Politics: other worries

By Richard North - November 9, 2021

In common with what is probably the majority of people in this country, I will be heartily glad when the CoP26 eco-fest is over. But therein unfortunately lies great danger.

While we all go back to sleep, the Climate Worshipers will not stop. In what Pete calls “the fight of my lifetime”, they will continue the unswerving pursuit of their agenda which has been in progress since at least the 1970s, building momentum with each passing year.

I don’t know exactly when the year 2050 came into vogue as the time when the grand plan was supposed to be complete, but it was sometime late last century – then far enough ahead for the doom-mongers never to have to account for their predictions if they failed to come to pass.

But, since the 70’s, fifty years have passed – a solid half-century of warming. And, with less than 30 years to go before the onset of Armageddon, you would think that the Worshipers would be able, by now, to build a solid base of direct evidence that unequivocally pointed to a planet warmed by the intervention of man to such an extent that a “climate catastrophe” awaits.

In other words, the High Priests should by now be able to take us beyond their rather dubious temperature models. As one commentator puts it, the record is so riddled with statistical errors that their realistic assessment would render any supposed “trend” to have an extremely low significance.

The assertion that “the earth is warming” is, in any event, without scientific basis, since it is impossible to measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface. Thus, we need to see more than claims of warming based on theoretical constructs. By now, there should be distinct, hard-wired warming trends based on real, measurable phenomena.

As we saw yesterday, though, some of their poster child causes, such as wildfires in the United States, simply don’t stack up, once the confounding factors are taken into account. And yet, such is the determination to make the case, the same evidence is endlessly reinterpreted until it provides the right result.

The same can be said of global sea levels, where there is no evidence yet of a global warming signal in European waters. But this does not stop Hull University propagandists producing an entirely misleading video purporting to illustrate the effect of climate change on the east coast community of Withernsea.

Yet, the reality is rather different. The town is mentioned in the Domesday Book and in 1444 Withernsea church was abandoned due to coast erosion. Over the next few years the original village of Withernsea was washed away by the sea. The villagers moved further inland to build anew in the location where the town is today.

Another little game is the way they have been treating data from the Antarctic, keeping the focus tightly on the Antarctic Peninsular, claiming air temperature increases of 3°C, without mentioning the influence of the underlying volcanic activity.

Then we have the World Economic Forum which jibbers about “global human activities” eroding the isolation of the Antarctic region in major ways, “melting the continent’s ice sheets and influencing weather”. Even before this winter’s record cold, though, NASA was reporting that the mass gains of Antarctic ice sheet were greater than its losses.

Any discipline which was sure of its ground would not have to resort to such cheap tricks. Yet, throughout the history of the climate change movement, we have seen no end of devious ploys – from Hansen’s “overcooked” Senate Committee evidence in June 1988 to Mann’s fraudulent “hockey stick”. No one who has followed in detail the history of the movement can be impressed with its protestations of scientific purity and objectivity.

That, in many respects is the crunch point. Very few of us are technically competent to evaluate the basic technical work which underpins the Climate Worshiper’s claims so, in the final analysis, it boils down to a matter of trust. And there is nothing there which would inspire sufficient confidence to accept the need for the draconian changes which the movement seeks to impose upon us.

This is especially the case when there are even more cost implications to “going green”, as the costs of making electric cars is set to soar, while Spiegel, in a lengthy and well-researched piece, lifts the lid of the “dirty truth” about clean technologies.

But, if the single-minded determination to pursue their obsession is the greatest strength of the Climate Worshipers, it is also their weakness. Real people in the real world have other things to worry about and do not afford the same priority to the Great Climate Terror.

For long enough, Brexit has been the focus of our attention on this blog, and current developments indicate that we may soon have to return to the subject. Then, of course, there is Covid-19 and, in particular, the government’s inept handling of the epidemic.

We have not heard the last of this, and the related question of NHS performance. This is given a further twist by the Telegraph which reports that “11,600 people caught Covid in hospital and died”.

Such a headline cannot come as any surprise to readers of this blog, despite the “exclusive” tag that the Telegraph appends to its front-page report. In May of last year, I wrote a piece suggesting that something over 10,000 of the deaths from Covid-19 reported in UK hospitals related to patients who had acquired their infection in hospitals. That, I went on to say, would make the NHS the largest single cause of death in this national epidemic.

As I am wont to say of the legacy media, “they catch up eventually”. But, in one respect, the papers are well ahead of me as they have been charting (albeit badly) the growing illegal immigration crisis – a subject I have barely touched recently, although Pete has written a word or two about it.

This is not just about the extraordinary situation in the Channel, where each week seems to bring a new record for the number of “illegals” who come to these shores in rubber dinghies, aided and abetted by the RNLI and the “Border Farce” marine taxi service.

Now, coming into high profile is the situation on the Polish/Belarus border where illegal immigrants are gathered, trying to force their way into Poland. Here, we see a stark contrast between the weak response of the British authorities to our “invasion”, compared with the Poles who have fielded troops and other resources to keep the intruders at bay.

And, while contemporaneous reports are clear that the Belarus government is precipitating the problem there, by shipping migrants to the border and then forcibly pushing them into EU territory, we get a perverse headline from the Guardian which writes of a “column of people including children led by border guards”, describing the Belarus forces as “escorts”.

In another piece, the paper somehow makes out that Poland’s robust response is an example of the country “toughening up, as if in preparation for climate displacement”. Everything, it seems, comes down to climate change, and there is almost nothing which cannot be attributed to it.

Even the Guardian, however, would have trouble blaming climate change for a mask-free Johnson’s and his craven behaviour in scuttling up to Hexham for an entirely unnecessary visit to a hospital (as if he hadn’t seem the inside of enough hospitals), in order to skip what has been widely labelled as the “sleaze showdown” in the Commons.

This, I suppose, is a warm-up for later in the week when the prime minister attempts to put further spin on the “success” of CoP26, a stance which is winning few friends. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, dismisses recent optimistic assessments as “an illusion”.

The New York Times, on the other hand, sees a curate’s egg, citing Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute. “The reality is”, she says, you’ve got two different truths going on. We’ve made much more progress than we ever could’ve imagined a couple years ago. But it’s still nowhere near enough”.

Despite this – or perhaps because of it – there is no getting away from the CoPists just yet, and even after the event we’ll have to keep a close watch on them. Meanwhile, our petition continues to show solid progress, although we have yet to break 18K. Really, we need the climate change obsession to go away, though. There are far more important things to worry about.