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TALLRITE BLOG
You can write to me at blog2-at-tallrite-dot-com |
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| April 2007 (no blogging in March 2007) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISSUE #149 - 29th April 2007 [484]
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Not often I beat the drum about religion, but here I am at it again, two issues in a row. Last time it was the non-religion of atheism; this week it is the new-age religion of environmentalism. I am a mild environmentalist myself: I believe I ought to minimise my negative impact on the earth (short of committing suicide). I should, for example,
To be honest, I am not sure whether such behaviour (even if practiced by the whole world) will have any appreciable influence on the overall global environment, but you never know. More to the point, these are things I should be doing anyway in order to minimise my expenses and to live in agreeable non-slummy surroundings. That's why environmentalism is so like religion, or at least Judeao-Christian religions. Such belief systems demand that we not kill, injure, deceive, rob or defraud others (an entire moral philosophy in one short sentence). But these are intrinsically ethical things we should be doing anyway, God or no God, if we are to live at peace with our neighbours and - especially - with ourselves. As an added bonus, Pascal's wager kicks in - that if God/Environmentalism does exist I get a bonus, if not there's nothing lost. But just as all religions seem to have extremists in their midst, who distort the intrinsic good of their religious teachings to justify wicked actions in pursuit of evil ambitions, so too there are environmental extremists. The difference is, however, that environmental extremism is in danger of becoming mainstream, at least that particular cult I would describe as climate changeology. We all know the basic tenets of the cult.
Too bad the science teaches something different. First and foremost, does CO2 cause climate change or is it the other way round? Though everyone agrees that temperatures have varied up and down wildly throughout the geological history of the world, the evidence the climate changeologists always cite in respect of recent changes is threefold.
But what they fail to point out is that the temperature always precedes the CO2, so CO2 cannot be a cause of temperature changes, but seems to be a result. Moreover, temperature rises in the last century most certainly did not correlate with industrial activity, at least not until the past decade or two.
So if humans aren't causing CO2 levels to rise, what is? Well this leads to another inconvenient truth that changeologists like Al Gore will not bother to tell you in their Oscar acceptance speeches. First of all, human CO2 emissions - 6½ Gigatonnes per annum - are miniscule in comparison with nature's own efforts:
Secondly, CO2 is only half a percent of the atmosphere anyway, of which the contribution of our puny few billion people is less than ten percent. And humans cause climate change? Come on! The driving reason that CO2 increases when temperatures rise is those oceans. They constitute a gigantic terrestrial heat sink: when they warm up, they release more CO2 out of solution - and vice versa. But they are so huge that hundreds of years can elapse between the cause (temperature) and effect (CO2). But if it's not CO2, what does raise and lower the world's temperatures? Well, the same thing that provides our warmth and keeps us alive. The sun, that massive violent nuclear star, a mere 333,000 times heavier than the earth. It also produces sun spots; no-one knows why. But they are visible, and observations show that temperatures track sun spot activity very closely. There is similar correlation between global temperatures and cosmic ray activity (which influences climate by promoting cloud formation). Again, to imagine that we humans can somehow compete with the sun and outer universe in influencing the world's temperatures is, when you think about it, ludicrous. And that's the true - and simple - story about climate change.
So why is there such a fuss? Over the past decade or so, the cult of climate changeology has become a bandwagon which is not so much rolling as careering at high speed and out of control. Governments believe in it, or are too afraid not to, and so they fund research. The US government alone looks like spending $4bn/yr to combat global warming. The availability of huge amounts of such money has spawned an entire industry, part of which is a massive lobbying effort to garner even more lucre. Major companies have felt obliged to follow suit and to fund their own multi-million-dollar climate change activities. As a result of all this largesse, the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people now depend on the continuing belief of climate change. Meanwhile, no-one is putting up a penny to challenge the conventional wisdom, and few if any politicians dare put forth a contrary view or even acknowledge that one exists. This was hilariously illustrated on BBC radio last month, shortly after the screening of a programme called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (on which much of this post is based - DVD coming). David Miliband is Britain's Secretary of State for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, and a potential pretender to Gordon Brown's prime ministerial throne. He is the force behind a draconian new Climate Change Bill, the first of its kind in any country, which mandates a whopping 60% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. But when asked about one of the very few serious challenges to the pious green orthodoxy, screened just five days before his bill was published, he lamely said “I haven’t seen it. I’ve only got a D in physics”. He clearly doesn't want to hear any alternative standpoint, particularly if credible, particularly if based on science. But at least, unlike his Liberal Democrat counterpart Chris Huhne, he did not try to get the programme shut down, without even having seen it. Al Gore's movie uses a quote from the socialist writer Sinclair Upton (1878-1968) as part of its advertising blurb:
Ironically, this is precisely the reason that climate changeology goes unchallenged. So far so intellectual or so religious. It's only wasting the money of rich taxpayers in the West who can well afford it. Unfortunately, however, the damage caused by following the precepts of the climate changeology cult goes well beyond that. Because CO2 emissions will not be reduced without raising the cost of energy which in turn will impede industrial development, trade and world GDP growth.
Note that last phrase: climate changeology is essentially protectionist and anti-trade. In my first ever blog, I mentioned that experts put the total global cost of reducing CO2 to meet Kyoto commitments at $100 bn/yr for a century. The largest proportion of this, in terms of lost development opportunity, will fall on the huge developing world, in which case all that “Drop the Debt” and “Make Poverty History” stuff is but a derisory palliative. By comparison, the UN and World Bank have told us that $200 bn is sufficient to provide all humanity with clean drinking water and sanitation and thereby avoid two million deaths per year in the developing world. So if your concern is the welfare of people, surely efforts and expenditure should be directed in favour of the poor majority rather than a mythical climate changeology cult. A final point about the cult. A recent BBC TV programme had a reporter, Justin Rowlatt, and his family spending a year cutting their carbon footprint by getting rid of the car, using low-energy light-bulbs, going vegetarian etc. A very creditable 20% reduction was achieved. However the experience must have been quite erotic, because at the end of the programme the coup de grace was delivered: the whole exercise had been rendered useless at the last minute. Why? Because during the year the couple had produced another baby whose own footprint would use up that 20%, and for the next seventy years. The depraved message of the cultists was unmistakable. The world will not be saved from climate change without committing demographic suicide. No more babies, please. And please, try to die young. So there you have the nihilistic essence of climate changeology.
It's enough to make me an atheist. (Almost.) Late Note (7th May 2007): According to
the
Sunday Times, a think-tank called the
Optimum
Population Trust, “The greatest thing anyone in Britain could
do What's that song from the 1970s TV series
M*A*S*H satirising the Vietnam War? In May, the Sunday Times kindly printed
an extract of Later Note ( 23rd October 2007):
Problems - When Huge - Become Democratically Insoluble In Ireland, as in other countries, before you get a driving licence you obtain a provisional licence that entitles you to drive provided a licenced driver is sitting beside you. This allows you to to get lessons and practice on the open road, until you are ready to take your test. The only thing is that, since driving licences were introduced in 1966, the conditions for the provisional licence have never been enforced. In other words, there are people who have been merrily driving around on a provisional licence, with no chaperone beside them, renewing their piece of paper every few years as required. They amount to no fewer than 380,000 of them, out of an adult population of only 3m, not all of whom are drivers. Many provisional licence holders have taken tests and failed (repeatedly); many have not even bothered. Anyway, due to insufficient testers, there has long been a massive backlog of testing which means you often can't get a test even if you want one. But life goes on.
And no-one cares. And politicians do nothing about this scandalous state of affairs. Meanwhile, in UK, the National Health Service continues to disappoint most of those who use it. Ever larger gobs of money are thrown into it, to be swallowed up by juicy pay rises for staff and hiring additional bureaucrats. With over a million employees, not to mention further millions working for contractors and suppliers, it is the largest employer in Europe, also the biggest monopoly. As such it gives its customers (patients) little or no choice and is spared the grim threat of competition. Imagine the selection you have in a supermarket for all the trivial items you might want, from toothpaste to baked beans to paper cups. Yet when it comes to life-and-death issues of health care, it's the NHS that makes the choice for you. Any suggestion of real reform of this cosy set-up meets with uproar from staff, so it has never happened. And no-one cares. And politicians do nothing about this scandalous state of affairs. What do these two situations have in common? What is the shared thread that makes them permanently intractable in a democratic society? It's the people, dammit. When over ten percent of the voting population have something that they like, such as a no-strings-attached provisional driving licence, no politician - under pain of ejection at the next election - is going to dare take it away from them. Likewise, when your radical reformations to improve a service (health, for example) are going to entail, for several million voters, uncertainty, scrutiny, changes of employment conditions, and in some cases the sack, you will not remain an elected politician for very long. Thus, if a problem is allowed to fester and grow for long enough, it can become completely insuperable by democrats. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher wanted to close down uneconomic coal mines, which resulted in a nationwide miners strike. The strikers were supported by nearly all other union members as well as millions of voters, yet she took them on with gusto and eventually, after nearly a year, defeated them, and at the same time enfeebled the union movement as a whole. You might think that drubbing such a large demographic disproves the rule, but there was a crucial element of difference. She was a Conservative, and her union opponents and their supporters were committed, traditional Labourites, who didn't vote for her anyway. So she and her party had nothing much to lose. Her democratic mandate would not have been so safe had she assaulted the City of London, say, in similar fashion. Thus, if you don't solve problems when they first manifest themselves, you eventually lay your successors open to an impossible situation. And you will get away with it because by then you will be long out of office. Who now blames Clement Attlee, creator of the NHS in 1948, for the inevitable problems he institutionalised into it? It seems to me, therefore, that the only solution is a coup d'état to install a benign but stern dictator with vision and drive, who would unilaterally fix all these problems with no mandate from anyone but the generals, and who would then, his/her job done, graciously hand back power (as if) to democrats and a grateful, forelock-hugging populace. Where can I find an application form?
You can always rely on going to Japan when you're stuck for a bizarre story. They rarely disappoint, and what's truth got to do with anything? It seems young Japanese girls have two unusual attributes. They yearn for the latest must-have pet, a little poodle, and they've never been on a farmyard or seen “foreign” farm animals. Japan has a couple of other characteristics: poodles are expensive (up to $2500) and Japanese don't eat sheep meat so never see the woolly critters. A Japanese internet entrepreneur in Sapporo joined up the dots and arrived at an interesting business plan. He set up an online company, “Poodles as Pets”, and began marketing, er, pedigree poodle pups. He sold 2,000 of them at a mere $1250 each, until complaints started coming in and he had to shut down and run for cover. Disgruntled customers came up with moans like
Ah well, anyone can make a mistake, even Japanese girls.
Week 149's Letters to the Press Two letters this week, both very different, both again rejected. I'm going to have to change my target.
Quote: “If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses and it will go on longer. I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense. We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense ... The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us ... America will be safer with a Republican president.” US Republican
presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, Quote: “Nappy-headed hos.” American talk-show
host Don Imus sensitively describes As a result he gets suspended by CBS and MSNBC Translation of this common, black gangsta-rap
term
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ISSUE #148 - 15th April 2007 594+553=1147
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Like many, I had, over the years, vaguely heard
of the controversial
Richard Dawkins, atheist or scientist - I was never sure which -
but only as some kind of occasional background hum. But
I suddenly snapped to attention when I happened to hear a few months
ago the tail end of a
radio discussion in which he was eviscerated by Irish journalist
David Quinn, a slightly militant Catholic. I studied some of
Prof Dawkins' more recent pronouncements and his
website, and
last November wrote a
post centred on the interview.
And I bought his latest book, “The God Delusion”, which I slowly read (my slowness having nothing to do with its quality or content). It is an elegantly constructed piece of work, clear, concise, comprehensive and sometimes witty. Indeed, it is written in much the same mellifluous, articulate, convincing tones in which Prof Dawkins speaks. He is meticulous in providing credible references complete with URLs - the antithesis of fellow-atheist Noam Chomsky, a charlatan who tries to obscure his sources for fear readers might find him out. There is much logic in what the Professor propounds, indeed he repeatedly stresses that science - especially Darwin's theory of evolution - is the basis for his atheism. If I were to have read the book as an agnostic from Mars, with no particular pro-God or anti-god axe to grind, I would certainly find his atheism persuasive. His attacks on God are focused primarily on the Roman Catholic religion. This is both personally safe for the author, and logical in the sense that among the Christian churches the Catholic doctrine is the most clearly promulgated. But it does not explain why other religions get such cursory treatment. In particular, Islam which is the world's most dogmatic and politicised faith, and the biggest after Christianity, gets very little attention, thaough this is understandable if you don't want your head sawn off under a fatwa.
Dogma, Strawmen, Mockery, Axioms He uses a number of cheap tricks to disparage and disprove religion, including invented dogmas, strawmen, mockery and even his own axioms. Several of these appear on a single page, 34.
A further interesting axiom he puts forth (p253) is that Adam never existed at all and therefore anything religious related to him (such as original sin) is a nonsense. OK, maybe he wasn't called Adam, but what he is actually saying is that there was never a “first man”, which contradicts both intuition and his own beloved Darwinism. For how would he describe the first ape which mutated into a human? There must have been one. On p61, he writes about an interesting prayer experiment, when groups of people prayed for certain sick patients to get better but not for others. The result was inclusive either way, which he takes to mean that prayer does not work because God does not exist.
Other strawman “proofs” of God's existence that he sets up in order to exuberantly knock them down, even though no serious theologian subscribes to them, include:
Another of the sneering reasons for rejecting God's existence is the very notion that he observes all the actions and thoughts of every individual and keeps some kind of tally for the day of reckoning. But a scientist, especially, should recognise that it's not that hard to keep track of one individual (private investigators earn their livings this way), and modern technology already allows some thoughts to be read by a computer (which, for example, then operates prosthetic limbs). So if man can already do some of what an all-powerful God does, albeit to a small degree, why would it be problem for an all-powerful God? After that, it's only a matter of scale. There are six billion people alive today, so that makes for a pretty big Excel spreadsheet. Some reckon the total for the whole of history is 110 billion, but it's still only a spreadsheet. Old & New Testament There are areas where I do agree with the professor. In particular, he deplores at some length the depravities to be found in the Old Testament, which match much of what is prescribed in the Koran (stoning women for adultery etc). I am left speechless by stories such as
But the whole point of Jesus was to put all that bad stuff in the past and begin anew with a message of loving your neighbour. My only hang-up over Jesus, and indeed the Christian churches of today, is that he did not repudiate the Old Testament. Rather, the good bits are preserved (eg the ten commandments) and re-read, while (most of) the bad bits are quietly ignored. The professor has fun denouncing the Old Testament, where - as in the examples above - there is plenty of scope. But he really struggles when he tries to do the same with the New. So to manufacture the conclusion that the New Testament is as bad as the Old, he simply
Atheist Mass-Murderers He addresses, rightly, the belligerent history of believers promoting their beliefs, though neatly sidesteps the issue of whether the respective beliefs actually demand such belligerence. Some do, but Christianity certainly doesn't. Those who have waged war to force conversion to Christianity (as distinct from, for example, protecting other Christians, which was the Crusades' original casus belli) will find no case for doing so in the words of Jesus. He contrasts this with atheism, asserting that, notwithstanding the atheism of Stalin (not to mention Mao, Pol Pot and others), no wars “have been fought in the name of atheism”. But here is a point he ignores. These atheists perpetrated mass-murder, to an extent unequalled in all of history, as well as untold destruction of religious infrastructure, largely to suppress the practice of religion. It seems a little churlish, therefore, to infer that such bellicose anti-religionism is somehow not a form of robust pro-atheism. In other words, atheism does kill, and - as you can see from the above chart - even more lethally than religionism. That is not to say that most atheists seek the violent overthrow of religion, just that some do. Similarly, most theists have peaceful intentions. It is noteworthy that the atheistic Soviet communism that caused or spawned all those mega-murders was defeated primarily by American Protestants aided by a Catholic pope.
Free Will The other area where atheists run into serious problems is explaining free will - which Prof Dawkins says he “is not interested in”, and for good reason. Science explains that we act in certain ways solely because neurons zipping around in our brains tell us to, and some mechanistic process causes the neurons to fire, the product of our DNA and learning. But theists (or, at least, Christians) say we have personal control over our actions - in effect neurons firing for no physical reason as atheist Mark Humphrys describes it. Theists would say there is a spiritual reason. This is a hugely important issue, because depending on it is the whole concept of human responsibility for behaviour, whether good or evil. This is what separates us from animals, who have no concept of morality. If Christians' explanation of free will is deemed to be unsatisfactory, then that of atheists must be even more so because it releases humans of all personal accountability for their actions. No wonder the professor wants to skirt the issue. Before Big Bang Meanwhile, there is an elephant in the room, which Prof Dawkins refuses to recognize. Science explains an awful lot of what we know about life and the world, and theists and atheists alike can share this common knowledge and understanding.
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