LOMBORG HAS WON!

I have lifted the post below from the excellent Madsen Pirie. See the original for links. I think I have met Madsen Pirie during one or two of my stays in London long ago. I seem to recollect he has a fondness for bow ties

"An engaging article about Bjorn Lomborg by Giles Whittel is in the Jan 1st Weekend Review of the Times. The article covers the familiar ground of Lomborg's work on The Skeptical Environmentalist. What strikes one immediately is Whittel's view that Lomborg, furiously assailed with a passion rarely seen outside of politics and academe, has actually won, and thereby changed the world.

But unlike most contemporary thinkers, including the Nobel laureates with whom he increasingly fraternises, he can claim to have waded into one of the great arguments of the age, initially as a complete novice, and, well, won it.

It is possible for a single person to demolish one of the great myths of their times. Julian Simon whom I greatly liked and respected, did this with the argument that the world was running out of scarce resources. He also helped to kill the Population Time Bomb myth. As in a fairground shooting gallery, a new one pops up whenever one is shot down.

Lomborg's contribution has been to cast doubt upon the extent to which global warming is occurring because of human-generated emissions, and on whether measures like the Kyoto Protocol represent a sensible and effective use of resources. Michael Crichton's State of Fear will probably help to spread Lomborg's doubts at a more popular level. Whittel says that Lomborg should no longer call himself an environmentalist because:

Environmentalists believe that protecting the natural environment has value in and of itself. Lomborg's entire outlook, by contrast, is based on putting people first.

..environmentalists would strive to protect the Amazon rainforest even if no human beings lived there and no medicinal plants grew there. Lomborg, apparently, would not.

"It turns out most people like other sorts of forest much better," he says airily. "Parents like open forest where you can see where the kids are playing. You also want signs to tell you what you're seeing . . . It's a very different kind of forest that most people actually want. You need a parking lot close by, that kind of stuff."

Lomborg has done environmentalists a tremendous service by showing them what happens when they cry wolf. But he's not one of them. He's on the other side now - the one that's winning.

Whittel could be right. While many of the lemmings are still dashing headlong towards the cliff edge, spurring each other on and deriding those who question the direction, more and more are pausing to consider the alternatives.




YES, MINISTER

It seems the Senator Ian Campbell, Minister for the Environment, has been got at by his permanent Secretary of his department, Sir Humphrey Enviroby. An article in the Oz today flags "a forum on global warming in Sydney in April, hosted by the US-based Pew Centre, and involving Australia, New Zealand and business representatives." The Pew Centre is a left-wing environmental organisation.

In particular is his assertion that Perth has had a 12% decrease in rainfall over the last 25 years, which Warwick Hughes has already shown to be a furphy here. As for the sudden collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf, that was caused by the sudden eruption of a nearby undersea volcanoe which caused local warming.

Those of us who enjoyed watching the "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" BBC comedy series, which Ex Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was reported to have said were too close to the truth for comfort, would realise that the following comes as no surprise:

"Having spent several months in his new environment portfolio reviewing the evidence, Senator Campbell said he accepted the greenhouse theory that emissions such as carbon dioxide from industry were the cause of global warming"

Global warming is a billion dollar tax-payer funded gravy train, like the UN which invented it in the first place. As politicians are not elected for their cerebral acuity, Senator Campbell's statement "Even if you're a greenhouse sceptic you need to face the fact that the climate is changing" should be no surprise. That is why it is called climate Minister, because it is always changing!


Post lifted from Mangled Thoughts

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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