The deadly attack gerbils of the liberal-left have had a go at Dan Hannan.
The Daily Mirror, NuLav’s comically useless online propaganda outlet Labour List, and a sweet-looking boy named James Mcintyre who writes for the New Statesman, have all seized excitedly on some thoughtful, unexceptionable remarks Dan made about Obama’s “exotic” background.
Here’s what Dan said in his blog:
“Barack Obama has an exotic background, and it would be odd if some people weren’t unsettled by it. During the campaign, he made a virtue of his unusual upbringing. He was at once from the middle of the country (Kansas) and from its remotest edge (Hawaii). He was both black and white. He was a Protestant brought up among Muslims. He seemed to have family on every continent. Like St Paul, he made a virtue of being all things to all men.”
“On one level, the strategy worked brilliantly. But it could hardly fail to leave a chunk of people feeling that Obama wasn’t exactly a regular guy.”
And here, roughly, is how Mcintyre and his chums chose to translate it:
“My name is Dan Hannan. I wear a tall, pointy white hat with eyeholes cut into it. Our Enoch was right. Send ‘em all back to where they came from. No, wait, better than that: string ‘em all up. And if you think I’m the only fellow in the Tory party who thinks this way you’ve got another think coming. We’re racists, the lot of us. And this my friends is why you should not vote Conservative at the next election but vote instead for the supremely competent and utterly sane Gordon Brown.”
Now I have at least two main objections to this.
First, though it’s true that Dan Hannan holds culpable, deeply objectionable, utterly wrongheaded views about Obama, they have nothing to do with the man’s race or exoticism. They’re to do with the fact – as he brazenly admits – that he likes and admires the guy and supported his presidential candidacy.
But what I loathe and detest far more is what it tells us about New Labour and what they have done to the level political debate. As pretty much anyone with even half a brain cell now realises, Britain is almost irredeemably b***ered after 12 years under Blair and Brown. In this week’s Spectator, Trevor Kavanagh racks his brain and finally comes up with “peace” in Northern Ireland and the minimum wage as examples of two of New Labour’s achievements. Personally, I wouldn’t even give them those. They have been a total and unmitigated disaster from beginning to end.
How, though, did they get away with it for so long? Largely, I’d argue, by manipulating the media – and by extension – the voters more cleverly than the Tories did. New Labour would lie, distort, tweak, smear, exaggerate, spin, announce, re-announce, re-re-announce or anything else that was necessary to ensure that they came across as the party that could do useful things and which cared, while the Tories were the party of reaction, snobbery, racism and cuts.
This feeble and desperate attempt to smear Hannan and, by association, Cameron’s Tories is merely a continuation of the same old methods they’ve been using for the last twelve years. Two or three years ago, it might just have worked. Today, now that we’ve all wised up to their methods, it just comes across as wearisomely predictable and a bit sad – the death throes of a party which knows it’s a busted flush and knows that in the total absence of things to say in its own favour its last remaining hope is to try to slag the opposition.
I understand this. You understand it. But here’s the part that makes me worried and angry: I’m not sure that Cameron’s Tories yet do.
Even now, far too much of their policy-decision-making appears to be based not so much on doing the right thing as on avoiding trouble. The 50p upper rate tax. The ring-fencing of spending on the NHS. These are positions not of a party of principle, but a party whose inner circle reads silly articles like the ones above, and STILL actually takes them seriously.
Related posts:
- Don’t Vote For Hannan’s crappy blog
- Charlie Brooker on Hannan: not even close to being funny
- Reason no 12867 why not to vote Tory: the NHS
- Why would anyone want to vote Tory? (pt II)
Dear Mr Cook
Reference CAS-561749
Thanks for your correspondence regarding ‘Horizon: Science Under Attack’ , broadcast on BBC Two on 24 January.
I understand that you feel this edition of the programme was biased in favour of the theory of man-made climate change.
Your concerns were raised with the producer of the programme – Emma Jay who replies as follows:
“I’m sorry you felt the film was biased. … In the course of the programme Paul Nurse argued that scientists need to focus on the science and keep politics and ideologies out of the way; that scientists need to be more open in the way they do their science, and be more willing to communicate the uncertainties that are sometimes inherent in their work.
“A substantial part of the film did use the example of climate science to look at this dynamic between science and society, and at the question of public trust. But I don’t accept that the film was biased in its representation of the state of the scientific debate about anthropogenic global warming. The overwhelming majority of scientists and scientific institutions accept the link; in scientific terms it is not controversial and the programme’s approach reflected that.
“I fully acknowledge that, even now, not everyone accepts this view and that there is still a continuing political debate. That is why the programme included Professor Fred Singer’s views on the primacy of solar activity and James Delingpole’s views on ‘Climategate’, the perils of scientific consensus, and how peer review in science was being challenged by peer-to-peer review. These were significant parts of the film.”
… Kind Regards
Mark Roberts
BBC Complaints
Emma made no comment about the lie I specifically raised in my complaint, namely the fact that the ONE reliable indicator or the rate of climate change (aside from cloud cover affected tree ring temperature “proxies” and weather stations downwind of direct heat sources like growing cities) is sea level rise rates, 120 metres over past 18,000 years = 0.67 cm/year mean compared to much smaller rates of rise at all times over the past century.
Emma doesn’t answer my scientific complaint. She just says that YOU being shown made the programme unbiased. It’s absolutely sickening propaganda, just like Dr Goebbels claiming that the inclusion of edited film of Jews in his racist propaganda films made the Nazis unbiased. If any decent politician ever censors this lying left-wing quango (Cameron won’t), people like her will be to blame.
Are you for real? Having watched the ‘Science under Attack’ episode of Horizon may I be the first to tell you that you came across as embarrassingly narrow minded to the extent that you reminded me of one of those American fundamentalist Christians, completely incapable of rational argument. This country built the modern world on the back of its scientific and technical achievements and it irritates me to think that every step of the way people like Newton or Darwin had to deal incompetent naysayers like you. On what basis are you standing in opposition to a proud historical tradition and what makes you qualified to comment on anything at all, let alone complex science? Your opinion is worthless! I firmly believe you and your ilk are debasing the quality of debate in contemporary society with your cynical form of arguing. Just because you cannot be 100% proved wrong does not mean you are right. Are you by any chance sponsored by an oil company?
Yours
Disgruntled
PS don’t even get me started on your silver spoon!
1. H2O due to water evaporation is a far bigger greenhouse gas than CO2, and the annual emission of CO2 from “unnatural” sources is only
2. Cloud cover presently covers 62% of the surface area of the globe and the fraction increases as a function of injected CO2, caused by evaporation of water from the oceans and lakes that cover 70% of the area of the globe. This additional “global dimming” causes a negative feedback cancelling out the temperature rise from CO2, as the oceans warm up (there is a slight time lag due to the high specific heat capacity of water and the wintertime mixing of warm thermocline waters with deeper water dueing storms).
3. Cloud cover has an average altitude of 2 km, so the lower altitude air and surface below the cloud is unable to benefit from CO2 which only absorbs infrared (the infrared energy is absorbed or reflected near the top of the clouds, where the heated air rises, and is unable to transfer warmth to lower altitudes efficiency due to the buoyancy of warm air).
4. “… there is … a very grave danger for science in so close an association with the State … it may lead to dogmatism in science and to the suppression of opinions which run counter to official theories.”
– J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), The Causes of Evolution, Longmans, London, 1932, p. 225.
5. Beware of NASA’s $1,000,000,000 annual budget to fight Delingpole with big lies:
To make a name for learning
When other ways are barred
Take something very easy
And make it very hard
“[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie
6. Dr Ferenc Miskolczi points out that NOAA data on atmospheric H2O over 61 years from 1948-2008 show a fall in humidity. It seems that this implies an increase in cloud cover so that H2O varies in such a way as to cancel out the effect of CO2 on temperature.
Notice that Rob van Dorland and Piers M. Forster wrote a paper “Rebuttal of Miskolczi’s alternative greenhouse theory” (hosted at realclimate.org) which falsely states on page 4:
“… there is ample observational evidence that the most important greenhouse gases, water vapour and carbon dioxide have increased in the last four decades, meaning that the total infrared optical depth is indeed increasing. Finally, direct satellite observations of the outgoing infrared spectrum show that the greenhouse effect has been enhanced over this period.”
This contradicts the NOAA data Dr Miskolczi gives. I don’t have any interest in Miskolczi’s idealized calculations which are irrelevant to the real world (regardless of whether they are correct or not), just in the actual data from observations and the mechanism he proposed. All of Miskolczi’s critics ignore the data and the cloud cover mechanism and focus on showing that his model is imperfect or beyond their understanding (by which they try to imply he is wrong, rather than they haven’t made the effort to understand the details!), which is obvious since it is just an idealized model.
As Dr Miklos Zagoni shows in his paper (CO2 cannot cause any more “global warming”: Dr Ferenc Miskolczi’s saturated greenhouse effect theory, SPPI Original paper, December 18, 2009), when you ignore Dr Miskolczi’s idealized calculations, and simply look at the data he unearthed from NOAA, you see the evidence for the cloud cover feedback mechanism.
The variations of CO2 during Earth’s geological record were all caused by rapid temperature changes by means other than CO2 variations, such as cycles in the Earth’s orbit or geological processes that created large mountain ranges. These variations produce the climate change, which in turn caused an imbalance between CO2 absorbers and emitters. Rainforests (CO2 sinks) can be killed off by temperature fall rates which can be compensated for by the migration of CO2 emitting animals. A drop in global temperature caused an increase in the atmospheric CO2 level indirectly, due to the fact that rainforests cannot migrate as quickly as animals, and are therefore more likely to be killed. An increase in global temperatures had the opposite effect, allowing dense rainforests to proliferate faster than the rate of increase of CO2 emitting animals. Therefore, the fossil record correlation between CO2 and temperature has nothing to do with a direct mechanism for CO2 to affect temperature.
“Since the Earth’s atmosphere is not lacking in greenhouse gases, if the system could have increased its surface temperature it would have done so long before our emissions. It need not have waited for us to add CO2: another greenhouse gas, H2O, was already to hand in practically unlimited reservoirs in the oceans. … The Earth’s atmosphere maintains a constant effective greenhouse-gas content [although the percentage contributions to it from different greenhouse gases can vary greatly] and a constant, maximized, “saturated” greenhouse effect that cannot be increased further by CO2 emissions (or by any other emissions, for that matter). … During the 61-year period, in correspondence with the rise in CO2 concentration, the global average absolute humidity diminished about 1 per cent. This decrease in absolute humidity has exactly countered all of the warming effect that our CO2 emissions have had since 1948. … a hypothetical doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration in the air would cause a 3% decrease in the absolute humidity, keeping the total effective atmospheric greenhouse gas content constant, so that the greenhouse effect would merely continue to fluctuate around its equilibrium value. Therefore, a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause no net “global warming” at all.”
– Dr Miklos Zagoni, CO2 cannot cause any more “global warming”: Dr Ferenc Miskolczi’s saturated greenhouse effect theory, SPPI Original paper, December 18, 2009, page 4.
Are you a qualified PHD (or whatever) holding scientist? People who ‘take an active interest’ in a subject and then feel a need to add their two cents make me laugh, it’s just the same as when women use the phrase ‘speaking as a mother’. Also what has Hitler got to do with cloud cover, are you trying to antagonise me by calling me a fascist? Are you familiar with Godwin’s law, which states ‘as an online discussion progresses, the likelihood of a comparison to Hitler approaches 1’. Why bring Hitler into it as this does not reflect positively on your argument. Also, never, ever reference Wikipedia in your argument (it’s only marginally better than brainyquote.com) as people with too much time on their hands (some might say like you and James) can alter it too say whatever they wish.
Now, Having read what you have to say I admit to being nowhere near qualified to further comment, which apparently neither you or Lord Delingpole have the humility to do. You say that statistics and facts can be used to say anything and then proceed to attempt to blind me with your ‘version’ of the science. You cannot convince me because I have told you I do not know, however, I am more inclined to trust someone qualified who may know, over someone such as a jumped-up journalist who happened to read a few reports. I suggest you leave science to the scientists and use your time more productively, you could take up fishing.
Disgruntled
Mind you, we could have guessed that.
Next time before commenting on the blogs of people way better informed than you here’s a novel idea: why not do some background reading first?
1. I’m quoting qualified climate scientists Dr Miklos Zagoni, Dr Miklos Zagoni. I’m a qualified technical author (not a PhD yet, but the PhD is just a badge of groupthink consensus outside the specialism concerned anyway), who has read the “peer”-reviewed crap.
2. Hitler’s “big lie” propaganda trick is ESSENTIAL to understanding climate groupthink.
3. Lawyer Godwin’s law in his own words: “When you get these glib comparisons you lose perspective on what made the Nazis and the Holocaust particularly terrible.”
(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10618638 .)
I think that says it all, however it appears Godwin takes his bible too seriously and believes in the myth that the Jews alone are God-win’s “chosen people”, and the “ethnic cleansing” of many peoples since 1945 doesn’t count as a holocaust worthy of comparison to the six millions gassed by Hitler’s brainwashing “science” of genetics.
See how genetics and weapons effects were perverted for appeasement of the Nazis; it all started out with the big lie from 1912 Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel best-selling eugenics book:
“Those who have … misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gasses.”
– L’Homme, cet Inconnu (Man the unknown)
Adding in the 1936 German edition preface:
“… German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal.”
To the 1936 German government, the “defective” included Jews. Now maybe you get the drift? If Carrel could succeed in misleading the world into not grasping the danger of Nazi eugenics in 1936, allowing Britain to appease Hitler instead of stopping him, does that not tell you the danger from “Godwin’s law” today? Sea levels have risen 120 metres over the past 18,000 years at faster rates than they’re rising today. We’re still here. Trying to stop the sea level rising was tried without success by King Canute. It cost him a fortune and he’d have been better off spending the money helping people, not putting carbon credit trading billions into politicians pockets, BBC pension funds, and politically correct windfarms.
The real problem is that the media is being manipulated by an age old conspiracy of fascist officialdom in science which gets beaten back at every scientific revolution (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein), then creeps back to shore up status quo against simple facts.
“Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
– Dr Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes.
There is nothing complex to understand, Disgruntled. It’s very simple. You heat water and it evaporates, right? Steam rises? Steam condenses when it reaches cool air high up? Clouds form? This simply adds to the “global dimming” effect which works against CO2 induced temperature rises. The global dimming effect caused the failure of tree ring data to proxy temperatures after 1960, contrary to Nurse’s claim.
There is evidence therefore from several different sources, not just global humidity measurements since 1948, indicating that cloud cover has been increasing, offsetting temperature effects from CO2. It keeps low altitude air cool, and warm air layers high in the atmosphere are unable to warm the ground because their positive buoyancy.
http://quantumfieldtheory.org/ALEXIS%20CARREL%20Man%20the%20Unknown%201935.pdf
Page 165 of the PDF:
“There remains the unsolved problem of the immense number of defectives and
criminals. They are an enormous burden for the part of the population that has remained
normal. As already pointed out, gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and
insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve
these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent the development of the normal.
This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the
insane in a more economical manner? We cannot go on trying to separate the responsible
from the irresponsible, punish the guilty, spare those who, although having committed a
crime, are thought to be morally innocent. We are not capable of judging men. However,
the community must be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements. How can
this be done? Certainly not by building larger and more comfortable prisons, just as real
health will not be promoted by larger and more scientific hospitals. Criminality and
insanity can be prevented only by a better knowledge of man, by eugenics, by changes in
education and in social conditions. Meanwhile, criminals have to be dealt with
effectively. Perhaps prisons should be abolished. They could be replaced by smaller and
less expensive institutions. The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some
more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to
insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or
machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public
in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small
euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.”
My argument is that if such fashionable gas chamber bullshit in best selling books by pseudoscientific “leaders” had not been so adored and loved due to Nobel’s warmongering prize (financed by deliberately supplying explosives to both sides in the Crimean War, an act of abject evil that makes Hitler’s gas chamber massacres look heavenly), maybe Nazi appeasement could have been stopped by Churchill. As it was, peer-review groupthink prevailed. Godwin should study what happened to cause the holocaust, which was the racism due to eugenics pseudoscience in the 1930s. There was a form of Godwin’s law then, where anyone criticising fascist evil was simply censored out of the British evil as being unpleasant. It didn’t help Churchill to stop Hitler.
All evil springs from perverted “science”, pseudoscience, enforced by petty dictatorial officaldom, wasting money. The abuse of anonymous “peer”-review power politics to censor rival theories is manifest in particle physics, where money from our pockets to fund CERN’s LHC fascist search for imaginary particles in a fascist attempt to prove mainstream hocus pocus theories that Feynman long ago exposed as speculative claptrap. These fascists are always portrayed as great Nobel Laureates in the right wing media, when their success comes not from originality or hard work, but from the corruption of “peer”-review.
“Using publicly volunteered distributed computing [11,12], we generate several thousand seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather, both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never occurred. … The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.”
– Pardeep Pall, et al., Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000, Nature, v470, pp382–385, issue date 17 February 2011, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7334/full/nature09762.html
There are two immediate obfuscation problems in this paper. First, the computer models used assume positive feedback from water vapour (not the negative feedback due to buoyant moist air forming extra cloud and thus “global dimming” that cancels out the CO2 effect over timescales of decades), so they are just assuming that CO2 is causing the massaged data on temperature rises from tree rings, weather stations in or downwind of direct heat pollution (e.g. growing cities, factories, etc.), and satellite data (62% of the surface is covered by cloud, so the satellite data is biased towards seeing ground blackbody temperatures for clear sky areas, etc.). Second, they are giving increased percentage risks as 20% and 90%, and the BBC is interpretating this (as evidently intended by the dishonest presentation of the abstract in terms of percentages) as a causal proof that the floods of 2000 were 20% or 90% likely to be due to global warming.
Nothing could be further from the facts. Those are just the percentage increases on very small percentages. If the risk is 1% then a 90% increase means 1.9% not 90%. But the spin the BBC gives is misleading because of their green pension fund managers. They have a vested interest in reporting deceitful spin, and adding to the spin even more. The biggest British floods, costing the worst casualty toll, were actually in 1953, when my father (in the Civil Defence Corps in Essex) helped out. The whole of the Essex coast was affected to some degree, 1,600 km of coast was flooded in Britain with over 300 people were killed in Britain. The BBC seem to have forgotten this event, which was FAR worse than the 2000 floods! If they want climate change flood probabilities, here’s one that they can’t go wrong with: over the past 18,000 years sea level rose 120 metres, causing massive floods. The probability that it was due to climate change was 100%.
just read your latest post on the Telegraph:
“Why do I call them Eco Nazis? Because they ARE Eco Nazis”.
Greatly written and well worth reading.
It was about time to shed a light on this rather murky chapter.
There are lots of telltale signs to discover everywhere in the green movement – since the beginning.
Ignoring the leaves (an endlessly abused symbol), you show us the deep BROWN colour of the ROOTS.