Climate ‘denial’ is now a mental disorder
Christopher Booker - 07 Mar 2009
How odd that, last Monday, none of our media global warming groupies should have bothered to report what was billed to be “the largest ever demonstration for civil disobedience over climate change”. There was talk of hundreds of thousands of protestors converging on Washington to hear Jim Hansen, the scientist who talks of coal-fired power stations as “factories of death”, call yet again for all coal plants to be closed. Perhaps the lack of coverage was due to the fact that, before Hansen arrived to address a forlorn group of several hundred hippies, Washington was blanketed in nearly a foot of snow.
It was generally another bad week for the warmists. The Met Office, which has been one of the chief pushers of the global warming scare for 20 years, had to admit that this has been “Britain’s coldest winter for 13 years”, despite its prediction last September that the winter would be “milder than average”. This didn’t of course stop it predicting that 2009 will be one of “the top-five warmest years on record”.
US climate sceptics such as those on the Watts Up With That website, for whom the predictions of the UK Met Office have become a regular source of amusement, recalled its forecast that 2007 would be “the warmest year on record globally”, just before global temperatures dived by nearly a full degree Celsius, cancelling out the entire net warming of the past 100 years.
Ever wilder wax the beleaguered warmists in their rhetoric. Our science minister Lord Drayson said last week he was “shocked” to find how many of the captains of industry he meets are “climate deniers”. This was the same Lord Drayson who, as our defence procurement minister, assured Parliament in 2006 that Snatch Land Rovers afforded “the level of protection we need”. The continuing death toll of soldiers in these unprotected vehicles approaches 40.
Even Drayson is outbid, however, by the groupies in The Guardian, who now suggest that people like Christopher Booker should no longer be compared to “Holocaust deniers” but consigned to even more outer darkness by branding them as climate “Creationists”, the dirtiest word they know. Meanwhile at the University of the West of England in Bristol this weekend, a conference of “eco-psychologists”, led by a professor, are solemnly exploring the notion that “climate change denial” should be classified as a form of “mental disorder”.
I myself am off this weekend to New York, to join all the top “deniers”, “creationists” and victims of psychic disorder at a conference organised by the Heartland Institute. It is an honour to be asked to speak alongside such luminaries as Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, Dr Fred Singer, founder of the US satellite weather forecasting service, and the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus (not to mention those two revered climate bloggers, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts). I shall report on this historic event next week.
PERFECTIBILISTS: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati
The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones
March 8th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Well, denial is a well established psychic defence mechanism, and holocaust denialistscan amass facts that they use to back their position, in a cherry-picking sort of way.There are valid similarities between holocaust denial and global warming denial.
In the end, though, nothing is gained by applying labels to each other. What matters is the practical results of applying different policies arising from different views of the situation. This is not an academic debate, because we and our children are part of the experiment. The consensus among scientists (yes, with a few exceptions, as is always the case in science) that we should decarbonise our economy as a matter of urgency.
Say we decarbonise our economy, and it turns out that AGW theory is wrong? Well, we will have created hundreds of thousands of jobs in insulation and manufacturing and taken thousands out of fuel poverty. Not bad, but that’s not all. We will also have reduced the shock of Peak Oil and Peak Gas. And addressed our energy security problems. Also not bad.
Say we go the way of the denialists/sceptics? Problems with energy security, Peak Oil, Peak Gas, fuel poverty, unemployment, and finally, massive, catastrophic climate disruption from droughts, floods, crop failures, disease, and war. Not good.
If I were a betting man, I would put my money on AGW. I’m sure Pascal would agree.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:26 am
I say we switch to a hemp-based economy, natural plastics, and the most efficient and cost effective sustainable and clean energy.
I saw a show on tv in Canada where they interviewed a bunch of people who had perfected the art and science of organic plastic products. They were not only biodegradable, but harmless if ingested. To me, plastics are the most toxic substances polluting the environment; they (and pesticides) are probably THE cause of the insane increase in cancer over the last 50 years, not to mention the significant number of them that behave like estrogen, wreaking havoc on the natural order.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:50 am
Terry Melanson quote:
“I say we switch to a hemp-based economy, natural plastics, and the most efficient and cost effective sustainable and clean energy.”
I’m with you there.