This One is Honest

Via the Bishop, we hear what the watermelons usually avoid telling us as James Lovelock, interviewed by Leo Hickman makes some uncomfortable comments for the AGW crowd:

We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

There you have it. We are not at war, and as Lovelock himself points out, the case for man made global warming has certainly not been helped by the corruption of science by the likes of the University of East Anglia. He also states that the science is weak in places (well I never).

I am no great fan of democracy as it invariably leads to the trampling of minorities by the majority. It is merely a means to an end; liberty (or at least, it should be). Lovelock’s suggestion would have us all trampled by a demagogue in the name of Gaia. His assumption that we are too stupid is a supreme piece of arrogance as are his comments that the sceptic blogosphere are going to look weird:

I think the sceptic bloggers should worry. It’s almost certain that you can’t put a trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere without something nasty happening. This is going to resolve itself and global heating is going to come back on stream and it’s these bloggers who are going to be made to look weird when it does. When something like this happens again, they’ll say we had all this before with ‘Climategate’. But there’s a danger that you can go off too strong, like they have. They are not sufficiently aware of the longer-term consequences

I am well aware of the possible long term prospects. Climate has always changed and it always will change. I cannot say for certain whether we are having a significant impact – and, importantly, neither do the scientists, or they wouldn’t be so ready to dissemble about their data. What is important is the ability to adapt. And taxing us to penury is not adapting. If we replace democracy – an admittedly flawed system – with something else, will it be better for liberty or worse?

Close your eyes for a moment and picture Gordon Brown deciding that he will now lead a war cabinet – a coalition government of national unity for the foreseeable future and this will be a long war. How does that make you feel? So, should we follow Lovelocks’s thinking and suspend democracy?

I think the sceptics have done us a good service because they’ve made us look at all this a lot more closely and hopefully the science will improve as a result. But everything has a price and an unexpected price may hit these bloggers. It’s the cry-wolf phenomenon. When the real one comes along, they’ll be laughed at.

It’s not the sceptics who have been crying “wolf!” it’s the alarmists. And it is not the sceptics who didn’t believe in global cooling in the nineteen seventies who are looking foolish now.

Overall, Lovelock’s thoughts make more uncomfortable reading for the alarmists than the sceptics – scathing as he is of the UEA behaviour. And, I think, he does us a favour by exposing just what the warmists really want; unbridled power, the destruction of civilisation and capitalism and preferably a return to a medieval, agrarian existence with all that that entails.

I think I’ll take my chances that in thirty years someone might laugh at me.