TalkClimateChange

A recent post from esteemed Red Team blogger Daryl provoked at least one colourful response, and a challenge to the level of argument that the Red Team has to offer. I have never been one to shy away from a challenge, so let’s Talk Climate Conspiracy.

The Roots.

The science of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) really began to kick off in the 1960s, when it was shown that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was increasing. At this time, nationalist movements across the globe were bringing, or had already brought an official end to the era of colonisation; the Bretton Woods institutions were setting themselves up to develop the world; the US was finding it’s footing as an imperial ‘super power’; and Rachel Carson was spawning the modern environmental movement.

Post-modernism, with its rejection of the claim of any theory to absolute knowledge, began its detrimental effect on society’s understanding of science, politics and economics. This would taint public understanding of the world for the foreseeable future, and has fuelled the emergence of myriad myths and nonsense; as Francis Wheen noted in the excellent “How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World”, ‘new-age’ books outsell science books by about 3 to 1.

Traversing this divide between the real and the delusional is John Perkins’s “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”. While this man should be taken with a pinch of salt, his book does contain an accessible (and mercifully brief) personal account of US foreign policy and its interaction with modern capitalism.

While Washington and Whitehall were devising the economic and developmental policies that shaped much of contemporary history, most of us had our backs turned.

The Bones.

A lot of developmental literature criticises the policies of the World Bank and IMF, and their impacts on the lives of the poor. Many of these policies are exactly the kind of thing recommended by the IPCC: preventing deforestation, the use of technology, and massive engineering projects, among others. For example, they criticise how the financial institutions described Egypt’s problems in the early 1990s as being ones of “overpopulation and resource constraints”, while overlooking the impact of Western economic policies on traditional land uses and diets.

Awareness of these issues increased dramatically during the 1990s, which saw an increase in protests against the policies of the international institutions and the “West”. (some argue that 911 was orchestrated in order to quell this uprising and introduce changes to civil rights laws, but addressing that would require an entire blog post in itself!)

The Flesh.

Anyone contradicting the AGW-consensus tends to be accosted with ad-hominem attacks, and claims that they are funded by big oil. In light of this, I thought it might be worth taking on the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change himself.

Aged 7 when India was granted independence from the British Empire, Rajendra Pachauri later began his career as a manager of the Diesel Locomotive Works, Varanasi. To point out the obvious, this tied him directly to the post-British Empire elite. He left for America in his late twenties, where he obtained a degree in Industrial Engineering and not one but two PhDs, one in IE and one in Economics. As a some time student myself, I must say I am in awe of this achievement, not least because he appears to have done it in 5 years. Not bad for a railway manager!

On returning to India, he spent considerable time in business institutes and energy corporations, for example serving on the Board of Directors of the Indian Oil Corporation Ltd, with a stint at the World Bank in 1990 – shortly after the formation of the IPCC. He was installed at the IPCC himself in April 2002, shortly after 911, and not so long after the Third Assessment Report had given a “well, maybe, maybe not” verdict to AGW.

The Skin.

Any good conspiracy needs purpose, and a friendly face to hold it together and keep it air tight. Step up the carbon lobby and the environmentalists to ’save the planet’. I don’t doubt there are some good intentions mingled in there, but AGW as a conspiracy is unsurpassed, for two reasons:

1) Everything anyone does emits CO2. Every country needs to emit CO2 to develop. Control carbon emissions, and you control everything around you.

2) Talk of environmental collapse has blindsided just about every protestor, NGO, charity and religious organisation on the planet.

And it’s also worth remembering out that the leading proponents of AGW are the inventors of social control themselves, the British and the Germans. And our former PM, bless his cotton socks, may this year achieve that which Adolf never did: Presidency of Europe.

Final Thoughts.

I’m not talking secret meetings of nine-foot shape-shifting lizards here, but to assume colonial and cold-war politics are behind us would be naïve (I for one want to hear what Simon Mann has to say about the Equatorial Guinea coup) and we must always be aware that there are people out there that will use all sorts of tricks to gain power and wealth. Allowing environmental hysteria to get the better of us will cause more harm than good.

I leave you with a sobering thought from Peace-Prize winning Albert Gore himself:

“I know from 30 years experience in politics that the political system shares one thing in common with the climate system. It’s what scientists call non-linear, which of course means that it can appear to move very slowly, but then it can cross a tipping point and move very, very quickly indeed”.

Further reading:

Climate history: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/summary.htm
Rachel Carson’s FBI papers: http://foia.fbi.gov/rcarson/carson_rachel.pdf
Review of John Perkins: http://www.putnampit.com/reviews/hitman1.htm
Structural Adjustment Programmes: http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/SAP.asp
Rajendra Pachauri bio: http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/bios/pachauri.htm
Simon Mann and Equatorial Guinea: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/09/nmann109.xml

Technorati Tags: Conspiracy, Politics, Global Change