A Place to Stand

  Via Al Fin comes this CityJournal article on the future of the Anglosphere.

A little-noted fact these days is that the Anglosphere is still far and away the world’s largest economic bloc. Overall, it accounts for more than one-quarter of the world’s GDP—more than $18 trillion....Long-run trends in the developing world also point to the expansion of the English language....

Much has been made of the aging of the West, but the English-speaking countries are not graying as rapidly as their historical European rivals are—notably, Germany and Italy—or as Russia and many East Asian countries are. Between 1980 and 2010, the U.S., Canada, and Australia saw big population surges: the U.S.’s expanded by 75 million, to more than 300 million; Canada’s nearly doubled, from 18 million to 34 million; and Australia’s increased from 13 million to 22 million. By contrast, in some European countries, such as Germany, population has remained stagnant, while Russia and Japan have watched their populations begin to shrink.
The U.S. now has 20 people aged 65 or older for every 100 of working age—only a slight change from 1985, when there were 18 for every 100. By 2030, the U.S. will have 33 seniors per 100 working Americans. But consider the numbers elsewhere. In the world’s fourth-largest economy, Germany already has 33 elderly people for every 100 of working age—up from only 21 in 1985. By 2030, this figure will rise to 48, meaning that there will be barely two working Germans per retiree. The numbers are even worse in Japan, which currently has 35 seniors per 100 working-age people, a dramatic change from 1985, when the country had just 15. By 2030, the ratio is expected to rise to 53 per 100.

  Al also compares the oil/gas reserves known in the Anglosphere and finds them a strong base for growth. I comment that the existence of these reseves is the effect not a cause of our advantage

I suspect us sitting on the energy reserves is overstating it. It is because we best combine technological advance with rule of law that these gas reserves have been looked for and therefore found here. It may well be that they are similarly distributed everywhere. It is certainly the case that nuclear power is usable everywhere.

  The cuturasl achievements of English speaking countries should not be underestimated. It is not unreasonable to suspect that this is because of a cultural tradition imbued with that language.In Malaysia people queue for buses. In neighbouring and historically linked Indonesia it is every passenger for themselves. Malaysia was ruled by Britain and indonesia by the Netherlands.

   A further advantage for the Anglospher is tha, in the age of the internet, we are all connected. China may get some of this critical mass advantage too.

   A downside is that most of the lunacies of the ecofascist movement also first became prominent here. To quote the same source on this massive self inflicted would on our society

All healthy, modern industrial economies require abundant supplies of energy. Any organisation or institution which obstructs the supply of energy to a modern nation is the deadly enemy of that society and those people. Today, the huge, well-funded green-industrial complex is exposing itself as opposed to all reliable and affordable forms of energy. This means that there is a war, of sorts, taking place in modern industrial nations, between the pro-prosperity forces and the energy-starvation force

   This letter went out to nearly 50 papers in Scotland, England and internationally and has been published (edits in bold and additions in italics) by the Scotsman. Google News doesn't always show all publications so I would be grateful if anybody who sees it elsewhere lets me know.

The President of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, who has long been heavily pushing catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) said, in the Dimbleby lecture on Tuesday, that this was an "extremist" position and redefined himself as a believer in lesser warming.

Since this has always been the position of sceptics & "deniers" - that [They believe]such warming as we have had is less than seen many times in history; that [They also say] a small amount of warming makes life easier; and that an increase in CO2 improves crop growth - [So] may we take this as official confirmation that the catastrophic warming scam has run its course?

If so can we have back some of the hundreds of billions governments have taken from us to subsidise windmills, quangos, adverts, regulations, more regulators and the whole "Green" paraphernalia we have been subjected to which has cut growth, in those countries which fell for it, to zero or less? Though world average growth remains at 5%.

  Fairly unusually for the Scotsman I don't l think the edits improve it. The middle paragraph is turned from 1 sentence to 3 which may be more grammatical but I think loses emphasis. I understand removing the calling of CAGW a "scam". I regret deleting the last sentence which puts our own recession in perspective with the notable failure of the rest of the world to achieve that distinction.
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   I have emailed the Royal Society asking Sir Paul, or anybody there, to name any of the deniers who  he alleges holds the "extreme" position that there has never been any warming whatsoever. It is proper to give them time to answer before I publish it. Certainly if he is in any way honest he must know of a large number of such sceptics who hold that view rather than the "no catastrophic warming" one which he and his alleged "scientific consensus" have now reversed into supporting.
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  On the Politics Show last night Michael Portillo (formerly a politician more Thatcherite than Thatcher but now, having been fired by the electors, a moderate who makes his living as a BBC approved media personality) chose Sir Paul's speech as his political "moment of the week" because of its inspiring support of science. He entirely missed his reversal on CAGW.
 
     The interesting tidbit was that he had been at the same school as Nurse (& incidentally Labour leftist and sender of her children to public schools - Diane Abbot) so it must have been a good one. Nonetheless he did so badly there that he almost failed to get a university place.
 
     Sir Paul has a Nobel (a real one not the Gore/Arafat "Peace" one or the "Economics" one which Nobel never heard of and is just the Swedish State Bank using his name). This, combined with the obvious fact that Sir Paul is a political "scientist" either with no respect for scientific principles or simply to stupid to understand how warmism fails them, raises some questions about how he got it, which may be worth an essay sometime.
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   And my girlfriend, who may be considered less committed to this than I, sent me this link of Richard Black and the BBC desperately trying to link an increase in a disease of sheep to CAGW. The disease is spread by midges and as everybody knows the main cause of midges is warmth, which is why they are so common in the Mediterranean while Scotland is known for its paucity of the wee creatures. Therefore GLOBAL WARMING WILL DOOM US ALL TO CATCH SHEEP DISEASES FROM MIDGES.. As she says

"Can I just say, I live in a really cold town, and we have loads of midges. I saw some in our garden a couple of weeks ago (and it certainly wasn't bikini weather). In fact, isn't Scotland famous for (a) Having lots of midges, as well as (b) Being really very cold?

I despair, I really do. I mean, it's one thing to not understand science, but to be completely devoid of higher brain function, that's just tragic."

  A few days ago I wrote here about how Peter Gleick of the Pacific institute had been responsible for a deliberate (and apparently criminal since the victim Heartland Foundation have asked for charges to be pressed) fraud in faking documents purporting to show a well funded "Elders of Zion" type conspiracy funding global warming scepticism.

    Obviously being honest upright investigative journalists the Guardian and other parts of the alarmist movement were horrified about lying and fraud wholly corrupt lying fascists without an honest bone in their body and long record of fraud to hack into innocent peoples electronic records the Guardian and other eco-nazis were supportive of this crook.

    However this thread is more about who is actually getting the moolah

     This from Bishop Hill
  Of course this is only US money, for example one British ecofascist  quango NERC gets £450 million from of our money to push the scam. It also excludes money only unofficially given - for example if a scientist wants a grant even in an unrelated subject it helps enormously to say it will help prove CAGW while there is no instance of somebody getting a grant by saying it is likely to prove CAGW a fraud.

    However the most amusing bit of this is that while Gleick and other econazis denounce "big oil", Microsoft and "the Koch brothers" as the secret master funders providing millions, well hundreds of thousands, this is a link to how Pacific gets funded.

Including but not limited to:

ChevronTexaco

Exxon Mobil Corporation

Microsoft

Pfizer

PhRMA

SBC (now AT&T)

Verizon Charles G. Koch Foundation
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  This is what "crony capitalism" is all about and why the "anti-capitalists" the most deeply corrupted by it.

  The same was found during Climategate when one of Jonse's emails was boasting about how much oil money he got.  In fact "Big ------" may well fund both sides in politics because it is useful to have friends everywhere. However they will fund the side supported by government more heavily because funding the opposition is merely hedging your bets. For example corporate funding of the LibDems has gone up sharply, which is not because of an increase in their popularity. Spiked also explains, better than I, what else there is in it for Big ---- to fund those promoting regulatory fascism. 

it has never been plausible. Large corporations do not suffer from regulation. They are simply able to pass costs on to the consumer. Moreover, regulation creates firm ground on which to base longer-term strategic decisions about capital investments. And finally, regulation creates opportunities for companies that are able to mobilise resources to enter new markets. Wind farms, for example, are not cottage industries. Regulation suits larger companies....

     To put that figure into perspective, an article in Time magazine recently revealed ‘that between 2007 and 2010, the Sierra Club accepted over $25million [£15.7million] in donations… mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas-drilling companies in the US and a firm heavily involved in fracking - to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign’.

It would seem that fossil-fuel companies give far greater sums to environmental campaigning organisations in order to score advantage over rival fossil-fuel companies than they give to anti-environmental campaigning organisations.

  Which is why every single person in the "environmental" movement who is honestly opposed to capitalist exploitation rather than just in it for the money and power has long publicly denounced their own side in terms literally thousands of times more strongly than they criticise people like Heartland.

   However this only applies to remotely honest organisations. FoI, Greenpeace, the Guardian, the Green Party, Lucas, Harvie, Gore, Huhne and the rest of the thieving econazi parasites never have.

   Last night the BBC broadcast the Dimbleby Lecture, named after a dead BBC broadcaster. in which annually a chosen member of the approved is invited to air his opinions.

   This time it was Sir Paul Nurse, boss of the Royal Society and someone previously employed by them to host a 6 hour interview with warming sceptic James Delingpole. As he describes it

That's why about the only section he used out of at least three hours' worth of footage is the one where he tosses what he clearly imagines is the killer question: "Suppose you were ill with cancer would you wish to be treated by "consensus" medicine or something from the quack fringe?"

    Not much of last night's lecture was about global warming, he was at least as eager to push the "sustainability" button - a term with no objective meaning whatsoever, at least as used by ecofasccists. However he did make an extraordinary weasel on warming.

     He urged us all to accept the "consensus" of scientists saying that those who claim that there has been no warming and those who claim "catastrophic" warming are equally "extreme" and that we should all agree with him that there is warming. (about 1/4rd of the way in). Later he went on about the extensive action we need to take to prevent it, suggesting that those opposed to that are politically opposed to regimented worldwide government control of everything and to be fair also saying that alarmists are also politically motivated by being in favour of that.

     Notice that. He has quite deliberately distanced himself from the entire concept of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) on which the entire edifice depends. Now he is simply a "moderate" believer in minor warming rather than the series of scare stories we have been subjected to for over 2 decades. No alarmist him; man behind the curtain must have been somebody else.

    In attacking "deniers" who say there has definitely been no warming he is also deliberately erecting a straw man to oppose his new position. I don't know of anybody that certain and he made no attempt to name one. There is agreement that there has been warming since the Little Ice Age 2 centuries ago - we sceptics simply doubt whether it is catastrophic the position Nurse is now claiming to also occupy..

     But if any warming is not catastrophic, indeed if it is that minor, history shows that it will be beneficial as the Medieval warming was more temperate than the Little Ice Age. If he had honestly believed that he could not possibly have made the comparison to being "ill with cancer". If warming is likely to be net beneficial the claim of necessity to destroy most of our economy to marginally reduce it is clearly untrue and could never be maintained as necessary by any remotely honest person. Yet Nurse maintained it even as he repudiated any connection to the only argument for it.

    Clearly, following the recent acknowledgement by the Met Office and CRU that not only has there been no warming for 15 years but also that the more probable scenario is cooling, Sir Paul is not only deserting a sinking ship but attempting, in an Orwellian way, to pretend he was never aboard. He will not be the last.

    To be fair to him most of the rest of his lecture was cliches about how society needs more belief in science and that scientific ideas should be evidence based. No disagreement there. He was lighter on concrete examples, for example, though saying a little in favour of nuclear power he was silent on the fact that the basis of the anti-nuclear movement, the Linear No Threshold radiation damage theory, never had any scientific basis and had now been disproven. Cliches are easy as long as you don't get specific.

  Another example of the dishinesty that led Sir David King and some other ecofascists, to pretend he had never made his ludicrous remark about how Antarctica would be the "only habitable continent" by 2100.  Such rewriters of history are entitled to no respect whatsoever.

UPDATE Via Bishop Hill comes the text of Nurse's speech. This is the relevent part (p 7)

The majority of expert climate scientists have reached the consensus view that human activity has resulted in global warming, although there is debate about how much the temperature will rise in the future. Others argues that warming is not taking place at all or that it will happen in a catastrophic way, but they have failed to persuade the majority of climate experts, who have judged the scientific arguments made to support these more extreme views as being too weak to be convincing.

UPDATE 2 James Delingpole, to whom even I defer in ability to find the mot juste to describe ecofascists, refers to this thread in his article today.

H/T Neil Craig who has also noticed at this blog, most disrespectfully titled Sir Paul Nurse slithers )

  He also points out that it isn't just Nurse discrediting himself but the entire recent history of the Royal Society which he leads, which has been unequivocal in promoting the most catastrophic warming predictions under both him and his predecessor.

UPDATE 3 - I have followed Prof John Brignells Numberwatch  since way back when I still assumed there must be something to CAGW if all these people thought so. He knew better. He has sent me this link to his latest post.

Is it the King Rat deserting the sinking ship or, perhaps, the captain accidently falling into a lifeboat? ..your bending author listened to the Richard Dimbleby lecture by Sir Paul Nurse and completely missed the import of the salient passage identified by Neil Craig, a regular correspondent, and elaborated by James Delingpole.

 That such a ruthless propagandist for the faith should now begin to pose as the neutral man of reason, standing between two poles of extremism, is not just an extraordinary volte face; it is a pointer to a crumbling of that monstrous edifice known as the consensus. Not just a president of the Royal Society, he is now the one who is our number of the month.
Perhaps there is light in our darkness after all.

  I am immensely gratified by such approval

  An academic article about the Longitude Prize, won by John Harrison and one of the earlier examples of how such prizes are so much more effective than normal government grant funding. Being academic it goes it has to explain how dreadful it was that the prize was used to discover longitude rather than for stopping illness at sea or inventing mechanically powered (steam) ships. Really.As a criticism of prizes this seems to be in line with "we shouldn't go into space/sail the Atlantic till all problems on Earth/Europe have been solved.

   However what is interesting is that the initial push for the prize came, at least partly, not from government being altruistic but from it trying to cover their collective arses over a monumental fuck up by somebody politically connected.

in 1707, a fleet of British naval vessels under the command of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell sailed headlong into the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall. Having the bodies of hundreds of British seamen, including members of some of the nation’s leading families, wash up on homeland beaches was simply unacceptable. People demanded that an effort be made to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again.
Shovell and his fleet had sailed from Gibraltar bound for England on or about October 10, 1707. They suffered stormy weather nearly continuously for the next 10 days. They were unable to make reliable astronomic observations and were forced to navigate by dead reckoning,.....Admiral Shovell’s decision to try to make port immediately rather than wait for a more reliable determination of his position was simply foolhardy and cost 2,000 lives, including his own.
Ignoring the fact that the error in latitude in nautical miles had been twice that of the error in longitude, the Admiralty chose not to blame the disaster on the mistake of a highly respected member of the nobility. Instead, it focused on the notoriously difficult problem of accurately determining longitude at sea. In 1714 the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, which established the Commission for the Discovery of Longitude at Sea, more commonly referred to as the Board of Longitude. The Act provided three prizes based on the accuracy of longitude measurement: £20,000 (equal to more than $3 million today) to anyone who could find a way to determine longitude at sea with an accuracy of one-half degree, £15,000 for two-thirds degree and £10,000 for one degree.

But, even if the politicls then weren't much more concerned about the common good than now, it worked. I wouldn't argue that it wouldn't also have been a good thing to have offered X-Prizes for improving longevity or producing a better method of transport then - as indeed it still would.

  This letter went out to the Scotsman in response to a letter from the ASH anti-smoking quango .

    As a general rule the letters pages of newspapers are the final refuge in the mainstream media, for any ideas that are not officially approved. After they have been censored from the broadcast media and after they are banned from the news pages, in a society in which any sort of dissent at all is permitted in the media they may still appear in letters pages.

   Thus even the most "right wing" Scottish newspaper simply will not allow letters disagreeing with government funded quangos producing Big State advertising against economic freedom, even in the sole section of the paper that is supposed to be reserved for individual readers not "news" placement by government.

    It would be interested to know if ANY of the letters or "news" stories they publish promoting Big Government scare frauds, come from anybody who is not a paid government propagandist. The fact that there is not a single scientist, anywhere in the world, who supports the warming fraud without being state paid (despite some claiming such independence and being proven liars) suggests that the assumption should be that anybody promoting such frauds is being paid until they choose to prove otherwise.
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Sir,



I note the letter today (Tues.) from Ash giving as a primary reason that the Adam Smith Institute must be wrong, that it believes in the efficiency of the free market. The fact is that there is a very strong correlation between economic freedom and success, as shown by the fact that Singapore and Hong Kong are now much richer per capita than we are.

 It is not surprising that such an organisation should hold such an position. It does not depend on raising charity money in the free market since it is very effectively funded by big government, largely for the purpose of "raising awareness" (i.e. advertising) for the need for more government regulation and lobbying that same government for more of this regulation (and more regulators). I'm not sure what other charitable activities take up its time.

 Am I the only person who believes government funding of political "opposition", whose programme is ever more state control, is the major threat to our freedom?

 It would be interesting to know how many of reader's letters published in newspapers across the country calling for more government busybodying, whether about smoking, alleged catastrophic global warming or whatever the scare story du jour is actually come not from private persons, such as myself, but from but by those paid by the government at least partly to do so.

 I have previously pointed out that it is impossible to find a single scientist anywhere in the world who supports the warming scare and is not government funded. It would be good to know many anti-smoking campaigners or "environmentalists", campaigning so loudly, actually work in that free market they appear to so despise.