Interview with James Delingpole

Vox Day interviewed James Delingpole, the British journalist and author of Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn’t Work, on February 4th, 2010.

When did you first become skeptical about the idea of man-made global warming?

There was no Saul-line moment of conversion, it was a gradual dawning. One thing that the global warming lobby likes to do is to make out that people who disagree with them somehow hate nature and that the reason they object to global warming is not on scientific grounds but because they aren’t prepared to make the necessary lifestyle changes. This is nonsense. In a way, I think my love of nature is the reason I care so much about this battle. For example, the measures adopted by the British government to deal with so-called man-made global warming involve carpeting the most beautiful countryside on Earth with wind farms that are inefficient, can only operate economically if heavily subsidized by the government and therefore the taxpayer, and utterly destroy the landscape. I don’t believe in this thing they call “the precautionary principle” because sometimes doing something can be much, much, much worse than doing nothing.

Historians are aware that Greenland used to be farmed and that the Romans grew grapes in England. Are the global warming scientists historical illiterates or were they just hoping that no one would remember that the world was quite a bit warmer a few centuries ago.

It’s a very interesting question. The first part of the answer is that scientists stick to their particular field. I think what’s happened with some of these climate change scientists is that they’ve been so engrossed in their little corner of the picture that they haven’t bothered to look at the bigger one. And the second part is that in some cases they have actively sought to rewrite history, as in those Climategate emails where you see Michael Mann mulling aloud how he might get rid of the Medieval Warm Period. That’s the kindest complexion one can put upon it. The Medieval Warm Period is an embarrassment to them. The fact is that the majority of scientists in that field agree that during the Medieval Warm Period it was warmer than it is now. There was no industrial civilization then, so how do you explain it? You can see why it’s a huge embarrassment to them. The same applies to the Roman history. They were growing grapes by Hadrian’s Wall.

I think it’s natural to be skeptical of global warming when you come from Minnesota, which was once covered by ice. And of course, around this time of year, global warming sounds pretty good.

There is a very interesting report that was sent to me recently written by one of the numerous lobbying foundations that advises the propagandists of how best to advance the cause of global warming in the minds of the various people around the world. And it said precisely this: in warmer countries it clearly makes sense to talk in terms of global warming. But in other places, where the weather was unlikely to behave in the correct manner, they should call it climate change and be sure to claim that any form of extreme weather event, be it cold or hot, was definitely further proof of this “climate change”. The dishonesty of what is being foisted upon us is extraordinary.

Why did it take so long for the global warming proponents to realize that Climategate was a serious blow to their efforts?

Denial. Denial is the obvious answer. Even now, you’re getting a lot of warmists, particularly the environment correspondents in the mainstream newspapers and at the BBC, they’re kind of finessing their position. They’re preparing their lines of defense. A lot of them are saying things about the recent IPCC revelations like “this of course is much more important than the totally insignificant Climategate emails”. This is a) an attempt to justify how they were sniffy and didn’t report the Climategate emails when they happened, and, b) they want to give their opponents as little ammunition as possible. They want to credit their opponents with as little intelligence or journalistic skill as possible. For me, the significance about the Climategate emails was not due to any new and specific revelations, but that for the first time, we had emails confirming what a handful of journalists and dissenting scientists had been saying for over a decade. You know, that the global warming scientists had been cooking the books and fiddling the data, that they had been suppressing the research of scientists who disagreed with them. All of these things that people had suspected before but never been able to prove were suddenly there. The Climategate emails were the smoking gun.

Do you think we’ve seen the last of the scandalous revelations to come out of the IPCC and the CRU?

No, it’s the gift that goes on giving. First of all, we had Glaciergate, then we had Amazongate, and of course before that we had Pachaurigate. Yesterday we had Hollandgate, where it was discovered that the IPCC report had exaggerated the extent to which lowland Holland is at threat from global warming and exaggerated, by a significant factor, the number of people there who were endangered by flooding being caused by global warming.

When I consider how wildly off these reports have been, I’m beginning to worry that the real danger is being overrun by hordes of ravenous polar bears.

I would think this is almost certainly the case. We’re actually in more danger of being frozen as well.

Copenhagen fell out of the news rather rapidly. Was that the result of Climategate or the economic situation?

I think Climategate had very, very, very little to do with the failure of Copenhagen. The fact is that the policymakers, the NGOs, and the lobbying groups were sitting in a bubble and carried on talking their talk as if nothing had changed at all. The reason that Copenhagen failed was the reason it was going to fail long before Climategate happened. People were talking about it inevitably being a failure and that the policymakers wouldn’t get their act together because the countries could not agree. It was in the midst of a recession.

Why has the international media been so quick to believe the claims of the global warming scientists and why has the British press been more skeptical than the American press?

You need to look at it historically. In the 1990s, there was a general feeling abroad among the chattering classes that they had had it too good for too long. People were enjoying the inflationary boom, the debt-fueled boom, but at the same time, in the way that middle classes do, they were starting to feel guilty about it. Maybe we’ve had it too good for too long. Maybe we should start thinking about more important things than money. And so you had lots of people going organic and talking about ethical lifestyles. This intellectual climate coincided with activists like James Hansen of NASA and Al Gore pushing for this vision of a world that was doomed by Man’s greed and consumption. It hit the spot perfectly. There was the famous conference that Al Gore staged in Washington on the hottest day of the year. They opened all the windows the night before, then closed them in the morning so the air conditioning broke down. Of course, it was sweltering inside as they announced the news that the world was in trouble and it was all Man’s fault. So you had suddenly an exciting story that the newspapers could get their teeth into and it gelled with their chattering class readership. This meme took off very quickly. At the newspapers you also had these environment correspondents, who I think are probably the most partisan correspondents in any genre you can imagine. They were not objective at all. These were environmental activists taking their cue from the propaganda of organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, which is effectively a Marxist revolutionary organization closely associated with people like Maurice Strong, the one-world government guy. So all these activist groups were feeding this information into the newspapers where it was reported uncritically and people read it because it was what they wanted to hear. You had this great big movement going on and no one wanted to say that the emperor was wearing no clothes. Anyone who pointed it out was marginalized.

As for the second part of your question, the grass is always greener on the other side. I don’t think the record of the British press has actually been much better than the American press. You’ve got papers like the Washington Times that’s taken the skeptical position, hasn’t it? I know you’ve got lots of papers like the New York Times pushing the warmist agenda, but if you look at most British newspapers, and also the BBC, you will find that they have been taking the same abject position as most American newspapers, reporting this AGW as if it were indisputable fact and expressly squashing the work of anyone who disagrees with it.

You mentioned the connection of some of the environmental organizations to the one-world advocates. Geoffrey Lean was writing that the idea global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of the world’s scientists and political leaders pushing a one-world agenda is far-fetched. Have the British learned nothing from the example of the European Union? It was always sworn up and down that the European Common Market had nothing to do with politics until it suddenly turned into a political entity?

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he. Listen, why do you think I want to emigrate so badly? It is precisely this. I feel that we are living in an eco-fascist tyranny. Many of us look aghast at what has been done by the European Union. 80 percent of all new laws passed in Britain emanate, not from the British government, but from the European Union. These are laws over which we have no democratic control. The people in the European Union are democratically unaccountable. And unfortunately, AGW is the European Union mark two. It’s no coincidence that the European Union has been pushing the AGW agenda harder than almost any political entity in the world. The reason for that is very simple. As Jonah Goldberg argues in Liberal Fascism, in order for fascist regimes to impose their power on the populace, what they need is an excuse, a crisis so apparently grave that only the most dire and stringent government action is justified. And this action, of course, can circumvent the wishes of the populace. It is perfectly okay for unelected bureaucrats and technocrats to impose unwanted policies on people because the world is doomed and if we don’t do something now, we’ve had it.

I always find this to be an interesting argument in light of the great government successes in eradicating poverty, drug use, and crime.

Exactly, exactly! I despair, I really do, of what’s happening and what’s going to happen. Since November, we have seen AGW unraveling at the most extraordinary rate. What has been the response among our lawmakers and what has been the response at the scientific institutions implicated in these scandals? Why, it has been to close ranks, to cover up, and to pretend nothing has changed as the caravan moves on! In Britain, we have the energy and climate minister, Ed Miliband, and the conservative opposition both saying effectively the same thing. They’re saying we must cut carbon by massive amounts, they’re talking about green jobs and expecting people to believe them! They’re saying this when we know from the evidence of Spain that for every green job created by the government, 2.2 jobs are lost in the real economy. The idea that green jobs are going to bail us out of this economic situation is pie in the sky, it’s Enron accounting.

I have one final question. Why are Guardian readers such wankers?

They are, aren’t they! Actually, having said that, one of my great pleasures in life, one of the few pleasures left for those of us who don’t believe in one-world government, is rooting through the comments below articles written by people like George Monbiot and seeing just how many of them have been censored by the moderators and how many more are antipathetic to George Monbiot’s point of view. What you realize is that certainly out in the blogosphere and on the Internet generally, skepticism is growing. There are a lot of very informed, clever, funny people out there who are saying “we won’t buy this shit, enough is enough!” I’m hoping that this revolutionary spirit that we see on the Internet spreads out into the real world too, because I think the Internet is our best defense against the one-world government tyranny that is being imposed upon us in the name of global warming. This is a battle worth fighting. The future of Western civilization depends on the outcome. I think it’s that serious.

On a tangentially related note, this Audi “Green Police” ad is a timely and light-hearted demonstration of the eco-fascism of which Delingpole is warning.  The ad is funny, but the reality won’t be, if the people of what were once known as the Western democracies are foolish enough to allow it to come to pass.


Research is hard

It appears global warming scientists are even more ignorant than biologists:

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday…. The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC’s numbers. The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

The joke that is AGW/CC just keeps on giving.


Coddling the Climategate criminals

The so-called “six-month” statute of limitations that is supposedly protecting the Climategate charlatans doesn’t exist:

There is something very odd indeed about the statement by the Information Commission on its investigation into “Climategate”, the leak of emails from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Gordon Smith, the deputy commissioner, confirms that the university’s refusal to answer legitimate inquiries made in 2007 and 2008 was an offence under S.77 of the Information Act. But he goes on to claim that the Commission is powerless to bring charges, thanks to a loophole in the law – “because the legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place”.

Careful examination of the Act, however, shows that it says nothing whatever about a time limit. The Commission appears to be trying to confuse this with a provision of the Magistrates Act, that charges for an offence cannot be brought more than six months after it has been drawn to the authorities’ attention – not after it was committed. In this case, the Commission only became aware of the offence two months ago when the emails were leaked – showing that the small group of British and American scientists at the top of the IPCC were discussing with each other and with the university ways to break the law, not least by destroying evidence, an offence in itself.

I’m with James Delingpole on this. Prosecute and imprison the lying, thieving little bastards. Force them to repay the millions in grant money they fraudulently obtained. Actually, they deserve far worse than penury and prison, for they were at the heart of a scheme to reduce all of Mankind to serfdom in the name of science.

But don’t worry. There’s so much more fraud and chicanery left to be uncovered that the scientists will have to be thrown to the wolves before long.

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based. A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

As I have stated repeatedly, scientists are no more trustworthy than anyone else, their self-serving claim to objectivity by virtue of academic training is no more credible than that made by journalists. Scientists whose income is dependent upon achieving specific results are no more trustworthy than used-car salesmen. And peer review is a worthless method for policing science, as it is primarily useful for passing off non-science as science. Regardless, it is becoming ever more clear that the age of the scientist as sage and secular priest is over.


Scientific consensus = false

The fraud and deception of the “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic global warming/climate change continues to pile higher:

The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

I’ve been a total skeptic from the beginning and even I think this is beginning to get ridiculous. They haven’t gotten ANYTHING right! By the time this round of exposes is done, I half expect to be told that Al Gore and the climate change “scientists” are humanoid aliens from Europa who require a frozen climate to live comfortably.


Criminal scientists

So much for the Climategate denialists claim that the global warming email scandal didn’t reveal any wrongdoing or anything outside the scientific norm:

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The Climategate denialists are not only defending frauds and liars, but criminals. This is now a fact. I have known this from the start, because man-made global warming is simply not taking place and therefore anyone who claims it is is either deluded, mistaken, or lying. In the case of the so-called scientists, it’s quite clear that they fall into the latter category.

The fact of the matter is that scientists are no less likely to be full of BS than anyone else, and scientists whose access to outsized incomes depends upon reaching specific predetermined conclusions are no more trustworthy than investment bankers touting a company in which they hold significant equity. For example, Phil Jones, the lead charlatan at the heart of Climategate, is reported to have collected 55 endowments amounting to $22.5 million for his pseudo-scientific crimes. The more insidious problem is the possibility that the Climategate denialists are telling the truth and that these sorts of shenanigans probably is the scientific norm.


There is no global warming: glacier edition

To put it bluntly, if you still believe that “scientific consensus” means anything, or that that man-made global warming is actually occurring, you’re an idiot:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research….

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.

So, telephone interviews are now science? That’s cool. I have been doing a crazy amount of science since RGD came out.


There is still no global warming

As I have said from the start, the significant point is not that Man is not causing global warming, although that is true, or that there are more important problems to be addressed than global warming, although that is true too. The significant point is that the so-called climate scientists are all incorrect, there is no long-term global warming trend, there is only a short-term and irrelevant warming spike, and all of the predictions of global warming based on the climacaustal’s scientific models will be proven totally incorrect over the next ten years.

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

Of course, the mere fact of being completely wrong won’t slow down the global government crowd, their scientific enablers or the scienthological faithful. I just wonder how long it will be before “global cooling is climate change too” becomes the new mantra.


Wikipedia and the warming scammers

The latest editing scandal underlines the inherent problem with Wikipedia and why it is intrinsically unreliable:

Through his role as a Wikipedia administrator, Connolley is said to have created or rewritten 5,428 unique Wikipedia entries.

“When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it – more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand,” Solomon wrote. “When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred – over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.”

….A Wikipedia arbitration committee has stated in the past: “William M. Connolley has, on a number of occasions, misused his administrator tools by acting while involved.”

If Wikipedia doesn’t immediately remove Connolley’s administrative privileges and ban him from ever editing Wikipedia again, this will conclusively prove that it is nothing more than a propaganda device, not an encyclopedia. When one dishonest ideologue is permitted to run roughshod over 2,000 other individuals, the pretense of democratic openness simply cannot be maintained. Any doubts about the fictional nature of global warming should not be difficult to see by this point, as is the left-wing nature of the charlatans. Those who are telling the truth are seldom interested in scrubbing the history books, and rewriting accurate history is the one of the Left’s signature characteristics.

UPDATE: The good news is that apparently Wikipedia hasn’t entirely given up on the idea of providing accurate information to the masses:

In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming.


Keep this in mind

Should you ever find yourself pondering the probability of evolution by natural selection being true:

PZ Myers: “Yes, it is quite probable that global warming has a significant anthropogenic component. About as probable as the idea that HIV causes AIDS, species diversity is driven by evolutionary processes, and that the world is round.”

For once, I quite agree with the chicken-hearted biologist.  The idea that global warming exists and has a significant anthropogenic component IS about as probable as the idea that evolution by natural selection creates new species.  It’s also about as probable as the reported economic recovery being anything more than a short-term statistical artifact caused by the fiscal and monetary authorities pumping a massive amount of liquidity into the financial system.


Climategate keeps growing

Skeptical economists and statisticians are simply killing the climate change charlatans:

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

No wonder the climate “scientists” are so protective of their data. The more people look at it, the more it becomes obvious that they’ve been cherry-picking the data in order to “prove” what they’ve already decided will be reported. I don’t read Russian, but as far as I can tell, in order to calculate global land temperatures the CRU used only 121 of 476 Russian stations, 73 of which were among the 78 stations that had been moved, presumably because of proximity to heat-producing urban expansion. This would explain why the purported increase in temperatures that could not be observed in the United States, Asia, or the rest of Europe was appearing in Siberia, which accounts for about 12.5 percent of the global land mass. The upshot is that this would eliminate 31.1 percent of the reported global warming. So there is not only no statistically significant global warming from the long-term perspective. There has been a lot less of it in the short term than was previously claimed.

As for the reported consensus, it is now obvious that scientific consensus should be given no more credence than real estate consensus, economic consensus, or stockbroker consensus. Intriguingly, it is now clear that the climate scammers have at least known that the Russian data possibly incomplete for five years. Phil Jones, the suspended director of the CRU, incriminated himself in an email to to Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame in March 2004:

“Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.”

Ah yes, and here we also see the way in which peer review is so conducive to good science.