Peace Legacy

I attended the Brisbane leg of Lord Monckton's Australian tour last week. The Irish Club was packed. I tried to estimate capacity and got up to around 400, but as the talk started crowds poured in and a standing crowd filled the space between the seats and the back wall. While the crowd swelled, Lord Monckton took the opportunity to introduce himself to attendees.

In "1984", George Orwell warns us of the dangers of allowing central control of language. Here's an example: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), defines “climate change” as: “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”

So now, the question: do you believe in "climate change"?

Hmm... Let's say "yes":

Ah ha! So you admit that emissions due to human activity are changing the atmosphere! Clearly we need to DO SOMETHING!!!! (Emissions trading scheme, global world government, shut down the western economies, bankrupt the only viable sources of power generation, you name it, it has actually been both proposed and attempted - whether successfully or not is yet to be seen.)

Okay then, let's say "no":

You are a DENIER! How can you POSSIBLY SAY that humans make NO difference to the atmosphere?

And, of course, that is correct - even an ant exhaling makes a change to the atmosphere, let alone all of human industry; but is it significant and dangerous (or even measurable)? The problem is, of course, that the choice of language definitions makes it impossible to think a simple thought: that human emissions of CO2 are not dangerous (and possibly even beneficial). It relies on a term (in this case "climate change") sounding like one thing (changing climate) and being defined as another (human-caused atmospheric changes). The game is to switch from one meaning to another as necessary to manipulate the argument in your favour. And that is the exact reason why this term is used in the first place.

I am convinced that peace needs more than a political solution - more than ideology, more than changed laws, better social security, and so on. The disgraceful behaviour of the Australian Prime Minister towards a hunger-striking farmer gives us an opportune example. Is the problem the lack of ethics - or the wrong ethics?

I am sure Mr Rudd doesn't think he did anything wrong by allowing someone to almost starve to death (it was good fortune that he didn't) just for want of a meeting with Mr Rudd to discuss his grievances. The 'big picture' undoubtedly demanded the death of one insignificant victim of government policies. Rudd is a utilitarian (or at least he acts and quacks like one). Utilitarianism, the near-universal ethic of our age, is particularly bad at the job most of us trust it for. Peter Spencer went on a hunger strike over de facto confiscation of his land without compensation. Justin Jefferson, writing in Quadrant had this to say about it:

The problem facing the Commonwealth government in Peter Spencer’s case is that on the one hand it’s embarrassing to have him dying of starvation up a pole because they denied him justice after forcibly taking billions of dollars worth of property in violation of the Constitution; and embarrassing to be caught out ignoring him, and lying to the population that it was all the States’ fault. But on the other hand, the Commonwealth has stolen too much property to be able to pay for it; and is too greedy to give it back.

It is no defence of this injustice to say that other environmental and planning laws also restrict people’s private property use-rights. That only begs the question whether they also represent unjust acquisitions.

It does not answer to assert that government acts in the national interest. That is precisely what is in issue. If it’s in the national interest for the government to take people’s property without their consent in breach of the law by threatening them with force, then presumably armed robbery and extortion might be in the national interest too.

Jefferson goes on to list various arguments that don't work: the laws are to protect native vegetation; native vegetation acts were done to protect biodiversity; ecological sustainability; and so on. But read between the text: a common feature in all the arguments that Jefferson demolishes is that they are based on bottom-line, "this is better than that, so do this" thinking. Indeed, we all imbibe this thought pattern from the moment we are born; many will ask: "But what else can there possibly be?"

What's up with Google? The company motto is "Don't be evil". I would have thought that, for an information collecting and analysing company, that would include not putting your own spin on things based on your own political or other opinions. Just give all queries an un-spun answer regardless of whether people query "tiptoe tulips" or "torture babies". And yes, the latter can be asked by good people - for example those trying to document the harm done during partial birth abortions.

But Google has mistaken information collection with advocacy. See the shameless plug for Al Gore at http://www.google.com/landing/cop15. But now I am wondering whether the search results themselves are being distorted. What's going on with ClimateGate? For weeks Google has been persistently refusing to display "ClimateGate" as a suggested search term. (I notice it has turned up this morning, suspiciously late for a word with multiple millions of hits.)

But the number of hits brings us to our second problem: the disappearing Climategate links. When I first became aware of the term, I Googled it. I got around 10 million hits. Over the next few weeks the hits increased to around 40 million. Then last night, down to ten million again?

I don't think the average person is yet aware that the era of freedom, the era of being able to do anything reasonable and say anything short of "fire" in a crowded theatre, is drawing to a close.

The Internet is arguably the greatest invention in the history of humanity, as it transcends the limitations of individual human minds and allows instant access to the thoughts (even the very recent thoughts, even the very sublime or the very base thoughts) of billions of other human beings. An era in which the world as a whole can start to think with the effective IQ of millions of minds reinforcing each other could be about to dawn.

But it will not, unless all freedom lovers do something about the totalitarians who now are on the verge of throwing the planet into a new dark age of secret control and knowledge restricted to the elites. From http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/329888/australian_federal_govern...

The Federal Government will introduce legislative amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act to require all ISPs to block Refused Classification (RC)-rated material hosted on overseas servers.

I have written to the federal minister Stephen Conroy under the title "You are either stupid or a tyrant":

This video from http://co2science.org. If you want solid evidence that cutting CO2 is an attack on the planet, their site is the best place I know of on the internet. 

While the ideologues and ethics-free financiers gather in Copenhagen to set up an unelected socialist world government (suits the former) that runs a scam "market" in an invisible and unaccountable "product" - carbon offsets (certainly suits the latter, who will find lots of opportunities there for mtaking money -ours!), we repeatedly hear the allegation that the "deniers" (meaning the ones who say the climate always changes and always will) are well financed by "Big Coal" whilst the ones who believe in "climate change" (i.e. who assert the climate was magically constant for two thousand years) are strapped for cash and always fighting against overwhelming odds.

Yes, the odds are overwhelming in one sense, because the "deniers" - meaning the realists - have truth on their side, whilst the "good guys" - meaning the ones trying to starve the planet of CO2 plant food and thereby send a billion people into starvation - don't.

But as for money, no, sorry. "Big Coal" finances the alarmists, not the realists. Here is part of a press release from Australian "Big Coal" (The Australian Coal Association):

So 56 newspapers are putting up a common editorial pushing the climate hoax. Are these editors: (1) too lazy to investigate the facts for themselves, and/or (2) too incompetent to do so and see the dripping evidence of fraud and political and financial manipulation cloying to this issue like thick red mud, and/or (3) one of the hoaxsters, who knows that the truth is that reducing CO2 emissions will cost lives in reduced food production as well as put endangered species in peril as their wild areas are converted to foodmaking by famished human beings? In other words, are they lazy, stupid, or evil? There is one other possibility, which I'll get to at the end, so without further ado, here is the entirety of their nonsense, with a few comments from me to the 56 editors.

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial.

Newsflash: Truth is not decided by majority rule, nor by authority.

We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Yes. The proposed Copenhagen treaty establishes an unelected, socialist government in all but name, with the power to tax every transaction in the western democracies. It will reduce the output of carbon dioxide plantfood, thereby starving humans and animals. This treaty must be defeated. From Lord Monckton's speech about the treaty:

"I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

"How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything."

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

A generation ago the lamestream media were telling us that there would be an ice age. Actually that was closer to the truth than your current alarmism, but in neither case was the lamestream opinion based on sound science. The Arctic icecap is actually freezing rapidly as we head into the northern winter, but taking the above misleading remark as a reference to the yearly meltback, the Arctic icecap is almost all the way back to the mean, having increased dramatically for each of the past two years [and notice, readers, how the Antarctic, doing well, is neatly forgotten]. So in what sense is it "melting"? It isn't melting right now, it is freezing. It isn't melting compared to last year, it is growing: 2008 was 10.6% more than 2007, and 2009 was 23.4% more than 2007. Editors, your statement is a lie pure and simple. Nextly, inflamed food prices can be directly traced to conversion of food crops to biofuel. What do you fools editors think will happen when you take a great chunk of the world's food off the food market? And we now know, thanks to climategate, that the insiders have been 'fixing' the peer-reviewed literature, thus making the record found in 'scientific' journals worthless from the point of view of a lay person simply looking for something to trust. It cannot be trusted, period!

Lord Christopher Monckton has come out with a condensed summary of some of the evidence in the ClimateGate papers.

Some highlights:

• A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

• The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.

• The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.

Many are wondering why the mainstream media are so slow off the mark reporting the revelations of sleaze and obvious criminality now emerging about the climate scare ringleaders. I can tell you a few reasons. Just think about it. The wealthy capitalists who run the media will be perfectly positioned to become key players in the Carbon Plantfood Reduction Schemes, trading nothing, and making no real difference to global warming (which would be a good thing anyway), but starving the atmosphere of plant food and thereby starving the poor - but the capitalists, who just love a corruptible market, will be perfectly positioned to skim their percentage off the top and become even wealthier than they are. The rest of us, meanwhile, see our fuel and electricity costs go through the roof and watch our standard of living plummet.