Dreams and Ideologies...

Came across an interesting document recently. It purports to make a case for a sustainable economic future in what it describes as a "climate constrained world." Entitled "The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework" it tries to make a case for the redistribution of wealth by a different guise. What should not have surprised me was who the sponsors are. They include EcoEquity and Christian Aid.

The paper takes some reading. It is full of some tortured English words, such as "operationalization" and a few other choice gems. It is also full of the usual strident garbage contained in the Greenpeace authored chapters of the IPCC 4th Report.

Tellingly the passage that confirms, for me, that the authors are driven by ideology rather than reality there is this quote -

To be clear, this does not mean that the countries in which poor people live are
not required to cut their emissions, but rather that the global consuming class – both
within these countries and especially in the industrialized countries – are the ones
who must pay.

So it boils down to this. The evil people of the wealthy developed nations must give up their wealth, their industry and the things that made them wealthy - and give it to the "developing nations ...

The authors make clear their belief in the IPCC numbers, that the IPCC is correct and that all "warming" is down to Anthropomorphic activity is clear throughout. As I said at the beginning of this post, the report takes some reading, but having read it I am more than ever convinced that the authors and the protagonists of this type of report don't live in a world in which things like sustaining economies in order to provide jobs, sustaining incomes in order to maintain lifestyles and modern infrastructures play any part.

This is a report in which dreams and ideology are so mixed, reality doesn't even get a look-in. Sad really, because, while well intentioned, it essentially asks the "West" (Actually the US which is mentioned throughout as having to make the greatest sacrifices) to reduce its standards of living to that of the developing nations in the misguided belief that this will somehow translate into a better living standard for the poorer nations and peoples. While it talks of building "trust" between nations and the "politics" of distrust, it fails to recognise that there are very sound reasons for the distrust - such as the syphoning off of aid to Swiss Bank accounts by various "developing nation" leaders...

All that can really be said about it is that it does acknowledge the need for "developing nations" to reduce their emissions as well - though that is then destroyed by proposing that the US should destroy its economy and give away the proceeds to provide "sustainable" development for everyone else.

I think I'm more likely to encounter fairies in my garden than reality among those who believe they can stop the world and its climate changing naturally by attacking the key element to life - carbon.

A rather scary observation ...

Came across this quote recently and it is a rather damning one. Unfortunately, when it comes to certain sections of the media, particularly the Left-wing media, it is all too true. Sadly it seems to be the cornerstone of national politics as well -

"The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

The scary part about this quotation is not that it was, is or even may be true, but who made it and when. At this point I will say that he is also a man who specialised in twisting fact, presenting half-truths as fact, and when there were neither facts nor semi-facts to support the case he was making, told lies. His technique has been copied and mimicked ever since by the Left who never miss an opportunity to misquote or use outright untruth, secure in the knowledge that most listeners, viewers or readers are too lazy to check.

This is the same man who probably did more to bring National Socialism to power in the 1930's than the man who led it himself. Yes, you've guessed it, the quote is from the mouth of none other than Dr Josef Goebbels.

The same man who claimed to have learned from the British that, if you tell a lie big enough and repeat it often enough, it becomes the new truth. Going by the recent assaults by atheists, humanists, "pro-choice" and anti-life campaigners on a range of issues from faith through to abortion - some organisations seem to have taken his maxim to heart and practice it assiduously.

Another Birthday to mark ...

Two birthdays close together sometimes creates a conflict of celebration, but the Monk is happy to report that on this day his son marks a significant birthday. He hopes that Nicolas and his partner will have a terrific day and a fantastic year ahead. Again, he is proud of what his son has achieved and of what he does - but he does wonder if his own insane career spent running into burning buildings and placing himself in danger has rubbed off.

After all, who wants to fly something where everything is suspended from a single bolt holding a great big fan over your head?

Have a great day Nick!

Happy Birthday ...

The Monk's youngest daughter today celebrates her XXth Birthday. While wishing her a great day and a fabulous year ahead, the Monk confesses that he still can scarcely believe so many years have slipped by almost unnoticed and yet not unmarked. He is enormously proud of her, her determination to achieve her goals and her achievements.

Many happy returns of the day, Allison!

A date to remember ...

On the 3rd September, 1939, the "Great Appeaser," Prime Minister of Britain, Mr Neville Chamberlain addressed Parliament and declared that an Ultimatum had been delivered to Mr Hitler, demanding the withdrawal of German troops from Poland. He completed his rather short statement with the words -

"I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany."

By the time it was over in 1945, Britain had lost a million soldiers and civilians, Germany lost 13 million on the Russian Front alone and another 7 million elsewhere, the Russian losses tallied over 20 million (mainly due to Stalin's insane demand for "attack, attack, attack. It does not matter how many die!") France lost another million, Italy similar numbers. Over a half million German PoWs, simply "vanished" in Russian Camps and the survivors weren't repatriated until after 1949.

All for a lunatic ideology, a pernicious one, which has many faces and guises and is not, as so many believe today a "Right Wing" ideology. Study of the ideas which gave rise to it and some of the things it brought into public life and action are to be found in Marx and Jung. Nazi-ism was Corporatist Socialism as was Mussolini's Fascist Party, with Mussolini himself having Communism as his training ground. Among the many things it espoused were "secularist society, welfare provision, racial superiority supported by "Eugenics" (An extension of Darwin's Evolutionary Theory much favoured by some British thinkers and scientists including Huxley, Russell, Shaw and many of the politicians of the time), ethnic cleansing and the suppression of opposition by, initially, smear campaigns, then outright propaganda and finally, ghettos and death camps.

Sound familiar? It should, just take a look at some of the campaigns currently being run by the likes of the Socialist Worker's Party, Campaign for Choice, the Anti-Facist League, the Liebor Party and sections of the Left-wing media.

In remembering the failure of Mr Chamberlain's appeasement policies, we should also remember the lies that so many desperately wanted to believe they blinded themselves to reality. The cost was far, far higher than we think.

AGW - CERN proves it's Cosmic Rays ...

This is a story that begins back in 1996 with two very qualified Danish scientists and, as the Telegraph article "Sun causes Climate Change Shock" says, it goes downhill from there. In fact the campaign by the AGW proponents who immediately saw the risk to their lucrative funding, money making scams and the entire "Green" industry, would make an excellent plot for a book. But fiction is often never as convoluted as reality, and this is no exception.

This story has everything, from the character assassination of respected scientists who failed to grasp the political implications of their openness in voicing their findings, to the science magazine editor removed from his post for refusing to bow to pressure from the AGW lobby. The article quotes Lawrence Solomon -

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

One reason why the CERN experiment is not more widely publicised is that CERN might lose its funding if it dared to enter the cut throat arena that is Green Politics and AGW/Climate Change. The last thing politicians, Green Lobbyists, windmill manufacturers and the anti-modern industry, commerce and everything else lobbies want is proof that Anthropomorphic Global Warming is a myth. As the Director of CERN says -

I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.

(The emphasis there is mine.)

So what is all the fuss about. Again I quote from the Telegraph article -

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

Not surprisingly, some scientists have smelled the large rat and blown the whistle -

CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It’s OK to enter “the highly political arena of the climate change debate” provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark’s heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation.

and

The once illustrious CERN laboratory ceases to be a truly scientific institute when its Director General forbids its physicists and visiting experimenters to draw the obvious scientific conclusions from their results

So there you have it. It is all about funding. Toe the line on AGW, and you can have all the money you want. But if you have something which shows up the AGW scam - suppress it or your funding will go the same way as the original Danish Scientists research. Straight down the tubes. As many members of the non-scientific public have begun to suspect, all this talk about reducing "our carbon footprint" (an oxymoron, since all life on this planet is Carbon based) is really about controlling resources, funding for certain research, population movement and mobility and wealth.

Do read the full article I have linked above.

Amnesty International or the International Criminal's Friend?

The Canadian Branch of Amnesty International has published an Open Letter to the Canadian Government expressing its concern over the decision to deport "war criminals" who have tried to take refuge in that country, rather than put them on trial in Canada according to "international human rights obligations." It is precisely this sort of activity and the abuse of facts, the misapplication of UN Resolutions (which are not binding on anyone unless a national government specifically adopts them) and re-interpretation of Treaty provisions that is bringing this organisation into disrepute.

It was founded with the very laudable purpose of campaigning for the recognition of human rights and the stopping of the use of torture and oppression among the world's many draconian dictatorships. That has obviously proved too hard for the well paid campaign managers based in the western countries whose ideals of freedom and justice accessible to all they are supposed to espouse. Now they resort to the dirty tricks of propaganda and misrepresentation of facts, even applying double standards in pursuit of their campaigns against the very countries whose cash supports their work. The response by the relevant Minister in Canada is informative in itself.

As the Minister identifies, Amnesty wants, from the Canadian government, the "protection" of the identities of the "accused" deportees and, in contravention of Canada's Privacy Act, that the details of the "accusations" be made public. As the Minister says, you can't have it both ways, but it seems that Amnesty's heirarchy thinks they can.

Both the Amnesty letter and the Minister's response are very well worth the time and effort to read. The first convinces me that Amnesty International has now reached a point where I can no longer be comfortable supporting their campaigns. It is time to call a halt to the complete nonsense that criminals should not be deported or extradited to the country in which they committed their crimes because "they MIGHT face torture or a death penalty." International Agreements are NOT national Law unless the national government chooses to enter it onto the Statute Book as an Act of their Parliament. Most nations honour such "agreements" as long as they do not impinge on matters of national security or, as the Canadian Minister points out, threaten the security or safety of any of that nation's citizens.

As a result of some of the more zany decisions forced through courts in the UK by Amnesty over the last few years, there are some very dangerous criminals living in the UK. And Amnesty is more concerned about protecting them than they are about the safety of the citizens they put at risk by their activities.