’t a concern for the environment. Nor, despite claims to the contrary, is there any valid concern of “over-population”. The UN estimates global population growth to peak in the 2040s at 7.87bn, then decline, assuming modest development is permitted to continue. Not only does economic development mean fewer people, but it means less suffering: those fewer people are much happier.

Clearly, we can easily generate enough food to feed everyone on the planet and we have the means to ensure there’s less human suffering. Some people want that to happen – and some don’t. You’ll find many nursing their Malthusian or Eugenics prejudices under the banner of Greenery in the former camp – but it’s a refreshing surprise to find King in the latter camp, or at least edging away from the Greens’ death cult.

©Situation Publishing 2008.