Mick Hume's article in The Times today hits the spot so nicely, and with such cogent choice of expression, that The GOS has decided The Times won't mind if he quotes it in full …
What do we want? Less freedom to go on holiday!
Yes, it was right that the British Airports Authority was denied the sweeping injunction it sought against eco-activists planning a Camp for Climate Action near Heathrow. Even prigs must have the right to protest.
But no, it is not right that the anti-flying protesters are now being hailed as champions of liberty. Their campaigns are dedicated to preventing millions who wish to fly from exercising freedom and choice. Theirs is arguably the most illiberal, elitist protest movement since the French counter-revolution.
Why protest at the height of the holiday season? Because the idea of the masses jetting off for no better reason than to have "unnecessary" fun offends their miserabilist sensibilities. So they will make the sacrifice of camping at Heathrow in order to "educate" the great unaware - that is, to tell us that we are greedy, ignorant morons. It seems they do not need the power of flight in order to look down on us all from Olympian heights.
The protest group named in the BAA's limited injunction is called Plane Stupid - by which they mean that we are stupid for boarding planes, whereas they do the intelligent thing by invading an airport with a Baptist minister and praying on the runway. For these moral crusaders, flying for pleasure is a "climate crime", a sin against nature, and they claim priestlike authority to lecture the majority "on behalf of" Africa's poor or unborn "future generations".
One Plane Stupid spokesman sneers that "our ability to live on the earth is at stake, and for what? So people can have a stag do in Prague." An activist who protested against "binge flying" by blocking the door to a cheap-flight company announced in messianic tones that "while G8 leaders have simply spouted hot air, I've shown how one woman alone can close down climate criminals". For Gaia so loved the planet, that She superglued Her daughter to the doors of lastminute.com.
Their contempt for the pleasure-seeking masses echoes earlier attacks on the tourist industry when the railways and Thomas Cook first took people from the cities to countryside and seaside. Jim Butcher's book "The Moralisation of Tourism" tells us that in 1870 the Rev.Francis Kilvert said "Of all the noxious animals, the most noxious is a tourist." Today it seems some would like flying tourists to be treated as if they were carrying foot-and-mouth.
If we want to live in a free country then they must be free to be self-righteous ecoprigs. But it is depressing to see young idealists reduced to supporting a movement that, in the words of one leading green, campaigns "not for abundance but for austerity . . . not for more freedom but for less".
What do they want? Less freedom!
When do they want it? Now!
Strangely, they didn't use that argument in court.
The Times attracts a fairly bright readership, and one or two of them added their own comments to the article. Philippa Pirie said "If we're really that concerned about the unborn child, lets close down all state schools and hospitals and start collectively saving for our retirement. Because otherwise, that unborn child will be born to slavery paying taxes to support his profligate elders in their old age. But we all know it's not about the unborn child at all: it's about the narcissim of ecologists who would enslave us all to their every wish," while Sam of Farnham added "always good to remember that you can't spell environmentalist without the word 'mental'... it always surprises me just how idiotic some people can be".
Meanwhile a paper from Germany by physicists G.Gerlich and R.D.Tscheuscher points out that the Global Warmers have got their physics arsy-versy. This is its introductory paragraph …
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896 and is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with, but radiatively equilibrated to, the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarifed. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 deg C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.
Nice one, Fritz und Fritz. We note particularly the sentence that says "According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist."
In this country the Royal Society has published The Lockwood Paper, designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film on Channel 4. But Lockwood is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was, of course, already well-known, but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper demonstrates so well - that solar output is on the downturn - is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start cooling the earth? Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. The Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.
Nothing new there, then.
From Australia comes the news that tree-planting schemes promoted by businesses and rock bands to offset carbon emissions do little to combat climate change. A paper by The Australia Institute accuses governments and businesses of exploiting such "fads" to avoid the need for real cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. "By diverting people's funds and attention to projects that are unlikely to reduce emissions significantly in the long term, some offset schemes could ultimately do more harm than good," Christian Downie, the author of the report, said. "Tree-planting is the most popular type of carbon offset promoted in Australia but it is, in fact, the least effective for dealing with climate change. The evidence indicates that offsets from renewable energy are the most effective, followed by those from energy efficiency projects, with forestry projects ranked last."
The comments are a blow to companies that have supported tree-planting to offset their carbon footprints, including BP, Sainsbury's, British Telecom, Orange, Avis and MTV. British rock band Coldplay bought 10,000 mango trees for villagers in Karnataka, in India, to offset the greenhouse gases released as a result of the production of their album, fittingly entitled "A Rush of Blood to the Head". Dido, Atomic Kitten, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kylie Minogue, Kevin Keegan and the Rolling Stones have also promoted tree-planting schemes.
Mr.Downie said "Tree-planting or forestry cannot secure real, measurable and permanent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions because sooner or later the forest will be felled, burned or destroyed. When (people) buy offsets from a forestry project with their airline ticket, for example, they are actually buying a promise that the immediate emissions from their flight will be gradually offset over the next 100 years. There can be little, if any, guarantee that this will actually happen."
In America the Global Warmers have been sounding off (again) about the supposed fact that global warming deniers are funded by the oil industry. Marc Morano has responded by pointing out that actually the alarmists have actually received 2,500 times more funding than the sceptics - $50billion as against $19million in the last decade.
The GOS says: On the other hand, if the global warmers are right and the deniers are massively funded by the oil industry … where's my massive share?
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