Time will Reveal AllThe painting is by Heeremans, and depicts a winter scene on the walls of Amsterdam. I like the Dutch painters, and would happily direct readers not just to this site on Heeremans--who was a dealer-entrepreneur as well as a painter-- but to Jonathan Israel's great works on the Dutch republic and the Enlightenment as Christmas reading.
As I and many other bloggers have been writing for some years now, the dogma of global warming is just that. Dogma. A belief system, and not a particularly impressive one at that, upheld by scientists whose grants and incomes depend upon toeing the line and a vociferous group who are more than prepared to play the game of personal destruction. Those many scientists who have expressed serious doubts about the mechanism of carbon-dependent anthropogenic global warming have been traduced, ignored or dismissed. In part, that has been because mainstream journalists are what EU Referendum has called 'parti pris' to the warmist endeavour.
I have no scientific credentials. Science is not, however, a sacramental church. If a fact or a process is posited, it can be explained and evidence can be adduced for it. Evidence that tends to undermine it can be explained. A person with a reasonable education should be able to see this, and to understand what is being said. I do not know the mathematics behind the idea of particles and gravity that lie contained within folded space-time, for instance, but I have had people explain that idea to me lucidly.
Those who believe in global warming cannot tell me why the earth is presently either stable or cooling in temperature. Their reliable records are only decades old. They cannot explain to me clear evidence of past warming. They cannot explain to me the working of the mechanism by which the earth heated in the 1990s, along with many other planets in this solar system. They cannot tell me the effect of the sun or of the sea on global temperature, and they seem unable to explain the extent of the radical urbanisation experienced under globalisation on temperature.
On the other hand, I see those who question global warming, on scientific grounds, traduced and sneered at. I see absurd comparisons made with holocaust denial. I see assumptions--like an infinite atmosphere, and a general calculation of atmospheric penetration by what is really a small amount of CO2--and no one explains them. And, this week, I see a concerted series of e-mail releases, which appear to be genuine, suggesting the sort of personal destruction and political co-ordination many suspect. I see illiterate politicians jumping on a bandwagon for narcissitic purposes, and I see people suggesting that truth is about some sort of consensus, as if one could vote on a fact.
All of this is tragic. We are facing peak oil, though perhaps not as soon as I originally anticipated. We are facing a vast extension in the use of global resources that is unsustainable. Vast numbers of young people in mad countries are out of work and out of any realistic prospect of work, a pattern being replicated in rich countries where unemployment figures are seriously understated. Resource competition accompanied by extreme exchange rate volatility will soon be with us. We need to be pouring money, through markets or government, into new technologies, and into efforts to expand global food supply whilst securing present supplies (a more difficult job than just cutting tariffs).
I'd also argue that a viable strategy would be to cut global government deficits and make taxes much lower, spending much lower, and markets much freer, but I would find that the feudal banksterism of financial institutions would now get in the way of such a recommendation. Even then, it would seem to me symptomatic of the snake-oil nature of the banks that the only people now promoting carbon trade markets are the people who promoted derivatives, as a way of indebting European companies and governments yet further.
None of this is being addressed, though the substantial evidence that the world is now cooling is beginning to be assimilated. A cooling world means food problems, energy problems, and climate problems of an unanticipated sort. It has happened before, and bloody revolutions followed in its wake the last time it was seriously extended, in the Dalton and Maunder minima.
All of this was avoidable. But, in a west characterised by economic crisis and delusion, magic realism has become the matrix of policy. There's a reason despair is a sin, but sometimes flirt with it--and then, I think, 'truth will find a way. Time reveals all'.
God help us in the meantime, though.
Comments
I could claim to have invented this (also the V2 cocktail consisting of Vodka and Vimto;please notify me of any impostors)but the original version,which I felt was too good to share with many other people, had a different vertical access with Big State at the top and the Small State at the bottom. I feel this is much better than authoritarian and whatever on the the version which has inexplicably caught on,because you can have quite small but very authoritarian states.I used to describe myself as a Left Distributist for one very short period which was left of centre but very low down.The present crisis has prompted a vertical re-alignment.
I'm impressed by your claim of invention of the graph.
I sometimes feel as though I am moving rapidly rightward, as I am in some ways--and deeply-- culturally and socially conservative. I do like distributism too. But every time I even look at the left, I see antisemitism, anticatholicism, multi-culti stupidity and illiteracy. I would have sympathised with Callaghan's Labour Party, and Haughey's Fianna Fail I think, but lefty stuff now annoys me.
I have some time for old communists, because at least they think, though I couldn't sympathise with them. I like Burkean and Hobbesian conservatives these days, and am anti-liberal, or anti-neoliberal. Globally, I guess, that would put me in a centrist or a populist camp, but British and European politics are to the left, which is why I feel right....
The present crisis has a long way to run. I think that we are all going to re-evaluate things before its over.