Post by Teddy Bear on Feb 28, 2012 14:16:41 GMT
Great article by James Delingpole following his appearance on a recent BBC programme on the climate. It shows the typical mindset used by the lefty greenies to 'debate' their agenda.
(Links to various items are available on the article itself.)
(Links to various items are available on the article itself.)
Why I am so rude to Warmists
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: February 28th, 2012
Sharing a car back from the BBC Big Question debate in Cardiff on Sunday I had a tremendous bust-up with one of my fellow panellists which I think many of you would have enjoyed hugely. (Our driver could barely keep a straight face.)
It was prompted when I very vocally expressed my disgust at one of the standard phrases trotted out by Warmists and other eco-loons in these debates (as, of course, inevitably, they did again on Sunday): the one about "preserving the planet for future generations".
The reason this cant phrase makes me want to throw up every time I hear it is that it's such a grotesque inversion of reality. It's not people on my side of the debate who want to ravage the countryside with wind farms (with no provision for decommissioning them), rein in economic growth, introduce wartime-style rationing, raise taxes, destroy farmland and rainforests to create biofuels, and base heinously expensive public policy on hysteria and junk science. It's not people on my side of the debate who are condemning those "future generations" to a lower standard of living and an uglier environment in order to deal with a problem that doesn't exist. So how dare they have the gall to try to take the moral high ground?
Warming to my theme, I noted that there are now sufficient reserves of shale gas to power the US economy for the next five hundred years (at current consumption levels) and that after that we've got at least another five hundred years worth of viable energy from the clathrates (concentrated methane deposits) on the ocean floor. So that's panic over for the next millennium at any rate.
Does anyone imagine that back in 1012 they were all agonising about how the children of the future might cope in 2012, what with all the scarce resources being used up at an alarming rate to make ships and spears and light warning beacons for the next Viking raid? Somehow I don't think so. Yet this is precisely the kind of unutterable boll***s you hear being advanced almost every day by people like this liberal-leftie media type with whom I had my big row.
After I'd gone on in this vein for some time, the liberal-lefty media luvvie turned round and snapped at me: "Do you have any manners?"
"What's that got to do with it?" I said.
"You have just been exceptionally rude. You've repeated what I said in the debate and are accusing me of talking unutterable boll***s!"
"Yeah. Well. You ARE talking unutterable boll***s"
"You're a very rude man, do you know that?"
"What's that ****ing got to do with anything? The issue is whether or not you were talking boll***s and unless you can advance a sensible argument that proves me wrong, I maintain that you were talking boll***s."
"Don't you swear at me!"
"Why can't I swear, you're not my Dad. Anyway, you're changing the subject. All I'm asking is that you do what any half-way decent journalist would do and defend your position using facts. If you're incapable of that then, I'm sorry, but boll***s is what you were talking. So, can you advance any facts or arguments to defend your position?"
"I'm not going to because you're so rude."
"You're not going to because you HAVE no arguments, that's your real problem mate."
All right. I admit it: I was quite rude. But I have no regrets about this whatsoever. Especially not given that my antagonist was here deploying yet another of the disingenuous techniques exploited by the liberal-left on these occasions: the evasion of argument by turning the debate into an issue of style and character.
I get this a lot everywhere from the comments below this blog to Twitter. (One young man even Tweeted on Sunday asking for someone to "knife" me because he didn't like what I had to say on the BBC debate programme.) Their "thinking" goes something along the lines of: "James Delingpole is so rude and unpleasant and right-wing that everything he has to say is evil and I'm amazed he gets paid for this stuff and I just wish someone could shut him up or kill him." Yeah, but never mind what you think of me: that's obvious. Where's your counter to my argument, that's what I'd like to know?
The answer is, of course, that there is no counter. As Richard North and Autonomous Mind rightly note, we sceptics/realists won the "scientific" debate a very long time ago:
Spot on. As I note in Watermelons, the global warming scare – the biggest and most expensive outbreak of mass hysteria in history – has enabled some very bad people to do some very wrong things in the name of "saving the planet for future generations". And yet the eco-loons complain about people like me being rude? And they think I'm the one who should be knifed or head-butted?
A sense of perspective, gentlemen: please!
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: February 28th, 2012
Sharing a car back from the BBC Big Question debate in Cardiff on Sunday I had a tremendous bust-up with one of my fellow panellists which I think many of you would have enjoyed hugely. (Our driver could barely keep a straight face.)
It was prompted when I very vocally expressed my disgust at one of the standard phrases trotted out by Warmists and other eco-loons in these debates (as, of course, inevitably, they did again on Sunday): the one about "preserving the planet for future generations".
The reason this cant phrase makes me want to throw up every time I hear it is that it's such a grotesque inversion of reality. It's not people on my side of the debate who want to ravage the countryside with wind farms (with no provision for decommissioning them), rein in economic growth, introduce wartime-style rationing, raise taxes, destroy farmland and rainforests to create biofuels, and base heinously expensive public policy on hysteria and junk science. It's not people on my side of the debate who are condemning those "future generations" to a lower standard of living and an uglier environment in order to deal with a problem that doesn't exist. So how dare they have the gall to try to take the moral high ground?
Warming to my theme, I noted that there are now sufficient reserves of shale gas to power the US economy for the next five hundred years (at current consumption levels) and that after that we've got at least another five hundred years worth of viable energy from the clathrates (concentrated methane deposits) on the ocean floor. So that's panic over for the next millennium at any rate.
Does anyone imagine that back in 1012 they were all agonising about how the children of the future might cope in 2012, what with all the scarce resources being used up at an alarming rate to make ships and spears and light warning beacons for the next Viking raid? Somehow I don't think so. Yet this is precisely the kind of unutterable boll***s you hear being advanced almost every day by people like this liberal-leftie media type with whom I had my big row.
After I'd gone on in this vein for some time, the liberal-lefty media luvvie turned round and snapped at me: "Do you have any manners?"
"What's that got to do with it?" I said.
"You have just been exceptionally rude. You've repeated what I said in the debate and are accusing me of talking unutterable boll***s!"
"Yeah. Well. You ARE talking unutterable boll***s"
"You're a very rude man, do you know that?"
"What's that ****ing got to do with anything? The issue is whether or not you were talking boll***s and unless you can advance a sensible argument that proves me wrong, I maintain that you were talking boll***s."
"Don't you swear at me!"
"Why can't I swear, you're not my Dad. Anyway, you're changing the subject. All I'm asking is that you do what any half-way decent journalist would do and defend your position using facts. If you're incapable of that then, I'm sorry, but boll***s is what you were talking. So, can you advance any facts or arguments to defend your position?"
"I'm not going to because you're so rude."
"You're not going to because you HAVE no arguments, that's your real problem mate."
All right. I admit it: I was quite rude. But I have no regrets about this whatsoever. Especially not given that my antagonist was here deploying yet another of the disingenuous techniques exploited by the liberal-left on these occasions: the evasion of argument by turning the debate into an issue of style and character.
I get this a lot everywhere from the comments below this blog to Twitter. (One young man even Tweeted on Sunday asking for someone to "knife" me because he didn't like what I had to say on the BBC debate programme.) Their "thinking" goes something along the lines of: "James Delingpole is so rude and unpleasant and right-wing that everything he has to say is evil and I'm amazed he gets paid for this stuff and I just wish someone could shut him up or kill him." Yeah, but never mind what you think of me: that's obvious. Where's your counter to my argument, that's what I'd like to know?
The answer is, of course, that there is no counter. As Richard North and Autonomous Mind rightly note, we sceptics/realists won the "scientific" debate a very long time ago:
It is said of the British, however, that we tend to lose all our battles except that last, thus winning the war. Climate sceptics, on the other hand, now seem to be in danger of reversing this process – winning the battles but losing the war.
This thesis is tried out in an important piece by Autonomous Mind who notes that the battle over climate science is by-and-large meaningless. The climate agenda, he says, is but one front in a much broader campaign involving the centralisation of power, the erosion of democracy and liberty and the transfer of wealth.
Thus says AM, no matter what the "science" reveals and how much it is debunked, there will always be another line of attack from the sustainability playbook to further the political – and economic corporatist – agenda. On that front is where the battle needs to be fought, not in the theatre of carbon dioxide emissions, raw and adjusted data or fractions of a degree of temperature change.
Exactly the same sentiment is reflected in a report by Dennis Ambler.
Whilst the continual scientific rebuttals of the climate reports produced by the IPCC may make many people think that this charade cannot continue much longer, behind the scenes it is quite irrelevant, he writes. The long-term process marches relentlessly on as if there had never been any challenges at all.
As the advocates throw in yet more spurious claims of the "hottest year on record", or record cold caused by CO2 emissions, they occupy the debate, and determine the daily agenda in the media, whilst those who know that the claims are spurious, are driven to waste time, effort and resources on refuting them.
Spot on. As I note in Watermelons, the global warming scare – the biggest and most expensive outbreak of mass hysteria in history – has enabled some very bad people to do some very wrong things in the name of "saving the planet for future generations". And yet the eco-loons complain about people like me being rude? And they think I'm the one who should be knifed or head-butted?
A sense of perspective, gentlemen: please!